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THEODOSIUS DOBZHANSKY
REPUBLISHED FROM THE ORIGINAL WITH THE KIND PERMISSION OF BLACKWELL PUBLISHERS
AND ZYGON:
JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION: DOBZHANSKY, THEODOSIUS. "ETHICS
AND VALUES IN BIOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION," ZYGON , VOL. 8,
NOS. 3-4 (SEPT. - DEC. 1973), PP. 261-281.
The problem of biological foundations of ethics and values is a relatively
new one. For centuries and millennia, ethics and values were believed to stem
from God's commandments. Having revealed his will, God exacts compliance. He
rewards righteousness with bliss and wickedness with suffering. In the words
of Paul Ricoeur, God "corrects the apparent disorder in the distribution
of human fortune. The law of retribution makes of religion not only an absolute
foundation for moral law but also a world view, a speculative cosmology."
(1)
But why does God command doing certain things and prohibit others? Can the
wisdom of God's commands be demonstrated rationally? God's purposes need not
be all inscrutable, still less contrary to human reason, which is in itself
God's gift to man. Already medieval theologians, notably Saint Thomas Aquinas,
sought to discover rational bases of the moral law. His premise was that since
man is created in God's image, all humans have the same nature, and this nature
is the source of the same moral law.
The problem acquired a new dimension in the light of Darwin's theory of evolutionary
ascent of man. Man has evolved from ancestors who were not human. Unless human
nature and moral law were implanted suddenly and in their present state, they
too must have evolved. Moreover, there is no single human nature common to everybody
but as many variant human natures as there are men. These findings lead to many
new questions. And these questions are no longer only theological or philosophical.
Some key ones are biological questions. Since the creation of God's image in
man is not an event but a process, the moral law is a product of an evolutionary
development.
What causes brought about this development? This development is the key to
understanding of the unique human evolutionary pattern. Biological evolution
formed the foundation for the development of culture, including some aspects
of ethics and morals. The development of culture led to the emergence of other
kinds of ethics and morals, independent of and sometimes even contradictory
to the purely biological ones. Teilhard de Chardin saw this clearly when he
wrote: "The ethical principles which hitherto we have regarded as an appendage,
superimposed more or less by our own free will upon the laws of biology, are
now showing themselves--not metaphorically but literally--to be a condition
of survival of the human race. In other words, evolution, in rebounding reflectively
upon itself, acquires morality for the purpose of its further advance."
(2)
EVOLUTIONARY TRANSCENDENCE OF MAN
Darwin (3) showed that man is a part of nature, a descendant of living
beings who were not human, and a biological species related to other species
of the order of primates. This discovery, so shocking and upsetting to so many
of his contemporaries, is by now almost a truism. However, the nature of human
nature, or rather of human natures, is not always clearly understood even by
those quite familiar with Darwin's thought. In Julian Huxley's words: "Man's
opinion of his own position in relation to the rest of the animals has swung
pendulum-wise between too great and too little a conceit of himself, fixing
now too large a gap between himself and the animals, now too small.... The gap
between man and animals was here reduced not by exaggerating the human qualities
of animals, but by minimizing the human qualities of men. Of late years, however,
a new tendency has become apparent.'' (4)
The reason for the pendulum-wise swings is simple. The key problem for nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century evolutionists was to assemble incontrovertible evidence
that man is a product of evolutionary development. Similarities between the
human and the nonhuman evolutionary patterns were overstressed, and differences
de-emphasized. To some people and for some purposes, especially to racists and
for justification of race and class biases, the slogan "man is nothing
but an animal" was and still is quite convenient. Failure to realize man's
special position has misled also not a few philosophers and ethicists. No doubt,
man is subject to nature's biological laws, but he is as well subject to quite
different laws stemming from his cultural evolution which are meaningless except
in human contexts.
That man is an animal is platitudinous, but, as Simpson says, he is "not
just another animal. He is unique in peculiar and extraordinarily significant
ways." (5) What are these
ways? Man's bodily structures are distinctive but not extraordinary. They warrant
the human species being placed in a zoological family by itself with no other
living but several fossil species. What is unique about man are his mental abilities.
He is the only being that lives in the world of culture as well as in the physical
world. He communicates with other member's of his species by means of symbolic
language. He is capable of abstraction, and prevision of future. He possesses
the objectively or scientifically elusive but subjectively and existentially
irrefutable quality of self-awareness, which makes him a dweller in what Eccles
(6) calls World 2 and World 3, while animals dwell only in physical World
1. And finally man has a death awareness. All animals die, but man alone knows
that he will inevitably die. (7)
Whether or not traces or rudiments of the unique human characteristics and
abilities are found in animal species other than mankind need not concern us
here. Be that as it may, the constellation of these characteristics makes man
an altogether unique form of life. The appearance of man brought into existence
a being which, in its mental capacities, differs from all other animals more
radically than animals differ from each other. In this sense, man is outside
or, if you wish, above the rest of the living world. Human evolution has transcended
biological evolution. This statement does not imply any kind of philosophical
transcendentalism or intervention of supernatural forces. It does mean that
with the appearance of mankind a new dimension or level of being was added to
the previously existing ones. The other major evolutionary transcendence was
the origin of life from inanimate matter. Whether evolutionary transcendence
is a happy phrase may be questioned. I must however insist that the idea of
radical novelty of human evolution emerging from biological evolution, is essential
for clear thinking about human problems.
VALUES AND ETHICS IN EVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENT
The problem that interests us here is the evolutionary origins of ethics and
values. Has the biological evolutionary development which made the ascent of
man possible endowed mankind with ethics? Or has it merely made all nonpathological
members of the human species capable of being taught various kinds of ethics
and morality, and to be trained for various kinds of behavior? These are very
different propositions, and yet in some discussions of the alleged biological
basis of ethics they are confused.
An analogy with human symbolic language will hopefully make the difference
plain. Some congenitally malformed infants excepted, any human baby is born
with a genetically vouchsafed capacity to learn a language. By contrast, nonhuman
primates, even so close a relative of man as the chimpanzee, do not have this
capacity. Though their voice organs seem to be capable of uttering most sounds
of which human language is composed, the impediment to learning resides in the
structure of the brain. On the other hand, in man there are no genetic predispositions
to learning a particular kind of language. All nonpathological humans can, at
least during childhood, learn any of the hundreds of existing language families.
A Bushman child learns the Bushman language with its peculiar "click"
sounds just as easily as he could learn, say, the English language, and a European
child can learn the Bushman language. Human genes evidently enable us to speak,
but they have nothing to do with what particular language we utilize in speaking.
Even less do they determine just what any of us chooses to say in any language.
Biological evolution is, by and large, utilitarian. It is not programmed inside
the organism; neither mankind nor any other species was foreordained to evolve.
This does not mean that mankind arose by "pure chance," as Monod claims
in his now famous book. The role of so-called chance in evolution is outside
the framework of this article. Evolution is a creative response of living matter
to its environment: it maintains or improves the adaptedness of a living species
to its surroundings. However, evolutionary changes are not imposed on the organism
by the environment. The environment, the outside world, presents challenges
to the species living in it. A species may or may not respond by adaptive genetic
changes. Failure to respond may lead to diminution of abundance and eventually
to extinction. Successful responses allow the species to survive and to expand.
Adaptation to the same environment may however occur by different means. For
example, some desert plants cope with dryness by various devices which reduce
evaporation, while others grow, flower, and mature seed very rapidly when moisture
is available. Our apelike ancestors were not bound to respond to the challenges
of their environments by becoming human; they might just as well have become
other species of apes. In reality, they did however respond by evolving the
genetic basis of culture, language, and ethics. The environments, which are
"natural" for mankind in the sense that the human species is biologically
committed to live in them, are environments contrived by man's cultures. Mankind
could not survive for long in the environments of its ancestors of ten thousand
years ago, not to speak of a million years ago. It is egregious nonsense to
call these environments "natural," and yet this is a cliché
frequently used.
More than a century ago, Darwin concluded that "moral sense or conscience"
developed in human evolution as an outgrowth of what he called "social
instincts." Considered purely biologically, mankind has become by far the
most successful form of life evolution ever produced. Mankind has inherited
the earth; it has no serious competitors, and other biological species exist
on its sufferance; unlike most other biological species, it is unlikely to become
extinct, except through some kind of suicidal readiness. In the words of Hallowell:
"Man, unlike his animal kin, acts in a universe that he has discovered
and made intelligible to himself as an organism not only capable of consciousness
but also of self-consciousness and reflective thought. But this has been possible
only through the use of speech and other extrinsic symbolic means that have
led to the articulation, communication, and transmission of culturally constituted
worlds of meanings and values. An organized social life in man, since it transcends
purely biological and geographical determinants, cannot function apart from
communally recognized meanings and values.'' (8)
Meanings and values are "culturally constituted." They are communicated
and transmitted from generation to generation by instruction and learning from
parents, teachers, playmates, books, and are nowadays called "media."
There are no genes for meanings and values; yet it is the human genetic endowment
which makes articulation and transmission possible. Human infants are born with
a capacity to become, in Waddington's words, "ethicizing beings,"
that is, with a capacity to acquire ethics and values but without any specific
innate ethics or values. Furthermore, "it is only man who becomes an 'ethicizing
being' and 'goes in for ethics.'" (9)
Do animals other than man lack capacity for ethics? Students of animal behavior
as eminent as Rensch and Thorpe (10)
believe that rudiments of something like moral sense may be present. For example,
dogs may behave as though they have guilt feelings and bad conscience. Yet I
agree with Simpson that "it is nonsensical to speak of ethics in connection
with any animal other than man.... There is really no point in discussing ethics,
indeed one might say that the concept of ethics is meaningless, unless the following
conditions exist: (a) There are alternative modes of action; (b) man is capable
of judging the alternatives in ethical terms; and (c) he is free to choose what
he judges to be ethically good. Beyond that, it bears repeating that the evolutionary
functioning of ethics depends on man's capacity, unique at least in degree,
of predicting the results of his action." (11)
The Book of Genesis gives an unexcelled poetical account of the decisive evolutionary
step from animal to man: "And the Lord God said, behold, the man is become
as one of us, to know good and evil." (12) The capacity to know
and to foresee the consequences of one's own and of other people's actions is,
indeed, the fundamental biological precondition for becoming an ethicizing being.
Both as an individual and as a species, man acquires ethics when he gains knowledge
about the world and his place therein, and when this knowledge gives him foresight.
He is held responsible for his actions if he knows their consequences. It is
futile to look for special genes for ethics or for values. It is the genetic
endowment as a whole which makes us human. Not special genes but the total genetic
system of our species makes us capable of symbolic thought, of acquisition and
transmission of knowledge by means of language, of self-awareness and death
awareness, and hence makes us ethicizing beings.
IS MAN INHERENTLY GOOD OR INHERENTLY EVIL?
As indicated above, it makes no sense to ascribe ethics to animals other than
man. Nevertheless, one may say without contradiction that certain kinds of behavior
found in animals would be ethical or altruistic and others unethical and egotistic,
if these behaviors were exhibited by men. For example, the behavior of
workers and soldiers among ants and termites strikes us as a model of unselfish
devotion to a common cause; by contrast, the exclusion of many males of red
grouse from feeding grounds by the more successful males strikes us as cruel
because the excluded individuals are effectively condemned to die. Examples
of this sort can be multiplied indefinitely. Some nineteenth-century writers
and also biologists were fond of describing nature as "red in tooth and
claw."
The behavior of animals, no less than their anatomies and physiologies, is
shaped by natural selection in the evolutionary process. It is therefore not
inconceivable that man could have some behavior patterns and proclivities built
into his genetic constitution during his evolution. The evidence of such genetic
programming, residing ultimately in the DNA of the sex cells, is in many ways
confusing and contradictory. It would be out of place to discuss it here in
detail, but certain features are relevant to our subject. First of all, men
are not genetically uniform in their temperaments and inclinations. Though the
evidence is not as complete and detailed as we may wish it to be, it is safe
to say that there are genetic variations in intelligence, temperament, special
abilities, tastes, and consequently in behavior. A tall, muscular, athletic
boy with features conforming to the popular ideas of good looks may be expected
to behave differently from a not so well formed or physically weak individual.
An individual with an obvious musical talent, or mathematical ability, or aptitude
for painting or versifying may well choose a different lifework or career from
individuals not so endowed.
However, it cannot be insisted too strongly that all these variations condition
one's behavior, bias one's choices, but they do not amount to rigid determination.
Moreover, and this is crucial, the manifestation of a genetic endowment depends
on the social, economic, and educational environment in which its carrier is
placed. We all know edifying stories of poor but talented youngsters working
their way toward achievement; no stories are written about the equally talented
ones who did not succeed. The basic fact is still that most humans can be brought
up and trained for many or most professions and occupations which the society
needs. This statement does not contradict the recognition that some people are
more easily trained than others for some occupations, and that there are some
callings, such as conductor of a symphony orchestra, for which only a small
minority of individuals are qualified by their genetic endowments.
An appalling amount of printed paper, time, energy, and words have been wasted
on disputes of whether aggression and violence, or amity and kindness, are biologically
given, inborn, genetic drives, instincts, or imperatives in the human species.
Ethnologists, students of animal behavior, have described a wonderful variety
of aggressive behaviors, threat displays, dominance rivalries, pecking orders,
and territorial defenses in many animals, including primates, the nearest relatives
of man. It is no wonder that even so outstanding a scientist as Konrad Lorenz
(13) succumbed to the temptation of ascribing to man some of these things
as innate instincts. Of the ways the findings of ethology have been twisted
by some sensationalist popular writers on alleged territorial imperatives, the
less said the better.
Lorenz's argument is briefly as follows. Aggression in animals is usually ritualized;
a threat of violence from a stronger dominant animal is answered by a weaker
subordinate one by an innately fixed gesture of submission. This gesture of
submission acts as biological lightning rod -- the threat is not followed by
an attack. Thus the threat of aggression rarely overgrows into actual attack,
and neither the aggressor nor the aggressed suffers bodily harm. The trouble
with man is that he has invented powerful means of aggression, from stones to
knives to bullets to hydrogen bombs, and no corresponding ritualized behavior
to appease the aggressor. The really astonishing thing to me is that Lorenz,
while he is of course fully aware of the psychological restructuralization which
conferred on mankind mental abilities which none of its ancestors had, failed
to see that these can function to defuse aggression. A male baboon or a wolf
who threatens to use his canine teeth to sever the jugular of another individual
has not learned the commandment "Thou shalt not kill"; still less
can he foresee the effects of killing on baboonkind wolfkind. When I am occasionally
mad at somebody, I do not want to kill him even if appeasement gestures are
not forthcoming. Apart from foreseeing unpleasant consequences of doing so,
the abhorrence of any such act against another human being is a firmly rooted
part of my cultural heredity.
The theory of innate goodness and gentleness of man is just as far off the
mark. Montagu assures us that "babies are born good, and desirous of continuing
to be good." (14) It is an evil society which frustrates their desires
to be good and makes them grow into varying degrees of badness. I really do
not know how to elicit an inborn moral philosophy from a baby; in my limited
experience I find babies usually desirous of much simpler and matter-of-fact
benefits. Anyway, if it is true that a good society makes babies become good
men, and a bad one makes them bad, then I conclude that babies are born neither
good nor bad. They are born with the potentialities of developing into good
or into bad men according to the circumstances which they encounter. This is,
of course, just what the evolutionary view of human nature lends support to.
(15)
I do not feel qualified to judge to what extent this view may be in agreement
or in opposition to the insights of various psychoanalytic schools. Of the Freudian
triad id-ego-superego, the last is the most recent in evolutionary development,
the genetic basis for. which exists presumably only in the human species. It
is a part of man's most fundamental adaptation, which is culture. Culture is
not inherited through genes, although the capacity to acquire culture is so
inherited. The acquisition of culture occurs through learning and education.
Educability, or indoctrinability as Campbell (16) prefers to call it,
is therefore the paramount genetically established human capacity. Educability
does not mean only getting good grades in school; this concept is much more
inclusive -- it means the ability to learn whatever is necessary to function
as a member of a human society. Educability is unfortunately not as selective
as one might wish it to be. People learn bad habits and ideas as easily as good
ones.
One can be brought up to be gentle or violent, peaceful or aggressive. Anthropologists
have ample evidence to show that cultures of different peoples demand different
modes of behavior in their members, and that these demands are usually complied
with. Some cultures encourage extroversion and others introversion, combativeness
or meekness, swagger or modesty, profligacy or parsimony. What some admire others
find ridiculous or obnoxious. On the other hand, some persons seem to be predisposed
to learn certain kinds of behavior more readily than others, and the predisposition
may be genetic. Human males, and especially young males, are more prone to externalize
aggressive and violent impulses than are females. To some extent this may be
culturally rather than biologically determined--boys are expected to develop
what corresponds to the popular idea of manliness, and girls to behave in "feminine"
fashion. Yet at the base there is still this ineluctable chromosomal difference
-- two X chromosomes in the female, one X and one Y chromosome in the male.
LIMITATION OF BIOLOGICAL ETHICS
Evolution by natural selection has made man neither good nor bad, addicted
neither to lofty nor to base values. It has instead conferred upon man his educability,
plasticity of behavioral characteristics. It has made man an ethicizing being,
capable of learning, and perhaps of discriminating and of choosing more or less
freely among different ethics. Natural selection has acted as it did because
educability is the key adaptation in a being that lives in culture-created environments
and that fully depends on culture for survival and for biological as well as
spiritual welfare.
One may, however, ask a naïve but in spite of this reasonable question:
Would it not have been even more advantageous if, in addition to educability,
mankind had been endowed with antlike or termitelike, genetically fixed, selfless
devotion to the good of the species? Perhaps this would have been good indeed,
but doing so is unfortunately beyond the capability of natural selection. Let
it always be remembered that natural selection is not some sort of divinity
or a good spirit which can invariably achieve what is in the best interest of
the species on which it acts. Its inherent limitation is that it has no foresight;
in a brazenly opportunistic manner, it enhances the adaptedness of a population
or of a species in the environment that exists where and when it acts, even
if the genetic changes it produces will be maladaptive in the future. It should
never be forgotten that by far the commonest finale of most evolutionary lines
is extinction, and that the evolution of the lines that became extinct had been
controlled by natural selection.
What is referred to as unselfishness or altruism the human level, and ostensibly
similar kinds of behavior in animals other than man, can be achieved by natural
selection only with difficulty and under special circumstances. This problem
was first submitted to analysis by Haldane in 1932 and by Wright in 1949. (17)
For this analysis, altruism is defined as behavior which benefits other individuals
but harms or places at a disadvantage the altruist. An obvious example is a
person who tries to rescue a drowning man at the risk of drowning himself. In
contrast, selfishness or egotism is behavior directed exclu sively to the benefit
of the egotist, refusing to help other individuals except at a price advantageous
to him. The extreme of selfishness is criminal behavior, which harms somebody
else for the criminal's gain. Suppose now that a large population contains a
certain proportion of individuals genetically predisposed to altruism and some
predisposed to egotism or criminality, all as defined above. The result will
most likely be that the incidence of the genes for altruism will dwindle and
those for egotism will increase because of the disadvantages or advantages incurred
by the respective behaviors.
There are however ways to escape the impasse. As Haldane pointed out, if individuals
who benefit are relatives of the altruist, they are likely also to carry genes
for altruistic behavior. Therefore, even if the altruist is incapacitated or
loses his life, genes that resemble his may be conserved or multiplied. The
most obvious example is self-sacrifice for the benefit of one's progeny. This
is not at all uncommon among animals, parents risking their lives to defend
their children against predators or other dangers. Such behavior makes obvious
biological sense, and it is not difficult to envisage its origin by natural
selection. This is especially true in long-lived animals which breed repeatedly;
the value of an individual to the species gradually decreases with increasing
age. Postreproductive individuals can most readily afford being altruists, by
assisting the young at whatever risk to themselves. On the other hand, self-sacrifice
for relatives less closely related than parents and children makes little biological
sense, unless very many are likely to be saved by an altruistic act. Self-sacrifice
the benefit of the progeny of other individuals is uncommon. Likewise, while
parents run risks for the benefit of children, children, as a rule, do nothing
for their parents, even if they are physically capable of being of service to
them.
Some human behavior patterns which, in man, are charged with ethical evaluations
can reasonably be supposed to have been shaped in evolution under control of
natural selection. Not surprisingly, these behavior patterns are exactly the
ones which most resemble the behaviors of animals other than man. The human
family is perhaps the oldest social institution, having also the most evident
biological function. Motherhood has always been esteemed a virtue, even in societies
in which women were subjugated and treated little better than slaves. Children
have always been cherished and loved; parents often and willingly suffer discomfort,
self-abnegation, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of their own children, less
often for those of their relatives, and still less for unrelated children. Desire
to have children is regarded as "natural" and good, although abstinence
from parenthood no longer meets censure and disapproval. However, failure to
take care of children once they are born and to provide for their sustenance
exposes the parents to condemnation: it is regarded as a sign of moral turpitude.
Infanticide, which has been practiced in many societies, is considered hateful
and horrifying, although in some situations it was virtually indispensable for
self-preservation of the family (the parents and other children left alive)
and of the tribe.
All these attitudes and evaluations are consistent with the demands of natural
selection acting on the individual level. This can hardly be said of many other
ethics and values that are recognized in most, if not all, human societies as
valid at least in theory (if not always in practice). For example, it is wrong
to steal, or swindle, or rob or waylay, or murder other people, especially members
of one's own group or society and, by extension, any human being. This is wrong
even if so doing is profitable, the misdeed is undetected, and no vengeance
or retribution is to be feared. On the contrary, generosity, rectitude, and
veracity are praiseworthy, especially so if they bring hardships to persons
who practice them. Human life, that of a stranger no less than that of a relative,
is sacred (except in war). Life is to be preserved at all costs (including that
of incurably ill persons whose existence is sheer misery). At the summit of
ethics, we have the commandments of universal love, including of one's enemies,
service to others, and nonresistance to evil.
At the risk of oversimplification, we may distinguish two kinds ethics: family
and group (or species) ethics. Family ethics are shared by man with at least
some animals; they usually are genetically conditioned dispositions (although
they can be overcome by exercise of man's will); and they can be envisaged as
products of natural selection which promoted the genetic bases of these ethics
in our ancestors as well as in other animal species. Group ethics are products
of biological but of cultural evolution. They confer no advantage and may be
disadvantageous to individuals who practice them, although they are indispensable
to human societies which could not endure without them. Originating human group
ethics through natural selection on the individual level seems to be impossible,
and through group selection improbable, as we shall presently see.
GROUP SELECTION
Altruism is a paradigm of a behavior pattern disadvantageous individuals but
beneficial to groups, Mendelian populations, in which it occurs. Except when
practiced among family members, altruism will be discriminated against within
a population while egotism will be promoted by natural selection. But, as emphasized
particularly by Sewall Wright (18) about forty years ago, many species
are arrays of semi-isolated colonies, some consisting of small numbers of breeding
individuals. Populations of colonies in which some individuals carry genetic
predispositions toward altruistic behavior will be at an advantage compared
with colonies consisting of egotists. Furthermore, a colony which includes an
altruist is likely to contain other individuals with similar genes. Such colonies
may increase and spread at the expense of those lacking altruists or composed
of egotists. Competition of colonies, populations, groups, may conceivably lead
to spread of altruistic predispositions to the whole species.
Whether such group selection occurs at all is under debate. It is surely not
common, except under very special circumstances. Ants, termites, and other social
insects are striking examples of altruistic behavior, which some philosophers
and naturalists have naïvely advanced as models that human societies ought
to emulate. The catch is that the worker and soldier "castes" of social
insects do not as rule reproduce. The reproductive function in an ant colony
is relegated to fertile females, so-called queens, and fertile males. A sterile
worker or a soldier who perishes for the benefit of the colony does not risk
being outbred by his more cowardly relatives. The contrary is true--a sacrifice
which promotes the welfare of the society as a whole, including the reproductive
"caste," promotes also the spread of the genes that favor self-sacrificial
behavior. Conversely, cowardice may save a worker or a soldier but hurt the
society. The species is selected in favor of what on the human level would be
called altruistic and counterselected against egotistic behavior. (19)
The evolutionary patterns of social insects are utterly different from those
of mankind and other animals. We have no sterile castes whose genes are not
transmitted to posterity. The Scottish zoologist Wynne-Edwards nevertheless
argued with great eloquence that group selection may be taking place. In red
grouse, and probably in many other birds and mammals, some members of a colony
refrain from reproduction when the population reaches the limits of its environmental
resources. Wynne-Edwards (20)
believes that group natural selection has caused these individuals to sacrifice
their procreational potential for the benefit of the colonies and of the species.
WynneEdwards's claims were severely criticized by Hamilton, Williams, and Lewontin,
(21) who found that group selection of the kind envisaged by Wynne-Edwards
is very rare, if it exists all. In Hamilton's words, "The social behaviour
of a species evolves in such a way that in each distinct behaviour-evoking situation
the individual will seem to value his neighbors' fitness against his own according
to the coefficients of relationship appropriate to that situation."
(22) Human universalistic ethics must have a source other than biological
natural selection.
EVOLUTION AND HUMAN GROUP ETHICS
A perceptive analysis of the problem of evolutionary ethics has been given
by Simpson: "There are no ethics but human ethics, and a search that ignores
the necessity that ethics be human, relative to man, is bound to fail.... The
means to gaining right ends involve both organic evolution and cultural evolution,
but human choice as to what are the right ends must be based on human evolution.
It is futile to search for an absolute ethical criterion retroactively in what
occurred before ethics themselves evolved. The best human ethical standard must
be relative and particular to man and is to be sought rather in the new evolution,
peculiar to man, than in the old, universal to all organisms. The old evolution
was and is essentially amoral. The new evolution involves knowledge, including
the knowledge of good and evil." (23)
There is an interesting and suggestive difference between what we have called
family ethics and group ethics. The former are or less universal in mankind,
while the latter vary greatly in different cultures. For example, despite many
differences in child-rearing techniques, parental love and often self-sacrificial
devotion of parents on behalf of their children are universal. In contrast,
the approved or even prescribed way of conduct in some cultures is aggressive
and in others submissive, warlike or peaceful, extrovert or introvert, loquacious
or reticent, sexually free or straitlaced. Some societies enjoin marriage to
be monogamous, while others regard polygamous or polyandrous marriage fit and
proper. The contrast is explicable if family ethics are genetically and group
ethics culturally conditioned. The former are products of natural selection
and the latter of cultural tradition. Ethical relativism, which for a time was
fashionable among some anthropologists and sociologists, went even further.
The concepts of good and bad, right and wrong were declared devoid of any objective
meaning; they express simply emotional attitudes implanted by social pressures,
especially during child socialization and training. Ethical relativism gives
warrants to those who choose to rebel and reject the ethics and values of their
societies.
Many thinkers have endeavored to show that ethics and values are not entirely
arbitrary and that one is not free to accept or reject them according to one's
caprice. As mentioned it the beginning, Saint Thomas Aquinas held the moral
law to be immanent in human "nature." Pragmatists such as John Dewey
and utilitarians such as Moore held that some human acts and the state of affairs
which they produce are good and right while others are bad or wrong, regardless
of whether some people hold them appealing and others repugnant. Unfortunately,
a variety of criteria are proposed to distinguish the right from the wrong,
and nothing like unanimity is reached. Thus, greatest happiness of the greatest
number of humans, greatest total amount of happiness or well-being, satisfaction
of not merely the actor's own desires but also of those of all others who are
affected by his actions, love of other persons, of mankind, and of God, have
all been recommended.
It has also been claimed that, although ethics and values are not necessarily
fashioned by natural selection, criteria for their validation can be found in
general trends of biological evolution. In his new religion called evolutionary
humanism, Julian Huxley avoids proposing any new ethics and accepts by implication
the ethical system evolved by Judeo-Christian religious thought, which he nevertheless
denounces as a delusion. However, he puts forward a criterion by which one can
evaluate rules of behavior and judge them to be good or bad. This is the criterion
of "evolutionary direction." In his words, "Anything which permits
or promotes open development is right, anything which restricts or frustrates
development is wrong." (24)
Waddington's views have a greater clarity and precision. Man is born with "a
certain innate capacity to acquire ethical beliefs but without any specific
beliefs in particular." Ethical beliefs can be validated through evolutionary
studies: "The processes of evolution have produced the phenomenon that
the human race entertains ethical beliefs. Man can then, not so much through
experiment but rather by taking account of its results, use evolution to guide
the way in which those beliefs will develop in the future." The function
of ethicizing is, he thinks, "to mediate the progress of human evolution."
Waddington then defines wisdom "as a belief which fulfils sufficiently
the function of mediating evolutionary advance. One could, therefore, not question
the wisdom of evolutionary advance since that is a matter of definition."
(25)
This, I fear, is altogether too easy. No directions or trends in evolution
are really general or universal. Trends vary from group to group and from time
to time. Although every biologist intuitively feels that evolution has been
on the whole progressive, nobody has succeeded in defining what constitutes
evolutionary progress or advancement. But this is not the most serious objection
to the Huxley-Waddington evolutionary ethics. Suppose that we do find that biological
evolution in general, or human evolution in particular, has been going in a
certain direction. Why must we necessarily consider this direction good? Why
must wisdom be, and that by definition, helping the evolutionary process to
go on as it went in the past? To quote Simpson: "It is reasonable to consider
capacities for feeling, knowing, willing, and understanding as improvements,
and if that highly restricted definition is agreed upon, the matter can be discussed
clearly in those terms." (26) The wisdom of considering just these
capacities as improvements is not, however, deducible from our knowledge of
the evolution; it comes from the general body of human wisdom, much of which
has evolved even before biology as a science started to exist. To be sure, one
biological species, mankind, which developed these capacities to the greatest
extent is biologically the most successful of existing species. However, is
this pragmatic test an irrefutable validation of ethics? Is success always right?
Mankind has discovered that it is a product of evolution and that evolution
is an ongoing process. By this discovery, man has gained the right to judge
the merits of evolution. The past can not be changed regardless of our judgment,
but man is no longer obliged to accept future evolution caused by blind and
impersonal forces of nature. Evolution may eventually be managed and directed.
Must it go in the same direction in which it went in the past? Possibly so,
yet only provided that this direction appears, in the light of human wisdom,
good and desirable. It is not good by definition. (27)
GROUP ETHICS AND THE TEST OF EXPERIENCE
The conclusion is warranted that group ethics are not built into the human
genotype by natural selection. Nor can they be validated through knowledge of
the direction of the biological evolutionary development, even if we could unambiguously
establish what that direction was or is. Group ethics are products of evolution
of human culture, at least largely, if not entirely, evolution on an extrabiological
(or, if you prefer, suprabiological) level.
Attempts have nevertheless been made to envisage the shaping-up of the systems
of group ethics and values by a process analogous to natural selection, but
taking place on the social rather than the biological level. I choose the recent
article of Burhoe (28) as perhaps the most interesting and radical effort
of its kind. Burhoe speaks of "natural selection of the culturetype"
(which Burhoe believes to be analogous to genotype on the biological level),
"natural selection in the brain," and "natural selection in a
community of brains." New ideas, or new variants of old ideas, behavior
patterns, ethics, cultural or technological inventions, and "culturetypes"
are analogized with mutations on the biological level. Some of these variants
prove "viable," and they spread and eventually replace the old ideas
and ethics as components of the "culturetypes" in human populations.
Burhoe postulates "the equivalence of the mighty acts of God in history
with the operation of natural selection," and believes that "if you
trust in the Lord of natural selection, you need not fear that the wicked will
triumph." (29)
Alas, I trust in the Lord of natural selection no more than in the lords of
the Pentagon. Reference has already been made to the fact that natural selection
on the biological level eventually results in a decided majority of evolutionary
lines in extinction of these lines. There is no valid reason to assume that
the lines that become extinct could not perfectly well survive and even flourish
in some environments that happened to be inaccessible to them. They could have
survived also if they possessed more ample supplies of genetic variance at the
critical time. Is the so-called natural selection on the sociocultural level
any more trustworthy? There is no question that some sociocultural traits make
their individual carriers, as well as populations in which they occur, successful
and other traits unproductive in a cultural, economic, as well as plain biological
sense. The worldwide spread and dominant position of peoples of European extraction
were due not to their biological superiority (although some of them liked to
claim just that) but rather to their possession of efficient weapons and technologies.
On the opposite side of the ledger, the religious sect of Shakers considered
sex so sinful and wicked that it enjoined abstinence from sex on all its members.
As a result, very few Shakers are left. Whether or not goodness and honesty
triumphed, and evil and wickedness lost, in human history, not only always but
even as a rule, is for historians to decide. I am far from convinced that this
happy idea is valid.
Some biologists like to restrict the term "evolution"
to biological evolution only. This is unnecessary if evolution is defined as
a theory which maintains that "the current state of a system is the result
of a more or less continual change from its original state." (30)
Evolution has taken place on the cosmic, biological, and human levels, and these
three kinds of evolution are parts of one grand process of universal evolution.
This conception makes sense scientifically, philosophically, religiously, and
aesthetically. Recognition of the universality of evolution obliges us to exercise
the greatest caution in studies of the phases or subdivisions of the evolutionary
process. Processes, mechanisms, and methods whereby evolution is brought about
on the inorganic, biological, and human levels ought not be confused but clearly
and unambiguously distinguished. Natural selection is differential reproduction
of living systems. It changes the instructions for developmental patterns coded
in DNA. Changed ideas, ethics, technologies, etc., are transmitted by teaching,
example, imitation, learning, rather than through the genes. Burhoe is aware
of this distinction, but he finds analogies between "natural selection"
of ideas and ethics and natural selection of genotypes irresistibly seductive.
I believe that the differences are, in this case, far more important than analogies.
Any experienced teacher knows that analogies are valuable pedagogical devices.
They are, however, treacherous taken literally. I do not accept the idea that
"the process of natural selection may be said to be a reformation of the
doctrine of god" (31) (either with a capital or a small G).
Campbell takes a somewhat different view of the problem of origin of group
ethics. His approach is made clear in the title and in of the subtitles of his
article: "On the Genetics of Altruism and the Counter-hedonic Components
in Human Culture," and "On the Conflict between Social and Biological
Evolution of Man." (32) Family ethics have been shaped in man by
natural selection, like the homologous behavior patterns in many animals other
than man. Altruistic dedication of parents to the welfare of their children
is an example of such behaviors. However, natural selection also favors egotism,
hedonism, cowardice instead of bravery (except in defense of one's children
and perhaps other relatives), cheating and exploitation of other persons (again
excepting one's family), etc. And yet, in all human societies one finds group
ethics that tend to counteract or forbid such "natural" behaviors
and to glorify their opposites: kindness, generosity, and even self-sacrifice
for the good of others, of one's tribe or nation, and finally of mankind.
What human societies attempt to achieve through nongenetic group ethics social
insects have achieved by genetic means. Campbell rightly infers that "man
can have achieved his social insect-like degree of complex social interdependence
only through his social and cultural evolution, through the historical selection
and cumulation of educational systems, intragroup sanctions, supernatural (superpersonal,
superfamilial) purposes, etc." And further: "The commandments, the
proverbs, the religious 'law' represent social evolutionary products directed
at inculcating tendencies that are in direct opposition to the 'temptations'
representing for the most part the dispositional tendencies produced by biological
evolution.'" (33)
Campbell's argumentation is, I think, flawless. I would however stress more
than he does that natural selection has not made man inherently evil (as so
readily assumed by believers in original sin and territorial and other "imperatives").
Whatever proclivities to selfishness and heedless hedonism man may have, he
also has a genetically established educability which permits him to counteract
these proclivities by means of culturally devised group ethics. Natural selection
for educability and plasticity of behavior, rather than for genetically fixed
egotism or altruism, has been the dominant directive agency in human evolution.
Furthermore, the genetically conditioned family ethics bear a greater resemblance
to the nongenetic altruistic ethics than they do to egotistic proclivities.
Love and dedication to the welfare of one's children and other close relatives
become extended in cultural evolution to include wider and wider circles of
people, eventually mankind as a whole. All members of the human species should
be loved as children or brothers or sisters. Here, then, is the Christian commandment
of universal love.
CONCLUSIONS
Man is an ethicizing being. Ethics are human ethics. They are products of cultural
evolution. The evolution of culture is, to be sure, made possible by the evolution
of the human genetic endowment, but it is not imposed or rigidly determined
thereby. Systems of ethics and values are distillates of human wisdom and of
the experience of living, not products of human genes. These systems are not
identical in different societies and cultures, although some basic features
are cultural universals. One need not be a cultural relativist to recognize
that the variable features are often adaptive to requirements of particular
societies. As Durkheim pointed out long ago, "The idea of society is the
soul of religion." But he recognized, as many other thinkers did, the need
for a universal ethical system capable of securing allegiance of all mankind.
Unfortunately, many people consider only their own society's ethics suitable
for universal acceptance. Some scientists would derive all ethics from science,
artists from aesthetics, traditionalists from traditional religions. Yet what
is needed is a synthesis. This cannot be based only on science, only on aesthetics,
only on mysticism or on revelation. Nothing less than a synthesis of all these
can be acceptable.
We, scientists, should be particularly aware that life rigidly determined by
rational constraints evokes protest and rebellion in some people. Dostoevsky
described this rebellion with unsurpassed force in his Notes from the Underground.
The Underground Man declares that "I quite naturally want to live in order
to satisfy my entire capacity to live and not in order to satisfy only my rationality,
which may account for only one-twentieth of my capacity to live." Worse
still, if it were proved to him that inexorable laws of nature make it sensible
and advantageous for him always to act in a certain way, the Underground Man
will choose to be a madman, merely to insist that he is free to live according
to his "stupid will."
This revolt is perverse and destructive in my opinion. However, those who strive
for a religion in an age of science had better be aware of the fact that this
perversity is no longer hidden in undergrounds. It has become worldwide, especially
among the young, and is spreading. It has opened a gulf between generations
which is wider than a father-son dissension generally is. Fathers are blamed
for bequeathing to their children a society so depraved that their offspring
reject it out of hand and embark on a futile search for delusory substitutes.
Lionel Trilling has devoted a book to the thesis that this revolt of the young
and the hippie movement have their roots in attitudes like those of the Dostoevskian
Underground Man.
The answer to the revolt against the alleged tyranny of rationality is not
irrationality. It is rather demonstration that rationality is compatible with
human freedom. A man who was a senior contemporary of many of us made an attempt
to achieve a synthesis, the main features of which may be acceptable in an age
of science. I refer to Teilhard de Chardin. His is not a new religion. It is
a theology of nature rather than a natural theology. Teilhard was a Christian,
a mystic, and a scientist. He was accused by some of his scientific critics
of trying to invent scientific proofs of his religious beliefs. This is sheer
misunderstanding: nothing was more remote from Teilhard's intentions. But in
his view the evolutionary development has a religious meaning. In his words:
"To our clearer vision the universe is no longer a State but a Process.
The cosmos has become a Cosmogenesis. And it may be said without exaggeration
that, directly or indirectly, all the intellectual crises through which civilization
has passed in the last four centuries arise out of the successive stages whereby
a static Weltanschauung has been and is being transformed in our minds
and hearts, into a Weltanschauung of movement." (34) Even
more emphatically: "By definition and in essence Christianity is the religion
of the Incarnation: God uniting Himself with the world which He created, to
unify it and in some sense incorporate it in Himself. To the worshipper of Christ
this act expresses the history of the universe." (35)
What does this have to do with the biological basis of ethics and values? Teilhard's
answer is as follows: "For the man who sees nothing at the end of the world,
nothing higher than himself, daily life can only be filled with pettiness and
boredom." But "it is mankind as a whole, collective humanity, which
is called upon to perform the definitive act whereby the total force of terrestrial
evolution will be released and flourish; an act in which the full consciousness
of each individual man will be sustained by that of every other man, not only
living but the dead." (36)
NOTES
1. Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles Kelbley (Chicago: Henry
Regnery Co., 1965).
2. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper
& Bros. 1959).
3. Charles Darwin, The Decent of Man (London: Murray, 1871).
4. Julian S. Huxley. Man in the Modern World (New York: New American
Library, Mentor Books, 1948), pp. 7-8.
5. George Gaylord Simpson, This View of Life (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), p. 24. (Return to
Text)
6. John C. Eccles, Facing Reality: Philosophical Adventures of a Brain Scientist
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1970). See also Eccles, "Cultural Evolution
versus Biological Evolution," this issue.
7. Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern (New York:
New American Library. 1967).
8. A. I. Hallowell, "Culture, Personality, and Society," in Anthropology
Today, ed. A. L. Kroeber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
9. C. H. Waddington, The Ethical Animal (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1960; New York: Atheneum, 1961). p. 100.
10. B. Rensch, Biophilosophy, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1971); W.H. Thorpe, Learning and Instincts of Animals
(London: Methuen & Co., 1963). (Return to Text)
11. George Gaylord Simpson, Biology and Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1969), pp. 143, 146.
12. Gen. 3:22.
13. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1966).
14. A. Montagu, The Direction of Human Development (New York: Harper
& Bros., 1955).
15. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetics of the Evolutionary
Process (New York: Columbia University Press. 1970); "Unique Aspects
of Man's Evolution." in Biology and the Human Experience, ed. J.
W. S. Pringle (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1972). (Return to
Text)
16. Donald T. Campbell, "On the Genetics of Altruism and the Counter-hedonic
Components in Human Culture." Journal of Social Issues 28 (1972):
21-37.
17. J. B. S. Haldane. The Causes of Evolution (London: Longmans Green
& Co., 1932); Sewall Wright, "Adaptation and Selection," in Genetics,
Paleontology and Evolution, ed. G. L. Jepsen, George Gaylord Simpson, and
E. Mayr (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1949).
18. Sewall Wright, "The Roles of Mutation, Inbreeding, Crossbreeding,
and Selection in Evolution," Proceedings of the Sixth International
Congress on Genetics (1932), pp. 354-66.
19. E. O. Wilson, The Insect Societies (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press,
1971).
20. V. C. Wynne-Edwards, Animal Dispersion in Relation
to Social Behavior (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962). (Return
to Text)
21. W. D. Hamilton. "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour - I,"
Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 1-16; G. C. Williams, Adaptation
and Natural Selection (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1966);
R. C. Lewontin, "The Concept of Evolution," International Encyclopedia
of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills. 17 vols. (New York: Macmillan
Co., 968), 5:202-10.
22. W. D. Hamilton. "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour - II,"
Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 19.
23. George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New York: New
American Library, Mentor Books, 1951 ), pp. 15~56.
24. Julian S. Huxley, Evolution in Action (New York: Harper & Bros.,
1953), p. 167.
25. Waddington (n. 9 above), pp. 26. 59, 176. (Return
to Text)
26. Simpson (n. 11 above), p. 142.
27. Dobzhansky (n. 7 above).
28. Ralph Wendell Burhoe, "Natural Selection and God," Zygon
7 (1972): 30-63.
29. Ibid.. pp. 39, 56.
30. Lewontin (n. 21 above). p. 203. (Return
to Text)
31. Burhoe. p. 35.
32. Campbell (n. 16 above).
33. Ibid., p. 32.
34. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Future of Man (New York: Harper
& Row, 1964), pp. 261-62.
35. Ibid., p. 33.
36. Teilhard de Chardin (n. 2 above).
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