Is Sociobiology Nuts?
- From: "peace dream" <peace.dreamSPAMLESS@xxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 14:34:15 +0300
http://www.cross-currents.com/archives/2006/06/25/is-sociobiology-nuts
Is Sociobiology Nuts?
Filed by Jonathan Rosenblum @ 5:22 am
The influence of Darwinism has long since penetrated into the popular
consciousness, and spawned new pseudo-sciences, such as sociobiology
and evolutionary psychology, which attempt to explain every aspect of
human nature as an outgrowth of a hypothesized ruthless struggle for
existence. Popular Darwinism, and its pseudo-scientific offshoots,
properly belong more in the realm of the history of ideas than the
history of science.
The late Australian philosopher David Stove in a collection of essays
entitled Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and
Other Fables of Evolution, links popular Darwinism to other modern
deterministic theories, such as Marxian economic determinism and
Freudianism. There is apparently something appealing, he notes, about
doctrines that absolve us of responsibility for our lives. These
doctrines, Stove points out, tend to arise in periods of Enlightenment,
and to serve the cause of liberation, in particular sexual liberation,
and to undermine all traditional notions of morality.
Accordingly, evolutionary psychologists have of late turned their
sights on religion itself. Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom,
writing in Atlantic Monthly, provides a good example of the genre.
Bloom cites experiments showing that even infants attribute agency and
intention to animate objects. That ability is crucial to the
development of social understanding. According to Bloom, the innate
genetic tendency to attribute agency also causes human beings to find
design in the universe where none exists.
Responding to Bloom's article, one reader shared the brilliant
explanation given by his college anthropology professor for the
development of a "G-d-gene": primitive people who buried their dead
in order to prepare them for entry into an afterlife lived in more
sanitary conditions and thus were favored by natural selection.
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Tufts
University professor Daniel Dennett is a virtual compendium of this
type of naturalistic argument.
Such "scientific" attacks on religion and morality have little to
do with science. They derive rather from what Leon Wieseltier (no
orthodox believer himself) terms "scientism." Wieseltier defines
scientism as "the view that science can explain all human conditions
and expressions," and rightly terms one of the "dominant
superstitions of our day."
For Darwinian social scientists, the ubiquity of a phenomenon, such as
religious belief, is proof of its evolutionary origins. As Dennett puts
it: "Everything we value... we value for reasons. Lying behind, and
distinct from, our reasons are evolutionary reasons..."
That's a philosophical position, not a scientific theory.
For those convinced of that position a story, any story, will do to
establish the evolutionary advantage. The anthropology professor's
explanation of the "G-d-gene" is a good example. Starting with the
claim that human beings are born with a tendency to see everywhere
"agents with beliefs and desires," Dennett constructs an entire
speculative history of the development of religion. But as Wieseltier
points out, all this is only "a fairy tale told by evolutionary
biology," that amounts, for all Dennett's professed allegiance to
experimentation and evidence, to merely "a pious account of his own
atheistic longing."
The evolutionists accuse believers, in Bloom's words, of
"over-read[ing] purpose into things." But they are equally guilty
of finding evolution behind every social phenomenon. The "legendary
curiosity [of evolutionary psychology]," writes Wieseltier,
"somehow always discovers the same thing."
Princeton "ethicist" Peter Singer and Harvard psychologist Marc
Hauser recently provided readers of The Jerusalem Post with concrete
evidence of how grossly overpriced an Ivy League education is, as well
what a low bar of empirical support sociobiologists set for their
theories.
Singer and Hauser seek to establish that moral beliefs are the products
of evolution and that organized religion is pointless since all people,
in any event, share certain moral intuitions bequeathed to them by
evolution. How do they prove these propositions? Through the
observation that over 90% of test subjects answer the same to three
moral dilemmas posed by Singer and Hauser.
These moral dilemmas hardly tested the outer limits of moral reasoning.
Examples: Must one save a drowning baby if one will get one's pants
wet as a result? May we kill someone to harvest his organs and save
five others?
Moreover, the commonality of certain moral intuitions, as well as
belief in a Higher Being, is precisely what Orthodox Jews would
predict. All mankind is obligated to observe seven Noachide laws, even
in the absence of Divine revelation. That obligation assumes knowledge
of these laws to be innate. If God breathed into man a part of Himself,
as it were, it is also natural that every human being would have some
awareness of Him, no matter how obscure.
Nor does comparing answers to moral dilemmas establish that religious
belief makes no difference in a person's life. The true test of that
proposition lies not in the area of values, which are merely professed,
but in that of virtues, which must be laboriously attained. The litmus
test would be how one behaves in situations in which one's professed
values run up against powerful desires.
As with so many of their Darwinian peers, the purpose of Singer and
Hauser's evolutionary account is to free us from the shackles of
traditional religious belief and our common moral intuitions.
Singer's particular bugaboo is the view that there is special
sanctity to human life - a view, he once told The New York Times,
soon to be consigned to the dustbin of history. For Singer, humans are
merely differently evolved animals, possessing no souls, and with no
superior claims to those of animals. Both are nothing more than bundles
of various pleasures, and all pleasures are morally equal. Thus Singer
finds nothing to condemn about bestiality, and writes that a newborn
baby has less claim to life than a contented housecat. Indeed he would
give every parent the right to decide whether he or she wished to keep
a new baby or have it put to sleep.
Nowhere is it clearer that Darwinism is an alternate religion, or
anti-religion, than in the work of the sociobiologists. For
sociobiologists, all human development, like that of all other species,
is the result of a ruthless struggle for existence. The iron law of
existence is that genes seek to reproduce themselves, and compete with
one another in this regard. In the words of the best known
sociobiologist, Harvard's E.O. Wilson, "An organism is only DNA's
way of making more DNA."
That picture of human existence, charges the philosopher David Stove,
constitutes a massive slander against the human race, as well as a
distortion of reality that is readily apparent to any five-year-old.
The Darwinian account, for instance, flounders on widespread altruistic
impulses that have always characterized human beings in all places and
all times. Nor can it explain why some men act as heroes, even though
by doing so they risk their own lives and therefore their capacity to
reproduce, or why societies should idealize certain forms of altruism
and heroism. How, from an evolutionary perspective, could such traits
have developed or survived?
The traditional Darwinian answer is that such traits as altruism are
but an illusion, or a modern veneer of civilization imposed upon our
real natures. That answer, however, fails to explain how that veneer
could have come about in the first place; how could the first appeal to
higher moral values have ever found an author or an audience. Stove
offers perhaps the most compelling reason for rejecting the views of
those who deny the very existence of human altruism: "I am not a
lunatic."
In 1964, biologist W.D. Hamilton first expounded a theory explaining
how much of what appears to us as altruism is merely genes' clever
way of assuring the propagation of their particular gene pool via
relatives that share that gene pool. The preeminent modern defender of
Darwin, Oxford University's Richard Dawkins, popularized this theory
in The Selfish Gene.
Among the predictions Hamilton made is the following: "We expect to
find that no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single
person, but that everyone will sacrifice it for more than two brothers
[or offspring], or four half brothers, or eight first-cousins,"
because those choices result in a greater dissemination of a particular
gene pool. To which Stove responds: "Was an expectation more
obviously false than this one ever held (let alone published) by any
human being?" Throughout human history, men have willingly sacrificed
themselves for those bearing no relationship to them, just as others
have refused to do so for more than two brothers.
Here is a supposedly scientific theory bearing no relationship to any
empirical reality ever observed. Stove offers a number of further
common sense objections that only serve to highlight this point
further. Parents commonly show more regard for their children than
their children for them, despite the fact that they share the same
amount of common genes. Similarly parents act more altruistically
towards their offspring than siblings to one another, even though in
each pair there is an overlap of half the genetic material. If
Hamilton's theory were true, we should expect to find incest
widespread. In fact, it is taboo in almost every known human society.
Finally, the whole theory is predicated on the dubious proposition that
animals, or their genes, can tell a sibling from a cousin, and a cousin
from other members of the same species.
Sociobiology, Stove demonstrates, is a religion, and genes are its
gods. In traditional religion, human beings exist for the greater glory
of G-d; in sociobiology, human beings and all other living things exist
for the benefit of their genes. "We are . . . robot-vehicles blindly
programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes," writes
Dawkins.
Like G-d, Dawkins' genes are purposeful agents, far smarter than man.
He describes the process how a certain cuckoo parasitically lays its
eggs in the nest of the reed warbler, where the cuckoo young get more
food by virtue of their wider mouths and brighter crests, as one in
which the cuckoo genes have tricked the reed warbler. Thus, for
Dawkins, genes are capable of conceiving a strategy no man could have
thought of and of putting into motion the complicated engineering
necessary to execute that strategy. In one passage, Dawkins even
describes genes as immortal: "[Genes] leap from body to body down the
generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for its
own ends . . . The genes are the immortals . . . ."
Writing in 1979, Professor R.D. Alexander made the bald assertion: ".
.. . we are programmed to use all our effort, and in fact to use our
lives, in production." And yet it is obvious to any child that most
of what men do has nothing to do with reproduction, and never more so
than at the present when large parts of the civilized world are
becoming rapidly depopulated.
Confronted with these obvious facts about human nature and behavior,
sociobiologists respond by ascribing them to "errors of heredity."
As Stove tartly observes, "Because their theory of man is badly
wrong, they say that man is badly wrong: that he incorporates many and
grievous biological errors." But the one thing a scientific theory
may never do, Stove observes, is "reprehend the facts." It may
observe them, or predict new facts to be discovered, but not criticize
those before it.
The only question that remains is how could so many highly intelligent
men - at least intelligent enough to write books - could say so
many patently false and stupid things. Rabbi Dessler would have known
the answer.
*This article is excerpted from a longer article on Scientific
Objectivity in the current issue of The Jewish Observer. The relevant
quote from Rav Dessler can be found at pp. 367-68 of my biography of
him published by ArtScroll.
.
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