Evolution and the Big Questions E-Book

David N. Stamos

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 728

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Evolution and the Big Questions

“David N. Stamos’s Evolution and the Big Questions delivers what its title promises—you get to look at all of the issues, such as race and ethics and religion, that make the study of evolution so interesting, and more than just a science. The book is written in a clear and friendly manner and deserves a very wide readership.”
Michael Ruse, Florida State University

This provocative text considers whether evolutionary explanations can be used to clarify some of life’s biggest questions. It offers a lively, informative, and timely look at a wide variety of key issues facing all of us today—including questions of race, sex, gender, the nature of language, religion, ethics, knowledge, consciousness, and, ultimately, thc meaning of life.

Some of the questions examined are:

• Did evolution make men and women fundamentally different?
• Is the concept of race merely a social construction?
• Is morality, including universal human rights, a mass delusion?
• Can religion and evolution really be harmonized?
• Docs evolution render life meaningless?

Designed for students and anyone with an interest in the relationship between evolutionary heritage and human nature, the text takes an interdisciplinary approach and offers direction for further reading and research. Each chapter presents a main topic, together with discussion of related ideas and arguments from various perspectives. Along the way, it poses life’s biggest questions, pulling no punches, and presenting a challenge to thinkers on all levels.

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Evolution and Knowledge

2 Evolution and Consciousness

3 Evolution and Language

4 Evolution and Sex

5 Evolution and Feminism

6 Evolution and Race

7 Evolution and Ethics

8 Evolution and Religion

9 Evolution and the Meaning of Life

Appendix: Common Misconceptions About Evolution

Glossary

References

Index

For my students

© 2008 by David N. Stamos

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First published 2008 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

4 2009

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stamos, David N., 1957–

Evolution and the big questions: sex, race, religion, and other matters/David N. Stamos.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-4902-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4051-4903-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Evolution. I. Title.

B818.S823 2008

116-dc22

2007024791

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Blackwell’s Senior Editor Jeff Dean, who suggested I write this book (I had originally proposed an anthology) and who provided extensive and quite perceptive feedback on every chapter; to Prepress Projects’ Production Editor Catriona Vernal; to my mentor, friend, and colleague David M. Johnson and my late mentor and friend Robert H. Haynes; to George C. Williams, R. C. von Borstel, Alex Levine, and David Shaner; to my students to whom I taught Mind and Nature, in particular Adriana Iannozzi, Atessa and Mahsa Izadpanah, Robert Curtis, and Andreea Diaconescu; to Sharon Weltman Fixler, who went over the entire manuscript before its final submission; and last but not least to my mate Sandra Javadi. I thank you one and all for your help, advice, and encouragement.

Introduction

There is a debate raging in virtually every college and university in the Western world, and also widely among the public. It is whether evolutionary explanations—Darwinian explanations—can be legitimately extended to the big questions that vitally concern us all, questions that fall outside of biology as normally circumscribed. The big questions concern matters between the sexes, racial issues, religion, and so much more. The debate as a whole is the interdisciplinary question par excellence, involving not only biology but philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, feminism, theology, and virtually every other discipline in one way or another. This unique and timely book is devoted entirely to that debate, as a critical introduction. Both its content and its style were written for two main audiences, one the general public, the other students in college and undergraduate university courses in a variety of disciplines. I have also not refrained from developing my own views in every chapter, not only to provoke thought on the part of the reader but to challenge the heavyweights in the various fields. This book operates, then, on a number of levels. But more on all of this below, including chapter summaries.

What this book is not devoted to is a defense of the science of evolutionary biology per se. That debate is dead among scientists and the intellectual world as a whole. Beginning with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859, the evidence for evolution has grown exponentially, such that evolutionary biology long ago became the core and foundation of professional biology. To be sure, there are theories and debates about various aspects of evolution by professional biologists and philosophers of biology (biology would not be a healthy science were it otherwise). But the debates are not about evolution per se. Instead, all the debates occur within the framework of evolution as a fact, much the same way debates in modern astronomy occur within the framework of a dynamic rather than a static universe.

The fact is, all professional biological research around the world, in every country that has institutions of professional science—whether that research is on animal behavior, ecology, agriculture, medicine, genetics, or the fossil record—is conducted from an evolutionary point of view. The explanatory power of evolutionary principles is enormous, and that is putting it much too mildly. Evolutionary principles not only sufficiently explain what we find in the biological world, but they alone allow us to predict new findings and to understand the mysteries of life in their manifold diversity. Indeed every new finding by biologists, every new discovery, fits perfectly within the evolutionary framework begun by Darwin. From the changes and transitional forms studied in the fossil record, the geographical distribution of plants and animals, their anatomical relationships, the study of DNA and related mechanisms, to the study of the mutation and evolution of viruses and the evolutionary resistance of bacteria to antibiotics, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” This is what the renowned geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the principal architects of the Modern Synthesis, once wrote in defense of the teaching of evolution in public school science classes (Dobzhansky 1973, 125).1 At the center of it all is natural selection, Darwin’s main mechanism of evolutionary change and his only proposed explanation for the existence of biological adaptations such as beaks and eyes. This mechanism has now been studied and confirmed over and over again in the lab and in the wild, and it remains the core causal explanation of biological adaptation, of complexity and design in organisms.

In short, evolutionary science is one of the greatest and most solid of human achievements, possibly even the greatest of all time. As such, it should be denied to no one. But what is worse, to deny evolution is to deny the very nature and value of evidence itself. Reasoning that is not based on evidence, that ignores it or even fights against it, is reasoning that invites moral condemnation. We would hold a judge or jury in contempt were they to decide court cases on emotions and ideologies rather than on evidence. The offense becomes only worse for the big questions in life. As W. K. Clifford (1879) argued over a century ago, we have both a personal and a social duty to avoid belief unsupported by or opposed to evidence, just as we have both a personal and a social duty to avoid the spread of disease. Disrespect for evidence translates psychologically and socially into a culture of lies and power politics, not a culture that values truth and justice.

The public perception of the status of evolutionary biology, unfortunately, is in many parts of the world quite the opposite of what it should be. One often used to hear of creation science, especially of court cases in which special interest groups challenged the scientific status of evolutionary biology or attempted to have creation science taught in public schools as a rival to evolutionary biology. Recently it has reemerged under a new guise known as intelligent designtheory. Is not evolutionary biology just a competing theory after all? The answer is clearly no, for reasons already given and further elucidated in a number of places in this book. Nor is intelligent design theory genuine science. This theory, along with its previous incarnation as creation science, is essentially mythological thinking masquerading in a lab coat. It is the attempt to take a way of thinking common to frightened and ignorant peoples living in pre-scientific societies, a way of thinking possibly rooted deeply in human nature, and to make it intellectually respectable. But no matter how it is dressed, its explanations are not real explanations, it makes no testable predictions (because one cannot test the will of an invisible creator or designer), and it opens up no fruitful lines of research. In short, the public has been bamboozled by an enormous propaganda machine driven by the religious right wing. Debate over intelligent design theory does not exist within science itself, and for very good reasons. In all of this the public has been seriously misled. For more on this topic there is the Appendix, which includes plenty of references as well as a discussion on the main misconceptions about evolution. This is needed for removing obstacles in the minds of many readers and thus preparing them for the real debates, the debates that are alive and well and are being fought within one college and university after another.2

To return to the purpose of this book, then, it is to accomplish something far more interesting than to argue for the truth of evolution. That is something that has been done over and over again and need not be repeated here. Instead, the purpose of this book is to question whether and to what extent evolutionary biology shines light on the big questions debated in the humanities and social sciences, questions that concern us all. Adding evolution to those questions has the effect of making them controversial in the extreme. The philosopher Daniel Dennett (1995), for example, has argued that Darwinian evolution is what he, approvingly, calls a “universal acid” (63), corroding its way through our cherished beliefs in virtually all areas of life, such as ethics, politics, romance, and religion. Certainly one can choose one’s metaphor here, Dobzhansky’s light or Dennett’s acid or whatever else. Whatever one’s metaphor, it remains an extremely interesting question just how far evolutionary explanations can legitimately go.

The main theme that runs throughout the chapters is the debate between evolutionary explanations and what has come to be known as the Standard SocialScience Model (SSSM). The SSSM is a way of looking at human nature that is commonly found in sociology, behaviorism in psychology, cultural anthropology, Marxism, women’s studies, and gay studies. There is a danger in presenting this debate as a dichotomy, since in recent years some of these fields (particularly anthropology and psychology) have in some of their quarters been warming up to evolutionary explanations, while evolutionists on human nature have been paying more attention to the role of the environment. And yet the debate has not changed so much that the distinction between the two competing models no longer holds. Each model is alive and well and competing for allegiance, the social sciences and the humanities still have much of the SSSM in them, and the debates with evolutionists are as hot as ever. While I can only paint in broad strokes in this introduction, we shall see what I mean when we get to the details in the chapters. It will be useful at this point, then, to set the nature of the debate as an opposition between evolutionary models and the SSSM. Understanding each in its pure form will help to recognize and evaluate them when they are mixed.

One might say the debate between the two models is between an emphasis on evolutionary history and an emphasis on cultural history, but this is not entirely accurate. The debate is not nature versus nurture, but rather nature-nurture versus nurture. Biologists routinely argue that a full explanation for a given trait (whether physical or behavioral) requires a genetic and ultimately evolutionary explanation (nature) and an environmental explanation (nurture). Take, for example, the height of a particular plant. Reference to the genetics of the plant and the evolutionary history of its species is not enough for a full explanation of its height. For that, reference is also needed to the environmental conditions to which the plant has been exposed, such as the amount of sunshine and water. The same plant, with its genetics and evolutionary history, could have had a different height had it been exposed to different environmental conditions. This is easily seen in the case of clones.

The SSSM, on the other hand, tries its best to play down the role of biology and play up the role of the environment, namely, culture and conditioning. Ultimately it views human nature as enormously plastic (moldable), or, to vary the metaphor (following the 17th-century philosopher John Locke), as a tabula rasa, a blank slate. For example, Marxists argue that humans are not innately greedy, contrary to the view made popular by the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who thought humans were innately selfish but rational enough to form a social contract. Instead, for Marxists, it is a capitalist system that makes people greedy. Raised in a truly communist system, a system without class distinctions and private property, people would be unselfish and cooperative. Similarly, many feminists and social scientists argue that it is not because of their biology that men are so aggressive and violent toward women. Instead, they claim, it is a patriarchal system that makes men that way. Raised in a truly egalitarian system, men and women, behaviorally, would be basically the same. In gay studies it is similarly claimed that heterosexuality is not the biological norm for humans. Raised in a sexually permissive society, without stereotypes and prejudice, human sexual preferences would be either all the same or an even continuum. Common to each of these three examples, to Marxism, women’s studies, and gay studies—indeed it is part of the common denominator of SSSM thought—is the further claim that hierarchy is not innate to the human species but the product of cultural history, in other words a socialconstruction (this is the current fashionable phrase). Humans in this view are perfectly capable, in spite of their biology, to live in non-hierarchical social arrangements. It is the environment, past and present, that makes the hierarchies in humans, not genes, so also it is the environment that must be changed to fix the problem.

In the previous century one of the most powerful exponents of SSSM thinking was behaviorism in psychology. For behaviorists, what was true of serial killers and rapists was true of philanthropists and gifted musicians. In each and every case, it was not the person, or their genes, that was responsible, but rather it was the environment that had made them. John Watson, the first great of behaviorism, proclaimed,

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

(Watson 1924, 104)

Similarly for the last of the great behaviorists, B. F. Skinner, although he recognized the role of genes via instincts more than earlier behaviorists, the due he gave them was superficial. For Skinner as for many others, human nature is still so plastic that he envisioned a utopia in which human society, engineered using behaviorist principles, enjoys previously unknown bliss, a world where “behavior likely to be punished seldom or never occurs,” “people live together without quarreling,” and people “bear no more children than can be raised decently” (Skinner 1972, 66, 214). (Utopia thinking, indeed, tends to be common among SSSM thinkers.)

What went hand in hand with behaviorism, both ideologically and temporally, was cultural relativism in anthropology. Not only were fashion and art found to be tremendously variable and entirely culturally relative, but so too, as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1934) argued, were “mannerisms like the ways of showing anger, or joy, or grief... or in major human drives like those of sex... in fields such as that of religion or formal marriage arrangements” (59). What is considered normal in one society, she pointed out, might easily be considered abnormal in another. On such a view no culture is right and no culture is wrong, and morality, far from having any innate norm, “differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits” (73).

Although genuinely evolutionary explanations of human nature have been around since Darwin, they had difficulty being taken seriously in academic disciplines outside of professional biology until the power and pervasiveness of the SSSM received a number of serious blows. One serious blow (some would say the fatal blow) was delivered by the linguist Noam Chomsky. Beginning in the 1950s, Chomsky argued that language acquisition, contrary to behaviorism, is not simply a matter of basic intelligence and stimulus–response conditioning; indeed, that such a model could not possibly work. He argued, instead, that we humans enter the world with what he called a universalgrammar hard-wired into our brains, meaning that it is coded for in our DNA (more on this in Chapter 3). Chomsky accomplished a veritable revolution in the science of linguistics, one that is still ongoing but is now widely accepted in its broad outlines. His greater importance, however, lies in the effect his revolution had on the SSSM with its blank slate view of human nature. Not only did Chomsky’s revolution open the door to the computer model of the mindbrain (cognitive science), but it also opened the door to evolutionary models of human behavior, namely, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Sociobiology is the application of evolutionary principles to help explain social behavior in humans and other animals,3 while evolutionary psychology is the application of evolutionary principles to help explain psychological phenomena.4 These two burgeoning fields have much in common and a lot of overlap.

Another serious blow to the SSSM came from anthropology. In 1928, around the time behaviorism was becoming popular in professional psychology, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, the locus classicus of cultural anthropology, was first published. Mead claimed that in Samoan culture men were not dominant, rape and violence virtually did not exist, nor rivalry and competition, and sexual mores were completely free. A university textbook for many decades, Coming of Age inSamoa subsequently proved to be as shoddy as can be, with Samoans turning out to be basically no different than the rest of humanity. Mead, it turned out, got her information not from a careful study of the Samoans but from interviews with 25 teenage Samoan girls in one of the villages, girls who had fun in making up stories. Mead ultimately believed what she wanted to believe, taking most of anthropology with her (Freeman 1983, 1989; see Alcock 2001, 131–134). Although anthropology long remained in denial (Freeman’s study of Samoans and of Mead was done in the 1940s and 1960s), many anthropologists in recent decades have increasingly distanced themselves from anthropology’s SSSM past, taking seriously evolutionary biology and the search for cultural universals underlying cultural diversity (Brown 1991; Ghiglieri 2000).

The main problem with the SSSM is not that it is completely wrong. Indeed, it is obviously right about many things. For example, it is today plainly clear that the historically widespread view that men have a greater share of reason than women (e.g., Aristotle Politics I.12) was a socially constructed myth, as was the view that women are mainly to blame for the woes of humanity (the myth of Eve for the ancient Jews, Pandora for the ancient Greeks). And the SSSM might well turn out to be right about many other matters, for example that human rights are not natural or innate but are merely a social construction.

What is wrong with the SSSM, instead, is that as a way of thinking it produces resistance, even phobia or denial, to the fact that humans are a biological species. We can resist the fact as much as we want, but it remains the fundamental fact of our existence. Our species, Homo sapiens, did not pop into existence out of nothing, but instead evolved ever so gradually from an earlier species, which in turn evolved ever so gradually from a yet earlier species, and so on back through evolutionary time. Granted, very few, if any, professional academics who subscribe to the SSSM would wish to deny this (the evidence for evolution is just too great). But what they do wish to deny, instead, are the many implications of this fact. And that is where the problems arise. Quite simply, Homo sapiens is not just an evolved species but a social species, one that evolved in small hunting-gathering groups. As such, it would be utterly remarkable if this animal species did not evolve special instincts while all the others have. SSSM thinkers, interestingly, have no problem admitting rabbit nature, or wolf nature, or gorilla nature, but when it comes to humans they just do not want to admit that there is such a thing as human nature.

There are many reasons for this resistance, and they are interconnected. One reason simply involves the history of the term “human nature.” Deeply rooted in pre-evolutionary doctrines such as those of Plato, Aristotle, and St Augustine, talk of human nature immediately suggests to many today something essentialistic, something that is fixed and eternal, not something that gradually evolves. It also has normative connotations, suggesting not only what is but what ought to be. Indeed, so theory-laden is the term “human nature” that I recently had a prominent evolutionary biologist get angry with me at the very mention of the term. Such anger, however, is misplaced. As our knowledge grows, the meaning of terms naturally change. We still believe in the existence of humans, of course, and that, following Linnaeus in the 18th century, humans are a species. But ever since Darwin we also now recognize that, like other species, we are a constantly evolving species. Moreover, following Darwin but especially following our recent ability to read DNA, we know that variation is the norm for every population or species at the genetic level. But more than that, we also now know that there are statistical norms for populations and species at any one slice of time. Given this knowledge, then, there is no reason to abandon the concept of human nature altogether. Instead, our evolved knowledge suggests an evolved meaning, which in biology and related sciences is and should only be that of the genetically influenced statistical behavioral norm of the species taken at any one time slice in its evolutionary history. There is no essentialism here. There is also nothing in this meaning that need involve evaluative connotations such as that statistical deviations are “deviants,” nor need it involve normative connotations such as that the statistical norm is “good” or “best.” Instead, the only legitimate meaning of “human nature” in science today is purely descriptive. When legitimized as such, hopefully the fear that its folk and pre-Darwinian past evokes in so many will eventually subside and cease to be a barrier to understanding.

Related to this is the fear that talk of genes and human nature invariably involves biological determinism. The fear is that once it is granted that genes influence human behavior then it must also be granted that they determine human behavior, so that the status quo with all its injustice is justified and any hope of progressive change is lost. This fear is understandable, given that there is a history of injustice supported by biological theories, the Nazi doctrines of racial supremacy and inferiority being a striking example among many. Indeed, the fear of what evolutionary biology might mean for human nature has prevented many from taking the time to learn the basic principles of evolutionary biology and genetics. What should become apparent as we go through the coming chapters, however, is that “biological determinism” is a bogey term, one that does not have scientific respectability. To be sure, there are legitimate fears that are involved with the self-knowledge that comes from studying evolutionary biology, but the fear of biological determinism is not one of them.

Finally, there are political reasons for why many find the SSSM appealing and are immediately suspicious of, or will not even listen to, those who provide evolutionary perspectives on human nature.5 At the core of it all is political correctness, with its goal of a sensitive and fair society, especially with regard to groups that have suffered and continue to suffer discrimination and oppression. While among the general public there is a lot of division over the value of political correctness, with many thinking it has gone too far (just listen to call-in radio talk shows), in colleges and universities, especially in the humanities and social sciences, it has become quite a dominant force, even to the point of censorship (in many colleges and universities in the United States, for example, racial theorizing is not allowed). While the basic reasons for political correctness are just and laudable, much politically correct thinking is arguably unrealistic and a form of denial. Nowhere is this plainer than in the big questions where biology should be clearly relevant. Indeed, politically correct thinkers routinely give the impression that they could not care less about being biologicallycorrect. If there is a conflict between political correctness and biology, then too bad for biology. What we shall see in coming chapters is that political correctness, when it shuts itself off from empirical evidence and argument or flies too easily to the SSSM, easily becomes its own worse enemy. To give a quick example, it can now be argued that the communist experiment failed, in country after country around the world, just as every commune experiment of hippies in the 1960s failed, not necessarily because evil or stupid people were behind the experiments, but because they had the wrong theory of human nature. How many other grand visions of human happiness are destined to fail because they have an erroneous concept of human nature?

The truly interdisciplinary challenge, then, as I see it, and it is the real debate, is to try to figure out as best one can just where the SSSM is right and where it is wrong and to be fearless about it, even if that means throwing political correctness to the wind at times. Biology in general and evolutionary biology in particular need to be taken seriously, both if we want to truly understand the human condition and if we believe knowledge is power and we want to support the most effective ways of bettering the world. Granting that we should take biology seriously, however, is one thing, saying exactly where we should do so and to what degree is another. Indeed it is the hard part, but it is also the most interesting.

As mentioned briefly at the beginning, this book was written for three main audiences and I want to say more about them here. One of the main audiences is the general public, more specifically fairly well-educated people with at least some basic background in high school science. We all know that there is enormous interest out there over evolution versus religion, over whether evolution is true and whether it undermines religion and vice versa. But I suspect that there is also enormous interest out there about the wider implications of evolution should it be true. For example, virtually everyone has wondered about whether there is a genetic component to homosexuality or to behavioral differences between men and women. Well if genes are involved then so is evolution. It is that simple. Many also wonder if evolution and religion are not really antipodes but can be combined, and yet few will be aware of the fact (including Catholics) that in 1996 the late Pope John Paul II officially accepted evolution (combining it, of course, with theology) and that this is the official position of the Vatican. Indeed many scholars and intellectuals have combined evolution with theology, including some famous evolutionary biologists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky and Francisco Ayala. But can they do so legitimately? These and many other interesting questions are explored in this book, such that I cannot imagine the general public giving it a cool reception.

An equally important audience is college and undergraduate university students. What they shall learn in this book are not only the basic principles of evolution, but the real debates that are hotly engaging their own professors in department after department and from discipline to discipline. Indeed this book is a brief education in the nature and value of interdisciplinary studies. Whenever I have taught these topics (in the form of a course kit anthology which also contained my critical commentaries), twice in a university and twice in a community college, students became engaged in a way and to a degree that I have never seen elsewhere. This is because most if not all of their exposure in college and university is to SSSM thinking, so they are naturally surprised to find that there is a powerful alternative. It was in fact this situation that ultimately brought me to write this book, all combined with the discovery that there does not seem to be anything out there in the book market that is at all comparable.

Not only are evolutionary perspectives on the big questions normally not studied by undergraduate students in colleges and universities, but students who try to express evolutionary explanations in courses in the humanities and social sciences often find themselves in quite a tempest (as a number of my students have attested when they took courses after my Mind and Nature course). Undoubtedly much of the heat generated—and it is typically heat, not light—comes not from the topics themselves, or from the interdisciplinary approach as a whole, but first and foremost from the professors, from their territoriality which compels them to defend and protect their individual disciplines or subdisciplines from outside explanatory encroachment, and from their egos, which compel them to look down upon outside disciplines with a condescending smile or frown. Indeed there is enormous arrogance in academia, with in-group and out-group mentality. Unfortunately, not only is this egotism and arrogance misplaced, such that these professors do their respective fields a great disservice, but they also infect their students with the air of their high-minded insularity and thereby perpetuate a priori a barrier within those students to an increase in knowledge and understanding. In other words, they indoctrinate students into a specialization. Hence, students with an interdisciplinary mindset who attempt to introduce evolutionary explanations in classes outside of biology or philosophy of biology typically experience two walls of resistance: one from the professor, and the other, often before the professor even speaks, from other students in the class, especially those who share the disciplinary perspective of the professor.

Specialization, of course, is extremely important for progress within any field. Nevertheless, if one truly wants to know how the world works, whether the human world or the world of nature as a whole, in other words if one is genuinely imbued with a spirit of inquiry and a thirst for knowledge, then one has little choice but to welcome interdisciplinary studies with open arms. And the reason is simple. Not only is there ultimately only one reality, but examples abound of insights that were gained only by the cooperative efforts of workers in different fields. A prime example is the emerging explanatory paradigm of mass extinction #5 (which included the dinosaurs), a paradigm that involves the fields of geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, chemistry, geophysics, astronomy, and astrophysics (Glen 1994). Another example (though far less one of cooperation) is the species problem, the problem of determining the nature of biological species, a problem that has enjoyed an enormous amount of input and benefit not only from biologists but also from historians and philosophers (Stamos 2003, 2007). The present book, it is hoped, will awaken students to many other possibilities.

Although the expository level of this book is designed primarily for the general public with at least a high school education as well as college students and lowerlevel university undergraduates, it would be more greatly enjoyed by upper-level undergraduates, students with some background in disciplines such as philosophy, biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, women’s studies, gay studies, or theology. With students from a variety of backgrounds and the present book, both the course director and the students should experience (as I and my students have) a course they shall never forget!

As for specific courses, one obvious choice is philosophy of biology. However, it should be kept in mind that this book does not focus on some of the traditional topics in philosophy of biology (such as the species problem, the levels of selection problem, the problem of reductionism, or the problem of whether there are laws in biology). Instead, it casts a much wider net, a net that not only makes it more attractive than the standard philosophy of biology fare but that makes it attractive to many courses in the humanities and social sciences, especially courses that focus in one way or another on the topic of human nature.

The final audience for this book is professional scholars. While much of the content of this book is devoted to the clearest possible exposition of various views, concepts, and theories involved (again, it must be as clear as possible for students and the general public), I often critique the views of others and argue my own position on the various questions. In this way I hope to engage professional scholars and present a serious challenge to their views. This book, then, operates at more than one level and fluctuates between them, the one being clarity of exposition for students and the general public, the other being critical arguments designed for student research and professional scholars.

What this further means is that the style in each of the following chapters is not linear but mainly dialectical, in that each chapter moves forward typically by working through opposing views. This style is not only more engaging for the reader, I find, but it also provides the materials and perspectives necessary for responsible and informed conclusions on the various questions. For this purpose there are plenty of references to guide further research.

In all of this, whatever conclusions one comes to on evolution and the big questions after reading this book, they should always be tentative, and one need not even go that far. Instead, one may simply choose to suspend judgment on the various questions, pending further research and reflection. In either case, one cannot help but come away with a much more informed perspective on whether, where, and to what degree evolutionary explanations legitimately extend beyond biology as traditionally circumscribed. It is an exploration, indeed, that should not only enrich one’s life but that should continue for the rest of one’s days.

I should also say that my primary concern is to do justice to each of the big questions and to not hold back on what I think and why I think it. While an approach is needed that is sensitive to people’s feelings, since many of the questions and arguments in this book have the potential to disturb and even offend, my primary concern is to stimulate thought and to be sensitive to logic and evidence, which involves the value of being biologically correct. Throughout it all my attitude is that, to paraphrase the Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, there is no thought I am afraid to think whole. Nor do I think should you be afraid.

Now on to the chapter summaries.

Chapter 1 deals with epistemology, the study of knowledge, and we shall examine two questions that involve evolution. First, centering around the evolutionary epistemology of Karl Popper, we shall examine arguments pro and con on whether evolution evolved in us an ability to find truth, or whether that ability is a byproduct of other abilities that evolution evolved in us. We shall then examine a more narrow question, but nonetheless epistemological, namely, whether the science of evolutionary biology is capable of giving us any knowledge about human nature. After a brief discussion on postmodernism, the focus shall then be on the views of three critics, namely, the biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, and the anthropologist Marvin Harris. Much of this discussion paves the way for what is to come in the rest of the book.

Chapter 2 is devoted to evolution and consciousness. The problem of consciousness is arguably the central problem in philosophy of mind. The problem is whether this remarkable thing called consciousness, which seems so utterly different than matter, can receive an adequate explanation from evolutionary principles, or whether one needs to go outside of them. For some, such as Richard Swinburne, the existence of consciousness is literally a miracle, while for others, such as John Searle, Horace Barlow, and Gerald Edelman, it is perfectly natural.

Chapter 3 is devoted to evolution and language, a problem closely related to that of the previous chapter since many theorists connect consciousness irrevocably with language use, in the full-bodied sense of sentence formation (on this view, dogs and human babies, for example, are not conscious). The focus in this chapter is on Noam Chomsky’s claim that humans are born with what he calls a universal grammar (UG), a language organ distinctly human (animals do not have it),6 hard-wired into our DNA, in a sense the common denominator underlying natural languages such as English and Chinese (which for Chomsky are superficial surface phenomena, humans really have only one language). We shall examine the basic ideas in Chomsky’s theory of the UG as well as problems raised against the UG from an evolutionary perspective. Accepting the UG (in some form), we shall then examine Chomsky’s argument for why he thinks the UG is not the product of evolution by natural selection, as well as two very different attempts to fit Chomsky’s UG into the evolutionary picture, attempts by the evolutionary linguists Steven Pinker and Derek Bickerton.

In Chapter 4 we turn to matters of sex. Four questions shall be examined here. First, we shall look at the argument by the evolutionary psychologist David Buss that evolution evolved different mating strategies in men and women. Second, we shall focus on the question of why men rape, specifically the argument by the anthropologist Michael Ghiglieri for the evolution of a rape instinct in men, which makes rape at bottom a matter of sex and reproduction, as well as critical arguments that place the cause solely in culture, as a matter of male dominance and hatred toward women. Third, we shall look at the question of homosexuality, examining two very different evolutionary theories that attempt to explain why there is homosexuality, the kin selection theory of the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson and the X chromosome theory of the behavior geneticist Dean Hamer. We shall also examine some critical arguments, one of which is that heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality are not natural human kinds but social constructions. Fourth and finally, we shall look at the incest taboo, which is universal or near universal in human culture, specifically the argument by E. O. Wilson for the evolution of an instinct for incest avoidance and the argument by Marvin Harris that it is totally based on culture.

In Chapter 5 we deal with questions raised by feminism. One question is why women’s studies courses are characterized by what has been termed biophobia. Another question is whether sexual selection theory in biology legitimately applies to humans. Related to this is the question of gender roles. Feminists often argue that gender roles are social constructions. Certainly at least some are, but we shall examine arguments for whether on the whole they have an evolutionary basis. We shall also examine an argument, by the well-known feminist biologist Anne FaustoSterling, that not only gender roles but the very dichotomy of male–female is not biologically justified but is another social construction, so that what we really have is a continuum or single sex. Finally, we shall take a look at the question of whether the science of evolutionary biology is sexist and if so whether scientific knowledge must always be biased.

In Chapter 6 we deal with questions concerning human races. We shall begin by looking at some popular misconceptions about race that are undermined by a basic understanding of evolutionary biology. That will take us to the interesting debate over whether human races really exist. On the one hand we shall examine the now standard arguments for why many biologists say we should not name human races, focusing on a paper by Stephen Jay Gould. We shall then examine a number of arguments, much more recent, that attempt to reintroduce the concept of race, one using ecology, the other using cladistic taxonomy. We shall then examine the question of race and IQ, assuming that there are human races for the sake of argument. Finally, we shall examine the question of whether racism, which is a human universal, is acquired by culture and environment or has a deeper cause, one rooted in our evolutionary past.

In Chapter 7 we examine many of the questions that evolutionary biology raises for ethics. We shall begin with an examination of Social Darwinism, the older kind of evolutionary ethics which holds that we should apply the principle of natural selection to the human species. This will be followed by a discussion on the distinction (all-too-often confused even by professional philosophers) between the is-ought and naturalistic fallacies. We shall then examine the modern version of evolutionary ethics, the sociobiological approach, which argues that a variety of moral instincts evolved in the human species. We shall focus in particular on conscience and altruism. We shall also examine the arguments of some of the critics of the sociobiological approach, who focus on moral reasoning and who view ethics as an autonomous discipline. As a counterbalance, we shall then examine the argument by Peter Singer, the don of practical ethics, for why politically left thinkers (they tend to dominate in colleges and universities and are typically SSSM thinkers) should adopt a Darwinian view of human nature. Along the way we shall examine some arguments on the issue of moral values, whether they can have an objective existence given evolution, or whether we project them onto nature. In connection with this, we shall examine the question of whether natural, innate, universal human rights are objective or a social construction.

In Chapter 8 we examine the implications of evolution for religion. The human world teems with religion, and this cries out for explanation. Three questions shall be examined here. The first is whether the ubiquity of religious beliefs and practices can be adequately explained by memetics, which is the application of evolutionary principles to the spread of memes (the units of cultural evolution, the analog of genes in genetics). The second question is whether religion requires a deeper explanation rooted in the evolution of human nature, in other words, whether there evolved in humans a religion instinct, such that the world’s many religions are simply surface phenomena. Finally, we shall examine whether theology and evolutionary biology can be legitimately combined, as the late Pope John Paul II and Stephen Jay Gould and many others have attempted to do. I shall examine arguments pro and con and argue that they cannot be legitimately combined, a large part of the reason being the implications of evolution for the problem of evil, another being the ultimately incompatible approaches to knowledge and truth of science and religion.

In Chapter 9, the final chapter, we take a look at what it’s all about, at whether evolution adds to the meaning of life, is neutral or irrelevant, or dissolves it away completely. We shall also examine whether evolutionary biology is compatible with a major movement in philosophy and literature known as existentialism.

And so there it is. A common theme running throughout this book is that, as with other species, one should expect evolution by natural selection to have evolved in the human species a variety of instincts and that, moreover, these instincts play a continuing and significant role in human behavior, from language, sexual mating, racism, morality, religion, and even the search for truth and the meaning of life. Probably the most famous quotation in philosophy on the subject of instincts is from the metaphysician F. H. Bradley, who in the Preface to the first edition of his magisterial Appearance and Reality (1893) wrote, “Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct” (x). What is usually overlooked with this quotation is the clause that completes the sentence: “but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.” Certainly food for thought in a book like this, and probably more to the skeptic’s liking. But much more important than the quotation itself is the context in which it is found. It is none other than an expression of the true university mind. Not only is it the recognition that “to gain an education a man must study in more than one school” (viii), but it is also the recognition that the greatest enemy to just reasoning is the “dogmatic frame of mind” (ix). Thus along with Bradley hopefully we can all agree, no matter what our views on the big questions examined in this book, that “I would rather keep my natural place as a learner among learners” (ix).

1 Key terms that are not defined in the text, or that are defined but occur more than once, will find a discussion in the Glossary at the back. It might be a good idea for those not familiar with key terms in biology and philosophy to read the Glossary first, before reading the chapters.

2 There is a simple two-part test that I like to apply to anyone who thinks evolution is just a theory: (i) ask them what books by evolutionary biologists they have read, and (ii) ask them where they think species came from if not from evolution. Invariably the answers are lame. Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but this must not be confused with the fact that uninformed opinions are a dime a dozen (and that is putting too high of a price on it). The same is true of opinions that are informed to some degree but are motivated primarily by an agenda other than logic and evidence.

3 Wilson (1975) is the classic text, Alcock (2001) a recent and able defense.

4 Barkow et al. (1992) and Crawford and Krebs (1998) are the main anthologies, Badcock (2000) a recent introductory text.

5 Jumonville (2003) provides a nice discussion on how the debate between the SSSM and evolutionary models relates to politics, in particular the multicultural values of the rising New Left (which embraces group identity values, whether based on race, ethnicity, or gender, and opposes hierarchy) versus the universal values of the Enlightenment. For a sustained critical discussion on how the SSSM embraces the tabula rasa model and in effect denies the existence of human nature, see Tooby and Cosmides (1992), Gross and Levitt (1998), Alcock (2001, ch. 7), and Pinker (2002).

6 Although from a biological point of view humans are animals, throughout this book I shall follow linguistic convention and use the word “animal” to refer only to non-human animals. This is much more convenient than repeatedly using the phrase “non-human animals,” which quickly becomes tiring.

1

Evolution and Knowledge

Epistemology is the study of knowledge, whether there is such a thing and, if it exists, how we can acquire it. In modern philosophy, whether we are talking about rationalists (those who focus on reason) or empiricists (those who focus on the senses), epistemology has been dominated by the approach of René Descartes, who lived in the early 1600s. In order to find out if anything can be certain, Descartes in his Meditations took systematic doubt to its limits, finding not only that he could doubt authorities and experts, but even his senses, so that he could doubt the existence of an external world, a world outside of himself, even the existence of his body, even the existence of God and other minds, even that one plus one equals two. But there was one thing, he claimed, that he could not possibly doubt no matter how hard he tried, namely, the existence of his mind while he was doubting (or more generally thinking). This is his famous Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). But the Cogito is a position of solipsism (the view that only my mind and my ideas exist). To get out of the Cogito, and ultimately back to the external world and other minds, in other words to provide epistemology (including science) with a foundation, Descartes found it necessary to prove the existence of God and that God is not a deceiver, because only then can reason trust its senses and intellectual powers. It is commonly acknowledged in philosophy today that Descartes’ three proofs of God’s existence do not work. It is even possible that Descartes himself would have secretly agreed (Stamos 1997). At any rate, arguments that attempt to establish the existence of God have an interesting but ultimately bad history, involving flaws of one sort or another (Martin 1990). Partly because of this, modern epistemology has been plagued ever since with the problem of creating and justifying an epistemology from the inside out, an epistemology that starts with the inner self—one’s mind and the ideas found inside it including sense data—and works its way out to the external world (e.g., Russell 1940).

Because of this history of what is apparently a dead end, a number of philosophers more recently have argued that the only way out is to begin from an altogether different starting point, namely, modern science. Hence the program known as naturalized epistemology (Quine 1969; Kornblith 1994). Given evolution, one obvious candidate is to place knowledge on an evolutionary foundation, hence evolutionary epistemology, truly an interesting and growing field (Radnitzky and Bartley 1987; Maienschein and Creath 1999).

Evolutionary epistemology is the subject of this chapter, and two major questions shall first be examined, both following the useful division of evolutionary epistemology outlined by Michael Bradie. Bradie (1994) distinguishes between the evolutionary epistemology of mind, which attempts to “account for the cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans by a straightforward extension of the biological theory of evolution,” and the evolutionary epistemology of theories, which “attempts to account for the evolution of ideas, scientific theories and culture in general by using models and metaphors drawn from evolutionary biology” (454).

There are many examples of the former view, such as W. V. O. Quine’s (1969) suggestion that “Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind” (126), or Susan Blackmore’s (1999) claim that “We are designed by natural selection to be truthseeking creatures” (202). The don of philosophy of biology, Michael Ruse (1986, ch. 5), has attempted to be more specific, arguing that the basic tools and methods of science—inductive and deductive reasoning, analogical reasoning, mathematics, appeal to laws of nature (regularities), observation, experiment, etc.—are not only “rooted in our biology” but “have their being and only justification in their Darwinian value, that is in their adaptive worth to us humans—or, at least, to our proto-human ancestors” (155). Ruse’s book is aptly titled Taking Darwin Seriously, and it is interesting too that Darwin provided an evolutionary epistemology of the first kind. Noting that throughout human evolutionary history humans existed in social groups or tribes, and that tribes would compete with and supplant other tribes, Darwin (1871 I) argued that the main though not exclusive cause of success would be “art” (by which he meant technology, both for subsistence and for battle), that tribes with superior art would increase in number and supplant other tribes, and that since art is the product of the intellect it is “highly probable that with mankind the intellectual faculties have been gradually perfected through natural selection” (160).

Examples of the second kind of evolutionary epistemology are common too, going right back again to the time of Darwin. For example, the biologist T. H. Huxley, famously known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his public defense of Darwin’s theory of evolution, wrote in a book review of Darwin’s Origin that

Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis of the origin of species will take its place among the established theories of science, be its consequences whatever they may. If, on the other hand, Mr. Darwin has erred, either in fact or in reasoning, his fellow-workers will soon find out the weak points in his doctrines, and their extinction by some nearer approximation to the truth will exemplify his own principle of natural selection.

(Huxley 1859, 148)

Similarly, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, Darwin’s main advocate in the United States, wrote in a review of Darwin’s Origin that

A spirited conflict among opinions of every grade must ensue, which,—to borrow an illustration from the doctrine of the book before us—may be likened to the conflict in nature among races in the struggle for life, which Mr. Darwin describes; through which the views most favored by facts will be developed and tested by “Natural Selection,” the weaker ones be [sic] destroyed in the process, and the strongest in the long run alone survive.

(Gray 1860, 154)

Much more recently the psychologist Donald Campbell (1974) advocated a “selective retention paradigm [i.e., natural selection] to all knowledge processes” (56), not just to scientific knowledge.

Our focus in this first part of the chapter shall be on the evolutionary epistemology devised by the philosopher of science Karl Popper, hailed by Campbell (1974) and many others as “the modern founder and leading advocate of a natural-selection epistemology” (89). Popper is no longer today the biggest name in evolutionary epistemology, but he is nevertheless an excellent focus for our purposes, first because his is still indeed a big name in the field, second because he provides us with both kinds of evolutionary epistemology as described by Bradie above, and third because some of his key ideas recur in later chapters in this book.

Following our examination of the questions raised by Bradie’s two divisions, the final question we shall examine is whether the science of evolutionary biology is capable of telling us anything about human nature. For this question we shall begin by taking a brief look at the loose collection of ideas and agendas known as postmodernism, not only because it is good to know what it is about, but because, again like Popper, some of its ideas and agendas recur in a number of places in later chapters. We shall then focus on some critics who, unlike postmodernists, accept the evolution of species as a fact but who nevertheless take a negative position on our final question, namely, the biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, and the anthropologist Marvin Harris.

All of this, questions raised by Bradie’s two divisions and the question of whether evolutionary biology is capable of shedding light on human nature, helps set the stage for the remaining chapters in this book, making it important to keep the debates in mind as we go through chapter after chapter.

Turning to Popper, then, who gives us an epistemology of mind and of theories, in his article titled “Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind” (1978) he begins the final section with a standard view in science, which is that life gradually “evolved or emerged” from non-living matter and that mind gradually evolved or emerged from living things. This is a genuine view of emergence, one that rejects the philosophical flights of fancy known as hylozoism (the theory that all matter possesses life to some degree) and panpsychism (the theory that all matter possesses mind to some degree). Popper is not terribly disturbed by the question of the origin of life, thinking (like many others) that it will eventually be solved by science, but the emergence of mind from life seems to him a much more difficult problem, for which he offers some “speculative conjectures.”

Following the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, Popper supposes that natural selection first evolved in some organisms what Mayr calls “closed behavioral programs,” behavioral programs that are very detailed and rigid and are built into the DNA of the organisms, such as web-weaving in spiders, honeycomb-making in bees, and nest-building in birds. From these closed behavioral programs, natural selection then evolved what Mayr calls “open behavioral programs,” behavioral programs that are not rigid but leave open different possibilities, such as imprinting in goslings (Mayr’s example). Imprinting is a genetic program, such that the newborn gosling permanently takes to be its parent the first moving object it sees which makes the appropriate sounds, but it is an open genetic program in that the adopted parent need not be either of its actual parents (though it invariably is in the wild) and may instead be something else—such as a clever biologist doing studies on imprinting. Indeed Mayr (1976) claims that “On the whole, and certainly among the higher vertebrates, there has been a tendency to replace rigidly closed programs by open ones or, as the student of animal behavior would say, to replace rigidly instinctive behavior by learned behavior” (24).

Open behavioral programs are still instincts, behavioral programs that are coded in the organism’s DNA. How does one get from these to genuine learning behavior, indeed to what we readily recognize as knowledge? Popper supposes that there are four stages, all of them evolutionary stages produced by natural selection (and here we get some overlap with our next two chapters). The first stage is the evolution of pain and fear, the selective advantage of which ought to be obvious, as they increase survival to adulthood and consequently reproduction. Popper sees this stage as involving “real trial-and-error behavior” (151), and it is not difficult to see why. Organisms that experience pain or fear, or pleasure we might add, are attempting to adapt to their environment, by experimentation and feedback. But because they are being direct about it, these organisms are also directly putting their lives on the line. Hence Popper’s second stage, where natural selection evolved “imagined or vicarious trial-and-error behavior,” evolved by natural selection since this ability confers a selective advantage over mere (real) trial-and-error behavior. The advantage here is that the organism can play out trial-and-error scenarios in its mind, using memory based on its past experience, such as remembering to avoid certain kinds of animals or plants. From the second stage evolved the third stage, “the evolution of more or less conscious aims, or ends: of purposive animal actions, such as hunting” (152). Clearly Popper thinks that not only consciousness but teleology (having goals or ends that effect present action) is not confined to humans but is shared in various degrees by many animal species. I would agree with Popper, but it is a question for our next chapter. From the third stage, natural selection evolved the fourth stage, found thus far only in humans, namely, the evolution of language. It is only with language, in the full sense of sentences (words combined with grammatical rules), that we “formulate