Biology is, or rightly ought to be, more a science than a religion. This article suggests a possible shift in point of view in a particular part of the practice that might help in achieving that goal.
Section I: Different Perspectives in Sociobiology
Introduction
Did Darwin’s Descent of Man point the bony finger of time in the wrong direction? Are we men descended from animals? Or are we turning into them? From time to time arguments inspired by Dasrwin's influential work emerge from the field of evolutionary biology like demons from Pandorra’s box, and the brutality of the Darwinian vision turns gratuitous.
Natural selection was the name Darwin used to denote the process by which species differentiated, adapted to their environment, and displayed distinctive features associated with their adaptations. He showed how selection might work at the level of individuals, and he showed how it might work at the level of populations. Much of his argument will strike an unprejudiced reader as being sensible, even-handed, and fair. He noted how unique features in organisms related to unique functions and how natural variations naturally gave rise to natural adaptations. He showed how these adaptations might give individuals some tiny advantage. And he showed how this tiny advantage might cause the adaptation to become more widely spread in subsequent generations within a population.
Europeans culled from and distorted Darwin arguments to support a pre-existing notion of superiority. Economist Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” which managed to distort Darwin’s work and frame it in terms of the popular European prejudice. Europeans in general and British colonists especially were then quick to use the new idea to justify whatever acts were needed to forward the cause of colonialism, sometimes resorting to cruel and inhuman abuses.
We hesitate to suggest that colonialism would have been profoundly different in the absence of the notion of ‘survival of the fittest.’ After all, the abuses of the practice were well established, and in fact, they were already on the wane by the time Darwin wrote. Nevertheless, we imagine that in the absence of Spencer’s language treatment might occasionally have been a little less cruel. Or attitudes might have been a little less dismissive of the capacities of local peoples and therefore Europeans might have engaged them earlier and more broadly in acts that added value to the goods they removed from colonial regions. Europeans would have treated local cultures and customs with more respect. And they might have done more to advance the causes of indigenous peoples had Darwin’s idea not been used to support the prejudice that they were perhaps more different than they actually turned out to be. These issues are as germane today as they were a century ago because Americans are just as tempted to make the same mistakes as their European ancestors.
Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, Steel makes a convincing argument that western man is not
so much genetically superior as he is blessed with a rich cultural
background. And that the
advantages western man enjoys he has by virtue of accidents of geography and
history more than by virtue of genetic accidents. Western man has an incredibly deep and
rich culture that has been refined and reinvented repeatedly over the last
three or ten millennia. Patterns of trade have preserved and reinforced this
old tradition. When, from time to
time, one part of the west falls into a deep sleep and loses most or all of the
useful ideas of the past, they inevitably find their way to places not far off
where they are preserved. Then, some time later, they sweep over the west once
again, fueling renaissance.
What one cannot attribute to culture, one might attribute to
frontier. The center of gravity of
western civilization has been moving steadily northward and westward with the
most fertile agricultural land. At the height of the last ice age much of the
Sahara was grassland, and the civilization of Egypt was ramping up. Near the time the sphinx was
built, perhaps 8000 years ago, western civilization would have been mostly in
Egypt. As the earth warmed,
ice-sheets gave way to forests, forests gave way to fertile grasslands,
grasslands turned into steppes, and steppes became deserts. The best and most fertile land moved
north and west.
With it moved the frontier and the culture of the
frontier. Just behind that
line of frontier followed the great cities. From Egypt, civilization moved to
Mesopotamia, Persia and other parts of the fertile crescent. From there civilization moved to
what is now known as Turkey, then Greece, then Rome, then Venice, Paris,
London, then New York. The impetus
for this motion has been that these have been the gathering points for the
influx of goods from the newest frontiers of agriculture. Civilization grew at the intersection
of new fertile lands and newly applied agricultural methods because at this
intersection there always has existed the greatest excess labor that could be
concentrated on industry, craft, science, architecture, religion, and the
arts. Then, as population levels
approach equilibrium, and as agricultural methods fail from bad husbandry,
standard of livings fall and civilization stagnates or collapses. That’s the two paragraph explanation to
explain what Diamond leaves unexplained of the last millennium or two in the
west.
It is important to bear these explanations in mind, because
otherwise we yield to the temptation to believe that all of what western man
enjoys relates to his unique genetically inherited capacities, when actually it
may be only some relatively small bit of it. Or none at all. Darwin’s theory explains much. But we doubt that it explains the
ascendancy of the west nearly so much as a long series of accidents and
geographic conditions manage to do. Not the least of these was the repetitive opening and exploitation of
new frontiers by men with an old and rich culture. The receding ice sheets may have ten or fifty
times as much to do with the success of Western man as do any of Darwin’s
theories. So, too might the rich
resources of the New World.
Evolutionary Biology: Why Object?
For better or worse, there does exist a profound
relationship between evolutionary biology and man’s ideas about himself. And it is natural that this should be
the case. Evolutionary biology systematically looks at the nature of life and
the life of nature and tries to make sense of how it all works. To the extent that man sees himself as
a part of nature, as an intelligent animal, by looking at nature he sees himself.
This places a rather heavy burden on the backs of evolutionary biologists,
because it means that it is incumbent upon them to judge their interpretations
of fact by the light of a constructive view of society.
We do not argue that evolutionary biology ought to blind
itself to inconvenient truths: just the opposite. Rather,
it is incumbent of scientists to explore promising paths where they might take
us and not than adhere to some religious orthodoxy, but rather to explain
theories with care and a kind of openness to new interpretation.
Evolutionary biology is, first and foremost a science. And as a science it has a duty to make
interpretations that find as much meaning in experimental results as the
results would justify. As a
science it has a duty to exercise philosophical rigor and interpret
experimental results in a way that hews closest to some imagined truth. But we
know from the long history of physics that as soon as a proposition is taken as
being irrefutably proven, it stands the greatest risk of being overthrown
either as being false, or as being conditionally true. Or as being irrelevant.
No scientific theory may be considered unconditionally true, final, and
completely settled. Each is subject
to being overthrown partially or completely. Or to being interpreted in different ways.
A casual reader of books on sociobiology might come to the
conclusion that a number of the arguments in evolutionary biology are less
about the facts than they are about how to interpret the facts. This is a
natural condition for any new science. It is inevitable that any science should
go through such a stage. Physics
was born from astronomy. And for
some time the Ptolemaic view of the universe put the earth at its center. As a
good mathematician, Ptolemy was able to describe the apparent motion of the
heavenly bodies with great accuracy, even though he relied on a rather flawed
model of their motions. So not all explanatory models are equally good, even
when they do an equally good job of describing the facts.
Where evolutionary biology has opportunities to use facts
and models of reality to inform thinking about the natural world, its
practitioners behave as scientists. To the extent, however, that its practitioners treat and defend models
in a way that ignores or denies evidence or fails to accept models that provide
better or more robust explanatory models, these attitudes and practices tend to
resemble the ones of religious fanatics defending an orthodoxy. One might be
reminded of Galileo’s being excommunicated and placed under house arrest for
wresting Rome from the center of the universe when he placed the earth in orbit
around the sun. Galileo’s heliocentric solar system would overthrow not just
Ptolemy, but Rome itself. Some audacious person might imagine this case has
some hypothetical connection to certain views within the field of socio-biology.
According to Alcock in The Triumph of Sociobiology evolutionary biology’s focus since the 1970’s has
been on individual acts and traits. It has been based on an implicit assumption
that all that is worth knowing in evolutionary biology can be known by studying
individuals and mating act itself and a tiny bit of culture that surrounds that
act. This assumption, we will
argue, implicitly denies the utility of any relationships population members
have with each other outside of the act of copulation. We remain to be convinced that this
point of view is the best point of view if one is studying a paramecium. We are highly doubtful that it will get
us far at all in the study of ants and bees. And in the case of humans we are convinced that such a point
of view strips man of most of what is essential – his relationships with
other humans. It strips him of
society. This view of sociobiology seems to deny any link between biology and
social behavior. It is as if ants, bees, herd animals, and human society were
either biologically impossible or biologically irrelevant. Or both.
Our admittedly poor understanding of the socio-biologist’s argument goes something like this:
1)
It is the act of copulation that propagates the species to a
new generation, passing along all the genetic attributes.
2)
All mating pairs have survived to the threshold of
reproduction and therefore are ‘fit’ in an evolutionary sense. They exist as
proxies of their past histories and as physical votes for their respective sets
of genes.
3)
Virtually all females reproduce, and for reasons of
simplification we assume they all reproduce at identical rates.
4)
Males reproduce differentially. Highly successful males have many progeny, but less fit
males have fewer or none.
5)
The act of copulation is the sole selective act in evolution
because it passively and very effectively culls out those of low fitness who
have died and it culls out those of lower reproductive fitness who remain
alive.
The first proposition is true in one sense. Copulation does pass along at least
some genetic attributes. In
another sense, however, while the act of copulation might be viewed by the male
as the end of the process of reproduction, it is nothing but a marker in time
to the next generation. For this new generation, the process will not be
complete until it, in turn has borne its own offspring. So, if one is studying mosquitoes, proposition
1 might be close enough to being correct to be useful. But if one is studying mammals or
birds, it could materially mislead us about what factors are most important,
because it studiously avoids all the stuff that happens from the time of copulation
to the time the next generation does the same. Evolutionary scientists may
treat us to compelling arguments for why that is not important, but the
subjects of their studies, especially the long dead ones suggest to us that
such is not the case. On this point, fossils speak more intelligibly than
certain socio-biologists.
The second proposition is close enough. We are concerned
that fitness and survival are sometimes defined in such a way as to transform
‘survival of the fittest’ into a tautology. And that might cause other problems. We will look at fitness
and its relationship with survival later.
The third proposition sometimes comes close to being true in
a few species, perhaps. If one is
thinking about bees and ants, it is patently false. We expect that understanding this bias is more useful
in understanding the mental framework of certain socio-biologists than it is in causing serious problems in
the inner workings of the science. We might be wrong.
Proposition four is certainly true for a significant number
of animals. But when one evaluates proposition four, one properly does it in
light the cautions we proposed for proposition one.
Proposition five is a reasonable proposition from a male
perspective. From the perspective
of a male human, copulation is the end of man. And in a great many species it is the end of the male in
that species, literally. There are
countless arthropod species that provide examples of males perishing after
copulation. Many end up nourishing the next generation. So if one takes a
masculine point of view, copulation is the end in at least two senses. There
exist a large number of species in which the female (and/or the male) provides
some protection and nurture to offspring. And it is in these cases that
evolution has been most successful over the last two hundred million years. In many species, viewing the
world from the masculine point of view provides significantly less than half
the picture. Furthermore, we intend to show that focusing like a laser on the
male part can bias the view of the world to the extent that it points Darwin’s
bony finger of time in the wrong direction.
The Bony Finger of Time
If we lived in a world absent all nurturing acts by parents,
then this point of view would not be unreasonable. If we lived in a universe in which such nurturing were not
even helpful in theory, it would be unassailable. Birds and mammals, however, invest heavily in their
young. And even some poisonous
snakes and alligator mothers provide cursory protective services to their young
hatchlings. There is a clear pattern in nature of rewarding species that invest
in their young. So any study of evolutionary biology that fails to rather
explicitly account for this interaction fails to account for most of the more
interesting developments in evolutionary biology over at least the last one or
two hundred million years. Arguably, it would fail to account for the most
profound general trend in biology since the institution of the multi-cellular
organism – the act of trading reproductive quantity for a host of other
qualitative benefits.
We will argue that evolution has, generally speaking, been
moving species from reproductive quantity to reproductive quality. The general trend of evolution in the
plant and animal kingdom has been to greater scale, more complexity, higher
social organization, more interactions within a species, more interactions
between species. Any philosophical treatment of evolution that fails to account
for these trends and for the causes of these trends fails to account for the
whole picture. There is a storied
history of how each male gets to the point of copulation. And there is a storied history of how
males fail to reach this point. We
argue that to the extent that storied history matters, it must be accounted for
in the study of evolutionary biology. We are unprepared to take as a matter of faith that the storied history
does not matter.
Finally, we argue that as animals become more social,
interactions between them that do not involve copulation become ever more
important in comparison to copulation. Ants, for instance, are highly social animals. And they are highly
successful. While it may be possible in the case of ants to use males as a
proxy for success of a colony, one learns precious little about the social
structure of the ant colony in doing so. If one wishes to understand the
success of the ant in a meaningful way, no amount of studying the copulation
rituals will suffice. One must
instead, resort to considering social interactions.
In other words, perhaps it is good evolutionary biology to
assume that the male ant stands as the proxy for success in an ant colony
– that a successful colony will produce more and better reproductive
pairs than a materially less successful colony. But as a person standing outside the field
looking in, it is difficult to see how one can, in good faith, systematically
remove all the social interactions from consideration in a particular field of
biology and then call it sociobiology.
Specific
Background
One aspect of greater debate we are engaged in is a disagreement over certain cooperative social behaviors. One such category is termed ‘altruism.’ Evolutionary biologists might define altruism as an act in which an individual forgoes an opportunity to reproduce, and does so to extend some good that attaches to other individuals or to the population as a whole. In more normal usage the word altruism evokes some sense of self-sacrifice – a person runs into a flaming building to rescue a child, for instance. Or a person forgoes a career to raise a child. The notion of altruism is encountered from time to time in the study of evolutionary biology.
The idea of altruism inside the field of evolutionary biology is dead. We do not intend to resurrect it – such a notion would be suicidal to our ideas. We agree that the term attaches to a behavior a kind of assumption about the nature of the individual performing an action which, in the case of humans, is almost impossible to discover. And in the case of animals is all but impossible to discover. We will argue, however, that actions can be very objectively judged as being cooperative or non-cooperative in nature. And such a judgment can, from time to time, be extremely helpful in assessing social behavior in biological populations.
In the early 1960’s Wynne-Edwards observed in Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behavior that certain species appeared to have some mechanism by which they regulated fertility rates. From his observations of starlings he concluded that population levels influenced fertility rates. When the population was high, fertility was low, and vice versa. He imagined that certain species reproduced more slowly under conditions of high population levels; and he attributed the cooperative behavior in question to altruism.
He also used whale hunting as an example of a predator-prey problem in which the pseudo species, the whale fisherman, had harvested whales almost to the point of extinction. The consequence of this behavior was that the whale hunter himself, having no reason for existence, became extinct. Had the whale hunter managed to restrict his catch, he might have survived indefinitely, along with his quarry. If only the population of whale fishermen were as enlightened as the starlings.
H.C. Williams, in Adaptation and Natural Selection disagreed with Wynne-Edwards about starlings, and perhaps about whale hunters. He created a thought experiment that started by assuming a population that behaved as Wynn-Edwards conjectured. Imagine, he posited, a population in which all members cooperated. They reproduced at some normal rate until that rate was clearly unsustainable. Thereafter they would reproduce at a lower rate. Assume, as did Wynne-Edwards, that the lower rate of fertility protected longer-term interests that would be ill-served if populations outgrew their bounds.
Now, imagine that everyone agreed to reproduce at a lower rate and behaved accordingly. Things go along swimmingly for some time. But eventually the inevitable happens: a pair of individuals cheats and reproduces at the higher rate. These individuals would have an evolutionary advantage with respect to their peers. Imagine that the cheaters constituted only a small portion of the population and of its reproductive capacity early on. If the agreement to limit reproduction recurred frequently, and if the quality of cheating were inherited, it would be only a few generations before the ‘cheaters’ would outnumber the members who cooperated. In just a few more generations any cooperative behavior would be wiped out.
“The logic of this kind of argument as presented by Williams convinced almost every evolutionary biologist active since 1966 that Darwinian natural selection based on reproductive competition among individuals” would be more powerful in shaping the attributes of a species that would competition between groups or species ( The Triumph of Sociobiology, Alcock p 30).
This view transformed biology. The study of population effects was dead. It has since been taken as a matter of faith among evolutionary biologists that the prime measure of fitness, perhaps the singular measure of fitness, is reproductive fitness. And the study of evolutionary biology has focused like a laser on non-social species where almost all interactions are between mating pairs.
If we are to believe Alcock, Williams’ thought experiment proves that cooperative behavior that might suppress reproduction is impossible. In fact, it does not matter how the suppression of reproduction rates takes place. Regardless of whether suppression of reproduction is due to altruism as Wynn-Edwards posited or it was supposedly a quality inherent to the biology of a species, Williams’ thought experiment ‘proves’ that this suppressive behavior neither does exist nor ever could exist.
The argument is based on an implicit assumption that the incremental benefits of fertility are invariably positive. This is a rather interesting implicit assumption because the entire argument rests on it. The argument evaluates to it: if one were to assume that the incremental benefits to the parents of offspring could ever be negative, it would be impossible to support Williams’ argument without defining the conditions. It would be a conditional argument. According to Alcock’s representation of it, it is not conditional.
One might argue that Wynn-Edwards assumed implicitly that the incremental benefits of fertility were conditionally negative, in the cases of sufficiently developed populations; but Williams assumed implicitly the incremental benefits of fertility were unconditionally positive.
If one looks at population dynamics problems like the whale-hunting problem, it is easy to show that the population of whale hunters was sustainable at one population level but unsustainable at a higher population level. And that suggests that perhaps a population can have too many members. Perhaps fertility sometimes has a negative incremental benefit to a population. If that were true, Williams’ thought argument could not stand. We will examine this idea in detail just a bit later.
It might not be worth noticing, but Williams’ argument also assumes that the cheating phenomenon - which we will call Williams-cheating - is an inherited trait. If, instead, such a hypothetical trait happened to arise from some non-genetic social forces, then to the extent that evolutionary biology is concerned exclusively with inherited genetic traits Williams’ argument fails. Conveniently for his argument, in the case of a hypothetical trait that belongs to a non-existent population, it is very difficult to prove that it cannot, hypothetically, be inherited.
Implications of Williams’ Argument
There are a number of consequences to the Williams argument. Not all of them necessarily follow, but most of them relate to it in some loose way.
As we’ve noted, Williams’ argument implicitly assumes that higher fertility is unconditionally superior to lower fertility. The thought experiment posits a universal and perfect correspondence between reproductive fitness and total fitness. The way it is constructed is not conditional. It does not care about any possible side effects of over-population. Nor does it care about the possibility that a species might exploit a new ecological niche by trading fecundity for some other quality. If it did, it would fail to refute the Wynne-Edwards view of the world.
If it were possible to show a single hypothetical case in which the incremental value of fertility is negative, then Williams’ argument is not strictly true. It becomes conditionally true. At that point it becomes incumbent upon socio-biologists to define those conditions under which it holds and those under which it does not.
It may be true that few species have been wiped out by the collapse of the environment they depended upon as a result of over-population and over-extraction; but Jared Diamond in Collapse finds a long string of failed human populations that either met this fate completely or came to roughly the same end. Furthermore, predator-prey models predict such collapses.
In other words, we have a mathematical model for predator-prey behavior showing that once a predator population exceeds a critical level in an environment it causes collapse of the prey population. And this, in turn can lead to the extinction of the predator. We have examples of real populations of humans that have undergone precisely the cycle of collapse described by Diamond and by the mathematical model. So we have both the theory and the facts to suggest that, in fact, there is a point at which the incremental value of an additional member of a population is, in fact negative. In virtually every population that does not produce its own food supply directly from air, water, and sunlight, there must be a point at which the marginal value of fertility takes a negative value. We will demonstrate this in the second section.
Evolutionary biologists who buy into Williams’ argument see all evolution occurring as a result of the acts of individuals in a way that is sublimely oblivious to the consequences of collective action. This point of view places the entire responsibility for the trajectory of evolution on the choice of males for copulation. No other act matters. No other relationship matters..
There is a rather narrow sense in which such a point of view might be substantially correct, for certain non-social species. If we were to imagine a hypothetical solitary species in which the only interaction between members is the act of copulation, then this view of the world might not be far wrong. Perhaps there are certain kinds of bears that are not bad approximations to this model. Or certain esoteric desert insects. Or mosquitoes or paramecium, or aphids. Each time one encounters the idea that all of a species success might be traced to the selective act of copulation, one ought to consider ants and whether this point of view is very useful in describing to us their success as a species. Even if it were true in some kind of technical or theoretical sense, would it convey to us the common-sense notions that would teach us the reasons for the ant’s success?
A curious corollary of the argument is that if one believes it without condition or reservation, it renders all groups and all group interactions irrelevant. There is no point in studying populations in evolutionary biology. Rather, the population is composed of individuals; its survival is based on individuals, all that is worth knowing about populations can be found out by studying individuals. In essence, there is nothing about the relationships between individuals in the populations that warrants study. There is nothing about interactions between individuals that confers higher fitness.
The assumption is that it is only interactions that determine which males participate in the ceremony of copulation that warrants study. And there appears to be a (not completely uniform) tradition of ignoring all aspects of the life of an individual up until the courtship ritual at which a female selects a mate. It is as if everything in between were irrelevant. It is point of view that could only exist among young white men raised in America, who had never been exposed any sort of food shortage and who failed to completely comprehend the idea that a food shortage could occur anywhere in nature. Individuals starve. And individuals are lost to disease and predation. It happens among all species, even if it happens so rarely among young white men living in America as to seem hypothetically impossible.
The Williams-inspired point of view says that there is nothing to be learned by studying social animals: bees, wasps, ants, bats, sardines, chimps, prairie dogs, zebras, lions, elephants, and so on that could not be learned by studying aphids or mosquitoes. We remain to be convinced that this is a valid argument in the field of evolutionary biology. We completely fail to see how this point of view might help us get a clear and complete picture of all the biological processes that one might reasonably expect to find in sociobiology.
Williams’ argument implicitly denies any benefit to living in groups. It implicitly suggests that a small group is the same as a large group, that the qualities that would cause individuals to assemble in groups and the tendency to do so has neither biological basis nor evolutionary implications. Williams’ model denies any benefit in trade or in any other corporate and institutional behavior. By the same token, it denies the possibility of any disadvantages to living in a group. And when sociobiology experiments find evolutionary benefits to cooperation that arises from living in a group they use the example as proof that cooperation does not exist because there is some benefit to cooperation that confers upon cooperating members some competitive advantage. We find this a very puzzling point of view.
The point of view simply discounts all group interactions except those that give a particular male an incremental advantage in mating. And it takes account of these advantages implicitly. If we were to assume that this is, by some measure, the factually correct view of the world, it is hard to see that it is the most useful when one imagines evolutionary biology might be a tool to help humans understand something about themselves as social animals.
When we interpret Alcock, we perceive Williams’ legacy as being reduced to a kind of religious orthodoxy that posits zero value to the study of any individual interactions between any two living organisms except for the act of copulation. As interesting as the study of copulation might be, we are skeptical that all the insights that the study of the natural world has to offer man can be found by severely restricting study to this degree. But to define a field called sociobiology in a way that is, by definition, devoid of any social component strikes an outside observer as being roughly equivalent to defining physics as a field devoid of matter. There’s no there there.
Section II - Negative Returns of Marginal Fertility
Section III - Cooperation, Fitness & Related Arguments
Copyright: Stephen R. Brubaker, 2006. All Rights Reserved