An Evolutionary Theory Of Right And Wrong

AUTHOR: Nicholas Wade

SOURCE: An Evolutionary Theory Of Right And Wrong

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

Just in time, here is a review of a new book on the subject of the relationship between evolution and ethics/morals. Those of you who are currently students in evolution at Cornell will already be familiar with this topic: Essay #3 asks you to focus your attention on the very same question. Does knowing that our evolutionary past may strongly bias us in the direction of increased sociality have anything at all to do with answering the question "how should we behave?" Read the book review, and then meet me following it for my own opinion:

FULL TEXT OF ARTICLE:

Who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong? Yet that essential knowledge, generally assumed to come from parental teaching or religious or legal instruction, could turn out to have a quite different origin.

Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals’ feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart of human morality.

Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, “Moral Minds” (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind.

People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision generated subconsciously.

Dr. Hauser presents his argument as a hypothesis to be proved, not as an established fact. But it is an idea that he roots in solid ground, including his own and others’ work with primates and in empirical results derived by moral philosophers.

The proposal, if true, would have far-reaching consequences. It implies that parents and teachers are not teaching children the rules of correct behavior from scratch but are, at best, giving shape to an innate behavior. And it suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior.

Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying “that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.” Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.

The moral grammar too, in Dr. Hauser’s view, is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society — do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie.

But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different weights to the elements of the grammar’s calculations. Thus one society may ban abortion, another may see infanticide as a moral duty in certain circumstances. Or as Kipling observed, “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Katmandu, and the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.”

Matters of right and wrong have long been the province of moral philosophers and ethicists. Dr. Hauser’s proposal is an attempt to claim the subject for science, in particular for evolutionary biology. The moral grammar evolved, he believes, because restraints on behavior are required for social living and have been favored by natural selection because of their survival value.

Much of the present evidence for the moral grammar is indirect. Some of it comes from psychological tests of children, showing that they have an innate sense of fairness that starts to unfold at age 4. Some comes from ingenious dilemmas devised to show a subconscious moral judgment generator at work. These are known by the moral philosophers who developed them as “trolley problems.”

Suppose you are standing by a railroad track. Ahead, in a deep cutting from which no escape is possible, five people are walking on the track. You hear a train approaching. Beside you is a lever with which you can switch the train to a sidetrack. One person is walking on the sidetrack. Is it O.K. to pull the lever and save the five people, though one will die?

Most people say it is.

Assume now you are on a bridge overlooking the track. Ahead, five people on the track are at risk. You can save them by throwing down a heavy object into the path of the approaching train. One is available beside you, in the form of a fat man. Is it O.K. to push him to save the five?

Most people say no, although lives saved and lost are the same as in the first problem.

Why does the moral grammar generate such different judgments in apparently similar situations? It makes a distinction, Dr. Hauser writes, between a foreseen harm (the train killing the person on the track) and an intended harm (throwing the person in front of the train), despite the fact that the consequences are the same in either case. It also rates killing an animal as more acceptable than killing a person.

Many people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, Dr. Hauser says, a sign that it is being made at inaccessible levels of the mind. This inability challenges the general belief that moral behavior is learned. For if people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, how can they teach it?

Dr. Hauser began his research career in animal communication, working with vervet monkeys in Kenya and with birds. He is the author of a standard textbook on the subject, “The Evolution of Communication.” He began to take an interest in the human animal in 1992 after psychologists devised experiments that allowed one to infer what babies are thinking. He found he could repeat many of these experiments in cotton-top tamarins, allowing the cognitive capacities of infants to be set in an evolutionary framework.

His proposal of a moral grammar emerges from a collaboration with Dr. Chomsky, who had taken an interest in Dr. Hauser’s ideas about animal communication. In 2002 they wrote, with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch, an unusual article arguing that the faculty of language must have developed as an adaptation of some neural system possessed by animals, perhaps one used in navigation. From this interaction Dr. Hauser developed the idea that moral behavior, like language behavior, is acquired with the help of an innate set of rules that unfolds early in a child’s development.

Social animals, he believes, possess the rudiments of a moral system in that they can recognize cheating or deviations from expected behavior. But they generally lack the psychological mechanisms on which the pervasive reciprocity of human society is based, like the ability to remember bad behavior, quantify its costs, recall prior interactions with an individual and punish offenders. “Lions cooperate on the hunt, but there is no punishment for laggards,” Dr. Hauser said.

The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far greater moral weight than happenings far away, Dr. Hauser believes, since in those days one never had to care about people remote from one’s environment.

Dr. Hauser believes that the moral grammar may have evolved through the evolutionary mechanism known as group selection. A group bound by altruism toward its members and rigorous discouragement of cheaters would be more likely to prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes for moral grammar would become more common.

Many evolutionary biologists frown on the idea of group selection, noting that genes cannot become more frequent unless they benefit the individual who carries them, and a person who contributes altruistically to people not related to him will reduce his own fitness and leave fewer offspring.

But though group selection has not been proved to occur in animals, Dr. Hauser believes that it may have operated in people because of their greater social conformity and willingness to punish or ostracize those who disobey moral codes.

“That permits strong group cohesion you don’t see in other animals, which may make for group selection,” he said.

His proposal for an innate moral grammar, if people pay attention to it, could ruffle many feathers. His fellow biologists may raise eyebrows at proposing such a big idea when much of the supporting evidence has yet to be acquired. Moral philosophers may not welcome a biologist’s bid to annex their turf, despite Dr. Hauser’s expressed desire to collaborate with them.

Nevertheless, researchers’ idea of a good hypothesis is one that generates interesting and testable predictions. By this criterion, the proposal of an innate moral grammar seems unlikely to disappoint.

COMMENTARY:

So, do you think that we have an innate predisposition (inherited from our primate ancestors) to behave in ways we would recognize as "moral?" I think so, and so apparently do Franz De Waal and Marc Hauser (not to mention E. O. Wilson, Jane Goodall, and a host of other evolutionary biologists).

But, does it therefore follow that this predisposition necessarily dictates how we should behave? I believe that the answer to this question is no. More than that, I believe that to make the jump from the former to the latter is to commit a fundamental logical fallacy (indeed, it has a formal name - the "naturalistic fallacy"). It conflates statements about what "is" the case (i.e. what is "natural" behavior for us and our fellow primates) and what "ought" to be the case. This fallacy was pointed out a century ago, most forcefully by G. E. Moore, who pointed out that "is" statements cannot logically be made equivalent to "ought" statements.

This distinction is crucially important, and nowhere more so than in the application of evolutionary theory to human behavior. The economic and social movement known as "social darwinism" was fundamentally based on the "naturalistic fallacy," as exemplified by the words of the well-known English hymn, "All Things Bright And Beautiful," written by Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.

All well and good, but here's the next verse:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

(Interestingly, if you do a Google search for these particular lyrics, you will not find them. Apparently, the social darwinist overtones of the second verse do not sit well with modern audiences, including those in church.)

Alexander was most emphatically not a "social darwinist," yet the moral equation presented in his hymn is essentially equivalent to that of Herbert Spencer and the other social darwinists: that one's position in life (and, by implication, one's behavior) are determined by a force outside one's self (God or natural selection), and that all that remains for us is to "get with the program."

In a word: bullshit. That way lies the gas chambers at Auschwitz. No amount of science can tell us what we ought to do. At most, scientific knowledge can tell us how difficult (or easy) what we ought to do might be, but to conflate the two is to commit both a logical fallacy and monstrous evil. I sincerely hope that most evolutionary biologists will not agree with either the opinions of Marc Hauser or Franz De Waal on this subject, no matter how encouraging they may be. Long and hard experience has shown us that the "naturalistic fallacy" can be used to justify monstrous injustices (as has the belief in the authority of a "supernatural lawgiver," and for the same reason).

As adults, we must face up to the difficult responsibility of deciding what we "ought" to do, and then do it, no matter how easy or difficult. If it is the former (and if this is because of our evolutionary heritage), then perhaps the road ahead will not be as rocky as the one we have trod to get here. However, if it is the latter (and I suspect it may be, once again based on my understanding of our evolutionary heritage - more on this later), then that's just tough: but (to paraphrase Charles Darwin), one must do one's duty.

--Allen

To Whom Do We Owe Our Allegiance?

AUTHOR: Allen MacNeill

SOURCE: LewRockwell.com

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

This isn't exactly "evolution-related," but I've got an essay up at LewRockwell.com, one of my favorite political websites. For those of you who haven't been there yet, LewRockwell.com is the most popular libertarian website on the Internet, and the third most popular political website overall. As the masthead proclaims, it's "anti-state, anti-war, and pro-free trade," and Lew describes himself as a "paleoconservative," to distinguish his brand of libertarian politics from the economically and morally bankrupt politics and policies of the "neocons." And, although I don't always agree with some of the viewpoints expressed by some of the commentators on his site, Lew has always acted like a gentleman and a scholar, and I agree so much with the political positions taken by him and his cohorts that I've decided that, if I'm going to dabble in politics at all (and I'd like to), I'll do it at LewRockwell.com. So, to save you all the effort of clicking over there, here is my first attempt at a libertarian political essay, mirrored in its entirety from LewRockwell.com:

To Whom Do We Owe Our Allegiance?

I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
and to the republic for which it stands:
one nation indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
– Francis Bellamy (1892)

Our family has a flag. It's a variation of the flag of Robert the Bruce, king of Scotland. His was a red lion rampant on a field of gold. Ours is a golden lioness rampant on a field of purple. The problem is, to fly it correctly would require us to decide which flag should be flown higher - our family's flag or the star-spangled banner?

This is not a trivial problem. In fact, it goes to the heart of what is wrong with America today. To fly our family's flag correctly (even lawfully, in many jurisdictions), we should fly it in such a way as to make it clear to anyone seeing it that our family's flag - and therefore, by implication, our family - is subordinate to that of the United States government (and to the republic for which it stands). And therein lies the problem.

It is a basic tenet of libertarian conservatism that one's highest allegiance is to one's self and one's family. This principle is enshrined in the founding document of the United States of America. According to the Declaration of Independence, "[A]ll Men are created equal, [and] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

According to this viewpoint, individual people are sovereign entities, and governments are clearly subordinate to "the will of the people". Far from altering this relationship, the Constitution of the United States codifies these principles into law. It enumerates the very limited powers of the federal government, and then in the ninth and tenth amendments declares that "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" and "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, and reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

What this means is that, except for the powers and responsibilities enumerated in the Constitution, the United States government has no power or sovereignty over the lives of its citizens. In brief, we own ourselves and the government is, at most, our servant.

Today, however, it is clear that to the government and an increasing number of the citizens of the United States this situation is reversed. The government believes (and, more importantly, acts as if) it owns us and we are its servants. This is why the symbolism of the flag is so important: the flag of the United States takes precedence over all others, including the flag of the family of Lyonesse. In other words, in the view of those who would presume to rule us, the president of the United States is our lord and sovereign and we are merely his vassals. He may take from us and from our families anything he desires: our land, our property, our children, even our very lives (via the death penalty and the military draft), and the only justification he needs to do this is the exercise of pure, naked, overwhelming force.

This is not the way it was supposed to be, friends. There was a time in America when the president viewed himself as a servant of the people and abjured all signs and symbols of sovereignty. Grover Cleveland refused to be treated any differently than ordinary citizens at state occasions and is remembered for vetoing a bill providing emergency relief to farmers following a natural disaster, on the grounds that to do so would legitimize the forcible taking of some citizen's money (via taxes) to benefit others. It may come as a surprise to some (especially today's Democrats, and most Republicans) that Cleveland was a Democrat...and moreover, by his behavior, a true democrat.

Now, however, the candidates from both parties freely and openly state their wholehearted support for a government and a presidency that clearly recognizes no restraint or challenge to its power except the use of violent force. Furthermore, the majority of the voting citizenry agrees, and supports those candidates for public office who most vigorously propound the doctrine of unlimited force.

For itself, the government asserts a sole monopoly on the use of force and recognizes no limits to its use. Every president since Lincoln has, in the context of war or the threat of war, justified the unilateral and unlimited use of military force and the suspension of individual sovereignty (in the context of the military draft) with sole reference to the supreme sovereignty of the president and the federal government. Nowhere in the Constitution nor any of its amendments is it stated or even implied that the States may not secede from the union, nor govern their own affairs, nor respect and protect the rights to private property of individual citizens. Yet ever since the administration of Lincoln, the federal government has unilaterally arrogated to itself all of these, and has enforced this usurpation through the use of deadly force.

In a world dominated by force alone, only force matters, and the only law is the law of force majeur: "might makes right". The founders of the American republic believed otherwise, and tried to structure the Constitution and the government it created so that there would be built-in limits to the unilateral use and abuse of power. They did so because they realized that a government founded on force, rather than the fully informed consent of the governed, is not a government at all. It is tyranny, pure and simple.

To our increasing sorrow, it is clear that tyranny is what we are rapidly approaching. To state the case succinctly, the recent history of the presidency, congress, the supreme court, many state governments, and both major political parties has been a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the individual states and ourselves, the citizens of those states. Sound familiar?

But, if you've been paying attention recently, you already know most of this. The question is, what can we do about the accelerating slide toward tyranny? The first and most powerful thing we can do is to remember that crucial phrase in the Declaration: that governments, including ours, derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. So, as many did during the last election, we can withhold our consent: we can refuse to vote for those aspiring to be tyrants. We can also assert our personal and familial sovereignty over that of the tyrannical state by refusing to yield up to it that which it most desires: our land, our property, our children, and our lives.

In many cases, we can do this by simply ignoring Leviathan. Ever since George Bush stole the presidency in 2000, I've repeatedly found myself comforting my friends by pointing out to them that the party in power generally has little or no affect on our daily lives, especially out here in the hinterlands. So long as you pay as little taxes as you can legally get away with (yes, even the IRS has been forced repeatedly to admit that this is your constitutional prerogative), the dragon will pass you by, unseeing.

However, the time may come – indeed, it may soon be upon us – when the dragon will thirst for new blood. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran, and Syria, and North Korea, and – who knows – maybe northern Virginia) will necessitate the reinstatement of draft slavery. Then we must do what we did a generation ago, and the generation before that, and the generation before that, but this time in overwhelming numbers: we must march on Washington and speak truth to power. And that truth will be, as it was then, Hell no, we won't go!

And we can fly our families' flags: proudly, fearlessly, and freely, secure in the knowledge that there is where our highest and truest allegiance lies.

--Allen

Scientists Endorse Candidate Over Teaching of Evolution

AUTHOR: Cornelia Dean

SOURCE: New York Times

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

In an unusual foray into electoral politics, 75 science professors at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have signed a letter endorsing a candidate for the Ohio Board of Education.

The professors’ favored candidate is Tom Sawyer, a former congressman and onetime mayor of Akron. They hope Mr. Sawyer, a Democrat, will oust Deborah Owens Fink, a leading advocate of curriculum standards that encourage students to challenge the theory of evolution.

Elsewhere in Ohio, scientists have also been campaigning for candidates who support the teaching of evolution and have recruited at least one biologist from out of state to help.

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve who organized the circulation of the letter, said almost 90 percent of the science faculty on campus this semester had signed it. The signers are anthropologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, physicists and psychologists.

The letter says Dr. Owens Fink has “attempted to cast controversy on biological evolution in favor of an ill-defined notion called Intelligent Design that courts have ruled is religion, not science.”

In an interview, Dr. Krauss said, “This is not some group of fringe scientists or however they are being portrayed by the creationist community,” adding, “This is the entire scientific community, and I don’t know of any other precedent for almost the entire faculty at an institution” making such a statement.

But Dr. Owens Fink, a professor of marketing at the University of Akron, said the curriculum standards she supported did not advocate teaching intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism. Rather, she said, they urge students to subject evolution to critical analysis, something she said scientists should endorse. She said the idea that there was a scientific consensus on evolution was “laughable.”

Although researchers may argue about its details, the theory of evolution is the foundation for modern biology, and there is no credible scientific challenge to it as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. In recent years, with creationist challenges to the teaching of evolution erupting in school districts around the country, groups like the National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation’s pre-eminent scientific organization, have repeatedly made this point.

But the academy’s opinion does not matter to Dr. Owens Fink, who said the letter was probably right to say she had dismissed it as “a group of so-called scientists.”

“I may have said that, yeah,” she said.

She would not describe her views of Darwin and his theory, saying, “This isn’t about my beliefs.”

School board elections in Ohio are nonpartisan, but Dr. Owens Fink said she was a registered Republican. Her opponent, Mr. Sawyer, was urged to run for the Seventh District Board of Education seat by a new organization, Help Ohio Public Education, founded by Dr. Krauss and his colleague Patricia Princehouse, a biologist and historian of science, and Steve Rissing, a biologist at Ohio State University.

At the group’s invitation, Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, will be in Ohio today through the weekend campaigning for other school board candidates who support the teaching of evolution. Dr. Miller, an author of a widely used biology textbook, was a crucial witness in the recent lawsuit in Dover, Pa., over intelligent design. The judge in that case ruled that it was a religious doctrine that had no place in a public school curriculum.

After that decision, Dr. Owens Fink said, the Ohio board abandoned curriculum standards that mandated a critical look at evolution, a decision she said she regretted. “Some people would rather just fold,” she said.

But Dr. Miller said it was a good call, adding, “We have to make sure these good choices get ratified at the ballot box.”

COMMENTARY:

Once again Ohio is the battleground in the ongoing culture wars. A similar change in the composition of a state board of education happened in Kansas earlier this year. It will be interesting to see what happens in Ohio, especially in the context of what many are beginning to perceive as a "glacial shift" in Ohio politics, away from religious conservatism and the Republican party and toward a more tolerant and pluralistic libertarianism, as exemplified by Tom Sawyer (even his name resonates in American cultural history). Whether the Democrats can finally become vertebrates and take a principled position on this and related issues remains to be seen...

--Allen

New Definitions of a "Gene"

AUTHOR: RPM

SOURCE: Evolgen

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

RPM at Evolgen has a new post about evolving definitions of a "gene". Here are my thoughts on the subject:

For years I have been teaching my students that a gene is a segment of DNA that codes for a single RNA molecule with a complementary sequence, regardless of whether that RNA molecule is translated or not. This definition takes into account the genes for the various rRNAs and tRNAs, which are not translated, and also other forms of non-translated RNA that have recently been discovered. By this definition, genes that code for mRNAs that are actually translated are distinguished as "structural genes," using terminology that was first developed to describe the Jacob-Monod model of the lactose operon. Using this same terminology, the gene that codes for the lactose repressor protein is a "regulatory gene," insofar as the repressor does not function in an "extrinsic" biochemical pathway, but rather participates in the regulation of other structural genes.

However, the distinction between "structural" and "regulatory" genes outlined above is insufficient to describe the various kinds of genetically significant DNA sequences now known. For example, it does not include regions of the DNA to which protein regulators bind, but which are not themselves transcribed. It also does not distinguish between RNAs that are translated into proteins (either enzymes or repressor/regulator proteins) and those that are transcribed into RNA but never translated (such as rRNA, tRNA, and the newer non-translated RNAs).

Given the foregoing, it appears to me that there are four (possibly five) functionally different kinds of DNA coding sequences:

(1) translatable sequences: those DNA sequences that are both transcribed into mRNA and later translated into proteins, regardless of function (these can be further subdivided into proteins that participate in non-DNA related biochemical pathways and those that directly regulate DNA, but those seem to me to be classifications of the proteins, not the DNA sequences that code for them);

(2) transcribable sequences: those DNA sequences that are transcribed into RNA (i.e. rRNA, tRNA, etc.), but are not later translated into proteins/polypeptide chains. Again, what the RNAs do after being transcribed is not a function of the DNA, but rather of the RNAs, and therefore should not really be used to classify DNA coding sequences;

(3) binding sequences: those DNA sequences that are not transcribed into RNA nor translated into protein, but which function as binding sites for regulatory molecules such as repressor proteins, homeotic gene products, etc. While such sequences do not code for the production of a transcribed or translated gene product, they still participate in the regulation of other genes by serving as regulatory binding sites; and

(4) non-binding sequences: those DNA sequences that are not transcribed into RNA, not translated into protein, nor function as binding sites for regulatory moelcules. Such sequences would include highly repetitive sequences, tandom repeats, "spacer DNA", pseudogenes, retroviral and transposon inserts (both "dead" and potentially "alive"), etc. This latter category could be further subdivided into "functional" non-coding/non-binding DNA sequences versus "non-functional/parastitic" non-coding/non-binding DNA sequences, depending on whether they arise as part of the functional architecture of the DNA (primarily of eukaryotes), or whether they arise as side-effects of the action of parasitic genetic elements, such as retroviruses or transposons.

There may be other categories of DNA sequences that have other functions, but right now I can't think of any. Therefore, this is how I intend to teach the concept of a "gene" to my students at Cornell from now on.

So much for the Beadle/Tatum "one gene, one enzyme" model, eh? And the classical Mendelian definition of "one gene, one phenotypic trait" is no longer viable as well...

--Allen

Punctuated Equilibrium and the EEA for Human Behavioral Adaptations

AUTHOR: Christopher Ryan

SOURCE: Evolutionary Psychology

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

The following question was asked on the Evolutionary Psychology list:

"...[W]e look to the EEA for the origins of the design of the human mind (modules, and so on) precisely because the structures in question change so slowly. If, on the other hand, it is demonstrated that complex physiological (and, presumably, psychological) structures can arise and disappear in as few as twenty generations, then of what relevance is the EEA to our discussions here?...Does Gould's punctuated equilibria theory integrate such rapid evolutionary change? And is it accepted by the folks working in [evolutionary psychology]? If so, why do we spend so much time discussing adaptations that have likely been replaced long ago?"

To which I replied:

Eldredge and Gould, like the vast majority of other evolutionary biologists (beginning with Darwin and including such luminaries as Ernst Mayr) studied animals almost exclusively. It now appears that the equilibrium/stasis pattern that characterizes macroevolution in animals is at least partly an artifact of their developmental biology. Specifically, the hierarchical control of gene regulation in animals via homeotic genes makes possible surprisingly rapid phenotypic change without correspondingly large changes in genotype (i.e. the old "modern synthesis" has been superceded by the new "evo-devo").

Therefore, it is quite possible (indeed, likely) that relatively slight changes in genetic regulation of development have caused the remarkable changes in hominid phylogeny reflected in the fossil record. This has already been shown to be the case for the FOX-2-P gene, and just last month for the HAR-1-F gene (see "And the winner of the fastest gene award..."), slight changes in both of which have been correlated with significant changes in the human phenotype (both in the direction of greater neoteny, by the way).

So, it is quite possible that humans have changed significantly over the past 40,000 years, and perhaps not just via purely cultural means. It is still an open question just how much of our behavior is affected by our underlying genetics, and how quickly such relationships can change (and under what conditions). And, if new research in epigenetics is any indication, such changes may be even more common and rapid than has been heretofore suspected. Nutrition during early development, chronic stress (including chronic stress in utero), and exposure to certain environmental chemicals have all been implicated in altering gene regulation, and some such alterations have been shown to be heritable (shades of Lamarck!), thereby challenging further the "standard social science model" so vilified by Pinker and other EPers.

Therefore, the EEA for some current "modules" may not date to the Pleistocene, but rather to much later periods, including (but not limited to) events in historical times. Indeed, since relative reproductive success, rather than absolute numerical differences, is the basis for natural selection (and therefore adaptation), it may be that such seemingly cultural processes as warfare, migration (including forced migration via slavery), and religious practices involving both celibacy and increased procreation (via religious prohibition of contraception) may all have played significant roles in the shaping of the human behavioral phenotype via correlated alterations in the expression of genes affecting behavior.

In a nutshell, then, the answer is yes: since humans are animals (like those studied by Eldredge and Gould), it is quite possible that punctuated equilibrium theory is applicable to human evolution, including behavioral evolution, and that further investigations into the relationship between gene regulation, development, and human behavior may yield productive, testable hypotheses about such relationships.

At the risk of blowing my own horn, I have attempted to propose such a hypothesis for the evolution of the capacity for religious experience (see: "The Capacity for Religious Experience is an Evolutionary Adaptation to Warfare"):

"The pan-specific qualities of both religious experience and warfare indicate that they are both evolutionary adaptations. There is considerable variation between individuals with respect to their capacity for religious experience and motivation to participate in warfare. Selective advantages for participation in warfare accrue to both winners and losers as long as the benefits of participation exceed the average costs. These selective advantages, primarily in the form of differential reproductive success, accrue to males when they are on the winning side in a war, and often to females no matter which side they are on."

"Recent work on the evolutionary dynamics of religion have converged on a "standard model" in which religions and the supernatural entities which populate them are treated as epiphenomena of human cognitive processes dealing with the detection of and reaction to agents under conditions of stress, anxiety, and perceived threat. Religious experience at the individual level is characterized by depersonalization, coupled with submission to a super-individual force; the same is essentially the case for participation in warfare. The capacities for both religious experience and participation in warfare are adaptations insofar as they evolve by means of natural selection operating primarily at the level of individuals who are members of groups in which both kin selection and reciprocal altruism are also operative. It is likely that the overall patterns of supernatural organization exist as the result of coevolution between the memetic content of religious beliefs and the underlying neurological matrix within which such beliefs are maintained and transmitted in the context of specific ecological subsistence patterns."

--Allen

On the Detection of Agency and Intentionality in Nature

AUTHOR: Elena Broaddus

SOURCE: Evolution and Design

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

First, many thanks to the faithful readers who have also continued to pay attention to the Evolution and Design website (the weblog of the "notorious Cornell evolution and design seminar" and the contents contained therein. I am particularly pleased that the hard work and careful thought of the students whose papers have been posted has been recognized, and even moreso that they have been given the highest praise possible: that is, critical analysis.

I would like to draw some more attention to E. Broaddus paper on the “innate” tendency to infer purpose in nature. I have long suspected that humans (and perhaps many vertebrates, especially mammals) have this tendency. As an evolutionary psychologist, I at least partially subscribe to the idea that the human mind is composed primarily of “modules” whose functions are to process particular kinds of sensory information in such a way as to yield adaptive responses to complex environmental information. This is precisely what Broaddus argues for in her paper: that the human mind (and, by extension, the vertebrate “mind” in general) has a module that is adapted specifically for the precise and rapid inference of intentionality in nature. That such an “agency detector” (to use the commonly accepted term for such a module) would have immense adaptive value is obvious. In an environment in which other entities do indeed have “intentions” (i.e. predators, competitors, potential mates, etc.), the ability to detect and infer the possible consequences of acting upon such intentions would confer immense adaptive value on any organism with such an ability.

Furthermore, as Broaddus points out (and as we discussed briefly in the seminar), to be most effective such a detector should be tuned in such a way as to detect virtually all such “intention-indicating” behaviors. This would have the effect of producing a significant number of “false positives,” as any detector that is tuned high enough to detect all actual cases would have such a side-effect.

As Broaddus points out, one of the side-effects of such an “agency detector” would be the detection of intentionality in entities that clearly had no such intentions. If, for example, one of the most important functions of such a detector in humans is to quickly “read” and assess the intentions betrayed in human facial expressions, then it would almost certainly detect human facial expressions in objects in the environment that clearly do not have such expressions, such as rocks, foliage, water stains, etc. This would explain the ability of many humans to “see” human facial expressions in such things as water stains, cinnamon buns, rocks, etc.

Clearly, there are some “natural objects” that do, indeed, have human facial expressions impressed upon them: the faces of the presidents at Mount Rushmore are an example cited ad nauseam by ID theorists. However, I am much more interested in “faces” that humans detect in rocks and other environmental objects that are clearly not produced by human agency. Indeed, the faces at Mount Rushmore constitute a kind of “control” for this ability, as they are clearly the result of intentionality, and therefore can be used to anchor that end of the “agency detection” spectrum (at the other end of which are things like “faces” in clouds, tree foliage, etc.). Somewhere in this spectrum is a cross-over point at which actual intentionality/agency disappears and facticious intentionality/agency takes over. It is the location of that cross-over point that constitutes the hinge of the argument between evolutionary biologists and ID theorists.

Broaddus’s analysis of autism as a possible example of malfunctioning “agency detection” is, IMO, brilliant, and presents an immediately testable hypothesis: that autistic children lack well-tuned “agency detectors,” and that this at least partially explains their well-known indifference to intentional agents, such as other people (including their parents), animals, etc. In people with both full-blown autism and the milder Asperger’s syndrome (sometimes called Aspies”), a common attribute is an impaired ability to infer intentionality (or, in many cases, the mere existence of other minds) on the part of autistics and Aspies. As Broaddus points out, there are clear anatomical and functional differences between autistics, Aspies, and non-impaired people, and that these differences may be correlated with the etiology of these conditions. For example, it is very interesting that there appears to be more (rather than less) neurons in the brains of autistics than in non-impaired people.

This lends credence to the generally accepted hypothesis that the information processing “modules” proposed by evolutionary psychologists are the result of “pared down” neural networks that are speciallized for particular cognitive tasks. Clearly, the agency/intentionality detector in humans functions extremely well and, as the parlance goes, “in the background.” We are rarely conscious of its operation, despite the fact that it is virtually always “on.” This explains, for example, something I first noticed as a young child: that no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t NOT see faces in the patterns in the linoleum on the floor of my grandmother’s kitchen, in the foliage of trees, in rocks, and in photographs of billowing smoke, splashing water, etc. The agency/intentionality detector works extremely efficiently in people of all ages, but especially in children. Indeed, as Broaddus points out, part of becoming an adult consists in learning (usually by trial-and-error) which of the seemingly intentional entities which we perceive all the time actually are intentional agents and actually have intentions vis-a vis ourselves. We must learn, in other words, to critically analyze the constant stream of “positive” agency/intentionality detection events, and discriminate between those that affect us and those that do not. It may be that this discrimination process actually involves the neurological “re-wiring” of the parts of the sensory/nervous system that produces such detection events, and this might explain, at least in part, the decreased ability of adults to believe in the existence of intentional agents in the natural environment.

Broaddus not only presents a cogent hypothesis concerning the existence of such an agency/intentionality detector/module in humans, she proposes several possible ways of testing whether or not such a detector actually exists, and to “map” its dimensions, capabilities, biases, and limitations. I believe that this opens up a very fruitful area of empirical research into such detectors, and can ultimately lead to much more clarity about an issue that so far has generated much more heat than light. I hope that her ideas and suggestions will be followed up by others (I certainly intend to do so), and that further empirical research into this fascinating and little-known capability will add to our understanding of what makes us the peculiar creatures we are.

Follow-up Post on Analogies in Science

In comment # 20 in a thread at http://specifiedcomplexity.freehostia.com/?p=232, PvM said:

"ID relies on the concept of analogy to infer design. Science does the hard work to provide mechanisms, pathways and provides analyses of the data to support their conclusions. That’s the big difference. How do we know an analogy really exists?"

This was precisely my point in my blogpost on identity and analogy (see http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2006/06/identity-analogy-and-logical-argument.html)
For example, do we have any objective way to determine if one rock is analogous with another? Or whether an anatomical feature (or a protein/substrate binding site) is analogous to another? As in the case of telology, we think we can do this very easily (just as we can easily identify what looks like design), but I would argue that this is because both "finding" analogies and "finding" design/purpose are capabilities of the human mind/nervous system that have conferred enormous adaptive value on our ancestors. As in the case of our putative innate "agency/design/purpose detector" (which first becomes active in very early infancy), our "analogy detector" also appears to become active at a very early age, and operates entirely "in the background." That is to say, we are almost totally unaware of its operation, and concentrate only on its output.

Our ability to detect (and construct) analogies is probably the core of our "intelligence," as demonstrated by the fact that identifying analogies has been traditionally used as one of the most sensitive guages of general intelligence (i.e. "g") in intelligence tests (such as the Miller Analogies Test). As more than one participant in this thread has pointed out (Sal, I think you were first), doing mathematics is essentially the construction of highly compact analogies, in which numerical (and sometimes physical) relationships are expressed as abstract symbols.

Interestingly, in the case of some analogies in biological systems we have an independent double-check on our identification of analogous things. This is based on the evolutionary concept of homology, or derivation from a common ancestor. If two structures on two different organisms (say a small bone of the jaw of a reptile and the even smaller bone in the middle ear of a mammal) appear to be analogous (on the basis of size, location, relationship to other bones, etc.) there are at least two different, though related, methods of verifying that these structures are indeed analogous (and not just accidentally similar). One way is by means of comparative paleoanatomy, in which a series of fossils of known age are compared to determine if there is a connection between the evolutionary pathways of derivation of the structures. If such a pathway can be empirically shown to exist, this would be strong evidence for both the analogous and homologous nature of the objects. Alternatively one could compare the nucleotide sequences that code for the structures to determine if they are sufficiently similar to warrant a conclusion of homologous derivation. In both cases, evidence for homology, combined with our intuitive "identification" of analogous structure and/or function, both point to the same conclusion: that the two structures are both analogous and homologous.

BTW, this is why structures that appear to be analogous, but for which there is no convincing evidence of homology (as in the wings of birds and insects) can present a serious problem to evolutionary biologists, and especially systematists/taxonomists and those engaged in cladistic analysis. Such apparent similarities (technically called homoplasies) can either be the result of "true" (i.e. partial) analogy at the functional (and/or structural) level (and therefore assumed to be the result of convergent evolution) or they can be completely accidental. Simple inspection can be insufficient to separate these two hypotheses, and lacking either fossil or genomic evidence, conclusions about actual analogy can be extremely difficult to draw. However, if there is fossil and/or genomic evidence and it points away from homology (i.e. descent from a common ancestor), then the structures can be considered to be analogous but not homologous.

In the same comment, PvM also wrote:

"I also think that Sal is overusing the concept of analogy to mean almost anything."

Indeed, it is essential in discussions such as these that we be as precise as possible about our definitions, as imprecision can only lead to confusion (at best) and unsupportable conclusions (at worst). Perhaps the most essential distinction to be made in this regard is between "anaologies of description" (which could also be called "semantic analogies") and "analogies of function/structure" (which could also be called "natural analogies"). The former (i.e. "semantic analogies") are merely artifacts of the structure of human cognition and language, as happens whenever we describe an analogy that we have perceived. By contrast, the latter (i.e. "natural analogies") are the actual similarities in function/structure that we are describing (i.e. that resulted in our identification and description in the first place). As in the Zen koan about the roshi and the novice in the moonlit garden, much of the confusion about which of the two types of analogies we are discussing seems to stem from confusion between the moon that illuminates the garden and the finger pointing at the moon.