Darwin's Dangerous Idea (94 page)

thinking in the study of human nature, and clarify the position on rationality Cosmides and Tooby seem to have uncovered a fossil of our Nietzschean (or just nonstupidity) just presented.

past! Framing the hypothesis is not yet proving it, of course, but one of the How logical are we human beings? In some regards very logical, it seems, important virtues of their hypothesis is that it is eminently testable, and has and in others embarrassingly weak. In 1969, the psychologist Peter Wason so far stood up very well to a wide variety of attempts to refute it. Suppose it devised a simple test that bright people—college students, for instance—do is true; would it show that we can reason only about the things Mother rather badly on. You may try it yourself. Here are four cards, some letter-Nature wired us to reason about? Obviously not; it just shows why it is easier side-up, and some number-side-up. Each card has a numeral on one side and (more "natural") for us to reason about some topics than others. We have a letter on the other:

devised cultural artifacts (systems of formal logic, statistics, decision theory, and so forth, taught in college courses) that expand our reasoning powers many fold. Even the experts often neglect these specialized techniques, however, and fall back on good old seat-of-the-pants reasoning, sometimes with embarrassing results, as the Wason test shows. Independently of any Your task is to see whether in this case the following rule has any exceptions: Darwinian hypotheses, we know that, except when people are particularly
If a card has a "D" on one side, it has a "3" on the other side.
Now, which self-conscious about using these heavy-duty reasoning techniques, they tend cards do you need to turn over in order to discover if this is true? Sad to say, to fall into cognitive illusions. Why are we susceptible to
these
illusions? The fewer than half of students in most such experiments get the right answer.

evolutionary psychologist says: For the same reason we are susceptible to Did you? The correct answer is much more obvious if we shift the content optical illusions and other sensory illusions—we're built that way. Mother (but not the structure) of the problem very slightly. You are the bouncer in a Nature designed us to solve a certain set of problems posed by the bar, and your job depends on not letting any underage (under twenty-one) environments in which we evolved, and whenever a cut-rate solution customers drink beer. The cards have information about age on one side, and emerged—a bargain that would solve the most pressing problems pretty well, what the patron is drinking on the other. Which cards do you need to turn even if it lacked generality—it tended to get installed.

over?

Cosmides and Tooby call these modules "Darwinian algorithms"; they are mechanisms just like the two-bitser, only fancier. We obviously don't get by with just one such reasoning mechanism. Cosmides and Tooby have been gathering evidence for other special-purpose algorithms, useful in thinking 490 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

Sociobiology: Good and Bad, Good and Evil
491

about threats and other social exchanges, and other ubiquitous problem-This, of course, is wrong, wrong, wrong. But compare it with my Only types: hazards, rigid objects, and contagion. Instead of having a single, cen-Slightly Nonstandard Social Science Model:

tral general-purpose reasoning machine, we have a collection of gadgets, all pretty good (or at least pretty good in the environments in which they Whereas animals are rigidly controlled by their biology, human behavior is evolved), and readily exaptable for new purposes today. Our minds are like
largely
determined by culture, a
largely
autonomous system of symbols Swiss-army knives, Cosmides says. Every now and then, we discover curious and values, growing from a biological base, but growing indefinitely away gaps in our competence, strange lapses that give us clues about the particular from it.
Able to overpower or escape
biological constraints in most regards, history of R and D that explains the machinery that underlies the glittering cultures can vary from one another enough so that important portions of facade of culture. This is surely the right way for psychologists to reverse-the variance are thereby explained __ Learning is
not
a general-purpose engineer die human mind, always watching out for QWERTY phenomena.

process, but human beings have so many special-purpose gadgets, and I consider Cosmides and Tooby to be doing some of the best work in learn to harness them with such versatility, that learning
often
can be Darwinian psychology today, which is why I chose them for my example, but treated as if it were an entirely medium-neutral and content-neutral gift of I must temper my recommendation with some constructive criticism. The non-stupidity.

ferocity of the attacks they have encountered from the fans of Gould and Chomsky is breathtaking, and, embattled as they are, they, too, tend to This is the model I have argued for in this book; it is no defense of skyhooks; caricature the opposition, and are sometimes too hasty in dismissing skep-it simply acknowledges that we now have cranes of more general power than ticism about their arguments as flowing from nothing more presentable than the cranes of any other species.12

the defensive territoriality of old-fashioned social scientists who still haven't There is plenty of good work in sociobiology and evolutionary psychol-got the word about evolution. This is often, but not always, the case. Even if ogy, and there is plenty of bad work, as in any field. Is any of it evil? Some they are right—and I am confident that they are—that such rationality as we of it is at least dismayingly heedless of the misuses to which it might be put human beings have is the product of the activities of a host of special-purpose by ideologues of one persuasion or another. But, here again, the escalation of gadgets designed by natural selection, it does not follow that this "Swiss-charges typically produces more heat than light. One instance can stand in army knife" of ours cannot have been used, time and time again, to reinvent for a survey of the whole sorry field of battle. Do ducks rape? Sociobiol-the wheel. It still has to be shown, in other words, that any particular ogists have uncovered a common pattern in which males in some species—

adaptation is
not
a cultural product responding quite directly ( and rationally) such as ducks—violently mate with obviously unwilling females. They have to quite recent conditions. They know this, and they carefully avoid the trap called it rape, and this terminology has been decried by critics, most vig-we have just seen E. O. Wilson fall into, but in the heat of battle they orously by the feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling (1985).

sometimes forget.

She has a point. I said we wouldn't call the sibling-cide that many species Like Darwin overlooking the innocuous possibility of sudden extinctions engage in "murder," since they know not what they do. They kill, but do not because he was so intent on fleeing from Catastrophism, Tooby and murder, each other. It is impossible for one bird to
murder
another bird—

Cosmides, and the other evolutionary psychologists, tend to overlook the

"murder" is reserved for the intentional, deliberate, wrongful killing of one bland possibility of the independent rediscovery of forced moves, so intent human being by another. (You can kill a bear, but not murder it, and if it kills are they on replacing the "Standard Social Science Model" with a properly you, that isn't murder either.) Now, can one duck
rape
another? Fausto-Darwinian model of the mind. The Standard Social Science Model has among its precepts:

Whereas animals are rigidly controlled by their biology, human behavior is 12. Even Donald Symons ( 1992, p. 142) slips slightly, succumbing to a luscious slogan: determined by culture, an autonomous system of symbols and values. Free

"There is no such thing as a 'general problem solver' because there is no such thing as a from biological constraints, cultures can vary from one another arbitrarily general problem." Oh? There is no such thing as a general wound either; each wound has a quite specific shape, but there can still be a general wound-healer, capable of healing and without limit __ Learning is a general-purpose process, used in all wounds of an almost limitless variety of shapes—simply because it is cheaper for Mother domains of knowledge. [Pinker, 1994, p. 406; see also Tooby and Cosmides Nature to make a (quite) general wound-healer than a specialist wound-healer (G.

1992, pp. 24-48.]

Williams 1966, pp. 86-87; see also Sober 1981b, pp. 106 ff.). How general any cognitive mechanism is, or can be made to be through cultural enhancement, is always an open empirical question.

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Sociobiology: Good and Bad, Good and Evil
493

Sterling, and other feminists, say No—this is to misapply a term that also sociobiologists as supporting authorities, or so much as knew of their ex-properly applies only to human misdeeds. If there were a common term in istence. With equal justice she could blame the tribe of Shakespeare scholars English that stood to "rape" as "kill" (or "homicide" or "manslaughter") stood for such miscarriages of justice (supposing that such they were), for these to "murder," then the use by sociobiologists of the term "rape" for nonhuman scholars have no doubt been insufficiently condemnatory in their writings forced copulation, instead of using the less loaded term, would be truly over the years about Shakespeare's sometimes tolerant portrayal of rape in outrageous. But there isn't any such term.

his plays. This is surely not the way to foster enlightened consideration of the So is the use of the short, vivid term "rape" in place of "forced copulation"

issues. Tempers run high, and the issues are deadly serious, which is all the (or other such term) a serious sin? It is at least insensitive. But do the critics more reason for scientists and philosophers to be careful not to abuse either complain about the other terms drawn from human life in common use by the truth or each other in the name of a worthy cause.

sociobiologists? There is sexual "cannibalism" in spiders (the females wait What, then, would a more positive approach to a "naturalized" ethics look till the males have finished impregnating them, and then kill and eat them), like? I have a few preliminary suggestions to offer in the next chapter.

there are "lesbian" gulls (female couples that stay paired over several seasons, defending territory, building a nest, sharing the task of sitting on the eggs). There are "homosexual" worms and bird "cuckolds." At least one CHAPTER 16:
As Darwinian thinking gets closer and closer to home
—
where
critic, Jane Lancaster (1975), does in fact object to the word "harem" used to
we live
—
tempers run higher, and die rhetoric tends to swamp die analysis.

refer to the group of females guarded and mated by a single male— such as
But sociobiologists, beginning with Hobbes and continuing through Nietzsche
an elephant seal; she recommends the term "one-male group," since these
to die present day, have seen that only an evolutionary analysis of the
females "are virtually self-sufficient, except for fertilization" (Fausto-Sterling
origins
—
and transformations
—
of ethical norms could ever properly make
1985, p. 181n.). It seems to me that deliberate human cannibalism is much,
sense of them. Greedy reductionists have taken their usual first stumbling
much more terrible than anything one spider could do to another, but I for
steps into this new territory, and been duly chastened by the defenders of
one don't object if an arachnologist wants to use the term. For that matter,
complexity. We can learn from these errors without turning our backs on
what about the benign terms (G. Williams 1988)? Do the critics also object to
them.

"courtship ritual" and "alarm call"—or the use of the term "mother" to refer to a female but nonhuman parent?

CHAPTER 17:
What are the implications for ethics of the fact that we are
Fausto-Sterling does note that the sociobiologists she criticizes for using

Unite,
time-pressured, heuristic searchers for ethical truths? An examination
the term "rape" were careful to assert that human rape was different from
of th
e
persistent pendulum swing between utilitarian and Kantian ethics
rape in other species. She quotes (p. 193) from Shields and Shields 1983:

suggests
some principles for redesigning ethics along more realistic,
Dar-

winian lines.

Ultimately men may rape because it increases their biological fitness and thus rape may serve, at least in part, a reproductive function, but in an immediate proximate sense it is as likely that they rape because they are angry or hostile, as the feminists suggest.

This passage is not the ringing denunciation of rape that Fausto-Sterling requires—something that one might think would go without saying in the context of a scientific article—but it does firmly dissociate human rape from any biological "justification." That makes Fausto-Sterling's further charge outrageous. She places responsibility on these sociobiologists for various claims made by defense lawyers in rape cases who have got their clients off relatively easily by noting their "unbearable physical urges" or by describing a client's act: "as rapes go, a relatively mild rape." What do these claims have to do with sociobiology in general, or the articles she discusses in particular?

She offers no reason at all to believe these lawyers cited the
Can Ethics Be Naturalized?
495

rality just a matter of subjective taste ( and political power )? Are there no discoverable and confirmable ethical truths, no forced moves or Good Tricks? Great edifices of ethical theory have been constructed, criticized and CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

defended, revised and extended by the best methods of rational inquiry, and
Redesigning Morality

among these artifacts of human reasoning are some of the most magnificent creations of culture, but they do not yet command the untroubled assent of all those who have studied them carefully.