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The peculiar thing is that the party who is more unreasonable is apt to get the better of the deal. This isn’t news to used-car dealers, but it’s a little disturbing.
The Gospel of Matthew (c. 70-80 A.D.) attributes to Jesus the “golden rule”: “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.” (Matt. 7:12). In basic form, this rule was old even then. Earlier versions appear in the writings of Seneca (4 B.C.-65 A.D.), Hillel (fl. 30 B.C.-9 A.D.), Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), Plato (427-347 B.C.), and Confucius (551-479 B.C.)—and it may not have been original with any of them. It is probably not straining interpretation too much to say that the golden rule addresses prisoner’s dilemma-like conflicts. People normally look out for their own interests. There would be no need for the rule unless it sometimes results in the unpopular prescription that people overlook apparent self-interest in order to achieve a mutual benefit possible only when people cooperate.
...People learn how to play games not from the prisoner’s dilemma but from ticktacktoe, bridge, checkers, chess, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble—all of which are zero-sum games. They are zero-sum games because all they have to offer players is the psychological reward of being the winner, a reward that comes at the expense of the losers. This is true even of some games that offer the illusion of being non-zero-sum. In Monopoly, you acquire “real estate” and “cash”—but at the end of the game, it’s just Monopoly money and the only thing that matters is who wins.
At the risk of being obvious: avoid prisoner’s dilemmas whenever possible!
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It can be explained in a sentence of plain English: cooperate on the first round, then do whatever the other players did on the previous round.
This provides a game-theoretic rationale of separatist movements. Such diverse phenomena as “China towns” and ghettos, India’s partition into Moslem and Hindu States, the Pilgrims’ founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the separationism of Marcus Garvey and Black Muslims, and the Mormons’ founding of Utah all have or had the effect of limiting a minority’s interaction with outsiders distrustful of them.
“Tit-for-Tat strategies require that both sides believe essentially the same history; otherwise the players may be locked into an endless echo of retaliations as each side punishes the other’s latest “unprovoked” transgression. Because states seldom believe the same history, the utility of Tit-for-Tat strategies is severely limited in international affairs. Strategies to promote international cooperation through reciprocity may therefore require parallel action to control the chauvinist mythmaking that often distorts a nation’s view of its past”
- (As in any auction) the dollar bill goes to the highest bidder, who pays whatever the high bid was. Each new bid has to be higher than the current high bid, and the game ends when there is no new bid within a specified time limit.
- (Unlike at Sotheby’s!) the second-highest bidder also has to pay the amount of his last bid—and gets nothing in return. You really don’t want to be the second highest bidder.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions.
Usually, after a good puke you feel better right away. We hugged each other and then said good-bye and went off to opposite ends of the hall to lie down in our own rooms. There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
At home, all I ever saw was the Christian Science Monitor, which appeared on the doorstep at five o’clock every day but Sunday and treated suicides and sex crimes and aeroplane crashes as if they didn’t happen.
If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
Biological explanations of ethics can only perform the negative role of making us think again about moral intuitions which we take to be self-evident moral truths but can be explained in evolutionary terms.
By the standards of customary morality Socrates was corrupting the youth, for customary morality cannot stand the scrutiny of rational inquiry which questions the customary standards themselves.
so we have come full circle in our understanding of the relevance of biology to ethics. Seeing that an ethical principle has a biological basis does not support that principle. If anything, it undermines it, by showing that its widespread acceptance is no evidence that it is some kind of absolute moral truth. Clearing away these biologically based principles leaves us with the standpoint of impartial reasoning, and the principles of equal consideration of interests. Yet to rely on so broad and abstract a principle as equal consideration of interests would result in a morality unsuited to normal human beings, and unlikely to be obeyed by them. Hence, without abandoning the objective standpoint as the ultimate ideal test of right and wrong, we must return to biology, to use our knowledge of human nature as a guide to what will or will not work as a code of ethics for normal human beings.
Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.
—“The Latest Decalogue” The New Oxford Book of Verse
voter 1 ranks a > b > c
voter 2 ranks b > c > a
voter 3 ranks c > a > b
result: a > b, b > c, c > aWhen there are more than three individuals and alternatives, there does not exist any social choice function (or aggregator) that satisfies Pareto, nondictatorship, universal domain, complete and transitive rationality, and the independence of irrelevant alternatives.
Voters Rankings
1st 2nd 3rd 4 A C D 3 B B B 2 C D A 1 D A C
Richard Friedman (1973) famously bifurcates authority into two categories: in authority and an authority. The first is a procedural authority, created when individuals cannot agree on what is to be done but do agree on who is to decide what is to be done. Figures who are in authority are essentially equal to those whom they command. The second is epistemic authority. Here, individuals accept an authority figure out of deference to the authority’s superior knowledge or ability. The authority figure is superior, not equal, to those over whom he has authority. In both types of authority, the core concept of “a surrender of private judgment” is realized, but in different ways on different justifications.
“Realism is the doctrine that science is an inquiry into objective reality. The primitive realist claim is that scientific statements are true or false as they accord with the real world. Sophisticated realism says that terms in the language are governed in their usage by evidence for the existence of things to which the terms refer. Scientific change is, in general, a successive approximation to truth.”
Faust:I’ve studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,—
And even, alas! Theology, —
From end to end, with labor keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before:
I’m Magister—yea, Doctor—hight,
And straight or cross-wise, wrong or right,
These ten years long, with many woes,
I’ve led my scholars by the nose, —
And see, that nothing can be known!
That knowledge cuts me to the bone.
I’m cleverer, true, than those fops of teachers,
Doctors and Magisters, Scribes and Preachers;
Neither scruples nor doubts come now to smite me,
Nor Hell nor Devil can long affright me.
For this, all pleasure am I foregoing;
I do not pretend to aught worth knowing,
I do not pretend I could be a teacher
To help or convert a fellow-creature.
Then, too, I’ve neither lands nor gold,
Nor the world’s least pomp or honor hold—
No dog would endure such a curst existence!
Wherefore, from Magic I seek assistances,
That many a secret perchance I reach
Through spirit-power and spirit-speech,
And thus the bitter task forgo
Of saying the things I do not know,—
That I may detect the inmost force
Which binds the world, and guides its course;
Its germs, productive powers explore,
And rummage in empty words no more!
A student:
Deuce! how they step, the buxom wenches!
Come, Brother! we must see them to the benches.
A strong, old beer, a pipe that stings and bites,
A girl in Sunday clothes,—these three are my delights.
Soldiers:
Castles, with lofty
Ramparts and towers,
Maidens disdainful
In Beauty’s array,
Both shall be ours!
Bold is the venture,
Splendid the pay!
Lads, let the trumpets
For us be suing,—
Calling to pleasure,
Calling to ruin.
Stormy our life is;
Such is its boon!
Maidens and castles
Capitulate soon.
Bold is the venture,
Splendid the pay!
And the soldiers go marching,
Marching away!
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
“It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer.
Cohen had scoured the annals of discovery for years, looking for scientists who declared their own work to be “revolutions.” All told, he found just sixteen. Robert Symmer, a Scots contemporary of Benjamin Franklin whose ideas about electricity were indeed radical, but wrong. Jean-Paul Marat, known today only for his bloody contribution to the French Revolution. Von Leibig. Hamilton. Charles Darwin, of course. Virchow. Cantor. Einstein. Minkowski. Von Lane. Alfred Wegener—continental drift. Compton. Just. James Watson—the structure of DNA. And Benoit Mandelbrot.
Big whorls have little whorls
That feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls
And so on to viscosity.
A sequence like 010 0100 0100 0010 111 010 11 00 000 0010 111 010 11 0100 0 000 000... might seem orderly only to an observer familiar with Morse code and Shakespeare.
Mephostophilis
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d
In one self place, but where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be;
And, to be short, when all the world dissolves
And every creature shall be purify’d,
All places shall be hell is not heaven.
Faustus
I think hell’s a fable.
Mephostophilis
Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.
Faustus
...O, would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read a book!Mephostophilis
...what, weep’st thou? ‘tis too late, despair, farewell!
Fools that will laugh on earth must weep in hell.
“You are as ignorant of xenology as you are of physics, Mr. Wiggin”
“Let me tell you about gods,” said Wiggin. “No matter how smart or strong you are, there’s always somebody smarter or stronger, and when you run into somebody who’s stronger and smarter than anybody, you think, This is a god. This is perfection. But I can promise you that there’s somebody else somewhere else who’ll make your god look like a maggot by comparison. And somebody smarter or stronger or better in some way. So let me tell you what I think about gods. I think a real god is not going to be so scared or angry that he tries to keep other people down.
A real got already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them.”
“Occam was a medieval old fart. The simplest explanation that fits the facts is always, God did it. Or maybe—that old woman down the road is a witch. She did it. That’s all this hypothesis is—only you don’t even know where the witch is.”
Both species practiced a combination of nurturance and redundancy to protect their genetic heritage. Humans had a redundance of parents, and then nurtured the few offspring. The hive queen had a redundancy of offspring, who nurtured the parent. Each species had found its own balance of strategy.
Achilles: I thought anteaters were devourers of ants, not patrons of ant-intellectualism!
Anteater: Well, of course the two are not mutually inconsistent. I am on the best of terms with ant colonies. It’s just ANTS that I eat, not colonies—and that is good for both parties: me, and the colony.
Achilles: How is it possible that—
Tortoise: How is it possible that—
Achilles: —having its ants eaten can do an ant colony any good?
Crab: How is it possible that—
Tortoise: —having a forest fire can do a forest any good?
Anteater: How is it possible that—
Crab: —having its branches pruned can do a tree any good?
Anteater: —having a haircut can do Achilles any good?
Tortoise: Probably the rest of you were too engrossed in the discussion to notice the lovely stretto which just occurred in this Bach fugue.
“YIELDS FALSEHOOD WHEN PRECEDED BY ITS QUOTATION”
YIELDS FALSEHOOD WHEN PRECEDED BY ITS QUOTATION.
Unless a person designed himself and chose his own wants (as well as choosing to choose his own wants, etc.), he cannot be said to have a will of his own.
“A univer$ity alway$ $tand$ $tauchly by it$ $olvent a$$ociate$; that’$ the ba$ic $ecret of $chola$tic $ucce$$.”
“But here this lethal toy is a geometrical projection. A drawing of the coordinates of a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Each spike is exactly ninety degrees from every other spike.”
“Hrrumph! ‘Architect’ is a dirty word. I studied engineering. Architects copy each other’s mistakes and call it ‘Art.’ Even Frank Lloyd Wright never understood what the Gilbreths were doing. His houses looked great from the outside—inside they were hideously inefficient. Dust collectors. Gloomy. Psych lab rat mazes. Pfui!”
“At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that “news” is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived and that he himself is no different—in the crunch his life depends on his agility, alertness, and his personal resourcefulness.”
“With modern weapons, a computer programmer is more use in war than a sniper. Or—forgive me, Sir!—even an aerospace fighter pilot. I’m a programmer. I can shoot, too! I won’t be left out, I won’t!”
“Your genes are not your property; they come from your race.”
Khruschev was right about one thing: when it came time to hang the capitalist West, an American would sell him the rope. When the showdown came—and the showdowns always came—not all the wealth in the world or all the sophisticated nuclear weapons and radar and missile systems it could buy would take the place of those who had the uncritical willingness to face danger, those who, in short, had the right stuff.
Lyndon Johnson, who was the Senate majority leader, said that whoever controlled “the high ground” of space would control the world. This phrase, “the high ground,” caught hold. “The Roman Empire,” said Johnson “controlled the world because it could build roads. Later—when it moved to sea—the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age we were powerful because we had airplanes. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space.”
Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is wrong even in the strict sense intended. The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions—hate, love, guilt, fear, and others—that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and the limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths. Self-existence, or the suicide that terminates it, is not the central question of philosophy. The hypothalamic-limbic complex automatically denies such logical reduction by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism. In this one way the philosopher’s own emotional control centers are wiser than his solipsist consciousness, “knowing” that in evolutionary time the individual organism counts for almost nothing. In a Darwinist sense the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes; and it serves as their temporary carrier. Each organism generated by sexual reproduction is a unique, accidental subset of all the genes constituting the species. Natural selection is the process whereby certain genes gain representation in the following generations superior to that of other genes located at the same chromosome positions. When new sex cells are manufactured in each generation, the winning genes are pulled apart and reassembled to manufacture new organisms that, on the average, contain a higher proportion of the same genes. But the individual organism is only their vehicle, part of an elaborate device to preserve and spread them with the least possible biochemical perturbation. Samuel Butler’s famous aphorism, that the chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg, has been modernized: the organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA. More to the point, the hypothalamus and limbic system are engineered to perpetuate DNA.
Of largely medieval origin, many of these words still enjoy everyday use, while others are little more than amusing relicts: a school of fish, a pride of lions, a swarm of bees, a gang of elk, a pace of asses, a troop of kangaroos, a route of wolves, a skulk of foxes, a sleuth of bears, a crash of rhinoceroses, a trip (or herd) or seals, a pod of sea otters, a siege of herons, a herd of cranes, a tok of caperaillies, a murmuration of starlings, an exaltation of larks, a bouquet of pheasants, a murder of crows, a building of rooks, a knot of toads, a smack of jellyfish, and so forth.
Of the 12 or more times that true colonial life (eusociality) has originated in the insects, only once—in the termites—is this event known to have occurred outside the single order Hymenoptera, that is, in insects other than ants, bees, and wasps. W. D. Hamilton (1964) has argued with substantial logic and documentation that this peculiarity stems from the haplodiploid mode of sex determination used by the Hymenoptera and a few other groups of organisms, in which fertilized eggs produce females and unfertilized eggs produce males. One consequence of haplodiploidy is that females are more closely related to their sisters than they are to their own daughters. Therefore, all other things being equal, a female is more likely to contribute genes to the next generation by rearing a sister than by rearing a daughter. The likely result in evolution is the origin of sterile female castes and of a tight colonial organization centered on a single fertile female. This is in fact the typical condition of hymenopterous societies.
A principal conclusion of a 20-year study of dogs conducted at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine was that virtually every behavioral trait possesses sufficient heritability to respond rapidly to selection. This malleability is the basis for man’s success in creating such an imposing array of dog breeds, each specialized for a particular purpose within man’s own social scheme.
Despite such strong anecdotal evidence, however, we are not yet able to say whether incest avoidance in these animals is a primary adaptation in response to inbreeding depression or merely a felicitous by-product of dominance behavior that confers other advantages on the individual conforming to it. It is necessary to turn to human beings to find behavior patterns uniquely associated with incest taboos. The most basic process appears to be what Tiger and Fox have called the precluding of bonds. Teachers and students find it difficult to become equal colleagues even after the students equal or surpass their mentors; mothers and daughters seldom change the tone of their original relationship. More to the point, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, and incest taboos are virtually universal in human cultures. Studies in Israeli kibbutzim, the latest by Joseph Shepher [1972], have shown that bond exclusion among age peers is not dependent on sibship. Among 2,769 marriages recorded, none was between members of the same kibbutz peer group who had been together since birth. There was not even a single recorded instance of heterosexual activity, despite the fact that no formal or informal pressures were exerted to prevent it.
The model can now be extended to include all relatives affected by the altruism. If only first cousins were benefited (r = 1/8), the altruist who leaves no offspring would have to multiply a cousin’s fitness eightfold; and uncle (r = 1/4) would have to be advanced fourfold; and so on. If combinations of relatives are benefited, the effect of the altruism is simply weighted by the number of relatives of each kind who are affected and their coefficients of relationship. In general, k, the ratio of gain in fitness to loss of fitness, must exceed the reciprocal of the average coefficient of the relationship (r¯) to the ensemble of relatives: k > 1/ r¯
It is a fact worrisome to moralists that Americans and other culturally advanced peoples continue to devote large amounts of their time to coarse forms of entertainment. They delight in mounting giant inedible fish on their living room walls, idolize boxing championships, and sometimes attain ecstasy at football games. Such behavior is probably not decadent. It could be as psychologically needed and genetically adaptive as work and sexual reproduction, and may even stem from the same emotional processes that impel our highest impulses toward scientific, literary, and artistic creation.
Some have viewed the study of communication as coextensive with logic, mathematics, and linguistics. C. S. Pierce, Charles Morris, Rudolf Carnap, and Margaret Mead, for example, have used the word semiotic (or semiotics) to designate the analysis of communication in the broadest sense.
Ceremony, to use Edward Armstrong’s phrase, is the evolved antidote to clumsiness, disorder, and misunderstanding.
The size of pheromone molecules that are transmitted through air can be expected to conform to certain physical rules (Wilson and Bossert, 1963). In general, they should possess a carbon number between 5 and 20 and a molecular weight between 80 and 300.
Directionality is the paramount feature of systems of visual communication. Visual images are instantly pinpointed in space: the honeybee, a typical large-eyed insect, can distinguish two points that subtend an angle of approximately 1°, while the human eye, which is typically mammalian in construction, has an angle of resolution of 0.01°.
I have been impressed by how often such behavior becomes apparent only when the observation time devoted to a species passes the thousand-hour mark. But only one murder per thousand hours per observer is still a great deal of violence by human standards. In fact, if some imaginary Martian zoologist visiting Earth were to observe man as simply one more species over a very long period of time, he might conclude that we are among the more pacific mammals as measured by serious assaults or murders per individual per unit time, even when our episodic wars are averaged in.
Incidentally, another cherished notion of our wickedness starting to crumble is that man alone kills more prey than he needs to eat. The Serengeti lions, like the hyenas described by Hans Kruuk, sometimes kill wantonly if it is convenient for them to do so.
In other words, fixation can occur without reinforcement. The more an animal or person is exposed to an initially neutral stimulus, the more attractive the stimulus becomes.
In short, familiarity induces warm feelings. Or, as Zajonc has put it: “Familiarity does not breed contempt. Familiarity breeds!”
Human behavior provides some of the best exemplification of the xenophobia principle. Outsiders are almost always a source of tension. If they pose a physical threat, especially to territorial integrity, they loom in our vision as an evil, monolithic force. Efforts are then made to reduce them to subhuman status, so that they can be treated without conscience. They are the gooks, the wogs, the krouts, the commies—not like us, another subspecies surely, a force remorselessly dedicated to our destruction who must be met with equal ruthlessness if we are to survive. Even the gentle Bushmen distinguish themselves as the !Kung—the human beings. At this level of “gut feeling,” the mental processes of a human being and of a rhesus monkey may well be neurophysiologically homologous.
Although the sequence just given proceeds from unquestionably more primitive and older forms of life to more advanced and recent ones, the key properties of social existence, including cohesiveness, altruism, and cooperativeness, decline. It seems as though social evolution has slowed as the body plan of the individual organism became more elaborate.
The anthropological literature abounds with examples of societies that contain obvious inefficiencies and even pathological flaws—yet endure.
The extreme orthodox view of environmentalism goes further, holding that in effect there is no genetic variance in the transmission of culture. In other words, the capacity for culture is transmitted by a single human genotype. Dobzhansky [1963] stated this hypothesis as follows: “Culture is not inherited through genes, it is acquired by learning from other human beings... In a sense, human genes have surrendered their primacy in human evolution to an entirely new, nonbiological or superorganic agent, culture. However, it should not be forgotten that this agent is entirely dependent on the human genotype.” Although the genes have given away most of their sovereignty, they maintain a certain amount of influence in at least the behavioral qualities that underlie variations between cultures.
In short, there is a need for a discipline of anthrolopological genetics.
Their efforts were salutary in calling attention to man’s status as a biological species adapted to particular environments. The wide attention they received broke the stifling grip of the extreme behaviorists, whose view of the mind of man as a virtually equipotent response machine was neither correct nor heuristic.
Deception and hypocrisy are neither absolute evils that virtuous men suppress to a minimum level nor residual animal traits waiting to be erased by further social evolution. They are very human devices for conducting the complex daily business of social life. The level in each particular society may represent a compromise that reflects the size and complexity of the society. If the level is too low, others will seize the advantage and win. If it is too high, ostracism is the result. Complete honesty on all sides is not the answer. The old primate frankness would destroy the delicate fabric of social life that has built up in human populations beyond the limits of the immediate clan. As Louis J. Halle correctly observed, good manners have become a substitute for love.
The greater the dependence on herding, the more likely the belief in a shepherd god of the Judeo-Christian model.
The enduring paradox of religion is that so much of its substance is demonstrably false, yet it remains a driving force in all societies. Men would rather believe than know, have the void as purpose, as Nietzsche said, than be void of purpose.
This leads us to the essentially biological question of the evolution of indocrinability. Human beings are absurdly easy to indoctrinate—they seek it.
Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.
This is the genetic evolution of ethics. In the first chapter of this book I argued that ethical philosophers intuit the deontological canons of morality by consulting the emotive centers of their own hypothalamic-limbic system. This is also true of the developmentalists, even when they are being their most severely objective. Only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the canons be deciphered. Some of the activity is likely to be outdated, a relic of adjustment to the most primitive form of tribal organization. Some of it may prove to be in statu nascendi, constituting new and quickly changing adaptations to agrarian and urban life. The resulting confusion will be reinforced by other factors. To the extent that unilaterally altruistic genes have been established in the population by group selection, they will be opposed by allelomorphs favored by individual selection. The conflict of impulses under their various controls is likely to be widespread in the population, since current theory predicts that the genes will be at best maintained in a state of balanced polymorphism (Chapter 5). Moral ambivalency will be further intensified by the circumstance that a schedule of sex- and age-dependent ethics can impart higher genetic fitness than a single moral code which is applied uniformly to all sex-age groups. The argument for this statement is the special case of the Gadgil-Bossert distribution in which the contributors of social interactions to survivorship and fertility schedules are specified (see Chapter 4). Some of the differences in the Kohlberg stages could be explained in this manner. For example, it should be of selective advantage for young children to be self-centered and relatively disinclined to perform altruistic acts based on personal principle. Similarly, adolescents should be more tightly bound by age-peer bonds within their own sex and hence unusually sensitive to peer approval. The reason is that at this time greater advantage accrues to the formation of alliances and rise in status later, when sexual and parental morality become the paramount determinants of fitness. Genetically programmed sexual and parent-offspring conflict of the kind predicted by the Trivers models (Chapters 15 and 16) are also likely to promote age differences in the kinds and degrees of moral commitment. Finally, the moral standards of individuals during early phases of colony growth should differ in many details from those of individuals at demographic equilibrium or during episodes of overpopulation. Metapopulations subject to high levels of r extinction will tend to diverge genetically from other kinds of populations in ethical behavior (Chapter 5).
If there is any truth to this theory of innate moral pluralism, the requirement for an evolutionary approach to ethics is self-evident. It should also be clear that no single set of moral standards can be applied to all human populations, let alone all sex-age classes within each population. To impose a uniform code is therefore to create complex, intractable moral dilemmas—these, or course, are the current condition of mankind.
“If the ox could paint a picture, his god would look like and ox”
What was required of Romans was only that the ordained services and rituals should be carried out in the accustomed way; for the proletarian this meant little except that he should not work on a holiday.
The content of these was a mixture of Greek mythology and festivals and rites derived from primitive Roman practice and therefore heavily marked by agricultural preoccupations. One which lived to deck itself out in the symbols of another religion was the December Saturnalia, which is with us still as Christmas.
Even Jews who did not mind Roman tax-gatherers and thought Caesar should have rendered unto him what was Caesar’s were bound to draw the line at the blasphemy of sacrifice at his altar. In AD 66 came a great revolt; there were others under Trajan and Hadrian. Jewish communities were powder-barrels. Their sensitivity makes somewhat more understandable the unwillingness of a Procurator of Judaea in about AD 30 to press hard for the strict observance of the legal rights of an accused man when Jewish leaders demanded his death.
Under Innocent III papal pretensions to monarchical authority reached a new theoretical height.
Clerical celibacy became more common and more widespread. Among new practices which were pressed on the Church in the thirteenth century was that of frequent individual confession, a powerful instrument of control in a religiously-minded and anxiety-ridden society. Among doctrinal innovations, the theory of transubstantiation, that by a mystical process the body and blood of Christ were actually present in the bread and wine used in the communion service, was imposed from the thirteenth century onwards.
From the fourth century onwards, churchmen had urged the persecution of heretics. Yet the first papal condemnation of them did not come until 1184. Only under Innocent III did persecution come to be the duty of Catholic kings.
Human beings do not find it easy to pursue collective purposes without some sort of myth to justify them; nor did the British in India. Some of them saw themselves as the heirs of the Romans whom a classical education taught them to admire, stoically bearing the burden of a lonely life in an alien land to bring peace to the warring and law to peoples without it. Others saw in Christianity a precious gift with which they must destroy idols and cleanse evil customs. Some never formulated such clear views but were simply convinced that what they brought was better than what they found and therefore what they were doing was good. At the basis of all these views there was a conviction of superiority and there was nothing surprising about this; it had always animated the imperialists. But in the later nineteenth century it was especially reinforced by fashionable racialist ideas and a muddled reflexion of what was thought to be taught by current biological science about survival of the fittest.
Those who felt confident could point to the diminution of international violence in the nineteenth century; there had been no war between European great powers since 1876 (when Russia and Turkey had come to blows) and, unhappily, European soldiers and statesmen failed to understand the portents of the American civil war, the first in which one commander could control over a million men, thanks to railway and telegraph, and the first to show the power of modern mass-produced weapons to inflict huge casualties... A significant phrase was used by the German emperor when he sent off his contingent to the international force fielded against the Chinese Boxers. Stirred to anger by reports of atrocities against Europeans by Chinese, he urged his soldiers to behave ‘like Huns’. The phrase stuck in people’s memories. Though thought to be excessive even at the time, its real interest lies in the fact that he should have believed such a recommendation was needed. Nobody would have had to tell a seventeenth-century army to behave like Huns, because it was in a large measure taken for granted that they would. By 1900, European troops were not expected to behave in this way and had therefore to be told to do so. So far had the humanizing of war come. ‘Civilized warfare’ was a nineteenth-century concept and far from a contradiction in terms. In 1899 it had agreed to forbid, albeit for a limited period, the use of poison gas, dum-dum bullets and even the dropping of bombs from the air.
Even in the sphere of genetics, no researcher has suggested that genes fully determine sexual orientation.
Indeed, the boldest prediction from a study of individuals who share identical genes (monozygotic or “identical” twins) is that, if one of the pair is homosexual, the chances that the co-twin is also homosexual are slightly more than 1:2 (52 percent)—not much better predictive value than flipping a coin.
Although data at present do not permit researchers to claim that biology fully determines behavioral traits, this presumption seems to guide their work.
For the (crypto)biological determinist, free choice (more specifically, sexual choice) is an illusion. Reality is immutably inscribed in the genes at conception and in the nervous system at birth (or at least by the time of puberty). All the vicissitudes of individual and social histories are merely the elaborate and as yet ill-understood manifestations of the “realities” of genes and the nervous system. In some brave new world of total biological knowledge—once the Human Genome Project and, presumably, a Human Neurone Project have been successfully completed—we will be able to understand every political decision made by Ronald Reagan during his presidency in terms of his genetic and neurological construction and dynamics. This brings me to another binarism: the normal versus the pathological.
being an “out” “gay” man is a historical and social novelty in the same sense that being “American” is; furthermore, to many non-Americans, being “gay” or “queer” is specifically an Anglo-American phenomenon. Therefore, the search for a “gay gene” is the quest for the genetic basis of a sociohistorical construct.”
biomedical science, particularly genetics, has become the major authority entrusted with officiating the naturalization of human behaviors and ailments.
Critics will note that many behavior characteristics—going to mass, wearing an obi, eating feijoada—are familial more for cultural than for genetic reasons.
The Minnesota twins, as is now widely known, although raised apart, were found to share many astonishing similarities, from details of personal adornment (same hairstyles, type of eye glasses, number of rings, type and color of clothing) to personal quirks (flushing the toilet before urinating, wearing rubber bands on the wrist) to similar personality traits.
A “gay gene” has, therefore, not been found. At most, a marker has been identified in the neighborhood of that gene.
Most researchers now think that there is a “wired in” component to much of what we used to believe where wholly learned behaviors. Language acquisition, musical ability, attention, memory, addictive drug seeking (a behavior with an excellent analogue in laboratory animals), intelligence, and the predisposition to impulsive violence are some of the traits for which there is evidence for an innate predisposition.
The deaf, not surprisingly, want control of their culture and resent the imperialistic assumptions of the hearing majority.
One problem with the exercise of genetic choice is that we do not know how to do so in a manner beneficial to long-term survival.
If intelligence predicted survival, gorillas would be flourishing and cockroaches would be on the verge of extinction.
[Eugenics] takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they would have had.
The problem of grouping what may be a variety of behaviors under one name is what neurobiologist Steven Rose (1995) has called “artificial conglomeration”
Such was apparently the case with the (in)famous Minnesota Twin Study, which turned up preposterous coincidences in the life histories of MZ twins reared apart. It now appears that many of the twin pairs exaggerated their similarities in order to remain in the study, or to capture researcher and media attention and appear on TV talk shows.
people who are genetically self-reliant might be more likely to acknowledge and act on same-sex feelings than are people who are dependent on the approval of others.
Yet any experienced geneticist will tell you that, of course, it is not strictly true that genes directly determine traits independent of environment. The phrase “the gene for” is just a “shorthand,” they say. Yet it is a shorthand that may ultimately conceal more than it reveals. This “shorthand” has contributed significantly to the confusion surrounding human behavior genetics in the past five or more decades.
To his credit, Balaban, who did not wish to provide fuel for anti-gay campaigns, refused to testify. In so doing, he articulated what I think is a crucial philosophical and social point: civil rights or any form of social justice should never hinge on biology. Biology may inform us about how to deal medically with particular human characteristics, but the decision to treat or not treat, or whether treatment is even necessary, is a social not a biological decision.
to remove the blame from the economic and social system in which we live and to deflect responsibility for such problems away from society’s privileged and powerful elite.
“The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.”
“That Gandalf should be late, does not bode well. But it is said: ‘Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.’”“And it is also said,” answered Frodo: “Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.’”
“to content his own spirit—the necessity of contenting his own spirit and winning its approval.”
“to secure his spiritual comfort.”
“Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community.”
The embarrassed scientist is then like the guy who invented the universal solvent but found soon enough that there was no bottle to put it in.
Intelligence is as intelligence does. If there is no action that affects the environment, there is no intelligent behavior.
“But dost think, blacksmith, that we be witches?”
“I think naught! Messer Leonardo explained and proved to me in detail that there is no such thing as sorcery, nor can there be, by the laws of nature. Messer Leonardo knoweth everything and believeth nothing.”
“Believeth nothing?” repeated Monna Cassandra, “believeth not in the devil? But what of God?”
“Mock not! He is a righteous man.”
“I am not mocking... That is why the fathers say: to be a wizard is heresy; but not to believe in wizardry is heresy twice over.”
Leonardo, listening to this conversation attentively, wanted to contradict, but reflected that arguing with leeches was just as bootless as arguing with alchemists.
“Fra Domenico, representing Savonarola, and Gra Giuliano Rodinelli, representing Girolamo’s foes, shall enter the flames of a bonfire; he that shall be left unscathed shall prove himself right before God.”
“’Tis impossiblethat Savonarola really believes,” murmured Leonardo meditatively, as though to himself.
“He, I grant you, may not believe,” retorted Somenzi, “or, at the least, may not believe entirely. And glad enough would he be to back out of it, but ’tis too late. He has cultivated a sweet tooth in the rabble to his own downfall. They all have their mouths watering now,—serve up a miracle to them, and that is all there is to it! For here, messer, are also mathematics, and no less curious than yours: if there be a God, then wherefore should He not perform a miracle, so that two times two may be not four, but five, in response to the prayer of the faithful, and to the ignominy of the godless atheists,—such as you and I?”
“You and I [Paolo], Messer Leonardo, are accomplices in this matter. That is why I say that it is our turn to rejoice.Long live reason, long live science, for if there be a God, or He be not,—two times two is still four!”
“—I shall speak of sea-shells.”
“How then, if ye will have the goodness to tell me,—how is it that you expect, Messer Gabriele, that, during the forty days which the flood lasted, according to the testimony of Moses, it should crawl the two hundred and fifty miles, separating the knolls of Montferrato from the shores of the Adriatic? Only he that, despising experiment and observation, doth judge of nature by books, according to the concepts of chattering wordmongers, and who has never even once had the curiosity to look with his own eyes at that whereof he speaks, will durst to make such an assertion! ”
“Yes, all this is not science,” calmly retorted Leonardo. “I acknowledge the greatness of the ancients, but not in this. In science they have taken a false path. They desired to fathom that which is inaccessible to knowledge, while that which was accessible they contemned. They have entangled themselves and others for many ages. For, in considering subjects not open to proof, men can not come to an agreement. Where there are no sensible deductions, their place is taken by loud shouts. But he that knoweth hath no need of shouting. The word of truth is unique, and when it is said, the shouts of the disputants must cease; but if they still continue, it means that there is no truth as yet. For do they argue in mathematics if two times three be six or five? Or whether the sum of the angles of a triangle be equal to two right angles or no? Does not every contradiction in this case disappear before the truth, so that its devotees may enjoy it in peace, which is never the case in the psuedo-metaphysical sciences?”
“I leave all God-inspired books out of the argument, inasmuch as they are verily the highest truth”
“When science shall conquer,” he reflected sadly, “and the rabble shall enter its holy place, will it not defile with its allegiance even science, as it has defiled the Church, and will the knowledge of the mob be any less vulgar than the faith of the mob?”
Math and Science: A. Student possesses enormous aptitude. Advancing rapidly on all fronts now . . .
Language Arts: B-. Although gifted here, student remains undisciplined. Lapses into fits of inarticulateness when excited. Penmanship a joke.
Social Studies: C. Disappointing. Despite every opportunity of late, fails to rise above provincialism. Shows little sensitivity to foreign affairs . . .
Economics: C-. Extremely uneven. Impressive progress in some areas, at the expense of others. Has not yet figured out the basic principles . . .
Civics and Poly Sci: D. Don’t even ask. Pleads no contest on final exams.
Music and Art: B+. Student constantly surprises. Varied and restless. Creativity really coming to the fore. A big overhaul may lie in wait.
History: Incomplete.
Health and Personal Hygiene: F. Five million children dead each year of diarrhea, for God’s sake.
“I forgave my people, ” she [Mme. Liang] said. “Through our thousands of years, our weakness has been in our pride. We believed, and do still believe, that we are the superior race, out civilization above any other,”
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
In the first place, Professor Butterfield and all who think as he does are persuaded that it is a good thing to love your neighbor, and their reasons for holding this view are not derived from Christ’s teaching. On the contrary, it is because they already hold this view that they regard Christ’s teaching as evidence of His divinity. They have, that is to say, not an ethic based on theology, but a theology based upon their ethic.
that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.
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