 |
| Charles Darwin |
Note: This is the Second installment of my response to Dan Lazare’s polemic against me, Meeting Judith Butler halfway: Science, Darwin, and adaptation to postmodernism. Part One Marxism vs. Mechanical Materialism Part One: Sexuality, Mechanism and Vitalism was published on April 9, 2026. The Third and final installment of my response will be published next week.
In his
article Lazare makes a number of patently false statements attributing to me
positions I do not hold. He also fails to respond to the bulk of my essay, Marxism,
psychoanalysis and human sexuality, That essay was in turn written
in response to his article, Materialism
and Gender Theory: Anatomy of a bourgeois-radical train wreck . I
challenged the theoretical conclusions Lazare drew in that essay about gender
theory, psychology, human sexuality and evolutionary theory. I am continuing
the method I adopted in Part One of responding to the topics while relegating
the specific arguments raised by Lazare to the footnotes wherever possible.
Marx,
Darwin, reductionism and Social Darwinism
In
biology reductionism has been a problem for a long time but the stakes were
raised exponentially after the publications of Darwin’s Origin of the
Species. Marx and Engels immediately recognized the revolutionary
implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. Marx
even sent a copy of his work, Capital, to Darwin, seeing in Darwin’s publication, a
confirmation in nature of his own outlook in history. But shortly after Origin
of the Species was published, a byproduct of Darwin’s theory, Social
Darwinism, appeared on the scene. The idea behind Social Darwinism was that the
mechanism of evolution discovered by Darwin -- natural selection (later dubbed “survival
of the fittest”) -- can be extended from the realm of biology to explain and justify the class-based capitalist society that we inhabit. The reactionary implications of
this unwarranted extension of Darwin’s theory into the social realm was
expressed in crude form by John D. Rockefeller, who famously said,
The growth of large business is merely a survival of the
fittest… The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance
which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow
up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the
working out of a law of nature and a law of God.[1]
Marx and Engels immediately recognized the
reactionary and unscientific implications of this offshoot of Darwinism.
In a
letter to the Russian Marxist Peter Lavrov, Engels outlined the reductionist
methodology of what he called “bourgeois Darwinists”, a political current in
German political life at the time,
All that the Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence
boils down to is an extrapolation from society to animate nature of Hobbes’
theory of the bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against
all] and of the bourgeois-economic theory of competition together with the
Malthusian theory of population. Having accomplished this feat … these people
proceed to re-extrapolate the same theories from organic nature to history, and
then claim to have proved their validity as eternal laws of human society. The
puerility of this procedure is self-evident, and there is no need to waste
words on it.[2]
 |
| Friedrich Engels (1879) |
A more
general statement rejecting the application of the laws of biological evolution
to social forms can be found in Engels’ Dialectics of Nature where he
wrote,
Let us accept for a moment the phrase “struggle for
existence,” for argument’s sake. The most that the animal can achieve is
to collect; man produces, he prepares the means of
subsistence, in the widest sense of the words, which without him nature would
not have produced. This makes impossible any unqualified transference of the
laws of life in animal societies to human society.[3]
There is
also this explicit rejection of reductionism by Engels in the same unfinished
work,
The conception of history as a series of class struggles is
already much richer in content and deeper than merely reducing it to weakly
distinguished phases of the struggle for existence.[4]
Trotsky
provides, decades later, an even more adamant rejection of social Darwinism,
…we frequently find in Darwin himself, not to speak of the
Darwinists, completely naïve and unscientific efforts to carry over the
conclusions of biology to society. Interpreting competition as a ‘variety’ of
biological struggle for existence – is like seeing nothing but mechanics in the
physiology of mating.[5]
As the
above quotes make clear Marxists have always rejected theories that reduce
historical explanations of human behavior to biological explanations. On the other hand, it has long been a matter
of debate among historians whether Darwin himself subscribed to the tenets of
Social Darwinism. According to the
anthropologist Melissa Brown, there existed the “strictly scientific Darwin”
who wrote The Origin of the Species but there was also the “less than
scientific Darwin” whose book The Descent of Man was infused with the
racist and imperialist sentiments of the Victorian gentry of his time. [6]
While
the ideas behind Social Darwinism emerged shortly after the publication of Origin,
the phrase “Social Darwinism” only passed into
popular culture in the U.S. as a result of a book by the historian
Richard Hofstadter from 1940. But the idea had been germinating since the 1870s,
thanks largely to the work of an early proponent of Social Darwinism, the 19th
century English philosopher Herbert Spencer. Although Spencer is considered
today little more than a footnote in intellectual history, his influence on the
English speaking world a century ago cannot be underestimated. It was Spencer
who first coined the term “survival of the fittest.” And his ideas found an
immediate echo in the most reactionary social and political theories in
Victorian England and beyond. It allowed
proponents of a version of laissez faire capitalism to rationalize their indifference
to the fate of the poor, the disabled and other unfortunates as a necessary outcome
of an evolutionary process that results in losers and winners. Many social
theorists of the time also concluded that we can assist the natural process of
evolution by taking social measures to restrict the ability of the undesirables
to reproduce and spread their inferior qualities. Thus was born the pseudo-science of
Eugenics. Darwin’s cousin, Francis
Galton, was the father of Eugenics, having coined the word in the 1860’s.
Similar ideas that claimed to find a “scientific” explanation for the
superiority of certain races over others served as a rationale for the brutal
colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. That Darwin was influenced by such ideas even
if they did not appear in the strictly scientific chapters of Origin no
doubt explains why he was persuaded to
insert the phrase “survival of the fittest” into the Fifth Edition of the Origin
of Species in place of the original “natural selection”. [7]
 |
| Herbert Spencer. Painting by Sir Hubert von Herkomer, National Galleries of Scotland |
The rise
of Eugenics
Social
Darwinism remained an influential current in politics and philosophy in the
late 19th and early 20th century. Not only was it used to rationalize harsh and
cruel treatment of the most vulnerable members of society, the poor, the
disabled, the elderly, racial and sexual minorities that were deemed
“undesirable”, but it also became a new
ideological weapon in spreading racism and imperialism. Whereas the Southern
planters turned to a twisted version of Christianity to justify slavery by
claiming a Biblical authority for the superiority of Caucasians and the
inferiority of Africans, Social Darwinism provided a more “scientific”
rationale for racism and imperialism.
When Mendelian genetics was married to Darwinian evolution in the 1920’s
what was then called “the new synthesis”. It filled out a missing piece in
Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, namely what was it that
was retained in an individual organism that enabled it to reproduce its unique
features from generation to generation. At the same time chance variations in
this substance endowed it with either greater or lesser chances of survival.
The accumulated effects of these variations in the long run over many
generations, determined the course of evolution of the organisms. But at the same time as this great advance in
genuine science was made, the pseudo-science of Eugenics was given new life.
According
to one historian,
Eugenics was a pseudoscience, an epiphenomenon of a number of
sciences, which all intersected at the claim that it was possible to
consciously guide human evolution. Springing from the platform that human
behavior was tied to evolutionary heredity, eugenics made the disturbing claim
that human traits could be accurately measured, quantified, and assessed for
social desirability. Given that these traits were supposedly inherited,
manipulating the reproduction of people with these traits could spread or diminish
the prevalence of these traits in later generations. As became increasingly
clear, eugenics could be dressed up as an apparently humane solution to a
variety of social and medical problems. However, careful consideration of its
methods and aims revealed deep layers of flawed assumptions and immoral
agendas.[8]
Eugenics
caught on in post-World War I America.
It was no accident that its popularity increased at the same time as
America witnessed a rise in racist oppression and xenophobia and
anti-communism. This was the period of
the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and mass lynchings of black people, the Palmer
raids and the Red Scare that followed the October Revolution in Russia, and a
general backlash against the wave of immigrants who had come to America from
countries that were deemed “undesirable”.
The history of Eugenics and its destructive impact on society is
well-known. Arguments from Eugenicists were employed to enforce the most
reactionary legislation, the anti-immigration laws of the 1920’s. forced
sterilization, segregated education based on IQ tests, etc. [9]
The forced sterilization of individuals deemed “unfit” affected hundreds of
thousands in the United States and Canada. The state of California alone
forcibly sterilized approximately 20,000 such “undesirables” between 1909 and
1979. A number of incarcerated women were still subjected to forced
sterilization as recently as 2013.[10]
The nation of Peru, during the administration of Alberto Fujimori, forcibly
sterilized 300,000 women of indigenous heritage from the rural Andean regions.[11]
Peru’s sterilization program was promoted as a model of reproductive health and economic
development. It “drew on long-standing eugenic doctrines and neo-Malthusian
theories, which linked excessive population growth to poverty and national
instability.”[12]
It was
no accident that Hitler praised America’s adoption of these reactionary laws in
his Mein Kampf. When the Nazis
came to power later in the 1930’s Eugenics became the scientific rationale for
Nazi racial theories and their implementation.[13]
But it would be a mistake to think that the embrace of eugenics was confined to
the political Right. Lots of liberals and social democrats were also caught up
in it. Prominent figures such as Betrand
Russell, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb were enthusiastic
advocates of eugenics in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The Social Democratic
government of Sweden was responsible for the forced sterilization of 60,000
Swedish women from 1935 until as late as 1976.[14]
This atrocity was committed in the name of securing the integrity of the Nordic
race.
Following
the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War the pseudo-science of eugenics,
while not yet dead, was largely discredited.
This paved the way for a new, more sophisticated form of Social
Darwinism, Sociobiology.
The Rise
of Sociobiology
The
beginnings of Sociobiology is often attributed to the publication of E.O.
Wilson’s book from 1975, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis. Wilson’s book
was followed by a popular account of Sociobiology by Richard Dawkins, The
Selfish Gene, published in 1976. The
main thesis of Sociobiology as promoted by Wilson was that the social behavior
of animals was determined by a strict evolutionary strategy implanted in genes
and that what appears as altruistic behavior is proven to be rooted on a deeper
level in a strategy for survival. Wilson went a step further and proclaimed
that the Darwinian impulse which he claimed guided the behavior of social
insects can be applied to the behavior of human society. The reactionary implications of Wilson’s
version of genetic determinism were soon exposed when he was quoted as saying,
…the genetic bias is intense enough to cause a substantial
division of labor even in the most free and most egalitarian of future
societies. . . Even with identical education and equal access to all
professions, men are likely to continue to play a disproportionate role in
political life, business and sciences.[15]
 |
| Edward O.Wilson photo by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images |
Wilson
also offered the opinion, from a typical positivist and anti-philosophical
outlook, that,
…the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from
the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.[16]
Dawkins’
book, The Selfish Gene, was no less a sensation. Written for a more
popular audience, Dawkins argues that genes, not organisms, are the unit of
selection in biological evolution and employs the metaphor of a “selfish gene”
to drive home the point that evolutionary direction of a species is ultimately
determined by which genes are more adaptive and therefore can be passed on in
greater frequency across generations.
Dawkins invented the idea of the “meme” to describe a "unit of
imitation and replication.” The idea of a gene being such a unit in biology was
expanded to the social realm to explain how culture is transmitted. Dawkins’
views reinforced those of Wilson. Dawkins is also notorious for having said
that organisms, including human beings, are temporary survival machines for
genes.[17]
 |
| Richard Dawkins |
The
theoretical basis for Wilson’s and Dawkins’ work however had been developed a
decade earlier by William Hamilton and George Price. Hamilton and Price,
borrowing concepts from game theory, developed a mathematical model that
demonstrated that within the framework of the Darwinian logic of natural
selection any act of altruistic behavior rests on a more fundamental survival
strategy. This finding shocked Price who
had a deep belief in altruism. The author Andrew Brown, in his 1999 book, The
Darwin Wars, provides a dramatic retelling of the impact on Price,
For though his equation showed that truly self-sacrificing
behaviour can exist among animals, and even. humans, it also seemed to show
that there is nothing noble in it. Only behaviour which helps to spread the
genes that cause it can survive in the very long term. Since man, too, is an
animal, the human capacity for altruism must be strictly limited; and our
capacity for cruelty, treachery and selfishness impossible to eradicate.
Through algebra, George Price had found proof of original sin.[18]
The
collision between Price’s deeply held beliefs and what he took to be the iron
laws inscribed in the mathematics he developed that revealed self-interest at
the root of all behavior triggered a mental breakdown, eventually resulting in
his suicide. If unravelling the mystery behind human behavior had such an
impact on one of the founders of what was later called Sociobiology, its
entrance into the realm of public dialogue was no less dramatic. Wilson’s book
was an overnight sensation, something unheard of for a huge tome on science. An
enthusiastic review of the book was featured on the front page of the New
York Times. Dozens of reviews followed. Most were highly enthusiastic but
several expressed strong disagreement.
Perhaps the most important of the early objections to Wilson’s book was
a letter published in the New York Review of Books signed by more than a
dozen notable scientists, researchers and practitioners in the fields of
medicine, biology, zoology and paleontology, including Stephan Jay Gould and
Richard Lewontin. The letter placed
Sociobiology within the historical context of Social Darwinism and biological
determinism. It starts with the observation that,
Beginning with Darwin’s theories of natural selection 125
years ago, new biological and genetic information has played a significant role
in the development of social and political policy. From Herbert Spencer, who
coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” to Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey,
and now E. O. Wilson, we have seen proclaimed the primacy of natural selection
in determining most important characteristics of human behavior. These theories
have resulted in a deterministic view of human societies and human action.
Another form of this “biological determinism” appears in the claim that genetic
theory and data can explain the origin of certain social problems, e.g., the
suggestion by eugenicists such as Davenport in the early twentieth century that
a host of examples of “deviant” behavior—criminality, alcoholism, etc.—are
genetically based; or the more recent claims for a genetic basis of racial
differences in intelligence by Arthur Jensen, William Shockley and others.
Each time these ideas have resurfaced the claim has been made
that they were based on new scientific information. Yet each time, even though
strong scientific arguments have been presented to show the absurdity of these
theories, they have not died. The reason for the survival of these recurrent
determinist theories is that they consistently tend to provide a genetic
justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for
certain groups according to class, race or sex. Historically, powerful countries
or ruling groups within them have drawn support for the maintenance or
extension of their power from these products of the scientific community.[19]
The
letter goes on to elucidate several methodological errors Wilson commits in
order to back up his claims,
In his attempt to graft speculation about human behavior onto
a biological core, Wilson uses a number of strategies and sleights of hand
which dispel any claim for logical or factual continuity.”
Among the
methodological problems cited are:
1. Wilson’s
claim that all adaptive behavior can be traced to genes. Behavior that he
cannot easily explain, such as social unrest, he simply discards by saying it
is “maladaptive”.
2. He makes
an unjustified leap from the behavior of non-humans to humans by asserting a
genetic basis for anthropology.
3. Wilson
posits a continuity between the behavior of animals as understood by
evolutionary theory and human social behavior.
There is no logical justification for such a belief other than the
reductionist fallacy that human social behavior is of the same quality as
animal behavior, just a more complex version of the same. In arguing this point
Wilson has to turn to metaphors that blur the distinctions. “For instance, in
insect populations, Wilson applies the traditional metaphors of “slavery” and
“caste,” “specialists” and “generalists” in order to establish a descriptive
framework. Thus, he promotes the analogy between human and animal societies and
leads one to believe that behavior patterns in the two have the same basis.”
Furthermore, with the use of such misleading metaphors “…institutions such as
slavery are made to seem natural in human societies because of their
“universal” existence in the biological kingdom.”
4. He
provides an ad hoc hypothesis of a
“multiplier effect” to explain how major cultural changes can take place almost
overnight, a rate unknown in the relatively slow propagation of change through
genes. But there is absolutely no
evidence for the existence of any such mechanism.
5. “Many of
Wilson’s claims about human nature do not arise from objective observation
(either of universals in human behavior or of generalities throughout animal
societies), but from a speculative reconstruction of human prehistory. This
reconstruction includes the familiar themes of territoriality, big-game hunting
with females at home minding the kids and gathering vegetables (“many of the
peculiar details of human sexual behavior and domestic life flow easily from
this basic division of labor”—p. 568), and a particular emphasis on warfare
between bands and the salutary advantages of genocide.”
The
letter comes to the conclusions that,
What we are left with then is a particular theory about human
nature, which has no scientific support, and which upholds the concept of a
world with social arrangements remarkably similar to the world which E. O.
Wilson inhabits. We are not denying that there are genetic components to human
behavior. But we suspect that human biological universals are to be discovered
more in the generalities of eating, excreting and sleeping than in such
specific and highly variable habits as warfare, sexual exploitation of women
and the use of money as a medium of exchange. What Wilson’s book illustrates to
us is the enormous difficulty in separating out not only the effects of
environment (e.g., cultural transmission) but also the personal and social
class prejudice of the researcher. Wilson joins the long parade of biological
determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their
society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems.
 |
| Stephen Jay Gould |
This was
the opening shot in what was to become the most contentious and passionate
debate in the history of science since the fabled encounter between Darwin’s
champion, T. H. Huxley, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, more than century
earlier.[20]
A huge number of books, articles and debates followed and continue to this day.
Richard Lewontin summed up some of the issues in a 1982 lecture,
Sociobiology,
the evolutionary theory of human nature, is both determinist and reductionist
in common with other aspects of biological determinist thought. The
reductionism of sociobiology lies in the ontological priority it gives to the
individual over society and over the species as a whole. If people behave in a
certain way, say they are entrepreneurial, it is because each person,
individually, possesses an intrinsic property of entrepreneurship. Individual
entrepreneurs create an entrepreneurial society, not the other way round.
Moreover, the entrepreneurial tendency is coded in the genes of which we are
the ineluctable product. No matter how hard we try we cannot escape the
dictates of our genes.[21]
 |
| Richard Lewontin |
What are
‘Just so Stories’?
Stephen
Jay Gould first introduced the phrase “just so stories” in his earliest
critique of Sociobiology. What are ”just
so stories” and how do they fit into the debate between Gould and the
Sociobiologists? Following in the footsteps of Rudyard Kipling whose children’s
book of “Just So Stories” asked questions like “How did the leopard get its
spots?”, our modern Sociobiologists have
postulated fanciful tales to explain human behavior in terms of Darwinian
evolutionary principles. Yet there was
precedent for this turn in the history of evolutionary theory. Anthony Gottlieb
noted that, when it comes to inventing fanciful explanations for evolution,
this practice began a long time ago.
There is an allusion to a tale of this kind by Darwin in Origin. Gottlieb
writes,
The idea of natural selection itself began as a just-so
story, more than two millennia before Darwin. Darwin belatedly learned this
when, a few years after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” in 1859,
a town clerk in Surrey sent him some lines of Aristotle, reporting an
apparently crazy tale from Empedocles. According to Empedocles, most of the
parts of animals had originally been thrown together at random: “Here sprang up
many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders . . . and eyes strayed
alone, in need of foreheads.” Yet whenever a set of parts turned out to be
useful the creatures that were lucky enough to have them “survived, being
organised spontaneously in a fitting way, whereas those which grew otherwise
perished.” In later editions of “Origin,” Darwin added a footnote about the
tale, remarking, “We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed
forth.[22]
But
while this was little more than a passing thought on the part of Darwin, the
Sociobiologists appropriated such arguments into their explanatory schema. Gottlieb
explains how the debate about “just so stories” originated with Gould,
Today’s biologists tend to be cautious about labelling any
trait an evolutionary adaptation—that is, one that spread through a population
because it provided a reproductive advantage. It’s a concept that is easily
abused, and often “invoked to resolve problems that do not exist,” the late
George Williams, an influential evolutionary biologist, warned. When it comes
to studying ourselves, though, such admonitions are hard to heed. So strong is
the temptation to explain our minds by evolutionary “Just So Stories,” Stephen
Jay Gould argued in 1978, that a lack of hard evidence for them is frequently
overlooked (his may well have been the first pejorative use of Kipling’s term).
Gould, a Harvard paleontologist and a popular-science writer, who died in 2002,
was taking aim mainly at the rising ambitions of sociobiology. He had no
argument with its work on bees, wasps, and ants, he said. But linking the
behavior of humans to their evolutionary past was fraught with perils, not
least because of the difficulty of disentangling culture and biology. Gould saw
no prospect that sociobiology would achieve its grandest aim: a “reduction” of
the human sciences to Darwinian theory.
Defenders
of sociobiology assert that allusions to their discipline being replete with
“just so stories” are a pseudo-problem voiced by “anti-science postmodernists.”[23]
But are
“just so stories” really a pseudo-problem?
Gould’s
argument was never that Darwinian adaptations do not happen, but that such
adaptation cannot explain all biological features. Rather, Gould
defended a paradigm-shifting modified version of Darwinism, called “punctuated
equilibrium”, that allowed for multiple causal factors behind evolution and
argued that Wilson and other “fundamentalist Darwinians”, in their attempt to
explain evolution through a single all-encompassing mechanism, were often
reduced to postulating absurd hypotheses with no more justification than
Kipling’s fanciful stories. To quote Gould,
Since the ultras are fundamentalists at heart, and since
fundamentalists generally try to stigmatize their opponents by depicting them
as apostates from the one true way, may I state for the record that I (along
with all other Darwinian pluralists) do not deny either the existence and
central importance of adaptation, or the production of adaptation by natural
selection. Yes, eyes are for seeing and feet are for moving. And, yes again, I
know of no scientific mechanism other than natural selection with the proven
power to build structures of such eminently workable design.
But does all the rest of evolution—all the phenomena of
organic diversity, embryological architecture, and genetic structure, for
example—flow by simple extrapolation from selection’s power to create the good
design of organisms? Does the force that makes a functional eye also explain
why the world houses more than five hundred thousand species of beetles and
fewer than fifty species of priapulid worms? Or why most nucleotides—the linked
groups of molecules that build DNA and RNA—in multicellular creatures do not
code for any enzyme or protein involved in the construction of an organism? Or
why ruling dinosaurs died and subordinate mammals survived to flourish and,
along one oddly contingent pathway, to evolve a creature capable of building
cities and understanding natural selection?[24]
Was Gould
being unfair to Sociobiologists like E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins? Was he
dismissing legitimate hypotheses without justification? Not according to the
neuroscientist, evolutionary biologist and biomedical scientist Emily Casanova.
Discussing some of the more far-fetched theories of Darwinian fundamentalists,
she writes,
The great Stephen Jay Gould referred to these hypotheses
concerning adaptation of features as "Just So Stories," named after
the popular children's book by Rudyard Kipling that, through a series of
charming tales, told how different animals acquired their unique features, such
as the camel and his hump.
While modern hypotheses may seem a little less far-fetched,
they are no less fanciful- in part because modern scientists are sometimes so
focused on "What adaptive advantage could this trait possibly give?"
rather than determining how said trait could have arisen and been passed down
by other means. In addition, so often these hypotheses are untestable, so in
actuality they're not even "hypotheses". They're just interesting
thoughts.
My biggest complaint about these "interesting
thoughts" is why we insist that a single physical trait be acted upon
directly as if it exists in a morphological vacuum. For instance, just the
other day I wondered to myself, "Why do humans have such long hair?"
We have the longest hair of any mammals- especially of those naturally
occurring. While I wanted a causal reason for the increase in relative
hair-growth (e.g., mutations in Genes X, Y, Z lead to a prolongation of the
phase of anagen in humans), instead I found posts by evolutionary biologists
positing that it was an adaptive development to deal with the cold. (By their
measure, long versus shorter hair would've meant the difference between life
and death!)[25]
Richard
Lewontin provided a searing indictment of the use of “just so stories” by
Sociobiology in a lecture he gave in 1982,
…[A] step in the process of sociobiological explanation is
the invention of a suitable adaptive story to explain why the trait supposed to
be universal, coded by the supposed genes, has been incorporated into the human
genome by natural selection. A direct explanation can be invented for most
traits. A xenophobic person will keep out strangers, and so have less
competition for food in short supply and so successfully raise more offspring.
As a result the genes for xenophobia will spread. The same story can be applied
to territoriality and aggressiveness. Male domination is incorporated because
dominant males control more females and so simultaneously produce more
offspring and maintain a captive labor force to rear them. And so on. There is
no end to the just-so stories that can be invented.[26]
But as
absurd as some of these “just so stories” become when attempting to explain a
single morphological trait of an organism, their absurdity is raised to a new
level when such explanations are focused on an area of human psychology or
sexual behavior, a topic to which I will return shortly.
The
response from the camp of Sociobiology asserted that allusions to their
discipline being replete with “just so stories” are unfair and entirely
baseless. One such response accuses Gould of indulging in “The art of
name-calling”. This author, John Alcock,
wrote,
The "just-so story" epithet is one of the most
successful derogatory labels ever invented, having entered common parlance as a
name for any explanation about behavior, especially human behavior, that
someone wishes to dispute.[27]
The
Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Sociobiology and the emergence Evolutionary
Psychology
The
fortunes of the Sociobiologists rose and fell and then rose again in the
ensuing decades. By the mid-1980’s the critiques of Gould, Lewontin and others,
combined with some of the reactionary sentiments expressed by Wison and others
discredited Sociobiology. Yet Sociobiology, like the proverbial leopard,
changed its spots. Wilson, while sticking to his reductionist vision, walked
back some of his more outrageous statements to mollify a liberal establishment.
He began speaking not of genes “determining” behavior, but of their providing a
“tendency”. These verbal gymnastics
helped normalize Sociobiology as it shed its :”bad boy” image and became more
part of establishment “science” and popular culture. Also at work in shoring up
the reputation of Sociobiology was the spirit of pessimism about the
possibility of fundamental change in society that followed the dissolution of
the Soviet Union. Scientific and
political radicals like Gould and Lewontin soon found themselves as outsiders.
A taste of the atmosphere in the 1990’s can be gleaned from the book, The
Darwin Wars.
Politically,
however, the story seems to be one of the steady marginalisation of Gouldians
and the emergence and triumph of a refined and purified sociobiology. As a new
orthodoxy hardens, the Gouldians’ fate is clearly to be ushered into the
history books as The Men Who Were Wrong. Gould himself is particularly loathed,
even though some of his criticisms of Wilson’s original Sociobiology are now
accepted even by its sympathisers.[28]
The
counter-attack from Sociobiology against the critique of Gould, Lewontin and
many others were led by the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Dennett. His book Darwin’s
Dangerous Idea, took the basic idea of Wilson and Dawkins -- that all of
human behavior can be explained in Darwinian terms -- and weaponized it.
Dennett claimed that Darwin’s conception of evolution through natural selection
applied not only in evolutionary theory but pretty much explained everything
that had previously been pursued in the social sciences. To Dennett, Darwin’s idea
was “a universal acid” that dissolved everything in its path. He wrote,
Darwin's
idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to
leak out, offering answers—welcome or not—to questions in cosmology (going in
one direction) and psychology (going in the other di-rection ). If redesign
could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn't that whole
process itself be the product of evolution, and so forth, all the way down? And
if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artifacts of
the biosphere, how could the products of our own "real" minds be
exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin's idea thus also threatened to
spread all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship,
our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.[29]
 |
| Daniel Dennett |
Dennett
had an “in your face” style of expressing himself that distinguished him from
your more circumspect run-of-the-mill academic philosopher. This style
contributed to his books becoming best-sellers, something unheard of for most
philosophers. He even titled a chapter
in his book, “Who is afraid of reductionism?” He enthusasucally championed
reductionism where most reductionists were ashamed of openly embracing it. Richard Dawkins characterized this attitude
on the part of some of his colleagues when he wrote,
Reductionism
is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has
become fashionable.[30]
Dawkins
approved of Dennett’s full-throated defense of reductionism. Dennett tries to
get around all the critiques of reductionism by positing a “good reductionism”
against a “greedy reductionism”. It is
not so easy to disentangle the difference between the two. His attempt to do so is not very convincing.
The
difference, in the context of Darwin's theory, is simple: greedy reductionists
think that everything can be explained without cranes; good reductionists think
that everything can be explained without skyhooks.[31]
In
Dennett’s universe, “cranes” stand in for rational explanations whereas
“skyhooks” stand in for fanciful explanations. So Dennett is here saying that
good reductionism is good, because it is “good” whereas greedy reductionism is
bad because it is “bad”. It’s a fine
example of circular reasoning.
Nevertheless
despite the poor logic of Dennett’s arguments, his image of a universal acid
that provides a handy algorithm for explaining everything had a huge impact on
popular culture as well as biology. It was not for nothing that he was called
“Dawkins bulldog”, comparing his historical role to that of T. H. Huxley, who
was called “Darwin’s bulldog.”
One can
certainly say that by the mid 1990’s Sociobiology was triumphant, at least in
the minds of the public, and the work of Daniel Dennett had something to do
with that. Indeed a book published in 2001 had the title “The Triumph of
Sociobiology”.[32]
Sociobiology soon spawned other
disciplines such as Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary Psychologists like
Stephen Pinker and Sam Harris were writing popular books claiming, among other things, that
child-rearing advice from experts, such as the late Benjamin Spock, is just so
much “flapdoodle” since the personality of a child has already been
"determined by their genes. Louis
Menand provided a fitting response to Pinker when he wrote,
When
Pinker and Harris say that parents do not affect their children's
personalities, therefore, they mean that parents cannot make a fretful child
into a serene adult. It's irrelevant to them that parents can make their
children into opera buffs, water-skiers, food connoisseurs, bilingual speakers,
painters, trumpet players, and churchgoers—that parents have the power to
introduce their children to the whole supra-biological realm—for the
fundamental reason that science cannot comprehend what it cannot measure.[33]
 |
| Stephen Pinker |
(I would
however qualify Menand’s statement by noting that science can comprehend human
psychology but it requires very different tools than those that are available
to biology or chemistry.)
Menand
went on to provide an explanation of the difference between biological and
chemical properties that can be measured with a great deal of precision and the
psychology of human behavior that defies quantitative analysis,
That
chronic anxiety is biological—that it is not caused solely by circumstance—is
shown by the fact that medication containing a selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitor (that is, an anti-depressant) can relieve it. (Would medication count
as nurture or as nature?) But that's just the biology. The psychology is
everything that the organism does to cope with its biology. Innately anxious
people develop all kinds of strategies for overcoming, disguising, avoiding,
repressing, and, sometimes, exploiting their tendency to nervousness. These
strategies are acquired—people aren't born with them—and they are constructed
from elements that the environment provides. The mind can work only with what
it knows, and one of the things it knows is parents, who often become major
players in the psychic drama of anxiety maintenance. The mere fact of having
“the gene for anxiety” determines nothing, which is why some anxious people
become opera buffs, some become water-skiers, and some just sit and stare out
the window, brooding on the fact that their parents did not read them enough
bedtime stories.
“Evolutionary
psychology” in fact does not have a place for psychology at all as Menand
notes,
The
other trouble with evolutionary psychology is that it is not really psychology.
In general, the views that Pinker derives from “the new sciences of human
nature” are mainstream Clinton-era views: incarceration is regrettable but
necessary; sexism is unacceptable, but men and women will always have different
attitudes toward sex; dialogue is preferable to threats of force in defusing
ethnic and nationalist conflicts; most group stereotypes are roughly correct,
but we should never judge an individual by group stereotypes; rectitude is all
very well, but “noble guys tend to finish last”; and so on.
 |
| Louis Menand |
We will
see that the disappearance of genuine psychology is a recurring theme in all
variants of “evolutionary psychology”.
NOTES
[1] Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Social
Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993 [1944]), 45.
[2] MECW, vol. 45, 107–08. Letter to Pyotr
Lavrov, 1875.
[3] MECW, vol. 25,
584.
[4] Ibid., 585.
[5] Quoted by Philip
Pomper, Trotsky's Notebooks, 1933-1935: Writings on Lenin, Dialectics, and
Evolutionism.,Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 51. The original citation
is from Trotsky, Sochineniia, 21:277-78
[6] Darwin’s Legacy, lecture by Melissa
Brown at Stanford, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KZ9bU464zs
[7] Lecture by
Melissa Brown, Ibid.
[8] Aaron Gillette,
EUGENICS AND THE NATURE–NURTURE DEBATE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, Palgrave
Macmillan,
2007. p. 2.
[9] The classic
take-down of IQ testing and related racial theories based on anatomical or
genetic differences is Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man: The definitive refutation to the argument of ‘The
Bell Curve’, Norton,
1981.
[10] Nicole Novak & Natalie Lira, Forced
Sterilization Programs in California Once Harmed Thousands—Particularly
Latinas, School of Public Health, University of Michigan
https://sph.umich.edu/pursuit/2018posts/forced-sterilization-programs-in-california.html
[12] Ibid.
[13] The Nazis’
adoption of eugenics to justify their racial policies is well-documented by
Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009.
[14] Jonathan
Freedland, Eugenics and the master race of the left, The Guardian,
August, 30, 1997.
[15] E.O. Wilson, “Human Decency Is Animal,” N
e w York Times Magazine, October 12, 1975.
[16] E. O. Wilson,
1975, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, p.562.
[17] Interview on
PBS. https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/dawk-frame.html
[18] Andrew Brown, The
Darwin Wars: The Scientific Battle for the Soul of Man, Simon and Schuster,
1999, p. 2.
[19] Against
“Sociobiology”, In response to: Mindless
Societies from the August 7, 1975 issue, New York Review of Books,
November 13, 1975, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/11/13/against-sociobiology/
[21] Lewontin, Biological
Determinism, op. cit.
[22] Anthony Gottlieb,
It Ain’t Necessarily So, The New Yorker, Sept 10, 2012
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/17/it-aint-necessarily-so
[23] Lazare makes such an assertion
against me. His discussion of my supposedly unfair usage of this phrase is made
without any reference to the historical context of the debate between the
Sociobiologists against Gould, Lewontin and others that began in the 1970’s.
Lazare’s thoughts are not original however. He is grafting onto a long history
of such arguments by defenders of Sociobiology against the criticism of Gould
and others.
[24] Stephen Jay
Gould, Darwinian Fundamentalism, New York Review of Books, June 12,
1997.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/06/12/darwinian-fundamentalism/
[25] Emily Casanova,
The absurdity of ‘Just So Stories” in explaining evolution, https://scienceoveracuppa.com/2016/05/22/the-absurdity-of-just-so-stories-in-explaining-evolution/
[26] Richard Lewontin,
Biological Determinism, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Delivered
at The University of Utah, March 31 and April 1, 1982. https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/lewontin83.pdf
[27] John Alock, The
Triumph of Sociobiology, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.64.
[28] Brown, The
Darwin Wars, op. cit. p. 148.
[29] Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea:
Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Penguin Books, 1995, p. 63.
[30] Richard Dawkins (2016).The Extended
Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene”, p.172, Oxford University Press
[31] Dennett, op. cit. p. 82.
[32] John Alock, The Triumph of Sociobiology,
op. cit.
[33] Louis Menand, What Comes Naturally: Does
evolution explain who we are? first appeared in the New Yorker
edition of Nov. 25, 2002. It was republished online at http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2014/11/note-with-permission-of-author-we-are.html
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