Neurophilosophy Challenges the Strategic Use of Moral Reasoning: A Review of Churchland's Braintrust

Patricia Churchland. Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 288 pgs. $24.95 US Hardcover.  ISBN: 978-0691156347.

 

Questions at issue: 1. Where do moral sentiments come from?  2. Are the biological origins of moral sentiments relevant in evaluating moral norms and the motivated reasoning of moral authorities?

“We need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question—and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed.” Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, ¶6.

Critical investigation into the disturbingly non-transcendent origins of morality is not new.  Evolutionary and neurological investigations have been trickling out of the academy and into the popular press for a couple of decades. However, these have so far produced more reaction than consideration, both in the general public and among academics. If anything, prevailing beliefs about the origins of morality have been wrapped in anti-scientific rhetorical defenses, most of which deny out-of-hand that science could make any contribution to the formulation of personal ethics or public policy.

No stranger to the bulwarks constructed to shield the humanities from empiricism, neurophilosophy pioneer and academic blockade-runner Patricia Churchland offers perhaps the strongest and most concise defense of the interdisciplinary study of human morality. Churchland’s 2012 book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality focuses on the deceptively simple question of where values come from. Though the question is not significantly different from that posed by Nietzsche, its 21^st century incarnation cannot be answered by speculative aphorisms. To refine the question and establish a methodology for answering it, Churchland constructs two mutually-reinforcing arguments, one scientific and the other philosophical. In the scientific argument, Churchland proposes that our feelings about social responsibility, self-restraint, etc. may have emerged from the neurochemical reward system that ensures parent-child bonding in all mammals. The philosophical argument, equally important and skillfully interwoven with the scientific argument, is that rhetorical attempts to exorcise science from the discussion of moral norms and public policy are logically indefensible.

         

Neuro-Morality

The second, third, and fourth chapters of Braintrust contain the groundwork for a hypothesis of brain-based pro-social behavior. Churchland points out the nontrivial point that morality is inherently social. While I may like to believe that I would act according to a particular ethos even if no one was watching, the fact that I want other people to applaud my integrity manifests its social utility. Living in a group is evolutionarily adaptive, but it requires a mechanism to constrain self-interest in order to ensure group cohesion. Churchland examines the evolutionary history of neural systems which extend the instincts for self-preservation, first to offspring and genetic relatives, and eventually to the social group composed of both genetic kin and non-kin on whom the individual depends for survival and reproduction. Churchland is particularly interested in the role of neurochemicals, especially oxytocin and arginine vasopressin, in constructing emotional bonds between parents and children, parents and parents, and even allo-parents caring for offspring that are not their own. Citing studies involving a range of animal species—rats, rhesus monkeys, even fruit flies—Churchland explores the powerful, if complex, influence of oxytocin and vasopressin on animal behavior. Her favorite exemplars of the social effects of neurochemistry are the monogamous prairie voles and their promiscuous cousins, the montane voles.  Not only do the two species seem to differ in little more than their brains’ stocks of oxytocin, but artificially increasing the oxytocin levels in montane vole turns players into family men—just as reducing oxytocin in prairie voles brings on a seven-year-itch. While demonstrably influential in bonding behavior, such neuropeptides are not simple, one-cause-one-effect agents. Male rats who receive a shot of oxytocin become tender toward in-group members, but they simultaneously become hostile toward intruders. Oxytocin does not turn an individual into a universal altruist so much as it extends the individual’s self-promoting instincts (somatic effort) to family and, potentially, to immediate community. Just as parental affection may be expanded into care for others, the child’s feelings of attachment to the mother expand to create fears of social isolation in the adult—the origins of shame and approval-seeking. “Depending on ecological conditions and fitness considerations,” Churchland contends, “strong caring for the well-being of offspring has in some mammalian species extended further to encompass kin or mates or friends or even strangers, as the circle widens. This widening of other-caring in social behavior marks the emergence of what eventually flowers into morality”(14).

As the social circle expands to include non-genetic relatives, brains that evolved with greater social intelligence yielded an adaptive advantage.

Expanded memory capacities greatly enhanced the animal's ability to anticipate trouble and to plan more effectively. These modifications support the urge to be together, as well as the development of a ‘conscience’ tuned to local social practices; that is, a set of social responses, shaped by learning, that are strongly regulated by approval and disapproval, and by the emotions, more generally. More simply, mammals are motivated to learn social practices because the negative reward system, regulating pain, fear, and anxiety, responds to exclusion and disapproval, and the positive reward system responds to approval and affection. (15-16)

In other words, culture, like morality, emerges from brain systems that have adapted to form cooperative social units.  The norms as well as the individual’s receptivity to those norms both depend on a brain that is wired to care what other people think. In the fourth chapter, Churchland surveys the specifically human variables influencing or constraining social behavior, from market complexity to institutionalized religious identities, all of which depend on an interaction between internal (neural) and external (cultural) components. Churchland explores the impact of neurochemicals that influence the more reflective phenomenon of “theory-of-mind” in social cognition. The “human” social phenomena of cheating, punishment, hierarchy, cooperation, and philanthropic grand-standing have a surprising number of parallels in studies of animal behavior. In the sixth chapter, Churchland identifies brain areas (particularly the prefrontal cortext [PFC]) integral in the sort of predictive social thought needed to create and preserve extended networks of cooperation. While it is the seat of human reflective consciousness, the PFC is not an organ of perfect rationality. Churchland proposes that our focus on the moral or immoral actions of others (including essentialized cultural and religious identities) serves a primarily strategic purpose—shared morality is a means of predicting another’s behavior. As such, it is a heuristic engine. We distrust those who don’t share our moral prejudices, even when their beliefs can be shown to be more mutually beneficial than our own.

    

Qualified language

Any book that attempts to communicate the findings of cognitive science to the non-specialist is bound to trick some readers into making untenable over-generalizations about the scientific evidence or its implications. However, Churchland carefully separates what in the study of moral origins can be empirically studied from what cannot. She is reductionist in this sense, but not in the sense that the general public uses the word (meaning a sort of intrusive cynic who does violence to the transcendent object under study). She also inserts qualifying statements which discourage the reader from jumping to single-cause explanations (e.g. “oxytocin causes morality”). She reminds us that in even the simplest questions regarding the neural correlates of morality, “the answers are certainly going to be complex, even in voles, since the neurons affected are part of a wider system, meaning that what is going on elsewhere—in perception, memory, and so forth—will have an impact” (50). “Single genes seldom have big effects, but are part of multinode gene networks, and part of gene-brain-environment networks with recurrent loops”(53).  “[I]f a certain form of cooperation, such as making alarm calls when a predator appears, has a genetic basis, it is likely to be related to the expression of many genes, and their expression may be linked to events in the environment”(102). These statements are the dry, qualified, scientific versions of the humanists’ reminder of the roles of culture and experience in individual development. Churchland goes on to question the hypotheses of cognitive scientists such as Marc Hauser and Jonathan Haidt, whose propositions about human morality are based on empirical evidence but might exceed the parameters of the particular data. She even challenges claims by neuroscientists Marco Iacoboni and Giacomo Rizzolatti, whose research in mirror neurons has promoted a great deal of speculation about the nature of empathy and imitation. Whereas mirror neurons have been assumed to cause one individual to understand another by first understanding her/himself, Churchland argues that the causal order could actually be reversed—that mirror neurons function primarily to simulate another’s action to enable the individual to predict or imitate it. Rather than beginning as self-representations, mirror neurons may be necessary in creating self-representations from observed experience. While the reader might make the simplified observation that Churchland plays the proper role of philosopher by carefully analyzing logical inconsistencies in scientific hypotheses, the fact that her counter-arguments are equally grounded in empirical research should lead us to ask why we ever began to think that philosophy and science were different disciplines.

    

The Naturalistic fallacy fallacy

Framing her scientific argument, Churchland crafts a philosophical argument directly engaging the common claim that science has no place in the discussion of ethics or public policy. This claim takes various forms. Some forms are little more than tautological “semantic wrangles,” such as “only humans have human morality,” or the assumption that morality requires reasoning and reasoning requires language, therefore only humans are moral.  One common argument politely demonizes scientific approaches as “scientism,” a vaguely-defined crime that serves to do little more than distinguish “us” (humanists/theologians/policy-makers) from “them” (scientists and interdisciplinary traitors like Churchland).   Another tactic exploits a passage from David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (3.1.1.27) that has been decontextualized and over-simplified to say “you can’t get an ought from an is,” (i.e. moral conclusions are not based on factual premises). Such mixing of factual arguments with moral ones was dubbed the “naturalistic fallacy” by philosopher G. E. Moore. We may think of plenty of cases in which such a transition would, indeed, be fallacious. We commonly assume that something that is “natural” is, therefore, “good,” and “unnatural” is bad, until we come across obvious exceptions such as naturally-occurring influenza and its unnaturally manufactured vaccine. This is clearly an example of fallacious reasoning. But, as Churchland illustrates, there are plenty of cases in which moral arguments that are logically consistent but heedless of the facts of nature prove to be too presumptuous and abstract to find any consistent implementation in reality. Even the most popular rule-based morals fail in practice, not so much due to human frailty as to the frailty of rule-based reasoning, itself. As Churchland demonstrates, even the Golden Rule cannot function as a rule without a host of prior, unexamined assumptions to guide its interpretation. It also carries some unrecognized consequences. If a self-mutilator wants others to find the same salvation-through-pain that he does, is he morally obligated to torture them? The Golden Rule has a function, but not as an a priori rule.  According to Churchland, the Golden Rule primarily serves to activate empathetic, pro-social behavior already rooted in our evolved neuroanatomy, not in any set of rule-governed cultural norms. Proposed categorical imperatives by Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, John Rawls, and Peter Singer have similar problems. The idea of rules, like the idea of reason, is the problem. It creates an imagined antecedent that is not, ultimately, its origin. As philosophers from Aristotle and Mencius to Hume and Nietzsche recognized, our reflective rules are ad hoc generalizations. Churchland cites the now-famous interview of Georgia congressman Lynn Westmoreland by Stephen Colbert. Westmoreland vociferously advocated the inclusion of a graven image of the Biblical Ten Commandments in a Louisiana courthouse because, he insisted, those commandments are the origin of all morality. Despite this, the zealous congressman could only recall three commandments, and those in highly abbreviated form. Unsurprisingly, the three he recalled (“Don’t murder…don’t lie…don’t steal”) are featured in law codes predating the Bible, such as Hammurabi’s Code and the Laws of Manu, not to mention isolated cultures across the globe that have had scant contact with the West and none at all with Judaism or its offshoots. Churchland’s argument is that, instead of denying or lamenting the ad hoc nature of morality, we will achieve more substantive moral progress by admitting and systematically studying the evolved neurological structures that precede our discursive norms.

    

The Evolution of Bioethics

The relevance of Braintrust is not limited to the academy or the armchair. If the is/ought distinction is unduly exaggerated in moral philosophy, it becomes a weapon in the sphere of public policy—an excuse to defund or severely regulate research that does not reinforce popular prejudice. After all, what is at stake is the power to shape and regulate the behavior of others, and maintaining that power depends on popular appeal rather than empirical evidence. Churchland seems to have learned this political truth in 2008 when she presented a paper to George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics.

The council was already notorious as an ideological star chamber established to construct an intellectual façade for the administration’s war on stem cell research. With a few exceptions (including Michael Gazzaniga, who seems to have adopted a curious methodological relativism), the council was composed primarily of Right wing political pundits, such as Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer, rather than research scientists. The council was originally chaired by Leon Kass, who was appointed shortly after the publication of his anti-cloning essay, “The Wisdom of Repugnance” (The New Republic, June 2, 1997, 216.22). In this essay, Kass appeals to inarticulate emotional reactions, not only as a justification for banning scientific research, but as a justification for dismissing reasoned arguments which contradict those emotional reactions.

We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings […] because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. [… R]epugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.

Not only does Kass use a gut reaction to argue for the implementation of government policy, he uses it to divide the in-group from the out-group, the moral from the “shallow souls.” Kass’ argument exemplifies, perhaps deliberately, Hume’s claim that reason is the slave of the passions. At the same time, it abdicates any pretense of prioritizing reason over gut feeling.

As chair of the Council on Bioethics, Kass removed any “shallow souls” who would not ratify the Council’s foregone conclusions—most famously molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn, one of only 3 research scientists on the 18-member council. Though Kass was eventually replaced by Edmund Pellegrino, the council’s strategy remained dependent on ad hoc arguments and emotionalistic platitudes, particularly the malleable abstraction of “human dignity.” After bioethicist and council member Ruth Macklin publicly pointed out that the term “dignity” served only as a rhetorical red herring, the council, in an effort to salvage its own credibility, invited papers from philosophers, theologians, lawyers, physicians, and politicians, which were published as the report, Human Dignity and Bioethics. Though a handful of bioethicists, such as Churchland and Daniel Dennett, tried to explain the nature of Macklin’s argument, most of the articles (including one by Leon Kass, himself) aimed to ratchet up the emotional valence of the term rather than clarify precisely how it justified a government ban on life-saving research.

Churchland’s contribution to the report, “Human Dignity from a Neurophilosophical Perspective,” may have been the germ of Braintrust. Besides calling attention to the neural origins of moral sentiment, Churchland describes the tragic history of “misplaced moral certitude.” She points out that past advances in medical technology, including vaccination for smallpox, anesthesia for use in surgery and childbirth, dissection of corpses, organ donation, and blood transfusion were all initially prohibited by religious and political authorities with similar moral certitude (and “wisdom of repugnance”) at the cost of tens of thousands of preventable deaths. The loss of life in these historical examples bears its own emotional valence to those who see human suffering as a greater harm than rule-breaking. More importantly, they serve to undermine the is/ought dichotomy by juxtaposing moral norms with the measurable, real-world consequences disregarded by tautological, ought-ought moralizing.

In the council’s published report, Churchland’s essay is followed by a reply from council member and theologian Gilbert Meilaender. Rather than engaging the tenets of Churchland’s argument, Meileander simply launches an ad hominem attack on Churchland, herself, for “breath[ing] a spirit of condescension.” Rather than qualifying or refuting Churchland’s evidence, Meileander denies her right to cite it. Like Kass, Meileander appeals to sentiment as a power greater than reason and claims that if Churchland does not feel the same disgust a Catholic feels at HPV vaccinations or stem-cell research, she is therefore unfit to question them. “Unless and until one is capable of that,” Meileander demands, “the most dignified thing to do would be to remain silent.” In other words, only those who share the same foregone conclusion are allowed to question its logic or implications. Conspicuously, Meileander invokes the term “dignity” in an attempt to silence Churchland, proving her (and Macklin’s) original point—“dignity” like “wise disgust” is not a reason but a rejection of reason and testable evidence in moral arguments. What Meileander forgets to mention is that this emotionalistic certainty which is immune to rational criticism drafts public policy and impacts the lives of thousands, if not millions of people with Parkinson’s disease, cervical cancer, and other potentially preventable diseases. Neither Meileander nor Kass inquire into the gut feelings of those crippled by these diseases, nor do they invoke “human dignity” in their defense.

By openly exhibiting and even prioritizing the same sorts of behavior observable in monkeys and rats, professional moralists like Kass and Meileander prove Churchland’s argument in the very tactics they use to attack it. Moral arguments begin with evolved, brain-based heuristics which precede and structure conscious reasoning. This does not make them bad or good, but it makes them deceptively convincing when they are at their most self-indulgent. The most highly educated modern human is all-too-capable of ignoring evidence and abandoning reason whenever he feels like it. More importantly, moralists don’t seem to regard these feelings, themselves, as needing explanation. This is as problematic in the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas (whose empathy-based morality famously failed to find real-world application in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) as it is in the theology of Gilbert Meileander or the punditry of Leon Kass. Since demands for “ethics in science” can be a smoke-screen for imposing irrational restrictions on scientific research and its ability to save and improve lives, we might at least counterbalance the ethics of science with a science of ethics. By investigating the cognitive and evolutionary origins of moral sentiment, we do not invalidate that sentiment in policy discussion. Sentiment is inextricable from human thought. Rather, the science of ethics imposes a burden of proof on those who would exploit isolated anecdotes to evoke irrational emotion and then leap to non sequitur generalizations which would regulate the lives of others. It requires us to factor in actual outcomes, such as the loss of life that follows from denial of treatment, instead of assuming that Providence will protect the righteous.

The introduction of these new criteria will require a reevaluation of those who have been designated as moral authorities. Recognizing the all-too-human (or mammalian) motivations of moralists naturally prompts a reevaluation of trust, and it is with the question of trust, particularly when it comes to the formation of institutions like the Bioethics Council, that Churchland concludes Braintrust.

[W]hat kind of regulations should govern stem cell research? To begin to make progress on that question, one has to know quite a lot of science—what stem cells are, what about them makes them suitable for medical research and therapy, what diseases might be addressed using stem cell research, and what objections might be raised against it. (204)

These are simple questions, but they illustrate the false dichotomy of is and ought. While these questions do not exclude moral philosophers, theologians, or arm-chair commentators, they do introduce new requirements for methodological rigor, predictive accuracy, and accountability in a discourse which has traditionally relied on ad hoc reasoning and sensationalist anecdotes.

As research into the structure of the brain progresses, questions about brain-based morality are going to become even more common and more heated. Recently, President Barack Obama introduced the BRAIN Initiative, a project akin to the Human Genome Project. Assisting him with this introduction was NIH Director Francis Collins, who is serving as de facto director of the BRAIN Initiative in its early stages. In the past, Collins has not been shy about his belief in the metaphysical origins of moral judgment. Explaining his book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins explicitly bars moral cognition from scientific study, implying that some sort of social collapse will follow if we get too inquisitive:

After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house,’ the human brain with all of its neurological complexity, God gifted humanity with something special that makes us different from all the animals, the knowledge of good and evil, the Moral Law, with free will, which is not an illusion, and with a soul. ... If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as right or wrong, good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked by natural selection into thinking that there is such a thing. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview? (2008)

The answer to that last question would be equally well put to Collins, himself. A geneticist and professional administrator, he is new to neurobiology, and it remains to be seen if his stated beliefs will conform to the evidence or if he will follow in the footsteps of morally-certain policy makers like Kass and Meileander. For neurophilosophers, the short answer to Collins’ question is “Yes.” Collins may not like Churchland's thesis in Braintrust, but it is precisely because the people who hold the purse strings for scientific research frequently share his dichotomized view that Braintrust is a very timely and important argument.

- Eric Luttrell

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Mark Pagel and the Origins of the Human Social Mind

Mark Pagel. Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind. NY: W.W. Norton, 2012. 432 pgs. $29.95US. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-393-06587-9

Mark Pagel’s Wired for Culture is an eloquent and erudite examination of (to borrow from Richard G. Klein) the human career. While Pagel focuses on the universal aspects of culture (“knowledge, beliefs, and practices” [2]), much of the discussion hovers around the individual related to cooperation and moral behavior, the human tendency to form and adhere to small groups. Pagel places the blossoming of culture at around 80,000 years ago, by which time we not only learned from imitation but moreover began to innovate and re-engineer what we had learned. We then passed that understanding on to succeeding generations so that (via an intellectually ratcheting-up effect) symbolic artifacts (such as jewelry, paintings, and carvings) began to appear. In this way the bits of culture, from an idea to a technological feature, would “act like” a gene in terms of transmission and reproduction among individuals (3). Part of this claim is, of course, not new; and Pagel acknowledges Richard Dawkins and his notion of the meme. Other books that have approached this subject of culture and evolution include (to name a few): Cultural Transmission and Evolution by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman (1981), Culture and the Evolutionary Process by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson (1985), Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity by William H. Durham (1991), The Evolution of Culture by Robin Dunbar and Chris Knight (1999), and Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd (2006).

Some ground covered in Pagel’s book has been explored and explained before (human history, development of mind, altruism, emotions, group/individual selection, free will, and consciousness, to name a few). But Pagel’s efforts are thorough and packaged in clear, precise language with ample examples. One of Pagel’s key claims is that our cultures (both the products and influencers of genes) are what count for our flourishing and survival – we are the “first species to throw off the yoke of its genes . . .” (4). Nevertheless, we are not inhabited by unchangeable robotic ideas, evidenced by our long (increasingly complex) lineage and present survival (where cultural universals ripen in many different forms).

The physical properties of the book are excellent: handsomely produced, well-constructed, and printed on good quality paper. After the Introduction the book consists of four main parts, each of which has a Prologue and anywhere from one to four chapters. Each chapter is punctuated with many subheadings to help guide the reader. There are References, a comprehensive Bibliography, and a generous Index. Mark Pagel is a fellow of the Royal Society and a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Reading. His previous books include The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology (1991), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Evolution (2002), and, with Andrew Pomiankowski, Evolutionary Genomics and Proteomics (2008).

Pagel suggests that we have an immune system for ideas – we do not rely completely on instincts but consciousness, as the cultures we have created benefit us genetically. Our brain capacity is in part the result of our own inventions, a process of selective enhancement that continues. Culture, our social inclination and cooperative behavior, has served us in ways that were not available to other Homo species, such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans (with whom we shared part of our living history) who simply died off (or were perhaps killed by us). Our ability for symbolic thinking – to see and understand beyond the literalness of an object, event, or spurious thought – and the subsequent social creations and structures that arose from such, was key to our survival. For instance, Pagel presents the poignant image of Neanderthals on the edge of an ice cold Europe looking across to the warmth of Africa but not having the ingenuity to craft ships to take them there.

Pagel’s accounting of the migrations, especially the crossing of the Beringia and of the so-called Lapita people inhabiting the Pacific islands by navigating thousands of miles of sea (6,000 years ago, well before the short excursions of the Vikings) by using the stars as guides, is breathtaking. Such is the story of the homo sapiens sapiens – the wisest of the wise, and the ones who could flexibly use the various modules and intelligences of the brain to solve complex problems. (Many others have written about these mental adaptations in various formulations, from Jerry Fodor, Howard Gardner, Steven Mithen, and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.) Other homo species made no such spectacular migrations and simply adapted to their existing environments, apparently incapable of understanding, for example, that the leftover bones from a hunt could be put to other uses, whether technological or ornamental. We, on the other hand, developed cultures to help us disperse across the world and spread ideas within and between our many groups. Without committing to a number, we know that there were many other species related to us, from the Ardipithecus (about 4.5 million years ago), the Australopithecines, and the Paranthropus (with several species in each) and then to the early genus of homo, which includes habilis, rudofensis, and ergaster. Why did we survive while they did not; why are we so different?

Our species went beyond stimulus enhancement (repeating in different environments what one would do anyway) to social learning, deliberate awareness to design in order to improve a behavior or tool – invention by thoughtful creation and not by chance (41). There might be a genetic basis for such constructive designs, since we find similar artifacts in widely different places. While there are human artifacts (such as stone tools) that are very old (Pagel points to a later species, homo erectus), there is almost no improvement for over 1 million years. While this is true, such a statement can be deceiving. Steven Mithen dates the earliest stone tools to almost 3 million years ago (flaked quartz) that gradually (and somewhat dramatically) improved: heavy duty and light duty tools (1.5 to 2 million years ago), hand-axes and Levallois flakes (1.5 million to 250,000 years ago), Blade technology and flint slivers (pre 100,000 years ago). Nevertheless, Pagel’s point is well taken: if ancient and early human species had a very rich inner cognitive life, it would probably be reflected in the artifacts they produced and left. This neglects the obvious: perhaps the early hunter-gatherers needed not to improve (over long periods) what they had since they had not yet begun to farm, settle, and establish cities – meaning that they could indeed have had a richer (individual) cognitive life that is not necessarily reflected in their basic, and quite serviceable, tools. Since Pagel’s claim is that we improved on learning, there is no way for us to discount the possibility that some random, discrete individuals had nascent, rich cognitive lives that had yet to see efflorescence and others capable of copying. Cultural eruptions were embryonic and had yet to find the right catalyst (probably when our brains began to make connections in finding new and different uses for existing products).

At any rate, Pagel is less speculative and looks to the evidence at hand. Not until 160,000 to 75,000 years ago do we see (caves in Western Cape Province, South Africa) evidence of cultural (and not technological) artifacts – and those are dates pushed back far, since European cave paintings (Ardèche and Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, France) date to around 36,000 years ago and Lascaux at about 18,000 years ago. (Of course there is the red ochre dated to around 360,000 years ago, but no one is quite sure what that might have been used for.) The capability for such cultural manifestations was latent but only flowered, says Pagel, once we adopted social learning: cultural genesis and development come from mind and not necessarily from genes (though genes are in play with neurons and neural connections). For example, our predecessors roamed the globe and adapted (physically, genetically) to the new environments, but it was culture that initially propelled them (47) and subsequently sustained them to form complex social divisions of labor and societies.

There is, of course, an advantage to different cultural groups: the passing down of rights and property (an advanced development), and hence why, Pagel suggests, there are many different cultures. “Cultures restrict the flow of genes” (54) and so, in spite of one homo sapiens sapiens species we all look ethnically different (in our ancestors’ predilections for selecting certain features). Just as we see in natural biology (RNA strands joining, hungry amoebae forming a spore tower to sacrifice many to save a few, the many cells and organs of the human body), “natural selection made it possible for individuals to align their interests with those of their group” (72), and indeed there are cues to which we respond positively when identifying who is part of our group and negatively when noting who is outside of the group. While Pagel stresses over and again the importance of the group in terms of culture, he does not minimize self-interest – “natural selection has duped us with an emotion that encourages group thinking” (98). Regarding cultural evolution and social learning (or what biologists call diversifying selection), the “variety” of individual skills and talents count most (100). Culture is a sorting process, says Pagel (131): someone makes a musical instrument, and then someone else begins to play it (109). Pagel makes a sustained argument for diverse cultural groups (human culture), but this development can only come to pass through distinct individuals. Oddly, high heritability (individual differences) has little to do with overall human survival (118); but yet natural selection would then have eliminated our differences. Pagel seems to suggest that there is an evolutionary bias for a variety of personality types.

Likewise, Pagel says that the arts and religion are “cultural enhancers” – emotional motivators related to behavior (135). He seems satisfied with the simpler notions that the arts transmit ideas and that religion helps explain occurrences. Is this a bit perplexing? Pagel is arguing that we survived and thrived because of culture, but he does not quite come out and argue for an adaptive function in the arts (and lumps arts together without distinguishing one from another). Or maybe he does argue for an adaptive function. Even if beliefs are wrong, false, or incorrect they might, nonetheless, help a group survive (as D.S. Wilson has noted). Be that as it may, Pagel says that even without religion we would be much the same (i.e., selfish and morally corruptible). Simply, we have concocted religion to offer ourselves “courage and hope” and to coordinate and unite groups over other groups (159). As natural selection pits genes against genes, so religion induces emotions shared in a group (opposed to another) in “cultural relatedness” (165). However, there is no cycle (typically) of endless conflict; in fact, conflicts can render “opportunities” that produce moral outcomes (180-181). There are many distinct cultural groups with different beliefs (though all with one common denominator, the need, apparently, to own beliefs).

With acknowledgment to Robert Trivers, Pagel notes that reciprocal altruism by virtue of its mental complexity exists only among human beings (190). But such altruism is always on shaky ground (as game theory has demonstrated) for, in the words of Robert Axelrod, there is “the shadow of the future” – the possibility that one party will look ahead to extraordinary gains and so default on any agreement (191). Nevertheless, we all seem to be programmed not only to be fair but to be generous – since we expect to be so treated; but paradoxically fairness is rooted in self-interest (201). Such social interactions depend on theory of mind (nonverbal), which in turn depends on a brain very different from that of a chimpanzee or our own ancient ancestors. We are able to detect deception quite well. The human brain has more than doubled in size over about 1 million years compared with that of a chimpanzee’s. Pagel suggests that the rapid development of our brain (in quality and not just quantity – on average Neanderthals had slightly larger brains) explains our survival over all others (251). The human brain is a super-charged version of Darwin’s descent with modification. (Some of the more interesting parts are when Pagel discusses Human Accelerated Regions – 49 in our genome, especially influential in neurons – and so-called junk DNA.) Much of our cooperative behaviors are a direct result of language, the ability to navigate multi-party transactions. Although we believe that homo ergaster had very rudimentary speech followed by more advanced speech in late homo erectus (the larynx), Pagel insists that only our species produced language (at most 200,000 years ago) because of “social complexity” and as a “trait for promoting cooperation . . .” (279, 281). As others (Dunbar) have pointed out, Pagel notes that we use language (across the globe in 7,000 current forms) not just to speak but “principally to talk about each other . . .” (294), and this is reflected in key sounds and word lengths universal for thousands of years.

In his discussion of free will (and returning to the function of consciousness as a cultural operator), Pagel says that our brains work out patterns ahead of schedule so that the subconscious might already know what to do in certain instances. This is relevant since our culturally-hungry brains are always in operation mode, as if on a sixth sense. Relatedly, an older part of our brain (affective) responds instinctually to highly charged moral situations – do no harm (329). Clearly, such social sensitivity has become over time a key cultural ingredient. Interestingly, though, Pagel (citing Daryl Bem) suggests that we do not know ourselves because of “introspection” but because of “observing our own behaviors . . .” – and why we often do not know how we would react in a hypothetical situation (327). Pagel goes on to say that consciousness is little more than an after effect (of a highly active brain) organizing input (332) – there might be something illusory about what we label “I.” Yet Pagel does not seem to be hinting at cultural determinism or the standard social science model in learning; rather, he seems to suggest that in order for us to imitate and improve upon behaviors (the cultural tools that have preserved our species), our brains need to catalogue (seamlessly) various strands of information in advance of our conscious processing such information.

Finally, coming back to social learning and our ability (need) to connect in clusters, Pagel notes that in spite of our near obscurity in large cities (some of which date back almost 8,000 years), Stanley Milgram’s six degrees of separation (i.e. our proximity to others) is valid, and, social viscosity, where we form small groups and stay close by (i.e., “social rules”) has not changed much over our long evolutionary history (365, 367).

- Gregory F. Tague

Christof Koch and Lisa Zunshine: Combo Review

Koch, Christof. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. 200 pages. ISBN: 9780262017497. Hardcover, $24.95.

Zunshine, Lisa. Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 240 pages. ISBN: 9781421406169. Hardcover, $29.95.

The word consciousness is bandied about among academics but is a rather slippery term: some use it as shorthand for spiritual mysticism, others for an organic process. Christof Koch, in Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, engages in, on the one hand, a continuing quest for a greater understanding of consciousness (and not just the human variety), and, on the other hand, an academic explanation of the physiology of consciousness. The book is subtitled Romantic since Koch believes the “universe has contrails of meaning . . . in the sky . . . and deep within us” and Reductionist since his method is “quantitative” (8). In this dual approach the book (colloquial and humorous) is scientific and elegant, intellectually absorbing and personally entertaining. Whereas other scientists (Antonio Damasio and Michael Gazzaniga, to name two neuroscientists) have managed to produce eloquent prose for a general audience, Koch has gone further to inject himself into such writing – and the reader is captivated.

The physical properties of the book are good. There are ten chapters, with subheadings throughout each chapter. There are notes, a bibliography (short with only 108 items, 10 attributable to Koch or Crick), and an index (basic). The colorful graphic on the cover of the dust jacket reminds one of imagery by Dr. Seuss. Koch is a Professor of Biology and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science (Seattle). His main work (aptly titled) is The Quest for Consciousness. Koch spent a great deal of his career working with Francis Crick. They authored a number of papers together, and Crick figures as an important character in this memoir-like Confessions.

Consciousness is physical – organic, electrical matter. For readers who insist on some mystical component to consciousness, do not look here. Koch says there needs to be a “respect” for “hard-won neurologic and scientific knowledge” (59) – i.e., consciousness is not some other-worldly zone. (If one has an altered state of consciousness, that is consciousness impaired and not the evolutionary capacity we are designed to have for survival.) Rightly so, Koch strips consciousness away from mystical explanations and gets down, beyond brain matter, to the 1000 trillion synapses for 86 billion neurons in the human brain. (Oddly, this reductionism does not eradicate any preternatural experience; rather, with so much wiggling motion in brain matter, it helps explain it.) Koch homes in on the electrical “feedback” that “forces neurons to synchronize their activity” (18), for what makes us human is not simply the volume of our brain (some species have larger brains – dolphins) but the complex network of and conversation among neurons. The key question (with many questions about the nervous system and consciousness remaining) is how brain matter “can possess an interior perspective . . .” (24). That is, we have subjective feelings and these have provided an evolutionary advantage (31). (We will look at this evolutionary advantage in Lisa Zunshine’s book, Getting Inside Your Head.) Koch suggests that self-consciousness is an adaptive form “of older forms of body and pain consciousness” (38), a personal diagnostic. The brain generates but does not cause consciousness – neural and neuronal correlates, the actual synaptic connections are responsible (and some brain portions create “a more privileged relationship to the content of consciousness than others”) (42). Spinal cord injured patients have consciousness; cerebellum damaged patients (who could lose balance and coordination, eye and speech functions) have consciousness. We are always conscious (but for coma and deep sleep).

Koch claims that in spite of work by, e.g., Antonio Damasio (he never mentions Michael Gazzaniga), we still do not have a full or accurate list of all brain parts involved in consciousness (43). Besides, consciousness is not just about brain parts but the connections: there are a million neurons in the primary visual cortex, but activity there is meaningless (i.e. without the feeling of consciousness) if the neurons in the higher cortex are not involved (48). Koch’s particular area of expertise is with vision, and he informs us, for example, that we don’t really see with our eyes (consider dreaming): the optic nerve perceives information that gets “edited” before entering the realm of the “neural correlates of consciousness” (51).

Koch says that no one yet knows which areas of the brain “underlie consciousness”; nevertheless, that particular investigation could prove futile, since consciousness runs “across regions” of the brain (54). In fact, there are up to 1000 different neural cell types, differentiated by location, dendrite “morphology,” synaptic “architecture,” genes, electrical charges, and the destination of axons (which pretty much solves – eradicates – the mind/brain split) (54).

In the course of brain monitoring epileptics (and the medial temporal lobe) it was revealed that there is “startling selectivity at the level of individual nerve cells . . . [i.e., that] medial temporal lobe neurons [which include the hippocampus, responsible for memory] are indeed extremely picky about what excites them” (65). This selectivity points to individual differences (in spite of brain similarity across species) and bolsters the general statement Koch makes early in the book: “It is, after all, in the choice of what we work on that we reveal much about our inner drives and motives” (8). This means that repeated exposure to an object or person generates neuronal activity, and patterns are therefore instantiated in the medial temporal lobe because of where one regularly decides to go, what one routinely decides to see, and with whom one usually decides to consort. Nevertheless, there are unconscious processes at work – there must be (as clearly there was, evolutionarily) a “cleansing mechanism” to shield us from thoughts of our own mortality, anxiousness, and depression (76). So there are exposed, deliberate, and hidden, automatic, patterns. This means that some (but certainly not all) of the “actions of the sovereign ‘I’ are determined by habits, instincts, and impulses that largely bypass conscious inspection” (77). Koch is not, however, suggesting that an individual is not responsible – in fact, the opposite seems to be the case (and a point driven home by Gazzaniga in his book The Ethical Brain).

In chapter seven, perhaps the most intriguing, Koch looks at free will, and declares that “freedom is just another word for feeling” (91). (This phraseology reminds one of Douglas Allchin’s observation that morality is a behavior.) But as in many other parts of the book, the emphasis is on mechanics. Looking at free will through physics (and of course invoking Benjamin Libet, whose experiments still hold), Koch says that while the universe is governed by cause-and-effect, we nonetheless require the feeling of agency. Koch’s causality implies that one cannot “do and say things that are not a direct consequence” of one’s “predispositions and . . . circumstances” (91).This is not precisely Ortega y Gasset’s I am myself and my circumstances, where emphasis might be placed more on the circumstances, but rather (to borrow from my Ethos and Behavior) I am myself in spite of my circumstances – one’s genetic makeup compounded by the “habits and consistent choices . . .” repeatedly made through one’s life (95) and converted into neural patterns in the medial temporal lobe. (Of course Jerome Kagan’s research indicates that we are born with a temperament that persists.) But Koch is no Newtonian determinist. Invoking quantum mechanics (Werner Heisenberg, 1927), Koch suggests, on the cellular and neuronal levels, that there can be an uncertain, ambiguous, and random aspect (99). It’s not what will happen but what might probably happen.

In terms of consciousness, the human brain develops “concept neurons” (patterns of changes that develop with similarly repeated stimuli), but action potentials on the neuronal level vary from one encounter with the stimulus (a face, an idea) to the next – “quantum indeterminacy” can lead to “behavioral indeterminacy” (101). Turns out that the behavioral unpredictability favored organisms over time, granting them the ability to modify actions or choices (101). This is where Libet comes in. Although we act before we are aware of acting (and the feeling of willing an act does not cause the action), the personal sensation (consciousness) does belong to the individual. Libet’s groundbreaking experiment (of hand movement performed before conscious awareness of such), however, does not account for more complex problems and dilemmas we face. (See, e.g., work by Joshua Greene on moral dilemmas and Zunshine’s investigation of theory of mind.) We need the feeling of agency, control, which springs from neural activity. Examples of loss of control include addictions, Tourette Syndrome, obsessive compulsions.

Koch discusses and explains much current research (as he has worked with such researchers). He firmly believes other animal species have consciousness, that they “experience life” in a way not dissimilar from us (151). While his last chapter is very personal and engaging (lots of confessing), he manages to raise some spectacular (though unanswerable) questions concerning the existence of God.

As clear as Koch is in his writing, he is nevertheless dealing in (as he admits) an area still filled with unknowns. Such is not the case with Lisa Zunshine’s Getting Inside Your Head: rather than skirting around the murky areas of consciousness, she applies the well-accepted concept of theory of mind to popular culture. However, Koch’s book (or any other) on consciousness (especially with its physiological and evolutionary aspects) is fundamental to understanding the roots of theory of mind. (An enlightened look at neuroscience is Jean-Pierre Changeux’s The Physiology of Truth.) In a nutshell, Zunshine’s thesis is that we often manifest an “embodied transparency” in experiencing (or estimating someone else’s) thoughts and feelings, and our greed (her word) to read other people is what has fueled our culture.

In fact, the first sentence of Zunshine’s book says it all: “We live in other people’s heads: avidly, reluctantly, consciously, unawares, mistakenly, inescapably” (xi). Of course mistaken since as often as we attempt to read another’s mind we are not always correct. Yet since theory of mind is anxiously working, it has enabled our cultural icons – from novels, theater, movies, television, and visual arts. Since our long evolutionary heritage (during the Pleistocene) was social, and since a great deal of our consciousness is about other people, our cultural representations mimic what we do in real life: we read characters in novels and guess their intentions, we study the body language of actors on stage for emotional clues (and respond to cues from the audience), and we examine closely the facial nuances of screen actors to gauge their thoughts.

Lisa Zunshine, the Bush-Holbrook Professor of English at the University of Kentucky (Lexington), has authored or edited ten books (and numerous articles). Her books include: Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative; Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies; Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. In her Preface, Zunshine says this book took about five years to write, part of which was funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), and includes research from time spent at Yale University and Paul Bloom’s Mind and Development Lab. The physical properties of the book are very good (though the dust jacket borders on the garish – perhaps deliberately), and there are 36 illustrations. There are ten chapters, with useful subordinate sections clearly marked in each chapter. The book concludes with a Coda (summary of key ideas) and includes Notes, an extensive Bibliography, and a comprehensive Index.

Zunshine tells us that theory of mind empowers culture and is premised as follows: we have an inborn need to read other minds, and that’s what cultural representations help satisfy; we expect others to attempt to read our own mind, and so our evolution has endowed our bodies with ways to express mental attributes. Because of these two premises “we assume that there must be a mental state behind an observable behavior,” although we don’t know exactly what the mental state is, and yet we accept as true whatever we can glean or conjecture (17-18). In this way, Zunshine has come up with a key idea (and a nicely coined phrase) to express her thesis: “embodied transparency” – defined as a moment when “body language involuntarily betrays . . . feelings . . .” (23). This ability to read mental states works well with fictional characters rather than real people and explains why we have such cultural representations (since consciousness in real time is not as effective in connecting all the dots concerning one’s behavior). There are three requirements (especially in fiction) for “embodied transparency”: contrast (among characters in a key scene); transience (so that the behavior does not persist continuously); and restraint (so that the reader has to guess at the character’s inner feelings and thoughts) (30).

Zunshine applies these ideas lucidly with good examples throughout the book: she is an astute literary critic and psychologist. As noted, other genres are examined equally well. For instance, there is the theater, where one goes (especially in the eighteenth century) to read other people as much as (or more so than) the performance (and true, too, of horse racing). Movies are particularly well suited for embodied transparency, especially those complex characters in key scenes where they try to hide a feeling or thought (and so we attempt to read into them). Of course with a movie the director can offer close ups of facial expressions not available to theater goers. There is television, where we often need to distinguish fact from fiction: we process fiction differently than fact, and so there is a moral element if we accept something as true and learn later (to our chagrin) that we have been duped. There is cinéma vérité which at first tried to capture expressed feelings in real time (though the presence of a camera holds in question any authenticity), but then, eventually, this genre began to mock itself in television shows such as The Office and in Reality T.V. There are musicals where we accept the act of singing and the song as “revealing . . . true feelings” (142). And finally there is painting, especially complex in terms of theory of mind. For instance, we could be reading the mind of someone in the painting: one absorbed in an act; one contemplating a question (such as a marriage proposal); one engaged in a dilemma of some sort not disclosed. If the representations in the painting are too challenging (e.g., surreal art) we consider the mind of the artist. With abstract art we focus on reading our own minds.

Zunshine’s book was difficult to stop reading; while she handles all these genres with skill, clearly her strength is in reading literature (as she returns to literary references even in the other chapters). Having an understanding of human evolution and how the brain works makes reading a book such as Zunshine’s more satisfying. Whereas Koch focuses on how consciousness works, Zunshine puts such a function into perspective by explaining why we have a mind anxious to read other minds. In a sense, one could say that theory of mind is our consciousness exposed.

- Gregory F. Tague

EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES COLLABORATIVE

◙

St. Francis College

The Mission of the Evolutionary Studies Collaborative (ESC) is to advance the study and discussion of evolution using an interdisciplinary approach. The Goals include working with students, faculty, and administrators to include clear and robust elements of evolution in courses, to foster an open conversation about evolution on campus (as well as in the classroom), and to promote a greater awareness and understanding of evolution in campus-wide (public) forums.

What we are doing now:

°        Collaborating with the ASEBL Journal / blog and Editions Bibliotekos website (ongoing)

°        Working on the second Moral Sense Conference

°        Independent Study (guided reading, particularly for non-science majors)

What we have planned:

°         Reading from Being Human: Call of the Wild [6 February, 4pm, Founders Hall]

°         Film/discussion: Are We Born Good? [TBA, April 2013]

°        Open Meeting/Discussion about ESC: [TBA, Fall 2013]

°         Evolutionary Presentation/Readings from Battle Runes: Writings on War [TBA, Fall 2013]

°         Artist/Science Collaborator Natalie Settles [TBA, Fall 2013]

°         Moral Sense Conference [TBA, Spring 2014]

°         Evolutionary Presentation/Readings from Puzzles of Faith and Patterns of Doubt [TBA, Fall 2014]

~ Senior Developers & Collaborators ~

Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D. (English), Irina Ellison, Ph.D. (Biology), Kristy Biolsi, Ph.D. (Psychology)

Faculty and students, feel free to contact any one of us (especially to collaborate)

Evolution of Human Conscience: Christopher Boehm

Christopher Boehm. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. NY: Basic Books, 2012. 432 pgs. $28.99US Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-465-02048-5

Going against the grain of individual selection theories (which posit the emergence of altruism from parental bonds and kin relationships), Christopher Boehm makes a powerful argument for group (social) selection to account for the advent of altruism. Paradoxically, according to Boehm, altruism occurred through negatives: punishment of free-riders and subsequently the fear of public shame (which in turn developed into conscience). Boehm claims our moral origins lie in the adaptive design (its flexibility to rules) of the conscience (away from “fear-based” bullying) and its great concern with maintaining the highest possible personal reputation (176). Drawing from his vast experience as a field researcher with primates (working, for example, with Jane Goodall) and from his research on Pleistocene-like contemporary foragers, Boehm concludes that small bands of people pressured others to act generously for the sake of group cohesion and cooperation. The book is captivating in its strong narrative voice, its compelling stories from the field, and its scholarly grounding.

This is a handsomely-produced book, with a typeface / font that is very easy to read. There are twelve chapters (and an epilogue), as follows: “Darwin’s Inner Voice”; “Living the Virtuous Life”; “Of Altruism and Free Riders”; “Knowing Our Immediate Predecessors”; “Resurrecting Some Venerable Ancestors”; “A Natural Garden of Eden”; “The Positive Side of Social Selection”; “Learning Morals Across the Generations”; “Work of the Moral Majority”; “Pleistocene Ups, Downs, and Crashes”; “Testing the Selection-by-Reputation Hypothesis”; “The Evolution of Morals”; “Humanity’s Moral Future.” Numerous sub-headings within each chapter make for easy navigation. There is an extensive bibliography and a thorough index. The dust jacket of the book features images of a coiled snake and a red apple, symbols of Eden, and as Boehm points out (not apparent in the Book of Genesis), the Garden of Eden would have been a dangerous place. Christopher Boehm is also the author of: Hierarchy in the Forest; Blood Revenge; and Montenegrin Social Organization and Values (as well as many articles). Boehm is Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center and Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California.

This is an important book and essential reading for anyone in a field that intersects with evolutionary studies. However, even as Boehm admits, there is no single book or theory that will answer the conundrum about the origins of human morality. This review, therefore, complements the review (in these pages) of Dennis Krebs, The Origins of Morality: An Evolutionary Account – it is recommended that both these recent books be read (nearly side-by-side), as each one helps fill in the complex picture concerning the genesis of human morals. Aside from their different approaches to charting the birth of moral systems, both Krebs and Boehm give voice to an exclusively evolutionary reading of human morality. And from these books, one can work backwards through the literature on this subject that started in earnest with Darwin (The Descent of Man). In our pre-history (ancestral human species) and from the DNA level, the selfish-gene model is attractive; from the perspective of more recent history (the emergence of Homo sapiens) and epigenetics or culture, the group model is attractive.

While he draws from some of the leaders in this field (Trivers and Alexander), Boehm places emphasis on a social (and not selfish or kin) model, in fact often invoking Émile Durkheim’s name. There is very little discussion of Hamilton, some reference to Axelrod, and counter arguments to Williams (the last of whom argues that altruism evolved between individuals and is not a group product). Books by Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Marc Hauser are criticized for neglecting evolutionary history, which might not be wholly accurate (since quite often they bring into their discussions evolution and the prehistory of humankind). However, Boehm takes pains (in the tradition of Richard G. Klein) to chart human prehistory. Unique to this book is how Boehm meticulously links our ancestral past to our present (and accommodates both industrialized and still-present foraging societies).

Boehm is a cultural anthropologist, so it is not (perhaps) surprising that he would lay emphasis on the group: culture as problem solving; morality is a group concern. Consider how Dennis Krebs, a psychologist trained by but then turning away from Kohlberg, lays emphasis on the individual: indirect reciprocity; morality as a personal action. According to Boehm, Richard Alexander “flirted” with group selection theory (73). Interestingly, Alexander (a biologist) is used differently by the psychologist Krebs and the anthropologist Boehm. Nevertheless, as Alexander himself proposes (in The Biology of Moral Systems), there cannot be any altruism without selfishness: both punishment of and aid to another are motivated (in the short or long term) by one’s self-interest. Matt Ridley (The Origins of Virtue) insists (for many sequential pages of explanation) that while altruism is evident on a social / group level, the ultimate cause of such is selfishness.

In a nutshell, here is Boehm’s line of argument: easily by 250,000 years ago large game hunting (horses and antelope) was done in egalitarian groups (which had replaced the alpha male hierarchy) and which set the pace for altruist sharing (meat distribution) and punishment of cheaters who demanded or stole more than their share. Boehm admits that hunting goes back much farther, that there was large game hunting as far back as 400,000 years ago. But by 250,000 years the large game was hunted routinely and butchered carefully and systematically. This is not a new argument. Ridley (as well as Richard G. Klein) comfortably places such hunting and butchering back to approximately 1.4 million years ago. Novel here is Boehm’s insistence on a complete shift to group culture. However, in The Origins of Virtue Ridley cites Hill and Kaplan (1989) who say, “Societies . . . do not have needs, individuals do; and societies are the sum of individuals, not entities in themselves. Therefore only by understanding what made sense for the individuals would anthropology make progress” (99).

Debunking the tolerated theft theory (biologist Nicholas Blurton-Jones), Boehm asserts that such cooperative hunting and sharing would promote “social bonding,” encourage “sympathetic feelings,” and involve some form of “perspective taking” (139-140). Of course one could argue that, nonetheless, there is always (risk) calculation in such sharing. The fascinating aspect of this book is how Boehm correlates his theory to the many contemporary late Pleistocene-like communities he has so assiduously researched, from the Inuit to the Kalahari (and many more). Drawing on work of Donald T. Campbell, Boehm notes that many early civilizations (and even contemporary foraging communities) employ “preaching in favor of altruistic generosity” (191). Such preaching might underscore, however, our innate selfish tendencies that repeatedly need correction; indeed, the preacher might be an individual within the group who wants his ego to supplant many others. And yet intriguing is how Boehm uses evidence from our prehistory to bolster his message: the conscience evolved through a process of social (more than natural) selection as hierarchical coalitions were formed and it was paramount to choose “useful partnerships” wisely while punishing (at times severely) others (149). Boehm says that this idea of deviant punishment affecting gene pools and leading to a conscience is evident in Darwin and Trivers (the latter of whom suggests [1971] there is “’moralistic aggression’”) (166). If the cheater is quiet there is no expression of the selfish gene, so that behavior is not (genetically) passed on (200). In his favor and to his credit, Boehm is optimistic and not cynical.

But the egoistic gene / behavior (tendency) does not disappear; in fact, we are probably more prone to selfish behavior and hence the altruistic preaching. Altruists are universally compensated in some way, and yet after many thousands of generations we still see cheaters, deceivers, free-riders, and other forms of selfish behavior quite often (to say nothing of what lurks beneath the surface). Mark Van Vugt and Paul Van Lange (psychologists, “The Altruism Puzzle” in Evolution and Social Psychology) like others have made the claim that we evolved cheater detection methods to benefit the group, but such deception-finding is merely a mirror of one’s selfishness and is like theory of mind – i.e., these mental calculations are enormously advantageous to the individual. The logic is as follows: because we are self-interested we therefore know to doubt (indeed to question) the trustworthiness of another, especially if there is an outward sign of dishonesty. Boehm’s group model (like Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson’s) might represent a conformist tendency dating only to the emergence of big-game hunter bands and not necessarily explain the deeper origins of moral emotions. Outside of the group an individual would seek to conserve what little he has (to gain) for himself and his immediate family; but within a large group the individual could attempt to exploit (profit by sharing).

To some extent we need aggressive genes to keep us alive and going: in theory, the aggressive gene was modulated and never disappeared (310). Key to Boehm’s thesis is that over time group suppression of cheating has raised the level of conscience to a level where moderately potential cheaters are kept in control (201). But for the most part, is this not (via Durkheim) a form of the standard social science model (which Krebs de-emphasizes considerably)? Our instincts are such that we cooperate in order to survive. No one doubts the practicality of the group, but we cannot over-credit the group for self-interested work of the individual(s). We know that cooperators prevail (see, e.g., D.S. Wilson), but what is the underlying motive of the individual(s) to cooperate (as each hunter will always second guess the desire of his fellow)? Individual incentive to invest in the group can yield a more secure return, but this investment does not obviate the individual’s egoistic needs or desires. With a nod to individual differences, Boehm admits that the free-riding gene is in the human pool but suppressed at the level of the phenotype (201); yet he insists that this selection occurs on the social (and not individual) level and dismisses as much less responsible any kin-type, reciprocal altruism, or mutualism selection theories (by, e.g., Ghiselin, Dawkins, Wright, or Ridley) (204). Public opinion and gossip (reputation selection) undoubtedly impact fitness (245). Consider, though, how Constantine Sedikides writes about the symbolic self in our prehistory (in nascent form perhaps as far back as 1.8 million years) – that too, on an individual level, would account for perspective taking and the importance of a public persona before big game hunting.

Boehm spends a considerable amount of time discussing Alexander; but whereas Alexander emphasizes “good reputations” as part of mating / cooperation, Boehm stresses how bad behavior will ultimately lead to gossip and then group punishment, which, through the process of natural selection, would have led to a “’debilitation of aggressive responses’” and a “’strengthening of inhibitory controls’” (167-168, quoting himself from Hierarchy in the Forest). What Boehm is describing here is the evolution of the conscience, which is like a “social mirror” highlighting our behavioral accounts, good and bad, for us to view in full (172). Without addressing brain science or consciousness fully, this is where individual differences come into play – how one can use this very social mirror in a calculating manner to subtly deceive while appearing good. Even Adam Smith in the eighteenth century (his notion of the impartial spectator) recognized individual differences in the competition between caring and personal gain (though as a product of his time Smith chalks up such differences to class). At any rate, Boehm admits that since the tendency to altruism is slight, the hunter-gatherer groups he examines prove that “cultural support” is necessary and apparent if the group is going to survive cooperatively and without serious conflicts (273). For instance, in discussing tit-for-tat, Boehm says that the exchange of goods is less important than the “spirit of generosity” such exchange produces (302). Granted, but one knows that if he boosts the generous spirit of the group he stands a better chance of gain, for without any likelihood of (eventual) profit a player is sure to defect.

For those interested in evolutionary studies (especially humanists interested in ethics), Boehm’s work is crucial in that it takes complex questions of morality out of a theoretical cloud and places them squarely in the human arena (of altruism and shame). Boehm’s scholarly research of prehistory and anthropological work in contemporary people give credence to our innate sense of fairness and capacity for reciprocity. We evolved away from the hierarchical model to the egalitarian. More precisely, Boehm is able to delineate how and why human conscience arose: more than the function of the individual in a group and more to the function of the group on the individual. While using the imperfect geologic record we have (of human remains, evidence of human culture, climate shifts affecting our prehistory) to complete the puzzle about the origins of morality, Boehm’s book makes a significant contribution to this important discussion. 

- Gregory F. Tague