A Thousand Posts (5)

2013
This was the year of my Darwinian Grand Tour--from Chicago to the Galapagos to Houston to Atlanta to Freiburg, and a few places in between. 

In April, I presented a paper at the Midwest Political Science Convention in Chicago on "Nietzsche's Darwinian Liberalism." 

In June, I was travelling in Peru, Ecuador, and the Galapagos Islands.  The trip to the Galapagos began with a week-long yacht tour of five of the larger islands, followed by a week in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on the island of San Cristobal, where I participated in the Mont Pelerin Society meetings on "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty."  For those MPS meetings, I wrote a paper on "The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism." 

In October, I lectured at Lone Star College-Kingwood, where John Barr was teaching a remarkable course entitled "The Emancipators: Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and the Making of the Modern World." 

Also in October, I spoke at the Philadelphia Society meeting on Russell Kirk and "The Permanent Things" in Atlanta. 

In December, I went to Freiburg, Germany, where I lectured for a workshop on "Liberalism and the Evolutionary Agenda," organized by Ulrich Witt, the Director of the Evolutionary Economics Group at the Max Planck Institute (Jena). 

I saw the MPS meetings and the Freiburg workshop as especially important moments in the recent intellectual history of evolutionary classical liberalism.

January 1 was the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and so I began the year with a post on "Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in Evolutionary History," in which I showed how Lincoln's classical liberalism was based on an evolutionary understanding of human history.

Then, I wrote a long series of posts on Nietzsche (from January to April, in September, and in December).  This work on Nietzsche was connected with my graduate seminar on Nietzsche that I taught in the fall semester.

My main argument is that the Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period (1878-1882)--particularly, Human, All Too Human (1878)--is superior to Nietzsche's earlier and later writings. 

I first began to see this from my reading of Lou Salome's book on Nietzsche, the first book ever written on Nietzsche, and in some ways still the best book.  Lou had insights that came from her brief friendship with Nietzsche (April to October, 1882), when Nietzsche repeatedly proposed marriage, and she turned him down.  She saw that once Nietzsche broke off his friendships with her and Paul Ree, he moved away from the evolutionary science that dominated his middle period.

The Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period is morally, politically, and intellectually superior to the mythic metaphysics of his early and late writings.  This Darwinian science is morally superior because it promotes a sober morality of moderation that restrains tendencies to intoxicated extremism.  This science is politically superior because it promotes a prudent respect for liberal democracy that restrains tendencies to tyrannical power-seeing.  And this science is intellectually superior because it can be grounded in empirical evidence and methodical reasoning rather than the delusions of enthusiastic fantasizing.  In contrast to the Darwinian science of the middle period, the distinctive teachings of the late Nietzsche--the will to power, eternal return, and the Ubermensch--are morally corrupting, politically dangerous, and intellectually confused.

In Nietzsche's later writings, we can see how the Darwinian refutation of the universe as a moral cosmology provoked a turn to art and an atheistic religiosity as mythmaking to escape from this "deadly truth."

The attraction of Nietzsche's later writings and rejection of the free-spirited evolutionary science of his middle period is evident among the Nazis and the Straussians.

I wrote a series of posts on Nietzsche's "Sociobiology of Animal Morality" and on his "Aristocratic Liberalism."

I use the term "aristocratic liberalism" to convey the thought that while a liberal regime secures equal liberty under the rule of law, it also thereby secures inequality of results in allowing for "the natural aristocracy of virtues and talents" (as Thomas Jefferson called it).  Aristocratic liberalism can thus combine the ancient concern for social virtue and the modern concern for individual liberty.  The aristocratic liberalism of Nietzsche's middle period is in contrast to the aristocratic anti-liberalism of his later writings.

Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism can be sketched out as four affirmations and four negations:  affirming constitutional democracy, liberal pluralism, religious liberty, and cosmopolitan globalization, while denying socialist statism, "great politics," anti-Semitism, and atheistic religiosity.

Nietzsche's evolutionary aristocratic liberalism is very similar to what Douglass North and his colleagues identify as the modern "open access society," which was the subject of a post in April.

Also in April, I defended Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism in his middle period as superior to the aristocratic radicalism that Bruce Detwiler saw in Nietzsche's later period.  Detwiler failed to see that his good criticisms of Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism don't apply to Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism.  Detwiler also failed to see how that aristocratic liberalism was rooted in the Darwinian science that Nietzsche embraced in his middle period.

I also pointed out that Strauss failed to see how his account of Nietzsche as surfing the "third wave of modernity" that led to Nazism does not apply to the Darwinian liberalism of Nietzsche's middle writings.

In the first half of July, I wrote a series of 6 posts as "An Evolutionary Tour of the Galapagos" that was based on my tour of the islands on the Cormorant.  (In early February of 2017, I did a second tour of the Galapagos on the Cormorant; and I wrote another series of 12 posts on "Thinking About Galapagos.")

In the second half of July, I wrote a series of 14 posts on the lectures and discussions at the Mont Pelerin Society conference.  The Mont Pelerin Society was founded in 1946 by Friedrich Hayek as an organization for people who wanted to think about classical liberalism in the modern world.  Hayek saw classical liberalism as rooted in an evolutionary science of liberty and spontaneous order.  In recent years, there has been growing interest in how contemporary sociobiology and evolutionary science might apply to Hayek's evolutionary conception of liberalism.  This was the concern of the MPS meetings in the Galapagos, which brought together some of the leading evolutionary scientists and classical liberal thinkers. 

In my paper for the conference--"The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism"--I argued that evolutionary moral psychology has largely confirmed the truth of the liberalism defended by Adam Smith and Hayek.  But I also argued that Hayek's socialist "atavism" thesis--that socialism appeals to our evolved instincts, but liberalism does not--is mistaken.  I made the same argument at the Freiburg workshop.

From the end of July into the first week of August, I wrote a series of 6 posts on the book Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension, edited by Stephen Dilley, which had recently been published by Lexington Books.  Of the 13 authors in this book, 9 are opponents of Darwinian classical liberalism, and most of their criticisms are directed at me.  2 of the authors seem neutral, and 2 seem to be defenders (somewhat) of Darwinian liberalism.

The argument that seems to be embraced by the nine critics can be called Dilley's Syllogism, because it's stated by Dilley in his introductory chapter:

Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity.

Darwinism denies Christianity.

Therefore, Darwinism denies classical (Lockean) liberalism.

Consequently, the nine critics are proponents of what they call "Christian classical liberalism" or "theistic classical liberalism."  They also identify this with the liberal political thought of the American founders, and so they defend "the rich theistic classical liberalism embodied in the American founding."  I have inserted "Lockean" into the syllogism because the nine critics generally appeal to John Locke as "the quintessential classical liberal," although they also often identify Adam Smith as a paradigmatic classical liberal.

The nine critics say that they are attacking "Darwinian conservatism," which "integrates a Darwinian conception of human nature with the essentials of classical liberalism, drawing on the work of Locke, Smith, Hayek, and others."  They identify the most prominent proponents of Darwinian conservatism as me, Thomas Sowell, Robert McShea, James Q. Wilson, Michael Shermer, and Francis Fukuyama.  Most of their attacks, however, are directed at me.

Most of the nine critics are associated with the Discovery Institute, and most of what they say conforms to the famous "Wedge Document" of the Discovery Institute, which lays out a strategy for saving Christian civilization from the moral and political degradation promoted by Darwinian science, a strategy that depends on "intelligent design theory" as the alternative to Darwinian evolution.

In my series of posts, I answer their criticisms.

One of my posts on the MPS meetings was on Richard Wrangham's lecture on his "chimpanzee model" for explaining the evolution of war.  This is part of an intense debate among biologists and social scientists over whether Hobbes was right that the state of nature is a state of war or whether Rousseau was right that it was a state of peace.  Those on the Hobbesian side think that war has been natural for chimpanzees and human foragers.  Those on the Rousseauean side deny this. 

Although I agree with Wrangham and lean towards the Hobbesian side, I argue that the opponents in this debate end up agreeing on a position that is neither Hobbesian nor Rousseauean but Lockean.  Thus does the evolutionary anthropology of war and peace confirm John Locke's account of the state of nature and the evolution of government.  Hobbes was partly right.  Rousseau was mostly wrong. And Locke was mostly right.  I wrote posts on this in August and September.  (This became part of my paper "The Biopolitical Science of Locke's State of Nature" that I presented at the 2015 meetings of the American Political Science Association.)

I have written a long series of posts on the evolution of war among chimps and humans (August of 2013, September and November of 2014, June of 2015, January of 2016).

In September and October, I wrote about my participation in the national meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Atlanta on Russell Kirk and "The Permanent Things."

In my lecture, I argued that an evolved human nature that is enduring but not permanent is enough to support an evolutionary conservatism rooted in an evolutionary moral anthropology of natural desires, customary traditions, and individual judgments.

That’s not enough, however, for a metaphysical conservatism that appeals to a transcendent moral cosmology of eternal order as intelligently designed by the Creator.

This contrast between evolutionary conservatism and metaphysical conservatism was displayed in the debate between Friedrich Hayek and Russell Kirk at the 1957 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. 

At the Philadelphia Society meeting, I was disturbed by how many of the speakers assumed a divine command theory of ethics, so that we cannot know what is right or wrong except by obeying God's commands, particularly in the Hebrew Bible.  As I suggested in my remarks, this is dangerous, because it would mean accepting slavery and the brutal despotism of Mosaic law.

Almost all of the speakers at the meeting were uncritical in their praise of Kirk.  The only critics were me and Alan Charles Kors.  Kors is a prominent historian at the University of Pennsylvania who is known for his studies of the intellectual history of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe.  Kors defended the French Enlightenment, which was a bold move before an audience of Kirkian conservatives.  I defended Friedrich Hayek's evolutionary conservatism as an alternative to Kirk's metaphysical conservatism.

Kors and I were in complete agreement.  That might seem odd, particularly since Hayek presented his Burkean evolutionary conservatism as rooted in the British and Scottish Enlightenment as opposed to the French Enlightenment. 

But Kors argued that what Burkean conservatives criticize as the excesses of the French Revolution--the Jacobins and the Reign of Terror--manifest the intellectual legacy of Rousseau rather than the philosophes.  After all, Rousseau was a vehement opponent of the philosophes.  Leaders of the French Enlightenment like Voltaire and Montesquieu opposed every form of despotism and supported the tolerance, liberty, and commercial spirit that they saw in Great Britain.  Robespierre's "Republic of Virtue" was inspired not by the thought of Voltaire or Montesquieu but by Rousseau's Social Contract.  For example, Robespierre's "Religion of the Supreme Being" was explicitly an attempt to enforce Rousseau's teaching that all citizens must embrace a deistic religion, and that neither atheists nor Christians can be true citizens.

In his speech, Kors often referred to Hayek in ways that suggested that most of French Enlightenment thought was in agreement with Hayek's evolutionary liberalism, which I defended in my speech.

In December, I wrote 6 posts on the Freiburg workshop on liberalism and evolution.

One of the benefits for me of this workshop was that it helped me to think through my ambivalence about Hayek's evolutionary liberalism.  I am persuaded by Hayek's claim that Darwinian science supports the fundamental idea of classical liberalism that social order--including morals, markets, and laws--can arise as a largely spontaneous  or unintended order from the interactions of individuals acting to satisfy their individual desires.  But I am not persuaded by Hayek's account of exactly how cultural evolution produces the modern liberal order. 

My conclusion is that we need to see how Darwinian science corrects the mistakes in Hayek's account while confirming Hayek's insight about how liberal thought can be rooted in an evolutionary science of spontaneous order.  Naomi Beck was one of the participants in the workshop, and I saw her critique of Hayek's evolutionary liberalism as reinforcing this conclusion.

At least half or more of the participants were proponents of Hayekian classical liberalism who were interested in the possibility of grounding liberalism in evolutionary science, although they were unsure as to whether Hayek was correct in the details of his evolutionary theory of liberalism.  A few of the participants--including Beck--were opponents of Hayek and of liberalism in general.  This was similar to the situation at the Mont Pelerin Society conference in the Galapagos Islands last summer, where much of the discussion turned on the assessment of Hayek's evolutionary liberalism.

In the discussions at the MPS meetings and at the Freiburg workshop, I criticized Hayek’s suggestion that the market order requires a suppression of our natural human desires.  This is what I have identified as Hayek’s Freudian theory of human evolution, in which civilization requires the repression of our evolved human instincts.  Here is where Hayek’s argument for liberalism becomes incoherent.  

If a liberal society is so painful because it requires the suppression of our deepest natural instincts, why does it succeed?  And if a socialist society satisfies our deepest natural instincts, why does it fail?  

As I have indicated in various posts, I see the same incoherence in the “mismatch theory” of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.  At the MPS meeting, Cosmides and Tooby indicated their agreement with Hayek on this point.  At times, they seemed to say that Karl Marx was right about the “primitive communism” of hunter-gatherers, but at other times, they seemed to say that Marx was wrong, because even hunter-gatherers show only conditional sharing or reciprocation, and therefore their sharing is not indiscriminate.  Moreover, Tooby and Cosmides seemed to agree with John Locke and Adam Smith in seeing trading behavior in hunter-gatherers that would provide the natural basis for the modern commercial society.

At the Freiburg workshop, I agreed with Naomi Beck in criticizing Hayek for not reading Darwin and considering his theory of cultural evolution.  Remarkably, Hayek in The Fatal Conceit dismisses Darwin as having nothing important to say about cultural evolution, although Hayek never cites Darwin, and thus leaves the reader with the suspicion that Hayek never read Darwin. 

Darwin's Descent of Man offers an elaborate account of the evolution of morality that should have been important for Hayek.  Darwin presents the evolution of morality as moving through three interacting levels--natural instincts, cultural traditions, and individual reason.  To me, this seems more reasonable than Hayek's attempt to deny instinct and reason in elevating culture as the only ground of morality.  That was one of my arguments in my paper for the Freiburg workshop.

A portion of my Freiburg paper was published in the Journal of Bioeconomics (2015) 17:3-15.  I reprinted this as a post in May of 2015.

I have written many posts on how Darwinian biology supports Aristotelian teleology. One of the best of these posts was written in September with the title "The Biological Teleology of Natural Right: Aristotle, Darwin, Strauss, and Rand."  It highlights the remarkable work of Allan Gotthelf in showing how Darwinian evolutionary biology restored Aristotelian teleology to biology and thus showed how modern biology can sustain Aristotelian natural right.  Strauss claimed that the "problem of natural right" today is that "modern natural science seems to have refuted teleology."  Gotthelf demonstrated that Strauss was mistaken about this.

In October and November, I wrote some posts on the foolishness of longing for immortality and the wisdom of Wallace Stevens' insight that "death is the mother of beauty."

I also wrote some posts on music--Wagner's Die Meistersinger (February) and Parsifal (November) and Handel's Messiah (December).

A Thousand Posts (4)

2012
In the spring semester, I taught a graduate seminar on Leo Strauss.  Consequently, I wrote many posts on Strauss from January to June.  Much of this writing was incorporated into my chapter on Strauss in Political Questions.

Although I never met Strauss, many of my teachers at the University of Dallas and the University of Chicago had been colleagues and students of Strauss.  Many of my colleagues and students in the political theory program at Northern Illinois University were deeply influenced by Straussian thinking.  I absorbed many of the Straussian ideas about the history of political philosophy that shaped much of my thinking, although I was never an orthodox Straussian. 

I was particularly interested in Strauss's understanding of "natural right."  And from Roger Masters, one of Strauss's students who specialized in the study of Rousseau, I picked up the idea that natural right might be rooted in Aristotelian biology in a way that could be supported by modern Darwinian biology.  This led to my argument for "Darwinian natural right."  The Straussians have been hostile to my argument, mostly because of their hostility to modern natural science generally, and to Darwinian biology in particular. 

In my posts, I pointed out Strauss's silence about how Aristotle's biology supports natural right, and also his silence about Nietzsche's Darwinian liberalism in his middle writings (especially, Human, All Too Human).  Strauss and the Straussians tend to stress Nietzsche's early and late writings, where they can find a Nietzschean attack on Darwinian naturalism.  But they ignore Nietzsche's appeal to Darwinian science in his middle writings.

I also reflected on the similarities between what Strauss identified as the liberalism of Lucretius and Darwinian liberalism.  According to Strauss, the central insight of Lucretius's argument is that "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable." Strauss calls this "the most terrible truth," because it denies that the cosmos is ordered to the human good.  Strauss and the Straussians are deeply disturbed by this "terrible truth" that there is no cosmic teleology.  Darwinian liberalism accepts this truth and is satisfied with grounding the human good in the immanent teleology of evolved human nature. 

Strauss's most famous claim is that many of the classic writers of political philosophy have practiced an art of secret writing, by which they could convey an esoteric teaching that is unpopular or heterodox to a few careful readers who are philosophic, while conveying an exoteric teaching that is more popular or orthodox to the many careless readers who are unphilosophic.  This claim--elaborated in Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952)--suggests the question of whether Strauss himself was a secret writer with a secret teaching.  If he was, then what's the big secret that would be so disturbing to most readers that it needs to be hidden from their view?

If Strauss had a big secret, I think, it's to be found in that "most terrible truth."  When a writer has a deeply disturbing message that he wants to transmit to his philosophic readers, while hiding it from his vulgar readers, Strauss suggested, there are various techniques available to him.  A writer can convey his own views through writing interpretive commentaries on the texts of other writers, so that only careful readers will notice his implicit endorsement of ideas attributed to others.  A writer can also hide his most unpopular views by putting them at the center of his text, because careless readers tend to pay more attention to the beginning and ending of what they read than to the middle.  In Strauss's Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968), the central chapter--and the longest chapter--is a commentary on Lucretius's On the Nature of Things.  The exact center of the book is page 135, where Strauss concludes his study of Lucretius by explaining "the most terrible truth."  Strauss hints that he agrees with this teaching of Lucretius. "Lucretius' poetry makes bright and sweet the obscure and sad findings of the Greeks, that is, of the philosophers" (83).

Since the world is not the product of an ordering mind, the world is not teleological, although it contains intelligent species--particularly, human beings--that have evolved to be teleological in their natural striving to satisfy their natural desires.  Since the world is not intelligently designed by a divinely providential mind, the world is indifferent to human beings and thus provides no cosmic support for human purposes.  Moreover, while the world is enduring, it is not eternal.  The world and everything in it--including the human species and all other species of life--will eventually collapse into the ceaseless motion of atoms that will then produce another world.

In one post in June, I have argued that the temporality of life is indicated by the dependence of life on photosynthesis as the evolved process by which the energy of the Sun is captured for sustaining life on Earth.  Once photosynthesis ceases, as it must in a billion years or so, there will be no life on Earth.  Many people worry about the degrading effects of teaching evolution to our school children.  Perhaps they should also worry about teaching them about photosynthesis, because this will teach them the "most terrible truth."

If the idea of natural right depends on the cosmic teleology of the universe, as Strauss says, then the "most terrible truth" that the cosmos is not teleologically ordered means that the idea of natural right is an illusion.  If Strauss agreed with Lucretius that the universe is neither eternal nor purposeful, then natural right cannot be defended, unless it is rooted in the immanent teleology of evolved human nature as an enduring but not eternal product of a natural evolutionary process, which is my argument.

Shadia Drury has argued that Strauss's core teaching was the natural superiority of the philosophic life of the few human beings capable of such a life, as the only life that was good by nature, and thus the inferiority of the nonphilosophic life of the great multitude of human beings who were incapable of living this naturally good life.  She criticized this teaching as both false and dangerous.  It was false because this absolute separation of all of humanity into two groups--the philosophic few and the vulgar many--was a pure fantasy rather than an accurate account of what human beings are like.  It was dangerous because it promoted a tyranny of the philosophers, in which the moral, religious, and political life of the vulgar many was seen as governed by lies--even if noble lies supported by philosophers for the good of philosophy.  In my posts, I have suggested that Strauss's defenders have not properly answered Drury's criticisms

Similarly, Strauss's defenders have not answered William Altman's charge that Strauss's secret teaching was his promotion of a Heideggerian Nazi attack on liberalism.  I point to some weaknesses in Altman's reasoning.

Altman identifies Strauss's secret teaching as an affirmation of Darwinian evolution and his public teaching as an affirmation of Platonic eternity.  That public teaching of Strauss is what Altman embraces as true.  By contrast, I find the Platonic teaching of eternal cosmic standards implausible, and I embrace Darwinian natural right: even if the world that we care about is neither eternal nor purposeful, and even if the cosmos does not care for us, natural right can still be rooted in the immanent teleology of evolved human nature as an enduring but not eternal product of a natural evolutionary process.

Other than Strauss, perhaps the single greatest influence on my thinking about Darwinian natural right has been Edward O. Wilson, particularly through his books Sociobiology (1975) and Consilience (1998).  In May, I wrote about his new book The Social Conquest of Earth, and I saw seven major themes related to Darwinian natural right: (1) consilience, (2) emergence, (3) genetic plasticity, (4) the two peaks of social evolution, (5) the iron rule of moral evolution, (6) religion and science, and (7) the rejection of kin selection theory.

Wilson identifies two paths to the social conquest of the earth--the insect path and the human path.  The social insects rule the invertebrate land environment.  Humans rule the vertebrate land environment.  Like the social insects, humans are "eusocial" in the technical sense that multiple generations of individuals live together, caring for dependent offspring and cooperating in a social division of labor.  While the social insects organize their colonies largely through pure instinct, with the insect queen producing robotic offspring guided by instinct, humans must organize the cooperation of individuals through personal relationships based on social intelligence, which requires navigating through a tense social network balanced between the selfish interests of individuals and the social interests of groups.  Wilson explains this tense balance in human social life between selfishness and sociality as a product of the countervailing evolutionary forces of individual selection and group selection.

Some of my writing on Wilson's Social Conquest of Earth went into my review of the book in the Fall 2013 issue of The Claremont Review of Books.

A third person whose writings greatly influenced me was another Wilson at Harvard--James Q. Wilson. In March, I wrote a post on Jim Wilson the day after he died.  He was best known for his work in criminology.  As a young scholar, I admired his book Crime and Human Nature, which I used as a text in some of my classes as a classic of political science.  I detected in this book and some of his other writings an evolutionary view of human nature.  This was confirmed in 1993 by the publication of Wilson's The Moral Sense.  Wilson said that he was most proud of this book.  For me, his pride was warranted.  This book was crucial in shaping my thinking about the evolutionary roots of human nature, and particularly the evolutionary confirmation of the idea of the natural moral sense in Scottish moral philosophy (Hume and Smith).  In many ways, this book pointed me to my book Darwinian Natural Right.

Wilson surveyed the evidence for how the natural and cultural evolution of morality can explain human cooperation as rooted in kinship and reciprocity, or what some evolutionary theorists have called kin selection and reciprocal altruism.  Evolution favors helping those genetically related to us, because this spreads our genes into the future.  Evolution also favors cooperating with those who are not genetically related to us if there is some reciprocal exchange.  I will cooperate with you if you have been cooperative with me in the past (direct reciprocity), or if I know you have a reputation for being cooperative with others (indirect reciprocity).  So it's tit for tat. People are rewarded for their good reputation as trustworthy cooperators and punished for their bad reputation as untrustworthy cheaters.

But does this show genuine altruism or selfless concern for others?  We could see helping our close relatives as genetic selfishness, because we are acting to spread our genes.  And we could see reciprocal cooperation as merely enlightened self-interest, because we're cooperating only as long as we expect some reciprocal benefits for ourselves. 

And yet, some evolutionary theorists--particularly, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis--have argued that human beings also show genuine altruism--totally selfless service to others--through what they call strong reciprocity.  This is a propensity to cooperate and share with others, even strangers, and to punish those who don't cooperate and share with others, even when the cooperation, sharing, and punishment are personally costly to the strong reciprocator, and the strong reciprocity requires neither ties of kinship nor expectation of future reciprocation.  Moreover, Bowles and Gintis think that the research in experimental game theory confirms the reality of such strong reciprocity.  They also think this confirms what Adam Smith said in The Theory of Moral Sentiments about those lovers of virtue for its own sake who desire to do what is praiseworthy even without the reward of actually being praised.

In a series of posts in June and July, I challenged the reasoning of Bowles and Gintis and suggested that what they see in experimental games as evidence for strong reciprocity is actually evidence of indirect reciprocity, in which people are generous because they expect (even if only unconsciously) to earn a reputation for generosity that will benefit them in the future.  Under conditions of total anonymity, people tend to express their purely selfish motivations.  Much of this writing went into the new chapter on Adam Smith in the 4th edition of Political Questions.

In September, I wrote some posts on how Jonathan Haidt's evolutionary moral psychology supports fusionist conservatism and Aristotelian liberalism.

In October, I wrote a long post on the evolutionary politics of minimal winning coalitions among both humans and chimpanzees.  Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith have shown how the power of political leaders depends on their having the support of a minimal winning coalition.  No ruler can rule alone.  Even an absolute dictator needs a small coalition of powerful people who are loyal to him, and to win and maintain that loyalty, the dictator must buy them off with money and power.  A democratic leader differs from a dictator in that the democratic leader depends on a larger coalition of supporters.  Frans de Waal found this to be true for chimps as well: success in political competition among chimps depends on the exercise of strategic intelligence in which chimps must form coalitions that will support them as the alpha male in the group's hierarchy.  My writing here was incorporated into my chapter on Machiavelli in Political Questions.

One seemingly profound objection to the evolutionary science that I defend on this blog is that this evolutionary science of nature cannot explain the existence of nature itself.  Why does nature exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? And why are things as they are and not different?  When Bill Nye debated evolution with Ken Ham, Nye was asked, What was there before the Big Bang?  Nye's answer was: It's a mystery!  Ham's answer was: God.

Jim Holt has written a book on how philosophers and scientists have tried to answer this question--Why does the world exist?  In October, I wrote a post on this question.  I argued that Why is there something rather than nothing? is a meaningless question, because it rests on two false assumptions.

First, the question falsely assumes the possibility of absolute nothingness.  Since human beings have no experience of absolute nothingness, whereas all of our experience confirms the being of things, there is no empirical evidence for absolute nothingness.  Even the very idea of nothingness as a product of the theological imagination pondering the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is dubious, because in the absence of any empirical evidence, I doubt that people even understand what they are saying when they ask why the world arose out of nothingness.

The second false assumption in the question of why the universe exists is that the principle of sufficient reason can apply to the whole universe.  Our experience of finding reasons or causes to explain things applies to events in the universe as governed by natural laws.  But this makes no sense as applied to the universe as whole.

This question comes up in the chapters on Augustine and on Nietzsche in Political Questions. 

Finally, I shouldn't leave 2012 without noting my posts in March on "genopolitics," because this bears upon one of the most common criticisms of any biological study of politics--the charge of genetic reductionism.

Beginning in the 1970s, a small group of political scientists jointed an intellectual movement that they called "biopolitics" or "politics and the life sciences."  I was one of the early members of that movement.  Although some of these people hoped to turn the mainstream of the discipline of American political science towards a political science rooted in biological science, this did not happen.  By the turn of the century, around 2000, some of these people lamented that the movement had largely failed, because most political scientists still showed little or no interest in the biological study of politics.

But then, sometime around 2004, there seemed to be a growing interest in biological explanations of political behavior.  Two articles were especially prominent.  In 2005, the American Political Science Review published "Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?" by John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing.  Through the methodology of behavior genetics, using the study of twins, they concluded that about 50% of the variance in propensities to "conservative" or "liberal" ideology is explained by genes.  This article gained widespread publicity.  This was followed by more articles advancing what was called "genopolitics."  One article by James Fowler and Christopher Dawes, published in 2008 in the Journal of Politics, claimed in its title that "Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout."  This was the first time that researchers had identified particular genes as linked to some political behavior.

I and others in the biopolitics movement were suspicious about these genetic explanations of political ideology and behavior.  They were too simplistic in thinking that political thought and action could be explained through genetics.  We knew that behavior genetics had a bad record of making strong claims about the genetics of behavior that could not be replicated.  So when Evan Charney began criticizing this research, I agreed with him and wrote posts explaining why he was right to say that the simplistic model of genopolitics cannot capture the emergent complexity of political behavior as the product of many interacting causes and levels of analysis.

In May of 2013, the American Political Science Review published three articles on the debate over genopolitics, which provided empirical confirmation for Charney's critique.  Fowler and Dawes were forced to suggest that their 2008 article should never have been published, because they and others had failed to replicate their results in that article.  They admitted that their simple genetic models cannot fully explain the complexity of what they are studying.

By contrast, the explanatory models for political life proposed by proponents of biopolitics are far more complex than the simple models of genopolitics: genes are there in the biopolitical models, but the genes have no effect on their own, because they interact with other factors at many different levels of analysis.

My post for September 13, 2015, surveys this debate and includes links to my many other posts on this.

A Thousand Posts (3)

2011
In January and February, my posts on "Darwinian Marriage: A Response to Robert George" initiated a series of posts stretching over the next six years defending a Darwinian view of marriage as open to gay marriage against the argument of George and his followers (such as Ryan Anderson) that gay marriage is not "real marriage."  George has made the best case against gay marriage as contrary to the Thomistic natural law of marriage.  I have argued that the Thomistic natural law of marriage is actually open to gay marriage, and that this natural law defense of gay marriage is implicit in Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

In January, I wrote some posts on the continuing debates over evolutionary science--debates over what is included in evolutionary theory, over what counts as evidence for evolution, and over whether creationism or intelligent design theory should be taken seriously as alternatives to evolution.  For all of these debates, I argue, it is good to go back to Darwin's own writings.  Those who argue that the modern evolutionary synthesis is too narrow, because it does not include new ideas about evolution--such as epigenetic evolution, gene-culture coevolution, group selection, niche construction, and moral evolution--do not realize that all of these ideas were already there in Darwin's writings.

Although some of the modern evidence for evolution was not available to Darwin--such as the evidence from genetics and modern dating methods--Darwin was rigorous in weighing the evidence available to him, while recognizing what he called the "difficulties" for his theory, which turn out to be the same difficulties brought up by the critics of evolution today.

Moreover, Darwin saw that it was impossible to judge the persuasiveness of his "theory of natural selection" without weighing it against its alternative--the "theory of special creation."  And so the idea of "teaching the controversy" originated with Darwin.

Darwin saw that the fundamental controversy here points to the problem of ultimate explanation--that all explanation depends on some ultimate reality or uncaused cause that cannot itself be explained: it's either Nature or God.

In the fall of 2011, I was teaching my undergraduate course "Biopolitics and Human Nature," and one of the books for that course was David Brooks' The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. Brooks surveys the research in evolutionary psychology as supporting an Aristotelian conception of human nature and human happiness. To illustrate his points, Brooks tells the fictional story of one composite American couple--Harold and Erica. As Brooks indicates, he intends to employ the technique of Rousseau's Emile, a philosophical novel, in using a fictional narrative to illustrate his account of human nature.

In March and April, I wrote a series of posts on Brooks' book that began with a critical review of the book by Thomas Nagel.  Nagel is a prominent philosopher at New York University. In 1978, he wrote one of the first responses to E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology coming from a philosopher. Like most philosophers at the time, Nagel showed the reaction of a Platonic transcendentalist in denigrating Wilson's biological account of morality. Nagel rejected sociobiological ethics because it failed to see that ethics is "an autonomous theoretical subject" like mathematics that belongs to a transcendent realm of pure logic. He argued that ethics exists at two levels--the behavioral and the theoretical. And while he acknowledged that biology could illuminate the behavioral level of ethics--the patterns of ethical action as motivated by moral emotions--he dismissed biology as irrelevant to the theoretical level of ethics as concerned with rational standards of moral justification and criticism. Insofar as morality is a matter of normative reasoning, it has nothing to do with any empirical science of human behavior.

With my memory of this essay, I was not surprised to see Nagel criticizing Brooks's book. Here we see the fundamental debate that has been the subject of many of my posts--the conflict between a Platonic or Kantian transcendentalism and an Aristotelian or Humean empiricism. Brooks shows how a Darwinian moral psychology confirms the Aristotelian and Humean tradition of empirical ethics, which will provoke the opposition of Platonic and Kantian transcendentalists like Nagel.

As can be seen in the comments on my post on Nagel, many readers of my blog object to my claim that Aristotle and Hume belong to the same empiricist tradition of ethics, because they see Hume as an ethical subjectivist or even nihilist who must be opposed to Aristotle's virtue ethics.  When I first began reading Hume as a college student, I was taught this view of Hume as opposed to Aristotle.  But later, as I read Hume more carefully, I changed my mind, and I began to see Hume as part of a tradition of ethical empiricism and naturalism stretching from Aristotle and Cicero to Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, a tradition opposed to the rationalist and transcendentalist tradition stretching from Plato to Kant.

Brooks defends the Humean tradition of moral psychology--or, as Brooks puts it, the British Enlightenment as opposed to the French Enlightenment--in showing how the deepest influences on our decisions arise largely from unconscious decisions, in being shaped by human genetic history and cultural history, rather than from conscious and rational calculations of individual interests.  Reason is important but only as guided by emotion or desire, because, as Aristotle said, "thought by itself moves nothing."  Deliberate choice should be understood as "reasoning desire" or "desiring reason."  I first saw this in one of Aristotle's biological writings--On the Movement of Animals.

In April and May, I wrote some posts on Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization.  Rather than pursuing a reductive explanation of war as determined by one or a few factors, he encompasses all the major factors influencing the whole history of human warfare over two million years, while showing how evolutionary theory can explain the origins and interrelationships of all of these factors. Gat's book helped me to think about the evolution of the natural desire for courage in war.

I continued to think about the evolution of war and possibly declining violence in modern times in October, November, and December, when I began writing a long series of posts on Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

That human history shows a general decline in violence has emerged in recent years as one of the greatest discoveries of social scientific research.  It has taken me many years to realize that.  And it has only slowly dawned on me that this has deep implications for political theory, because it provides dramatic support for Darwinian liberalism.

I decided that the empirical data of wars and violence over the last 200 years strongly supported some of Immanuel Kant's arguments for a liberal peace.  (Here is one place where I agree with Kant!) Liberal commercial republics are less inclined to go to war than other kinds of regimes, and as the cultural values of liberal commercial republicanism have spread around the world, there has been a decline in war and violence.

In fact, as Robert Wright argued in Nonzero, the entire evolutionary history of life might be rightly understood as a history of expanding cooperation producing ever increasing gains through the logic of nonzero-sum games.

This seems to confirm the evolutionary liberalism of the 19th century--particularly, as formulated by Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin--because we seem to see here that Darwin was right in his vision of the future: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.  This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races."  According to Darwin, the most recent advance of sympathy extends it even beyond humanity to include the lower animals, so that now we can see "the most noble attribute of man" in the "disinterested love for all living creatures."

In Darwinian Natural Right (pp. 143-49), I had rejected this as Darwin's "moral utopianism," while I defended Darwin's "moral realism."  Darwin's moral utopianism is clearest in the section of the Descent of Man where he cites "our great philosopher Herbert Spencer."  In some of my blog posts, I have criticized Spencer's evolutionary utopianism.

But I now think that I was wrong about this, because recognizing the evolutionary trend away from violent conflict and towards peaceful cooperation arises not from a naive utopianism but from an optimistic realism that vindicates evolutionary liberalism.

This has become clear to me from reading Pinker's Better Angels along with a book that Pinker often cites--James Payne's History of Force.  What is implicit in Pinker's book becomes explicit in Payne's book--that the evolutionary history of declining violence confirms Spencerian/Darwinian liberalism, because it shows how human beings through a long history of trial-and-error learning have discovered the benefits of peaceful cooperation and the costs of violent aggression.  Moreover, this also confirms the classical liberal insight that declining violence coincides with increasing liberty.

Payne brings this out more clearly than does Pinker, because Payne is explicit in his commitment to classical liberalism or libertarianism.  If one accepts the classical liberal or libertarian definition of liberty as arising from the absence of coercive violence, then a decline in violence means an increase in liberty, as people enjoy the benefits of voluntary cooperation while minimizing the costs of violent conflict. (This conception of liberty corresponds to what Isaiah Berlin called "negative liberty.")

As Payne indicates, the classical liberal thinkers of the 19th century were the first political theorists to adopt the reduction in the use of force as their fundamental political principle.  Although previously some political theorists had condemned some uses of force, they also wanted to use force to promote what they regarded as good ends for social and political life.  The classical liberals were the first political theorists to see how the reduction in the use of force was the fundamental condition for human progress.

This led me to add a chapter on Pinker to the 4th edition of Political Questions, which now has the subtitle Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker.  It seemed to me that Pinker's Better Angels should be seen as a major work of political philosophy that illustrates how empirical Darwinian science can illuminate, and perhaps even resolve, some of the fundamental debates in the history of political philosophy.

This also led me to organize a Liberty Fund conference on "Liberty and Violence" that met at the Westward Look Resort in Tucson, Arizona, in 2014.

In 2011, I was doing a lot of thinking about Thomas Aquinas.  At the end of the summer, I presented a paper at the American Political Science Association convention on "Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right: Replies to Critics," which renewed an argument from an article published in 2001.  In the fall, I taught a graduate seminar on Aquinas.

From June to September, I wrote a series of posts on how Thomistic natural law was rooted in Aristotle's biology, and how this could be confirmed by modern Darwinian biology. 

I also wrote some posts on Tom West's Straussian interpretation of Aquinas as an esoteric writer defending philosophic reason against biblical revelation.

In June, I wrote about how the neuroscience of self-awareness could support Locke's principle of self-ownership as the natural ground of equal rights.

In May, I wrote some posts on issues that had come up at a Liberty Fund conference on "Hayek and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge."  I decided that I needed to think more about three issues--Hayek's account of the open society as the repression of the tribal instincts of human nature, the evolution of oxytocin as one neural mechanism supporting morality and exchange in a free society, and the evolution of trade in prehistoric societies.

As I have indicated in various posts, I am not persuaded by Hayek's argument that the evolved instincts of human beings are adapted for life in a "closed society," and therefore the "open or free society" requires a cultural tradition of impersonal rules for an abstract society that suppresses those instincts, while the yearning for socialism and "social justice" manifests an atavistic desire to restore those primordial instincts.

Contrary to Hayek, it seems to me that even in small foraging groups, there was some individual autonomy, and individuals were inclined to resist domination by the arbitrary wills of others. In some respects, the modern liberal society revives the individual freedom of foraging societies, while combining that with all the advantages of modern civilization as based on global exchange networks. Our evolutionary ancestors were adapted for engaging in social exchange and detecting cheaters who violated the norms of fair exchange. Those evolved mental capacities for social engagement provided the psychological conditions in which the cultural evolution of a modern exchange society could succeed.

My debate with Hayek has continued over many years, particularly in 2013, at the Mont Pelerin Society meetings in the Galapagos and at a workshop in Freiburg, Germany, on the evolution of classical liberalism.

In July and December, I wrote out my response to Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against Darwinian naturalism: the theistic doctrine of the human mind as created by God in His image provides the necessary support for the validity of human thought, including the validity of modern science. If we embrace Naturalism--the view that nothing exists except Nature, and so there is no God or nothing like God--we are caught in self-contradiction: if human thought originated not from a divine Mind but from the irrational causes of Nature, then we cannot trust our minds as reliable, and thus we cannot trust our belief in Naturalism. Naturalism destroys itself by destroying the rationality of believing in Naturalism, or anything else. Insofar as science--including evolutionary science--depends on the validity of human thought, and insofar as theism is the indispensable support for trusting in the validity of human thought, science is not only compatible with theism, science depends upon theism.

The weak link in Plantinga's argument for metaphysical naturalism as self-defeating is his assumption that adaptive behavior is completely unrelated to true belief. The evidence of evolutionary history suggests that evolution produces cognitive faculties that are reliable but fallible. The mental abilities of animals, including human beings, are fallible because evolution produces adaptations that are good enough but not perfect, and this results in the mental fallibility that is familiar to us.  But despite this fallibility, the evolved mental faculties cannot be absolutely unreliable, because the adaptive cognitive faculties of animals, including human beings, must correspond in some manner to the reality of the world to which they are adapted.

A Thousand Posts (2)

2009
In January, my post on "Evolutionary Psychology's Slow Acceptance of Darwinian Morality" pointed to the most important turn in the recent history of evolutionary psychology--the acceptance of Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality in The Descent of Man. 

In his famous lecture on "Evolution and Ethics" in 1893, Thomas Huxley adopted a Kantian transcendentalist view of ethics and invoked the is/ought dichotomy in rejecting Darwin's claim that the evolutionary explanation of morality was part of the evolutionary science of human nature.  For over a century after Huxley's lecture, most Darwinian biologists--including George Williams and Richard Dawkins--agreed with Huxley's rejection of Darwin's evolutionary ethics.  Therefore, they were disturbed by Ed Wilson's efforts--in Sociobiology (1975) and Consilience (1998)--to revive Darwin's evolutionary study of morality.  In the 1980s and 1990s, I had argued in agreement with Darwin and Wilson, but my argument was scorned by the leaders of evolutionary psychology.  Remarkably, however, by 2009, the tide had turned as the growing research on the evolutionary psychology of morality confirmed that Darwin was right after all.  One of the leaders of this movement was Jonathan Haidt.  I wrote my first post on Haidt's research in November of 2009.  I returned to Haidt in September of 2012 and October of 2016.  In January of 2011, I wrote a post on how Sam Harris had persuaded Richard Dawkins to change his mind and accept Darwinian ethics.

An evolutionary moral psychology assumes the reality of an evolved human nature.  But my colleague at Northern Illinois University--David Buller--has dismissed the idea of human nature as a superstition in his book Adapting Minds, which is a general critique of evolutionary psychology.  In January, I wrote a post arguing that Buller's denial of human nature depends on a silly definition of human nature as consisting only of traits that satisfy three conditions--first, they must be unique to human beings and thus not shared with any other animals; second, they must be invariably and exactly the same for all human individuals everywhere; and, third, they must be eternal essences that are not historically contingent.  It is easy for Buller to argue that human evolution has not produced a human species with such traits. But a sensible definition of human nature does not require these conditions. We could define human nature as constituted by regularities in that suite of generally recurrent anatomical, physiological, and psychological traits that characterize the human species.  These regularities do not have to be uniquely human, invariably the same for all individuals, or eternal essences.  These regularities of human nature include what I have identified as the 20 natural desires.

I elaborated some of these points in April in posts on nature and human nature and on Marjorie Grene's account of natural teleology and the concept of species.  In September, I defended the Aristotelian and Darwinian understanding of species.

In the spring, I taught a graduate seminar on David Hume. In May, I wrote a long post on "A Research Program for a Humean Science of Human Nature."  In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume laid out his grand vision of a comprehensive science grounded on a science of human nature.  Every topic that I have taken up on this blog could be understood as part of this Humean science of human nature rooted in Darwinian evolutionary science. This science could be sketched out according to at least ten broad themes running through my blog posts: (1) Darwinian liberal education, (2) deep history, (3) ethology, (4) behavioral game theory, (5) neuroscience, (6) social history, (7) moral psychology, (8) evolution of religion, (9) evolutionary aesthetics, and (10) the Darwinian future of human nature.

In May and June, I travelled around England and Scotland, and I wrote a series of posts on the natural history of Great Britain based on my travels.  During this trip, I visited Darwin's house in Down and wrote some posts on that.  As I indicated, some of my first reading of Darwin included the notebooks that he began writing after he returned to England from his trip on the Beagle.  I was impressed with those notebooks as showing Darwin's mind at work, and my writing of this blog is in some ways following the style of Darwin's writing in his notebooks.

My visit to Darwin's house and reading about his family life led me to write about how Darwin's pondering the suffering and death of his daughter Annie manifested his understanding of love and death.  I wrote this in response to Peter Lawler's assertion that Darwin advanced an "impersonal theory of evolution" denying the personal reality of love and death.

From the end of June to the end of September, I wrote many posts on the history and philosophy of Platonic moral cosmology, in which I set up a debate between Remi Brague and C. S. Lewis, on one side, and Catherine Zuckert and Joseph Cropsey, on the other.  Brague and Lewis see Plato's dialogues (particularly the Timaeus and book 10 of The Laws) as defending a divinely designed teleological cosmology as setting the cosmic standards for the moral and political life of human beings, but they also see this Platonic moral cosmology as overturned by modern science (including Darwinism) in a way that promotes moral nihilism by teaching that the cosmos is indifferent or even hostile to human concerns.  By contrast, Zuckert and Cropsey see Plato's Socrates as denying, or at least questioning, that moral cosmology taught by Timaeus and the Athenian stranger, and suggesting that instead of finding moral guidance in the cosmos, humans need to look to their own human wants and desires.  Even if the cosmos does not care about or for us, we care about and for ourselves.  This Socrates identified by Zuckert and Cropsey belongs to a tradition of Socratic skepticism that includes Cicero, Hume, and Darwin.

If Zuckert and Cropsey have the correct interpretation of Socrates' position, then Socrates is close to my position--that human morality and politics depend not on a cosmic teleology but on an immanent teleology of human natural desires.  If human beings are by their natural desires directed to certain ends or purposes, then we can see those ends or purposes as intrinsic to their nature, regardless of whether those ends or purposes have any cosmic reference.  Darwinian biology supports such an immanent teleology because it recognizes the goal-directed behavior characteristic of various animal species, including the human species.

While some Straussians like Zuckert and Cropsey reject Platonic cosmic teleology as false, others insist that it needs to be supported as at least a "noble lie" that sustains popular conceptions of natural right, and that the Darwinian denial of cosmic teleology is (as Nietzsche put it) "true but deadly."

In September, I endorsed the "Midwest Straussianism" promoted by Catherine and Michael Zuckert.  The Straussians seem to have affirmed three propositions that are contradictory: 1. America is modern. 2. Modernity is bad. 3. America is good.  To overcome the contradiction, the West-Coast Straussians have denied #1, the East-Coast Straussians have denied #3, and the Midwest Straussians have denied #2.  I agree with the Midwest Straussians that modernity is good, and for me this includes not only modern political thought, but also modern natural science.

From October to December, I wrote many posts on the evolutionary biology of human rights as rooted in evolved human nature, and in doing so, I argued that the idea of human rights does not depend on any religious belief in the creation of human beings in the image of God.  As part of this discussion, I wrote about the debate over female genital mutilation as a violation of human rights.

2010
In January, I travelled to England to direct a week-long seminar at Oxford University on "Evolution and Ethics."  The participants were mostly philosophy professors and students from China.  In October, we met again in China (Beijing) for a conference to present papers coming out of the seminar.  This led to a series of posts on the evolutionary psychology of ethics.

As I anticipated, much of the discussion at the seminar turned on the debate between the Platonic or transcendentalist view of ethics and the Humean or empiricist view. A Darwinian evolutionary understanding of ethics is on the side of the Humean view that sees ethics as rooted in human nature, particularly in human emotions, beliefs, and desires. On the other side, the Platonic view taken by those like Kant looks to a transcendent conception of the Good that is somehow woven into the order of the cosmos. (As I have indicated in various posts, the careful reader of the Platonic dialogues might doubt whether Plato himself--or Plato's Socrates--was a Platonist in this way.)

A growing number of leading philosophers today are adopting a Humean/Darwinian moral psychology supported by recent research in evolutionary science, neuroscience, anthropology, and animal behavior. But one can still see the powerful influence of a Kantian transcendentalism in moral philosophy that regards morality as an autonomous realm of pure reason totally separated from the empirical realm of nature as studied by natural science.

Kantian philosophers like Richard Joyce worry that evolutionary ethics promotes moral nihilism by teaching that morality is fictional. Joyce agrees with Kant that by definition moral judgments presuppose belief in a transcendent world of moral facts beyond the empirical world of natural facts. But since he denies the truth of that belief, because there really are no such moral facts, he concludes that we cannot know that morality is true, and therefore we cannot know that moral rightness and wrongness really exist. Moreover, he argues that evolutionary ethics necessarily leads us to this conclusion that morality is fictional, because an evolutionary account of morality explains it as arising from the natural facts of human desires and capacities without any reference to any distinctively moral facts.

I agree that believing in a moral law grounded in divine will or transcendent reason might strengthen the moral motivation of people with such a belief. But it seems clear to me that people can still have a strong motivation for moral conduct when they believe that morality has no other ground than the evolved human nature of our moral emotions.

That a Kantian philosophical idealism does not necessarily support good moral judgment is indicated by the fact that most of the German philosophers who supported Nazism were Kantian idealists. For me, as I indicated in a post in January, this suggests that the evils of Nazism flowed from a metaphysical tradition of idealist utopian philosophy that stretches from Plato to Fichte to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

My reasoning for rejecting Kantian categorical normativity is clarified in my post on "Philippa Foot and the Hypothetical Imperatives of Natural Goodness" (March).

In 2010, I wrote a lot about the natural evolution of religious belief.  I have identified the desire for religious understanding as one of the twenty natural desires rooted in our evolved human nature. Human beings generally desire to understand the world as governed by gods or God, because this satisfies their natural longing to make sense of things that would otherwise be incomprehensible.

The recent research on the evolutionary and cognitive causes of religious belief goes a long way to substantiate my position. The general reasoning for how religious belief evolved as an innate disposition of human nature is laid out by David Hume and Charles Darwin. This new research provides elaborate theoretical and empirical grounds for their naturalistic account of religion.

One of the proponents of this research is Justin Barrett, whom I met at the Oxford seminar. He is an evolutionary psychologist who argues that the evolved propensity of the human mind to detect intelligent agents supports a natural tendency to believe in divine agents. Barrett is a Christian evolutionist.  His work largely confirms what Hume says in his Natural History of Religion. Barrett is a Christian who sees his evolutionary explanation of religious belief as compatible with his own Christian belief that God has created human beings so that they can discover him.  I have also written about Jesse Bering (in February of 2011), who explains the evolutionary psychology of religious belief in a way similar to Barrett's explanation, but Bering is an atheist.

Also in 2010, I wrote about Rebecca Goldstein's philosophical novel on the "36 arguments for the existence of God" (February), the evolution of Heaven and Hell (April-May), the evolutionary game theory of how religion supports cooperation (April), and Confucianism (June, August, October).  My writing on Confucianism was drawn from my paper on Darwinian and Confucian Ethics for the conference on "Evolution and Ethics" in Beijing in October, which included some of the same Chinese professors and students who were at the Oxford conference in January.

Religious belief is uniquely human because it arises from the uniquely human capacity for symbolic thought and communication that allows human beings to construct a shared imagined reality.  In February, I wrote about how Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have explained human symbolism as one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic.  Recognizing these four levels of evolution helps to explain the "animal culture wars" (April): if "culture" is defined as inherited behavioral traditions, then some nonhuman animals have culture; but if "culture" is defined as inherited symbolic traditions (like religious belief), then this is uniquely human.

In 2010, I wrote a lot about Aristotelianism.  In March and April, I wrote a series of posts on Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl's Aristotelian liberalism and showed how a Darwinian moral and political psychology supported this.  In the fall, I was teaching a graduate seminar on Aristotle, and I wrote some posts in September, October, and December, on "Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics," which went into my paper on "The Darwinian Science of Aristotelian Virtue" for the conference on "Science and Virtue" organized by Peter Lawler and Marc Guerra at Berry College (Mount Berry, Georgia) in November.  In 2013, the papers for this conference were published in The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke, edited by Lawler and Guerra (NIU Press).

In July, I pointed to my essay for "Cato Unbound" on "Darwinian Liberalism," which would lead to papers and lectures in later years on the Darwinian psychology of classical liberalism.

My list of 20 natural desires includes the natural desire for courage in war, because human beings generally desire war when they think it will advance their group in conflicts with outside groups.  The is the one desire that has provoked the most criticism from people who are uncomfortable with the idea that war might be rooted in evolved human nature.  In 2010, I began to write the evolutionary psychology of war in various posts (in February, June, and December).  I returned to this issue in 2011, in response to the publication of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Also, in 2010, I began writing about anarchism (June) and equality in the Lockean state of nature (July), and I would return to these topics in subsequent years.

To be continued . . .

A Thousand Posts

This is my 1,000th post!

As suggested by my publisher in England, I began this blog at the end of August in 2005 to promote my book Darwinian Conservatism.  I soon realized that I wanted to continue the blog as a way to collect and organize my thoughts about Darwinian evolution and political philosophy.  I did not foresee that I would write as many as one thousand essays.  Much of this writing has found its way into my conference papers, articles, and books.  For example, the 4th edition of Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker includes a lot of material that originally appeared on this blog.

It seems fitting to use this post to survey the highlights of my posts over the past 12 years.

2005
My first post was a reprinting of my article in First Things (November, 2000)--"Conservatives, Darwin, & Design"--with commentaries by Michael Behe and William Dembski and my response.  This article was the first presentation of my argument for "Darwinian Conservatism"--"Conservatives need Charles Darwin."  Behe, Dembski, and many others have dismissed this as a silly idea.  Most of my posts have been, in one way or another, attempts to show that this might not be as silly as many people assume.

Conservatives believe that Darwinian science must promote a morally corrupting atheistic materialism.  I have tried to explain why this is not true.  In the final months of this first year of the blog, I did that by replying to various critics of Darwinian Conservatism--including not only Behe and Dembski, but also Herbert Gintis, Bob Cheeks, and Richard Weikart.

At the same time, I agreed with the proponents of intelligent design theory who insist that biology classes in the public schools should "teach the controversy" by teaching intelligent design theory as an alternative to Darwinian science.  I suggested teaching the controversy by teaching Darwin.  Why not allow students to actually read Darwin and notice that Darwin argues for his "theory of natural selection" as superior to the "theory of special creation."  To understand Darwin's argument, one must understand the alternative theory that he was rejecting.  Along with Darwin, students could also read some recent science writing defending evolution along with the writing of intelligent design proponents criticizing evolution.  The students would then have to weigh the evidence and arguments on both sides and make up their own minds.  This would include studying the moral, political, and religious implications of this debate.  This would, I am sure, be a much more engaging way for students to study biology than the old-fashioned textbook class.

Although I have never taught high school students, I have taught college students in classes at Northern Illinois University that were cross-listed in both the political science and biology departments.  I have found that allowing the students to think through the issues for themselves is stimulating.  Many of the biology students found this more interesting than their regular biology classes in which they were prohibited from considering the criticisms of evolutionary science and deciding for themselves.

2006
In January and February, I began a series of posts continuing to the present defending what I call "Darwinian natural right" against the claims of Leo Strauss and the Straussians that modern biology cannot support the idea of natural right.  Contrary to what the Straussians assume, natural right can be rooted in an immanent teleology of evolved human nature rather than a cosmic teleology of eternally fixed species.  My best debating partner here has been Carson Holloway, a Catholic Straussian, who began his debate with me in graduate seminars at NIU.  In June, I began a long series of posts debating Peter Augustine Lawler, a Catholic conservative influenced by Strauss.

In October, I wrote the one post that has received more pageviews than any other--"So What's Wrong with Incest?"--which mostly supports Edward Westermarck's evolutionary account of the incest taboo.  Apparently, a lot of people are interested in incest.  I have noticed, however, that over the past year, the views of this post have declined.  Are people less interested in incest than they once were?  In any case, I have written many posts on Westermarck and the incest taboo, because this is, as Edward Wilson has noted, one of the best developed illustrations of how evolutionary science can explain a moral rule.

In November, I began a series of posts responding to John West's Darwin's Conservatives, which was the first book criticizing my Darwinian conservatism.  West is a proponent of intelligent design at the Discovery Institute.

In December, I wrote some posts engaging Timothy Sandefur, who generally supports the idea of Darwinian natural right, but who doubts the wisdom of my defense of "fusionism"--Frank Meyer's idea that American conservatism combines traditionalist conservatism and classical liberalism or libertarianism.  A recurrent theme of my writing on this blog has been a defense of this fusion, which I see in John Locke and Adam Smith as well as much of American conservatism, and which I present as founded in an evolutionary moral and political anthropology.

At the end of December, I wrote about my article on "Darwinian Liberal Education" in Academic Questions, which presents my argument for a broad conception of Darwinian science as a comprehensive interdisciplinary science that unifies the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.  Here the influence of Ed Wilson's conception of "consilience" is clear.

Reading Leo Strauss helped me to see how the fundamental dilemma of modernity explained the loss of liberal education as a comprehensive study of the whole. The natural sciences assume a materialist reductionism that cannot account for the human mind or spirit. The humanities assume a radical dualism that treats human consciousness and conduct as autonomous in their separation from the causal order of the natural sciences. The social sciences are then torn between these two contradictory positions.

We might overcome this dilemma, if we could see Darwinian biology as a comprehensive science that would unify all the intellectual disciplines by studying human experience as part of the natural whole. This would continue the Aristotelian tradition of biology, because, as Strauss observed, Aristotle believed that biology could provide "a mediation between knowledge of the inanimate and knowledge of man."

But as I have indicated in various posts, Strauss and the Straussians are inconsistent on this issue, because they often affirm a distinctly modern (and Kantian) radical dualism of nature and mind that contradicts their Aristotelian naturalism.

2007
In February, I began my annual posts on the birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln--February 12, 1809--which provides the occasion for thinking about the remarkable points of comparison in their lives.

Also in February, I wrote a post on "Chimpanzee Political Science" that was the first in a long series of posts on my argument that political science needs to become a Darwinian comparative science of political animals.  My thinking here began when I was a college student interested in Aristotle, and I noticed that over one quarter of all of Aristotle's writing was on biology, and that his moral and political writing--like the Nicomachean Ethics--is full of comparisons between humans and other animals.  Then, as I studied the research in comparative animal behavior based on evolutionary science, I began to see how there could be a comprehensive Darwinian political science of political animals.

In April and May, I defended Darwinian conservatism in debates at the national meeting of the Philadelphia Society and at the American Enterprise Institute.  I wrote about these debates and the press coverage, including a long front-page article in the New York Times.

Also in July, I began a series of posts criticizing Leon Kass's view of modern science, which shows a dubious Heideggerian and phenomenological account of modern science as crudely reductionistic that has been embraced by many of the Straussians.

In October, I argued that behavioral game theory confirmed Adam Smith's moral philosophy, which began a series of posts on evolutionary game theory as applied to the history of political philosophy.

In November, my post on "The Genetics of IQ and the Declaration of Independence" became the first in a series of posts over the years on the moral and political implications of the evolution of intelligence.  If IQ is at least partly genetic, and if some racial groups tend on average to have higher IQ, does that deny the moral and political principle of human equality?  I argue that the principle of human equality of rights does not require an absolute equality of intelligence, but rather an equality in those minimal moral and intellectual capacities that dispose human beings to resist exploitation and to demand justice as reciprocity.  Here I am elaborating points from my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Rights: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature.

2008
The most common criticism of evolutionary ethics and politics is that it commits the "naturalistic fallacy" by falsely inferring values from facts or an "ought" from an "is."  In January and February, I wrote posts on "Moving from 'Is' to 'Ought,'" which initiated a series of posts over the years arguing that the ideas of the naturalistic fallacy or the is/ought dichotomy are mistaken.  Human beings and other animals move from "is" to "ought" through hypothetical imperatives constructed as given/if/then reasoning.  Given an animal's nature, if that animal desires to flourish (survive and reproduce), then it ought to act in certain specified ways to achieve that end.  There is nothing fallacious about this.

In the spring, I returned to one of the recurrent themes of this blog--the flaws in intelligent-design theory, particularly as developed by the folks at the Discovery Institute.  One of the flaws is theological.  While it is attractive to many Christians, who believe that the intelligent designer is God, it actually contradicts orthodox Christian theology by assuming a Gnostic antagonism between natural order and divine intelligence. It assumes a dichotomy such that either living beings naturally evolved or they were intelligently designed. William Dembski's "explanatory filter" posits that if we can explain something as a product of natural regularities, then we cannot attribute this to design. But Christian theology would say that everything is intelligently designed by God--either through His design of natural laws (including evolution) or through His designing things outside His natural laws. For that reason, many Christian scientists (like C. S. Lewis and Father Michael Heller who received the Templeton Prize in 2008) believe that if all living things could be explained as products of Darwinian natural evolution, this would be a wondrous manifestation of God's power for intelligently designing natural laws to execute His purposes. Whether God works through the ordinary laws of nature or through extraordinary miracles, it's all an expression of His intelligent design. From the point of view of Christian theology, Darwinian evolution is intelligent design.

I also pointed to a split in the intelligent design movement, in that Michael Behe, a prominent intelligent design biologist, has concluded that human evolution from primate ancestors can be explained as fully natural evolution, and he has moved towards theistic evolution, so that the intelligent designer could work primarily through natural laws set up at the beginning.

I have also challenged the "Darwin to Hitler" argument of intelligent design proponents like David Berlinski and Richard Weikart, because it passes over the fact that Hitler's Nazism contradicts what Darwin said about the natural moral sense.

My blog writing has often been influenced by whatever I have been teaching.  In the spring, I was teaching a graduate seminar on "American Political Novels."  My blog posts on Mark Twain and Ayn Rand were connected with my teaching Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Rand's The Fountainhead.  In Twain's writing, I saw some expression of a Darwinian evolutionary ethics of sympathy.  In Rand's writing, I saw her teleological ethics of life that can be rooted in evolutionary nature.

My blog writing has also been influenced by my work on conference papers, articles, and books.  At this time, I was writing a paper on "Biopolitical Science" for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.  In that paper, I argued for a theoretical analysis of political behavior as conforming to a nested hierarchy of three levels of deep history: the natural history of political universals as shaped by the genetic evolution of the species, the social history of political cultures as shaped by cultural evolution, and the individual history of political judgments in of individual political actors in particular circumstances.  I argued that a biopolitical science would study these three levels in the political history of all political animals.  This could be applied to chimpanzee politics, bonobo politics, and insect politics as well as human politics.  In this paper, I explained Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 as illustrating the three levels of biopolitical science.  Many of my blog posts, including posts in July on Lincoln, were related to this paper.

My post in April on "The Individuality, Contingency, and Historicity of Life" is also related to this paper.  A biopolitical science, like biology generally, must recognize the historical contingency and individuality of life.  Political animals have a political history that is unique for each animal community.

In June, I wrote my first blog post on David Christian's "Big History," which based on the idea that the discipline of history should encompass all of history from the Big Bang to the present and beyond.  Evolutionary science can be understood in this way--as a comprehensive science of cosmic evolution from the beginning of the universe.  I returned to Big History in 2016 (in January, February, and June).  This is connected to my interest in Lucretius's On the Nature of Things as ancient Big History.  I would like to write an article someday on Lucretian political philosophy as Big History.

Also in June, I wrote about Daniel Smail's neuroscience of history, which is another form of Big History, or what he calls "deep history."  Traditionally, historians have written about the history of the past 6,000 years, and whatever might have happened before that time--before the invention of writing--has been dismissed as "prehistory."  Smail points out that this reflects the legacy of Biblical history and the assumption that the world is no older than 6,000 years.

In May, June, October, and November, I wrote a series of posts on the neuroscience of the soul, including male and female brains, and the neuroscience of law.  I am interested in how the mind or soul can be explained as an emergent product of the evolution of the primate brain, and how that emergent mind gives us freedom of thought and action.

In August, I wrote about my responses to seven commentaries on Darwinian Conservatism by Neil Blackstone, Lauren Hall, Carson Holloway, Peter Lawler, Timothy Sandefur, Richard Sherlock, Michael Shermer, and John West.  These seven commentaries and my response were published in 2009 in Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, edited by Kenneth Blanchard.  This writing clarified the debate among conservatives and libertarians over my conception of Darwinian conservatism.

Much of this debate, as I indicated in posts in September and October, can be seen as a debate between "metaphysical conservatism" and "evolutionary conservatism."  I elaborated this point in an article that appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review.

Ed Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge has had a deep influence on my thinking about evolutionary ethics and about the unification of knowledge that Wilson calls "consilience."  In October, I wrote a post endorsing Wilson's promotion of "empiricist ethics" as superior to "transcendentalist ethics."  I agreed with him that Aristotle, Hume, Smith, and Westermarck belonged to the empiricist ethics tradition as opposed to Kant and many "normativist" philosophers today who belong to the transcendentalist ethics tradition.  (In fact, here I proudly noticed some influence on Wilson coming from some of my writing.)  But I criticized Wilson for not seeing how Thomas Aquinas's natural law belonged to the empiricist tradition, although Aquinas's divine law belonged to the transcendentalist tradition.  This is part of my defense of Thomistic natural law as Darwinian natural right, which I first laid out in a 2001 article.

I also criticized Wilson for not seeing how the consilience of all knowledge was best understood through an emergent order rather than through a reduction of everything to physics.  I remember well how Wilson and I argued about this in a telephone call shortly after the publication of Consilience in 1998.

My rejection of Kantian transcendentalism is a recurrent theme that comes out in my post (in November) on John Hare's Kantian critique of Darwinian natural right.  Hare has been one of my best debating partners for many years.  He defends a Kantian "divine command theory" of ethics that puts him in opposition to my position.

 

To be continued . . .