Darwinian Natural Law: A Reply to Gavin Colvert

In Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I have suggested that a Darwinian naturalism can support a conception of "Darwinian natural right" that is similar to traditional natural law reasoning. I have also elaborated this point in my paper "Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right," published as an article in Social Philosophy & Policy (winter 2001)and in Natural Law and Modern Moral Philosophy (edited by Ellen Frankel Paul et al. for Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Recently, Gavin Colvert, a philosopher at Assumption College, has published a response to my reasoning--"Back to Nature: Aquinas and Ethical Naturalism"--which can be found here.

Although Colvert praises my efforts at providing a Darwinian grounding for natural moral law, he argues that there are serious defects in my position. Actually, I think that he and I are even closer than he realizes. He writes: "Aquinas holds that the normative force of the natural inclinations to various goods must be integrated through the consideration of reason. Humean sentimentalism does not provide for this possibility" (49). He concludes: "Natural inclinations are normative within a practical grasp of our nature and possibilities for human fulfillment. In other words, a genuine theory of practical reason is needed. Sentimentalism is not enough" (59). I agree! But Colvert doesn't see this agreement because he does not notice my emphasis on prudence as essential for moral deliberation. See, for example, Darwinian Natural Right (17-21, 44-49, 80-81, 152-60, 166-70,188-89, 224-30) and Darwinian Conservatism (10, 15, 23-25, 32-33, 41-45, 110-11, 133, 142).

The good is the desirable, I argue, but what is desirable is not the same as what we happen to desire at any moment. What is desirable for us as human beings conforms to our happiness or flourishing as a deliberate conception of the harmonious satisfaction of our desires over a whole life. As Darwin indicates, only human beings can be moral beings in this sense, because only they have the cognitive capacities for reason and language that allow them to formulate a plan of life, so that they can judge present actions in the light of past experience and future expectations. Pure reason by itself cannot move us to action. But practical reason can move us when it is linked to natural desire or inclination. I agree, therefore, with Colvert's claim that "reason must integrate the objects of natural desire into a coherent understanding of the human good" (37).

Colvert identifies me as a "Humean sentimentalist." This ignores the emphasis I give to practical reasoning. It also ignores Hume's point that morality requires a conjunction of reason and sentiment. I and Hume would agree with Darwin's conclusion: "Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment--originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit."

Colvert relies on Carson Holloway's critique of my position. I have responded to Holloway on various occasions. One of my posts on Holloway can be found here.

Like Holloway, Colvert appeals to Tocqueville in stressing the importance of religious belief for morality. I agree with Tocqueville's claim that "considering religions from a purely human point of view, one can say that all religions derive an element of strength which will never fail from man himself, because it is attached to one of the constituent principles of human nature" (quoted by Colvert at p. 53). After all, I stress the natural desire for religious understanding and the ways in which religion reinforces morality. But I also argue that the natural moral sense can stand on its own natural ground in human nature even without religious belief.

John West's DARWIN DAY IN AMERICA

I have had a series of debates with John West, the Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute will sponsor our next debate on November 15 at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle.

I have responded to West's book Darwin's Conservatives in various posts, some of which can be found here, here, and here.

West's new book--Darwin Day in America--is being published by ISI Books. The book will be released next month. But I have already read the book in page proofs. It is a very good book in surveying the bad effects of a crude scientific materialism in American public policy. That's why I have written a blurb for ISI Books praising it.

My one point of disagreement with West, however, is that I cannot understand why he wants to blame Darwinian science for all of the bad thinking and bad policies attributed to scientific materialism. For example, he criticizes Louis Sullivan's modern architecture for its "reductionist view of buildings as the sum of their functions and building materials." What does this have to do with Darwin? Well, Sullivan said that he was influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution, and therefore, West concludes, Darwin must have been responsible for modern architecture. But then West also notes that Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright also manifested a mystical romanticism that didn't seem very Darwinian. Again, I don't see that there is any kind of inevitable connection to Darwinian science.

Similarly, West criticizes John Watson for his behavioral psychology. But Watson's denial of human nature and affirmation that human beings come into the world as a "blank slate" with no innate propensities and open to environmental conditioning rejects any Darwinian science of human nature! And yet somehow, according to West, this behaviorist rejection of human biological nature is a consequence of Darwinism. I can't see the logic in this at all.

West assumes that Darwinian science requires a strong reductionism in which "the parts are more important than the whole--to the degree that sometimes the whole seems to be a lot less than the sum of the parts." But in Darwinian Conservatism, I argue that Darwinian biology requires the idea of emergence, in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's why I argue against E. O. Wilson's "consilience" as strong reductionism and in favor of "consilience" as emergent complexity.

West presents his argument in almost totally negative terms. He indicates the weaknesses in a strongly reductionist science--particularly, in its moral and political implications. But he never elaborates his positive alternative. (This reliance on negative argumentation is common for the proponents of intelligent design theory.) His argument would be strengthened if he could say: having shown the morally dubious consequences of scientific reductionism, now let me explain to you the moral strength of my alternative conception, which is . . .

West says that Darwin's science cannot support "traditional morality," because it provides no "permanent foundation for ethics," and it abolishes "transcendent moral standards." But then he never explains anywhere in his book the content or ground of those "transcendent moral standards."

At the end of the book, he criticizes Darwin for not appealing to "timeless standards of truth sanctioned by God or nature." He thinks the clearest evidence for this is the "startling passage" about how the morality of human beings would be different if they were hive-bees. If human beings lived like bees, Darwin suggests, "our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering." But why does West find this "startling"? Does he believe that the morality of bees must be the same as the morality of human beings, because all living things are governed by the same "timeless standards"? But surely what is naturally good or desirable for human beings is not the same as what would be good or desirable for bees.

West says that "according to Darwin's framework, everything that regularly occurred in nature must be regard as normal almost by nature." But Darwin's hive-bee passage says just the opposite. What is "normal" for hive-bees is not "normal" for human beings.

So, again, I ask, what is West's alternative conception of morality as based on "timeless standards of truth sanctioned by God or nature"? Could he give us an example of the "transcendent moral standards" that he has in mind? Perhaps he could say that the Bible provides such transcendent moral standards sanctioned by God. But don't we have to pass the Bible through a moral filter to get morally correct conclusions, because sometimes the Bible is contrary to our natural moral sense?

As someone deeply influenced by C. S. Lewis, West might want to appeal to Lewis's idea of the universal morality that he calls the Tao in The Abolition of Man. But isn't it interesting that when Lewis adds his appendix to that book, with examples of the Tao, he is very selective. Lewis quotes from the Bible the commandment "thou shalt not kill." But he does not quote the command to "let no breathing thing live" in the conquest of Canaan (Deuteronomy 20:10-20). Nor does Lewis quote any of the biblical passages endorsing slavery. Thus, Lewis carefully picks out those biblical passages that conform to his natural moral sense and rejects those that don't.

West devotes a lot of attention to the debate over the moral status of fetuses, because he sees abortion as a denial of the human dignity of the fetus. But there is no clear biblical statement that life begins at conception. On the contrary, the only biblical passage that seems pertinent suggests that a fetus's life has less value than that of a fully formed human being (Exodus 21:22-27). Even the papal statesments on abortion concede that the belief in life as beginning at conception cannot be based on the Bible. By contrast, many Jews interpret the biblical account of the creation of Adam as indicating that a fetus does not become human until there is a respiratory system in place, because Adam was less than fully human until God breathed life into him.

When readers of the Bible go through the story of God commanding Abraham to kill his innocent son Isaac as a test of Abraham's faith (Genesis 22), some readers interpret this to mean that we must obey any command of God no matter how immoral it is, and thus we are taught, as Kierkegaard said, that faith in God requires "the suspension of the ethical." But most readers assume that there must be some mistake in this biblical story, because surely God would not command what most of us recognize as an immoral act.

On this and other moral issues, it is not clear how we could grasp the transcendent moral standards sanctioned by God if we did not already have a natural moral sense.

West makes a lot of the connection between Darwin and eugenics. In Darwinian Conservatism, I argue that Darwin supported "good eugenics"--such as legally forbidding incestuous marriages that would produce harmful physical and mental disabilities. The recent efforts of Ashkenazi Jews to discourage the marriage of Tay-Sachs carriers would illustrate such "good eugenics." But I don't see any evidence in Darwin's writing that he endorsed Francis Galton's utopian schemes that we could properly condemn as "bad eugenics." West says that "Charles Darwin himself praised the idea of eugenic restrictions on marriage." But West doesn't notice that Darwin was specifically concerned about the effects of incest, which should be of concern for most people. Nor does West indicate that Galton's utopian eugenics goes back to Plato's proposal for eugenic mating in the Republic (459d). The cause of bad eugenics is not Darwin but utopianism.

Gregory Clark's A FAREWELL TO ALMS

Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World has been generating a lot of discussion. My interest in the book comes from its Darwinian theory of the Industrial Revolution. As I study the book, I am generally persuaded, but I am slow to fully embrace it because it goes against what I have believed about this issue.

Explaining why the Industrial Revolution emerged first in England, beginning around 1800, is one of the great questions in the social sciences. Throughout human history up to that point, all societies were caught in what Clark calls "the Malthusian trap." Clark shows that the average person in 1800 did not enjoy better material standards of living than the average person of 100,000 BC. This was because short-term increases in income due to technological improvements would bring growth in population, which would eventually force income down as greater numbers of people would divide up the limited resources. In the long run, birth rates would have to equal death rates. This was the natural economy of all animal species as subject to natural selection, including human beings. But then something happened in England around 1800, so that average incomes rose without falling, and this has spread to the most prosperous societies over the last 200 years.

The common explanation from many economists is that the institutional incentives for productivity--private property rights, free markets, low taxes, rule of law, limited government--developed first in England. The human preferences for accumulating material wealth had always been there throughout history, but the cultural evolution of institutional incentives in England was necessary to direct and channel these preferences. Before reading Clark's book, this was my position.

Against this, Clark offers some powerful empirical evidence that many, if not most, of these institutional incentives were already present in England in the Middle Ages, when private property was protected, taxes were low, markets were free, and so on. So there must have been something else at work to explain the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.

Clark's answer is that from 1200 to 1800 in England, there was a Darwinian process of "survival of the richest" by which the richest families had the highest fertility rates, so that their offspring spread through the population of England. This evolution favored the spread of middle class or bourgeois values. "Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving" (166). "The bourgeois values of hard work, patience, honesty, rationality, curiosity, and learning" were embedded "into the culture, and perhaps even the genetics" of the English (11).

This last phrase--"the culture, and perhaps even the genetics"--is repeated in various ways through the book but without much explanation. The thought seems to be that while the evidence for a cultural evolution of bourgeois values is strong, the evidence for a genetic evolution of such values is not so clear. It would be hard to prove such a genetic change by group selection in only a few centuries.

I can believe that such a cultural evolution of bourgeois values could have occurred, and if so, this would be part of what I have called Darwinian political science, which rests on the interaction of history at three levels--the genetic evolution of the species, the cultural evolution of groups within the species, and the individual history of political judgments.

There are, however, some unresolved problems in Clark's reasoning. Most important for me is whether he can adequately explain the "demographic transition." Beginning around 1890, fertility rates in the most prosperous societies begin to vary in inverse proportion to wealth. Wealthier classes of people tend to have fewer children. This reverses the "survival of the richest" trend that Clark finds in England leading up to the Industrial Revolution and then up to 1890.

Clark offers various possible explanations for the demographic transition (289-96). He seems to reject the ideas that increasing incomes in general reduce fertility or that the lack of contraception in earlier years kept fertility high. He seems to favor explanations based on the idea that people had to produce more children in the past to hope to have two or three surviving children because of the high infant mortality in the past, or based on the idea that increasing social status for women made them less inclined to submit to the rigors of mothering many children. But Clark never lays out his final assessment of the demographic transition.

This is an important issue, because it seems that if the "survival of the richest" had not shifted to the demographic transition at the end of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution would have returned to the Malthusian trap, because overpopulation would eventually have exhausted the resource base (see 289).

I would suggest that Clark's position needs to be reformulated slightly. He has shown that explaining the English Industrial Revolution as a product of institutional incentives is not sufficient. But by implication those institutional incentives are still necessary conditions for the "survival of the fittest" to bring about the cultural evolution of bourgeois values over hundreds of years. The crucial point, then, is that introducing capitalist, liberal institutions into a poor society is not going to immediately bring prosperity. That might require a long period of cultural evolution.

Darwinian Political Science in the APSA

Having just returned from the convention of the American Political Science Association in Chicago, I am thinking about the future of Darwinian political science in the APSA. (My convention paper on "Darwinian Political Science" is available on the APSA website.)

The general theme for this convention was "Political Science and Beyond," which looks to the multidisciplinary study of politics. Many of the theme panels and many of the regular panels showed interest in various areas of biology--particularly, genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary game theory, and evolutionary psychology. One of the plenary lectures for the convention was Frans de Waal's presentation on the 25th anniversary of his book CHIMPANZEE POLITICS. De Waal's lecture was a dramatic manifestation of the growing interest in Darwinian science among American political scientists.

This confirms my long-held view that although "biopolitics" is never going to sweep through political science as some kind of intellectual revolution, biological thinking will gradually enter many fields of political science research as scholars discover that human biology provides intellectual tools for political scientists working in their fields of specialization.

In particular, I see biopolitical ideas finding points of entry in public policy, political psychology, international relations, political history, and political theory. It's easy to see the importance of biology for public policy because of the issues surrounding biomedical policy. Advances in neuroscience and biotechnology will necessarily provoke deep legal and political questions with policy implications. Students get excited by these issues. And many political scientists specializing in public policy will see these issues as deserving research.

In political psychology, many political scientists are discovering the deep insights into the shaping of political attitudes and behavior coming from genetics and neuroscience. Some of the most interesting panels at the convention were devoted to this research in which neuroscientists and behavioral genetics researchers are cooperating with political scientists to develop a biological political psychology, much of which assumes evolutionary psychology as explaining the ultimate causes of human genetic and neural nature. Evolutionary game theory is also showing a growing influence among political scientists who want to understand the evolution of cooperation and the conditions for social order.

In international relations, human evolutionary biology might provide insights into the motivations for suicide terrorism and political theology. This research could also fall under the rubric of political psychology.

The APSA organized section on "Politics and History" has grown dramatically over the last few years. In the "behavioral revolution" after World War II, the tendency for American political scientists was to ignore political history and thus to ignore the historical character of political life. Now, many political scientists recognize how ridiculous this is. Political events have significance as they emerge in temporal sequences of events that often go back far into history. To abstract these events from historical time for the sake of measuring the correlations of "variables" is a strange way to study politics. The criticism of studying political history is that it becomes mere story-telling with no grounding in general theory or explanations of causal mechanisms, and is therefore not really scientific. Many of the papers for the political history panels at the APSA convention were attempts to develop and defend various ways to theorize about political history and find causal mechanisms for explaining historical patterns. Although there is no reference to Darwinian evolutionary reasoning, I believe this new political history would benefit from Darwinian thinking. A big part of my "Darwinian Political Science" paper is defending the need for Darwinian deep political history that ranges over the whole history of political animals from the Pleistocene to the present. By contrast, much of this new political history research tends to be remarkably shallow history--concentrating on the last century or two of American and European history.

As a political theorist, I see Darwinian science as providing the general theory of human political nature as moving through three levels of political history--the genetic history of political universals, the social history of political cultures, and the individual history of political judgments. And yet I have no hope that many political theorists are going to adopt such Darwinian ideas in their research. In particular, the Straussian political theorists are closed to such thinking because it runs contrary to their generally accepted doctrines about the moral and intellectual dangers coming from modern science because of its presumed reductionist materialism.

It's a safe prediction that modern Darwinian science will continue to probe ever more deeply into the human biological nature of social and political life. Those political scientists who adopt this research in application to their studies of politics will move towards a richer and deeper political science. My theoretical framework for Darwinian political science is a step towards developing a broad intellectual structure for organizing this specialized research into a coherent interdisciplinary study.

I should say, however, that those who think political science should provide precise predictive power are going to be disappointed in Darwinian political science. One of the commentators on my APSA panel criticized my proposed theoretical framework because he could not see that it would allow political scientists to predict political behavior precisely. My response to this is to point out that because Darwinian political science would grasp political life in its full complexity and contingency, such a science would not have any precise predictive power. But, after all, no science of animal behavior--including any science of human political behavior--can provide precise predictions. Jane Goodall's political history of the chimps at Gombe and Frans de Waal's political history of the chimps at Arnhem are histories of unique communities at a unique point in history, and these histories will never repeat themselves exactly. Goodall and de Waal can make some general predictions--for example, predictions about the general pattern of dominance hierarchies. But they can't predict precisely when and how any individual chimp will emerge at some position in the hierarchy. Similarly, Goodall was surprised by the war between two chimp groups that she saw in the 1970s. Based on her observations from the 1960s, she did not anticipate this. Even now, primatologists would probably not be able to predict precisely the future conflicts of chimp groups. Just as political scientists failed to predict the fall of the Soviet Union or 9/11 and the influence of terrorist networks on international relations today, so do primatologists fail to predict precisely the future of the chimps they study. The reason for this is that political animals--such as chimps and human beings--are all unique in their individual traits with unique life histories, and so the interaction of these unique individuals confronting the ever-changing circumstances of their lives produce political histories that cannot be precisely predicted.

As a true science of politics, a Darwinian political science would recognize the unpredictable complexity, contingency, and uncertainty of animal political behavior. It would permit us, however, to at least understand the general patterns of political behavior and thereby make some very general predictions about political life. But these predictions would not be precise. As Aristotle wisely said, we must demand only that level of precision that is appropriate to the subject matter that we study.

The Kibbutz Returns to Nature

In Darwinian Natural Right, I have a section on the kibbutz as an example of "secular communism." From their earliest foundings at the beginning of the 20th century, these Jewish socialist communities have been one of the most radical attempts at establishing pure socialism. In the original communities, private property and private families were abolished. Not only was all property shared in common, but children were reared in common without special ties between parents and children. This was one of the purest efforts to establish the sort of socialism prescribed by Marx and others.

My argument was that this was contrary to evolved human nature, and therefore it was not surprising that the kibbutzim were forced to give up much of their original socialism, particularly in response to the second generation of mothers and children who found the abolition of parent-child bonding too painful to endure.

I know a woman who was reared in the "children's house" of a kibbutz in Israel. She describes how painful this was and how she left as soon as she could, and then became remarkably conservative in her moral and political views, rebelling against the utopian socialism of her parents.

Now, the New York Times has an article on the recent history of the kibbutzim. It seems that not only have they given up on abolishing private families, but now they are even giving up on abolishing private property, as they increasingly rely on privatization and market incentives.

So we see even the most radical socialists returning to nature--returning to the private property and traditional family life of evolved human nature.

A Darwinian Account of England's Industrial Revolution

Gregory Clark has written a brief article summarizing the argument of his new book Farewell to Arms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

The general idea is stated in the third paragraph: "The Industrial Revolution is . . . plausibly linked to a Darwinian process of 'survival of the richest' that opeated from at least 1250. Capitalist attitudes and economic growth triumphed in England becasue those with such attitudes came to predominate in the population by biological means. The modern English are the descendents of the upper classes of the preindustrial world, those who prospered economically. The poor disappeared. The process was most likely cultural, but we cannot exclude the possibility that the English may even be genetically capitalist."

Since I don't yet have my copy of the book, I can't judge the persuasiveness of Clark's evidence and arguments based just on this article and some of the other press coverage of the book. But in principle at least, Clark's reasoning would fit into what I have called "Darwinian political science"--as in my immediately preceding post. Capitalist attitudes could have been shaped by a process of cultural evolution.

Whether this could also be genetic is, as Clark indicates, more controversial and dubious, because it's not clear that 800 years would be enough time for genetic evolution. Apparently, Clark appeals to some of the research on gene-culture coevolution--particularly, the classic case of the evolution of lactose-tolerance among people in dairying societies--as possibly applying to this case. But I will need to study the book before I can decide how plausible this is.

"Darwinian Political Science" at APSA Convention

On September 1, I will present a paper on "Darwinian Political Science" at the convention of the American Political Science Association in Chicago. My panel will meet at 2:00 pm. Preceding our panel, at 12:30, Frans de Waal will be speaking at a plenary session on the 25th anniversary of de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics. Here I will provide the introductory section of my paper, but without the references. The full paper can be found at the APSA website for the convention.

Political science could become a true science by becoming a Darwinian science of political animals. This science would be both Aristotelian and Darwinian. It would be Aristotelian in fulfilling Aristotle's original understanding of political science as the biological study of the political life of human beings and other political animals. It would be Darwinian in employing Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory as well as modern advances in Darwinian biology to explain political behavior as shaped by genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and individual judgment.

Some political scientists have complained about the deficiencies of their discipline in explaining politics. A small but growing number of political scientists have argue that a political science rooted in an evolutionary theory of human nature could overcome many of these deficiencies. I support this claim by laying out a theoretical framework for a Darwinian political science that indicates how it would rectify the defects in contemporary political science. To illustrate how such a Darwinian political science would explain particular political events, I show how such a science could account for one of the crucial turns in American political history--Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863.

Critics of the contemporary state of political science have identified at least seven deficiencies that could be alleviated by a Darwinian political science. (1) Although history matters in the study of politics, because the significance of each political event depends on its place in a temporal sequence of events over extended periods of time, contemporary political science often ignores the historical character of political life. So some political scientists have sought to recover political history as an integral part of political science. Darwinian political science would build on this scholarship, while exploring the deep history of politics over millions of years that includes not only human beings but other political animals. This evolutionary political history would move through three levels--natural history, cultural history, and individual history. So, for example, to fully explain Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, we need to see it as an event in the natural history of cooperation in the human species, in the cultural history of slavery in America, and in the individual history of Lincoln as a political actor in the Civil War.

(2) Although morality matters in the study of politics, contemporary political science often ignores the moral dimensions of political life. Against the assumption of many political scientists that political behavior is motivated solely or predominantly by the rational maximization of self-interest, some political scientists have argued for going beyond self-interest to recognize the other-regarding motives of political actors that drive political controversy as a moral debate over the common good. Darwinian political science would support this position by showing how the evolved political nature of human beings as shaped by genetic and cultural group selection shows not only a selfish concern for oneself and one's kin but also a moral concern for reciprocity, fairness, and the good of the group. Lincoln's participation in the debate over slavery and emancipation manifests this moral sense in the recognition of slavery as unjust exploitation, while also manifesting the need to accommodate the self-interest of the slaveholder as a constraint on the pursuit of justice.

(3) Although judgment matters in the study of politics, contemporary political science often has little to say about practical judgment in politics and how to distinguish good and bad political judgment. To rectify its defect, some political scientists have contended that political science needs to recognize and explain political judgment as an intellectual and moral virtue of practical wisdom that cannot be reduced to scientific or theoretical reasoning. Darwinian political science confirms Aristotle's insight about the importance of prudence or practical judgment in morality and politics. Darwinian science recognizes that brains evolved to help animals who need to make practical decisions to satisfy their desires in response to the risks and opportunities offered by their physical and social environments. Human beings and other political animals have evolved brains that allow them to make practical judgments in circumstances of social complexity where knowledge must be always uncertain and imprecise. For human beings, such judgments require deliberate reflection. But they also require worldly experience, proper habituation, intuitive insight, and emotional dispositions that go beyond purely logical reasoning. Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation illustrates the intricacy--if not mystery--of practical judgment in politics.

(4) Although emotion matters in the study of politics, political scientists who emphasize "rational choice" have often played down the role of emotion in political life, and generally many political scientists have assumed that emotion subverts rational decision-making, particularly in democracies threatened by popular passions. And yet some political scientists have argued that political decision-making and rhetoric show the interdependence of reason and emotion, because human practical cognition is guided by the emotional dispositions of human nature, which is apparent in the power that emotion has in electoral behavior. Darwinian political science shows how emotion belongs to the evolved nature of human beings and other political animals. Biological psychology uncovers the neural bases of emotion in the practical judgments of political animals. The power of emotion in political rhetoric is illustrated in the passionate controversies surrounding the Civil War and Lincoln's emancipation of slaves.

(5) Although religion matters in the study of politics, many political scientists have ignored the political importance of religion, particularly those who have assumed that "modernization" would bring a withering away of religious belief. But in recent years, the political effects of religion have been hard to ignore, which has made "politics and religion" a vibrant field of study. Even though Darwinism is sometimes associated with atheism, Darwin recognized religion's importance in the moral evolution of human beings. Following Darwin's lead, David Sloan Wilson has developed an evolutionary theory of religion as a product of genetic and cultural evolution driven by group selection: religion is adaptive insofar as it helps groups to solve collective action problems and function as collective units. American political culture has always been deeply shaped by biblical religion, and so a critical part of the debate over slavery was whether it was compatible with the Bible. It was crucial, therefore, for Lincoln to defend his Emancipation Proclamation as conforming to biblical morality.

(6) Although ambition matters in the study of politics, many political scientists look to impersonal laws of political behavior and abstract models of rational choice in which the personal ambition of political actors falls out of view. Against this tendency, some political scientists have asserted that politics is all about the manly spiritedness of ambitious political actors competing for importance. Darwinian political science recognizes such political ambition as the striving for hegemonic dominance that arises among political animals organizing themselves into hierarchies of dominance and submission. Among human beings and some other primates, this competition for dominance creates a tense balance of power between the desire of the dominant few to rule and the desire of the subordinate many to be free from exploitation. Lincoln was an example of a restlessly ambitious man who yearned to do something great in politics that would bring immortal glory to his name. His ambition was channeled and checked by the American system of constitutional government. But that constitutional system also allowed him to satisfy his ambition by winning the glory that came from issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

(7) Although liberal education matters in the study of politics, the discipline of political science has become so specialized and fragmented as to be almost completely separated not only from the natural sciences and the humanities, but even from the other social sciences, and thus it cannot be integrated into the interdisciplinary activity of liberal learning. Some political scientists worry that this professional isolation of political science from general education prevents students and scholars from seeing how the study of politics ultimately requires a general understanding of the place of human beings in the universe. Darwinian political science employs evolutionary thinking as a way of unifying knowledge across all the disciplines of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities to understand the evolved nature of human beings as political animals. This is illustrated by explaining Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as an individual political judgment constrained by the natural history of the human species and the cultural history of American politics.

The fundamental framework for Darwinian political science is the theoretical analysis of political behavior as conforming to a nested hierarchy of three levels of deep political history--the universal history of the species, the cultural history of the group, and the individual history of animals within the group. To fully comprehend the human nature of politics, we must understand the unity of political universals, the diversity of political cultures, and the individuality of political judgments. I will work through these three levels of Darwinian deep political history as they are generally manifested in human politics, and as they are particularly illustrated in Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Mark Lilla's "The Politics of God"

Today's New York Times Magazine (August 19) has an article by Mark Lilla on "The Politics of God."

Lilla traces back to Thomas Hobbes the modern Western liberal idea of separation of politics and religion. "In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation." But he argues that despite the apparent success of this Great Separation in the West, it ignored what Rousseau recognized--that human beings are "theotropic creatures" with an "urge to connect" who long for redemption from the world. Political theology, therefore, will always reassert itself to satisfy this religious longing. This can come in a secular form--such as the messianic utopianism of Nazism and Marxism. Or it can come in the form of an orthodox religious movement like Islamism. But in any case, this religious longing supporting political theology will not be easily defeated by Western liberalism.

Lilla is obviously much influenced by Eric Voegelin, particularly in his account of political messianism, although Lilla never refers to Voegelin.

In speaking of human beings as "theotropic creatures," Lilla is acknowledging what I have called the natural desire for religious understanding. Because this religious longing is rooted in evolved human nature, there is no reason to think that it can be eliminated by "modernization" or "secularization."

The question, then, is whether this religious longing can be channeled in such a way as to avoid a dangerous moral and political fanaticism. Lilla seems pessimistic about Hobbes' Great Separation as the final answer. At the end of his article, he suggests the better answer might be a "renewal of traditional political theology from within" that makes orthodox believers good citizens. He suggests that Martin Luther and John Calvin did this in the Protestant Reformation, and that Islamic thinkers like Khaled Abou El Fadl and Tariq Ramadan might do that for Islam today. But it's hard for me to understand exactly what Lilla has in mind here, particularly since both Calvin and Luther taught that heretics should be persecuted!


The one path that he does not consider is that taken by Roger Williams--the path of radical Protestantism. Contrary to what Lilla says, Hobbes did not invent the separation of religion and politics. Williams and other radical Protestants had argued before Hobbes that the New Testament--as opposed to the Old Testament--dictated liberty of conscience in religious belief. That's why Williams was expelled from Massachusetts when he rejected the theocracy in Massachusetts Bay. Moreover, Williams could argue that the New Testament Christians showed no interest in politically enforcing their beliefs on those outside their Christian churches. Paul was clear about this: "For what is it to me to judge those outside? Is it not for you to judge those inside? But God is to judge those outside" (I Corinthians 5:12-13). Here, then, is the New Testament basis for a Christian libertarianism that runs against the theocratic traditions that began with Constantine and Augustine. It is not surprising that Locke was able to quote Paul's verse as supporting the idea of toleration.

Actually, Williams and others in the Baptist tradition would seem to be much better sources for the idea of separating religion and politics than are Hobbes and Locke. In fact, Hobbes taught that the political sovereign should have the sole power to dictate the theological doctrines sanctioned by the state. So it would seem that far from teaching the Great Separation, Hobbes taught the Great Unification!

Darwinian conservatism recognizes the importance of religious belief as satisfying a natural human desire and as supporting the social life of believers within their religious groups. But it also recognizes that the natural human tendency to be corrupted by unchecked power makes it necessary to separate religion and politics by securing individual freedom of conscience.

In another post, I have elaborated my argument for Williams's position.

Reproduction Favors Religion--The Darwinian Link

Mary Eberstadt has an article in Policy Review entitled "How the West Really Lost God." Proponents of the "secularization thesis" argue that modernity brings atheism, because the spread of "Enlightened" education will bring to more and more people the news announced by Nietzsche that "God is dead." There are some problems with this idea, however. Although proponents of secularization generally assume that this is an improvement in the human condition, it has been noticed that decline in religious belief is connected to declining fertility. Particularly, in western Europe, where "secularization" seems most evident, declining birth rates are creating a social crisis, because the present generation is not producing enough children to replace themselves. One explanation is that declining religious belief creates declining birth rates, because atheists are less inclined to have and care for lots of children. So here it seems that secularization is socially harmful. Another problem, however, is that the secularization thesis can't explain why one of the most "modern" countries--the United States--is also one of the most religious.

To resolve these issues, Eberstadt argues that the causal arrow might point in the opposite direction for many people--it's not that people produce lots of babies because they're religious; rather, they are religious because they are producing lots of babies. She suggests, for example, that the history of secularization in Europe could be explained this way, because, historically, low rates of fertility in various European countries preceded the drop in religious practices.

Thus, Eberstadt is offering an anthropology of religion based on the biology of the "natural family." Giving birth, caring for children, and forming families are elemental experiences for human beings throughout history in all societies. This universal experience teaches us that there is something greater than ourselves--the perpetuation of our offspring and our families--and this opens us up to the thought that there is transcendent reality that is captured by religious belief. After all, religion is not for most people a purely intellectual and solitary decision. It's a social activity. We're religious because our religion is part of our family and the extended community of family ties.

This might also explain, Eberstadt suggests, why women tend to be more religious than men--because women are more immediately and deeply affected by having children than are men.

As I have suggested in some previous posts, the Bible shows this connection between religion and reproduction. Whenever Moses has to give some explanation as to why the Jews should obey his laws, he tells them that if they obey, they will live and propagate themselves with numerous offspring (see, for example, Deuteronomy 30:15-20).

While Eberstadt recognizes the biological ground of this connection between reproduction and religion, she does not see that she is implicitly making a Darwinian argument. In fact, her argument is very similar to what David Sloan Wilson says about religion as an adaptation of cultural group selection in which religious belief helps believers to work together as collective units, so that family ties are reinforced and extended through the group.

One should also notice that like Wilson, Eberstadt concentrates on the practical benefits of religion rather than its theological doctrines. For Wilson (and for Darwinians generally), the "vertical" dimension of religion (beliefs in supernatural agents and supernatural afterlife) is a proximate means to secure the "horizontal" dimension (practical rules for cooperation) as the ultimate end. Eberstadt says nothing about the theological truth or falsity of any particular religion, because what counts for her is the practical truth of reinforcing good social order in supporting the natural family. The concern here is with the social or moral effects of a religion, regardless of its doctrinal claims.

This preoccupation with the practical effects of religion is the proper conservative stance. That's why conservatives can agree on the practical benefits of religion even when they disagree about whether any particular religion is superior in its theological truth to any other. So you can have conservative Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Mormons working together, even though they disagree in their doctrinal creeds. You might even have skeptical conservatives (like Friedrich Hayek or Michael Oakeshott) who agree on the moral importance of religious traditions, but without necessarily accepting their theological doctrines.

Eberstadt lists Darwin along with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud as intellectuals who proclaimed that "God is dead." But in fact, as I have often argued, Darwin never openly spoke against religious belief. He was probably a skeptic by the end of his life. But he never professed atheism. And he spoke often (in THE DESCENT OF MAN and elsewhere) about the importance of religious belief for moral progress.

Conservatives like Eberstadt who make so much of the connection between reproduction, the natural family, and religious belief should recognize that they are making a Darwinian argument, which should be part of the case for Darwinian conservatism.

Bonobo Politics

In a previous post, I commented briefly on Ian Parker's article on bonobo research in The New Yorker. The article was slanted against Frans de Waal, arguing that de Waal has been responsible for a naive view of bonobos as "hippie primates" based on his limited observations of bonobos in the San Diego zoo, but without having ever seen a bonobo in the wild. Now, de Waal has written a response, which I find persuasive.

Here's how I would summarize the points of agreement and disagreement in this debate. The fundamental problem is that the observational study of bonobos is not as extensive as that for chimpanzees. In the wild, bonobos are found only south of the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's very hard to study them there because of the density and inaccessibility of their jungle habitat, and because of the political violence in the DRC. Most of the behavioral research has been done in zoos. In 2006, there were only a total of 84 bonobos in North America and 76 in Europe. The largest captive group is in the Milwaukee County Zoo, which has 21 individuals. By contrast, there are far more chimps in zoos around the world. Moreover, chimps have been studied in the wild for many decades at multiple sites.

Chimps have both male and female dominance hiearchies, but the alpha male dominates overall. Chimps are both competitive and cooperative. Their competition can be violent, even to the point of lethal violence. Until the 1970s, Jane Goodall was reporting that chimps were remarkably peaceful. But then she observed the chimps at Gombe dividing into two territorial groups that went to war, with the northern group (led by aggressive males) decimating the southern group. There have also been observations of lethal violence within chimp groups in the competition for alpha male status.

Bonobos also have both male and female dominance hierarchies, but it seems that the females dominate over the males. Although the adult bonobo males are bigger and stronger than the females, the females seem to be able to intimidate the males through a sexual bonding of females, who engage in elaborate bisexual acrobatics. The situation here is unclear because some primatologists speak of bonobos as showing "co-dominance," in which the alpha male and alpha female share dominance. Richard Wrangham, Takayoshi Kano, and Chris Boehm take this position. But de Waal and Amy Parish tend to stress female dominance.

This ambiguity in the dominance structure of bonobos is evident in the group at the Milwaukee Zoo, where I have often taken the students from my "Chimpazee Politics" class. Until recently, the top of the dominance hierarchy has been held by a male-female mated pair. (A good survey of this Milwaukee group can be found in a new book--Jo Sandin's Bonobos: Encounters in Empathy.) Careful observation by keepers at the zoo, supported with meticulous daily records of behavior, suggests that the female Maringa is the "matriarch" over the whole group, although her longtime mate Lody is the alpha male. At times, Lody seemed to be just enforcing the female dominance of "the power chicks." At other times, he seemed to be acting as equal to Maringa, as if they were the "royal couple."

Bonobos seem to use sexual pleasure--homosexual as well as heterosexual--as a way of pacifying conflict and releasing tension. Thus, sexuality is not just for reproduction but also for nonreproductive bonding. This pacifying effect of sexual coupling also seems to be used when bonobo groups meet in the wild. While chimps have been observed using lethal violence in group competition, bonobos have never been seen to do this. This might be because we haven't yet observed bonobos long enough. After all, Goodall had to wait for almost 15 years before she saw warfare among her chimps. But at least as of now, the evidence suggests that bonobos are better at pacifying conflict than are chimps.

Still, this does not mean that bonobos are totally peaceful. As de Waal says, the very fact that bonobos have to work hard at reconciliation shows that there is competition and conflict that needs to be controlled.

And if bonobos seem in some ways to be more egalitarian than chimps, this does not mean that hierarchy is completely absent among bonobos. There is a dominance structure among both females and males, and it's ultimately a matter either of female dominance over the males or co-dominance of alpha female and alpha male.

If human ancestry is traceable back to a common ancestor with bonobos and chimps, then one would expect that human beings show a political nature that is ambivalent in combining competition and cooperation, a propensity to dominance and a propensity to resist dominance. In his newest book Our Inner Ape, de Waal concludes that human beings are the "bipolar ape," combining chimp and bonobo traits, "being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathic than bonobos."

In any case, I see nothing here to support the Marxist notion that social engineering in a socialist society could make human beings so selflessly cooperative that they would have no interest in private property or social hierarchy. The failure of the Marxist regimes in the 20th century confirms the conclusion of primatologists like de Waal that Marxism is contrary to human nature.

We are neither selfless cooperators nor rational egoists. We are neither purely egalitarian animals nor purely despotic. We are a complex mixture of natural propensities that balance self-interest against cooperation and dominance against equality.

This goes against the utopian belief of the radical left in human perfectibility as supporting a revolutionary transformation of the human condition through social re-education. Rather, it supports the realistic belief of libertarian conservatism in human imperfectiblity as showing the need for regimes based on traditional morality, family life, private property, and limited government.

Other posts on bonobos can be found here and here.

Phil Gasper's Article in the INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW

The July/August issue of the International Socialist Review has an article by Phil Gasper criticizing my argument for Darwinian conservatism.

Gasper insists that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels accepted Darwin's science, which shows that the ideology of the socialist Left is compatible with Darwinism. But Gasper does not tell his reader that Marx and Engels set up a sharp dichotomy between animal nature and human culture, so that they could say that Darwinian science explained the natural world of animals and the human body but not the uniquely human world of cultural history. Although other animals have some capacity for labor, Marx claimed, only human beings have the capacity for purposeful working upon the world to conform to some plan in the imagination. By changing the natural world to satisfy his needs, man also 'changes his own nature.' This allows Marx to protect his utopian vision of socialist perfectibility from being subverted by Darwinian naturalism. This same socialist tendency towards viewing human beings as capable of a utopian transcendent freedom from nature is manifest in Gasper's appeal to Stephen Jay Gould's vision of human transcendental freedom.

The mistake that comes from such utopian transcendentalism--broadly characteristic of all Leftist thought--is refusing to recognize the limits set by human imperfectibility. For example, Marx asserted that the greatest revolutionary change would come with the rule of the proletariat, which would bring a classless society and thus the end of all domination of some over others. Against Marx, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin warned that Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" would actually become a new "despotism of a governing minority." "He who doubts this," Bakunin insisted, "simply doesn't know human nature." Marx responded by ridiculing Bakunin's "hallucinations about domination."

Like Marx, Gasper rejects my claim "that humans instinctively seek power." According to Gasper, we can conclude that there is no "instinct for power" when we see "examples of cooperation and solidarity." He quotes from anthropologist Richard Lee's account of the Kung bushmen as showing that "the earliest human societies were not based on competition, inequality, and hierarchy." Here Gasper follows Marx's lead in arguing that pure communism would restore the original communism of primitive hunter-gatherers.

Gasper does not tell his reader that Richard Lee calculated that the homicide rate among the Kung was comparable to that of Detroit. (See Lee's book The !Kung San [1979].) Nor does Gasper tell his reader that Lee studied patterns of "leadership" among the Kung. Although there were no formal structures of leadership or government, some individuals had more status or power than others. The Kung were egalitarian in the sense that they worked hard to punish people who might become too arrogant in their bullying. But that's just the point--they had to work hard to restrain the human tendency to dominate.

Far from restraining that human tendency to domination, socialist utopias have appealed to the "instinct for power" as expressed in the yearning for revolutionary leadership. In this same issue of the International Socialist Review, there are articles on Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Castro is quoted as saying that when he was a young boy, he admired people like Alexander the Great and Napoleon. Becoming the leader of the socialist revolution allowed him to satisfy his dream of power and glory. Chavez shows the same love of glory in proclaiming "socialism for the twenty-first century." The author of the article on Chavez opens with breathless excitement: "Venezuela's 'Bolivarian Revolution' is moving ahead fast." Well, yes, and all for the glory of Hugo Chavez.

Wouldn't it be more prudent to recognize the need to limit government to protect against a potentially tyrannical "instinct for power" that is too deeply rooted in human nature to be abolished by socialism?

Political Judgment in Darwinian Political Science

A Darwinian political science would have to move through three levels of political history. The first level would be the natural history of political universals as shaped by the genetic evolution of the species. By "political universals" I mean the recurrent patterns of political behavior that characterize human politics generally in every human community. So, for example, the tendency for every political community to be organized as a dominance hierarchy with the "people" defering to the dominance of the one or the few. This seems to be part of the inherited propensities that human beings share with other primates. Even in democracies, all citizens are not equal in their power or status. This behavioral propensity to dominance and deference is probably part of the genetic nature of the human species.

The second level of political history in Darwinian political science would be the social history of political cultures as shaped by cultural evolution. By "political cultures" I mean the somewhat variable patterns of political behavior that distinguish different political communities. Contrary to popular belief, cultural learning is not uniquely human, because researchers in animal behavior have shown that many social animals have some capacity for culture. For example, different chimpanzee communities in Africa are distinguishable by their various cultural traditions that apparently arise as innovations made by individual animals that have spread throughout the community by learning or imitation. So, if one reads, for instance, Jane Goodall's CHIMPANZEES OF GOMBE, one can see some patterns of political behavior--like dominance and submission--that are universal to all chimpanzee groups; but one can also see some behavioral traditions at Gombe (such as certain kinds of tool-use) that are found at Gombe but not in some other chimpanzee groups. Similarly, of course, human communities show great cultural variability in political behavior. While every human community shows dominance and deference, the cultural institutions or norms for regulating the pursuit of dominance are highly variable. S. E. Finer's HISTORY OF GOVERNMENT surveys the history of the many cultural inventions in government that would illustrate this.

Finally, the third level of political history for Darwinian political science is the individual history of political judgments that reflects the highly variable decisions of individual political actors in particular circumstances. Goodall's history of the chimps at Gombe shows that chimps have individual personalities that reflect innate temperament and individual life histories. In navigating their way through the complex social environment at Gombe, individual chimps must make decisions that influence not only their individual lives but also the social life of the community. We can see the same kind of variability in human political communities, which is captured in political biographies. So, for example, the life of Abraham Lincoln continues to fascinate historians and political scientists because we can see that his political judgments were crucial for the political history of the United States. His decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, for instance, brought a critical turn in American political history.

At the level of the natural history of political universals, we could explain Lincoln's political life as manifesting the sort of dominance drive or political ambition that one sees throughout political history in every political community. At the level of the social history of political cultures, we could explain Lincoln's political life as shaped by the peculiar political culture of nineteenth-century America, which would include the constitutional framework of American government and the problem of slavery in American politics. Finally, at the level of the individual history of political judgment, we could see how Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was constrained by, or responsive to, the political universals of political ambition and the political culture of American political institutions. But this would still not fully explain Lincoln's political judgments, such as the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

As Aristotle indicated in Book 6 of the NICOMACHEAN ETHICS, the intellectual virtue crucial for moral or political action is prudence or practical judgment, which is the intuitive capacity to judge what should be done in particular circumstances where it is impossible to infer any right answer by general rules or logic. The historical contingency and complexity of political life make it necessary to rely on such practical wisdom in circumstances where it is impossible to determine the right answer by purely logical means.

Leslie Paul Thiele's new book THE HEART OF JUDGMENT: PRACTICAL WISDOM, NEUROSCIENCE, AND NARRATIVE is the best single book I have ever read on the subject of political judgment. Thiele's book is a good beginning towards thinking about how the study of political judgment could fit into a Darwinian political science. Thiele shows how contemporary neuroscience illuminates the character of judgment by exploring its roots in the brain. Thiele argues that by indicating the dependence of judgment on worldly experience, emotional dispositions, intuitive insights, and narrative thinking, neuroscience confirms the wisdom of Aristotle's account of prudence.

Darwinian political science would have to be complex, because it would have to capture the complexity of political life as it arises from the complex interaction of political nature, political culture, and political prudence.

The Pope on Theistic Evolution

Many times on this blog, I have argued that there is no necessary conflict between Darwinian evolution and biblical religion, because Darwinian science leaves open the question of First Cause, which allows for theistic evolution. Traditionally, the Catholic Church has taken this position. Pope John Paul II affirmed this in 1996.

In recent years, there has been some speculation that the new Pope might take a different position--perhaps even endorsing "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. But now there is a story in the NEW YORK POST reporting that Pope Benedict XVI has reaffirmed theistic evolution, so that the Church can accept Darwinian science as compatible with Biblical revelation.

Behe's Intelligent Design as Intellectual Retreat

The August 16th issue of The New York Review of Books has a review of Philip Kitcher's Living with Darwin by H. Allen Orr. Unfortunately, the full text of this review is available only to subscribers.

Although I have a copy of Kitcher's new book, I have not yet had a chance to read it. Orr's review makes me think that it's a good book. As summarized by Orr, Kitcher's book confirms my claim in some posts on this blog that Michael Behe's version of intelligent design theory is really an intellectual retreat from earlier versions of creationism. The first version of creationism based on a literal reading of Genesis was common among many scientists in the early 19th century. This was refuted by a fossil record that did not conform to the Genesis story. The fossil record showed clearly that the earth was much older than 6,000 years and that some primitive forms of life appeared long before other forms. This fossil record could not be explained as the consequence of Noah's Flood.

The next version of creationism was what Kitcher calls "novelty creationism"--over a long expanse of time, the Creator intervened to miraculously create new species. Geologist Charles Lyell took this position. But this new form of creationism was rendered implausible by the pattern of evolution. For example, why would the Creator create new species of finches on the Galapagos Islands remarkably similar to those on the South American mainland? Such patterns of geographic speciation are plausibly explained as products of evolutionary descent with modification.

The third form of creationism--intelligent design like that proposed by Michael Behe--is a further retreat. Behe agrees that Biblical literalism is implausible. He also agrees that evolution by common descent is more plausible than "novelty creationism." He retreats to the position that the Intelligent Designer somehow arranged things at the beginning of the universe so that evolution by common descent might unfold so as to produce "irreducibly complex" mechanisms like bacterial flagella. But then we ask, what is his alternative explanation to substitute for Darwinian natural selection? When, where, and how did the Intelligent Designer do this? Behe has no answer to such questions. And so "intelligent design theory" is left with almost no intellectual content.

As Orr indicates, Kitcher wants also to explain the implications of Darwinism for religion. He thinks Darwinism refutes Biblical literalism and supernatural religion, but not "spiritual religion." And yet, as Orr indicates, since "spiritual religion"--that idea that some spiritual leaders offer morally exemplary models--denies both Biblical revelation and supernatural reality, it seems hardly distinguishable from secular humanism.

Kitcher thinks that skepticism about the divine inspiration of scriptural texts subverts supernatural religion. But I would suggest that supernatural religion does not require belief in the authenticity of scripture. All that it requires is the belief that some supernatural cause is the only answer to questions of First Cause or ultimate explanation: Why is there anything at all? Why not nothing? Darwin acknowledged that such questions point to a fundamental mystery. I do not see how Darwinian evolution denies such supernatural explanations for the origin of life and the universe.

Bonobos--The Politically Correct Primate

Although bonobos resemble chimpanzees, bonobos are now considered a separate species. They have passed into popular culture as the "hippie chimps." They are sexual swingers who shift easily from heterosexual to homosexual activity. They resolve conflict through sexual pleasure rather than aggressive violence--make love not war! Although bonobo males are bigger and stronger than bonobo females, the females seem to be dominant over the males, which seemed to be enforced by females bound together by lesbian sex attacking any male who becomes too assertive. And while chimps have shown what looks like warfare between distinct territorial groups, bonobo groups seem to mix easily without warfare. So while bonobos would appear to be political animals in the sense that they must manueuver their way through a complex social community, bonobo politics would seem to be more peaceful, egalitarian, and matriarchal than is chimp politics.

But all of this is based on remarkably skimpy observational evidence. Wild chimpanzees are found only in the dense tropical jungle south of the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The few primatologists who have tried to study them in the wild have found them so hard to track that some observers have seen them for only a few hours after years of seeking them out. Most of the popular picture of bonobo behavior comes from Frans de Waal, who has seen bonobos in zoos, but who has never seen a bonobo in the wild.

I have regularly taught a course at Northern Illinois University on "Chimpanzee Politics," which includes some reading on bonobos. Each time I teach this course, I take my students on a field trip to the Milwaukee County Zoo, which has the largest group of bonobos in captivity (18-20 individuals). Each time that we go, I am struck by how we don't see the behavior that we have read about in de Waal's books (particularly, the 1997 book Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape). For example, we go there with the voyeur's expectation of seeing lots of sexy encounters, but we're usually disappointed. This experience as well as my reading of the primatology research comparing chimps and bonobos has made me skeptical of de Waal's story of bonobo life and the popular acceptance of this story as showing the potential for confirming Rousseau's image of the noble savage.

In the July 30th issue of The New Yorker, Ian Parker has an article on bonobo research. He surveys the debate among primatologists over de Waal's claim that bonobos are radically different from chimps. One can see here the moral and political implications of these debates. Feminists, gay activists, and those on the political Left would like to see bonobos as the closest living evolutionary relative of human beings, and they like de Waal's account of bonobo life as suggesting that human beings could potentially adopt the "bonobo way" of sexual equality and peaceful hedonism. Darwinian conservatives are suspicious of this as motivated by utopian longings.

As Parker indicates, the direct observations of bonobos in the wild are leading some primatologists to question de Waal's account. Bonobos are probably more violent than de Waal is willing to admit. They are not more bipedal than chimps. They are not more sexually active than chimps. And whether bonobos show female dominance--in contrast to the male dominance of chimps--is open to doubt. Even in de Waal's Bonobo book, there are some occasional suggestions that bonobo males are "slightly dominant" or maybe "co-dominant" with females (60, 74-81).

Wilson vs. Dawkins on Religion

Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion has become a best-seller. This book reinforces the popular prejudice that Darwinism must denigrate religion. Dawkins's fanatical attack on religion falls into the stereotype of the Darwinian scientist as the village atheist.

But as I have argued in my books and on this blog, there is no necessary conflict between Darwinism and religion. Although Darwinian science cannot confirm or deny the theological doctrines of religion, it can recognize the practical truth of religion as satisfying certain natural human desires in ways that foster social cooperation. This sustains the conservative view of religion as important for supporting morality and political order.

David Sloan Wilson has written a response to Dawkins that shows how evolutionary theory can explain the practical importance of religion for sustaining cooperation in groups. Wilson's statement can be found here. A previous post on the debate over evolutionary explanations of religion can be found here.

A Response to Jonathan Wells

Jonathan Wells works for the Discovery Institute promoting "intelligent design theory." In his book Icons of Evolution, he shrewdly employs a rhetoric of negative argumentation--attacking weaknesses in Darwinian theory while refusing to defend intelligent design in any positive way. He encourages the reader to assume that if Darwinian evolution hasn't been absolutely demonstrated to be true, then creation by an intelligent designer wins by default as the only reasonable alternative. But in doing this, Wells demands standards of proof for Darwinian biology tht are unreasonably high. After all, Wells himself could never satisfy those standards if he had to show the exact causal mechanisms by which a disembodied intelligence shapes natural objects in the world.

Wells's new book is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. This book has been a "main selection" of the Conservative Book Club, and it has been endorsed by that great conservative philosopher Ann Coulter ("Annoy a godless liberal: buy this book!").

He has a chapter on "Darwinism and Conservatives," in which he casually dismisses my arguments without seriously confronting the intellectual issues. For example, he quotes Carson Holloway as saying that "Arnhart's 'Darwinian political theory . . . provides the basis for no useful moral teaching at all.'" But Wells does not lay out Holloway's reasoning for his conclusion, and he does not tell his reader that I have responded to Holloway's critique.

To show that Darwinism leads to immoral eugenics, Wells very carefully quotes some comments from Darwin's Descent of Man about how "the weak members of civilized societies propagage their kind," but then he doesn't the quote the immediately following comment from Darwin about the importance of the instinct of sympathy in moving us to care for the weak and the helpless (see pp. 158-59 in the Penguin Classics edition of the Descent). Wells doesn't allow his reader to see what he is doing.

Similarly, he accuses Darwin of being a racist, but he says nothing about Darwin's life-long opposition to slavery and his rejection of the racial science that supported slavery.

Wells also links Darwin to Hitler by quoting from Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler. But he does not respond to my criticisms of Weikart's book in Darwinian Conservatism for failing to show any clear line of influence "from Darwin to Hitler."

Wells doesn't indicate that one of the texts most often quoted by the Nazis to justify their persecution of the Jews was Martin Luther's long pamphlet "On the Jews and Their Lies," which urges Christians to attack Jews as "poisonous worms." Of course, it would be unreasonable to say that this "from Luther to Hitler" connection shows the evil influence of Christianity. But it's just as unreasonable to blame Darwin.

Wells also claims that Darwinism leads to "managed economies" because it sees life as a "zero-sum game," and fails to see the logic of free market economics as laid out by Adam Smith. This is ludicrous. Robert Wright has written a whole book--Nonzero--on the Darwinian logic of cooperation as a nonzero-sum game in which individuals find mutual benefit in reciprocal exchange. Darwin rested much of his argument for the evolution of morality on Adam Smith's account of "sympathy" as the ground for moral sentiments.

Wells presents himself as a scientist. But he never reveals to his readers that his decision to get a Ph.D. in biology was in obedience to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who picked him along with other seminary graduates to do battle against Darwinian science. Moon is the founder of the Unification Church who reports that as a 15 year-old boy, he was visited by Jesus in Korea in 1935, and Jesus told him that he was needed to carry out Jesus's plans for the Second Coming. Wells joined the Unification Church and submitted to Moon's authority. Wells explains this in a Unification Church sermon--"Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D.--which can be found here.

Frederick Kagan on the Failure in Iraq

Frederick Kagan is one of the leading neoconservative proponents of the American war in Iraq who helped the White House formulate the current "surge" strategy. Oddly enough, his recent article in The Weekly Standard on "The New Strategy in Iraq" shows that the American war there has been--with only one possible exception--a complete failure.

Imagine that you know nothing about the war and that you're relying on this one article for your assessment. Read the article carefully. The first and last paragraphs declares that "Operation Phantom Thunder" is working well, and the war should continue, which is what you would expect Kagan to say. But if you read the rest of the article, you see a remarkable survey of the failures in the war.

Consider the following quotations from the article under the section subtitles used by Kagan.

"Falluja, 2004"
"The Marines were not allowed to follow up on their success in Falluja. . . . Nevertheless, Falluja was fairly stable for many months after the Marine attack, only slowly sinking back into chaos and enemy control."

"Najaf and Sadr City, 2004"
". . . The successes in Najaf and Sadr City were fleeting in another respect, however. U.S. forces left both areas quickly, and the Sadrist militias retook control of them within months. The Sadrists remain largely in control of Najaf and were long uncontested in Sadr City, although recent events have greatly complicated their situation there."

"Tal Afar and the Upper Euphrates, 2005"
". . . Operations in 2005, although inadequately followed up and sustained, created a lasting change in a critical province of northern Iraq."

"Ramadi, 2006"
Ramadi seems to be the one bright spot. Elsewhere in the article, Kagan says, "Ramadi is the model."

"Bagdad, 2006"
"These operations failed. . . . By November, Operation Together Forward II had mostly ground to a halt, having made no lasting improvement in the situation."

"Lessons of the Past"
". . . rapid reductions in Coalition forces after clearing operations undermined the success of almost all past operations. In Sadr City and Najaf, the withdrawal led to the complete if quiet restoration of the militias tht had been driven out. . . . Turning control of cleared areas over to Iraq forces prematurely--as in Falluja after the first battle and in Baghdad after Operations Together Forward--generally led to rapid failure. . . ."

"Operation Phantom Thunder in Context"
". . . The establishment of security, moreover, is a precondition for further political progress, not a guarantee of it. The enemy may find a way to disrupt the current operations, or to derail or defeat the subsequent clear-and-hold operations. It is possible that Iraqi Security Forces will prove unable to develop the numbers and capabilities required to maintain security once it has been established. And unpredictable disasters can always drive a well-designed strategy off course."

And what conclusion does Kagan draw from this bleak history of failure and prospect of unpredictable disasters? "The current strategy . . . deserves to be given every chance to succeed"!

As I have suggested in other posts, the utopian folly of the Iraq war is a predictable consequence of a neoconservative view of government in which presidents initiate and manage wars guided by a messianic rhetoric of spreading democratic liberty around the world. The Machiavellian utopianism of the neoconservatives is most evident in Harvey Mansfield's recent defense of the "manly nihilism" of the American presidency and his praise of George Bush's "one-man rule" as manifesting "the living intelligence of a wise man."

Leon Kass and the Science of Color

This continues my previous post on Leon Kass's recent article in Commentary and the response from Steven Pinker.

As I have indicated, I am not persuaded by Kass's assumption that we can look to Rene Descartes--and particularly, his materialist reductionism--as determining the whole history of modern science. To me, Descartes' dualistic separation of matter and mind and his physicalist reductionism denies the emergent complexity of living phenomena as studied by Darwinian biology.

To illustrate his claim about Descartes as the founder of all modern science, Kass says that "in a revolution-making passage in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes sets the program of all modern science by transforming how we should approach the study of color." (Like much of this article, this entire section is taken from Kass's essay on "The Permanent Limitations of Biology" in his book Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, 277-97.)

Descartes says that we can study colors by arbitrarily identifying them as corresponding to various geometrical figures. Kass writes: "Descartes's geometrical figures, standing for the differences among the colors white, blue, and red may be passe, but the principle he proposes is not: today we still treat color in terms of 'wave lengths,' purely mathematical representations from which all the color is sucked out. This tells the whole story: the objective is purely quantitative. All quality disappears."

Is this really "the whole story" of the scientific study of color? Certainly, part of the story is that scientists explain visible light as a continuously varying wave-length. But this is not the whole story, because wave-lengths of light have no color intrinsic to them. Color arises only for animals that have neural systems of vision that translate the variations in wave-length into color perceptions. Different species perceive different colors or none at all.

Many anthropologists used to say that human color perception was an arbitrary creation of culture depending on the variable color vocabularies of different human languages. But in the 1960s, a famous experiment conducted by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay showed that this variation in color vocabularies followed a regular pattern indicating a universal of human nature. Native speakers of twenty languages from around the world were asked to look at a Munsell array showing the full spectrum of colors and then apply the color terms from their languages. Although there was great variation, the variation followed a universal pattern moving from two to eleven basic color terms. The reason for this is that the human sensory system for vision tends to break down the continuing varying wavelengths of visible light into discrete units.

Notice that Berlin and Kay had to ask their subjects to report their subjective experience of color in the terms of their color vocabularies. Color as a perceptual quality is known to us only by our subjective experience. But we can testify to that qualitative experience through language that can then be the basis for scientific study. It is not true, then, that for modern science, "all quality disappears."

Edward O. Wilson--in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge--offers the Berlin and Kay study of color vocabularies as an example of "gene-culture coevolution" guided by "epigenetic rules." He writes: "The brain constantly searches for meaning, for connections between objects and qualities that cross-cut the senses and provide information about external existence. We penetrate that world through the constraining portals of the epigenetic rules. As shown in the elementary cases of paralanguage and color vocabulary, culture has risen from the genes and forever bears their stamp. With the invention of metaphor and new meaning, it has at the same time acquired a life of its own. In order to grasp the human condition, both the genes and culture must be understood, not separately in the traditional manner of science and the humanities, but together, in recognition of the realities of human evolution" (163).

In my chapter on "emergence" in Darwinian Conservatism, I indicated that although Wilson sometimes identifies "consilience"--the unity of all knowledge--as based on a strong form of reductionism, he has to recognize the emergent complexity of life that cannot be explained through strong reductionism. So, for example, the epigenetic rules of human biology shape the broad patterns in color vocabularies that are universal propensities across all human societies. But within those broad patterns, the specific content of color vocabularies will be determined by linguistic practices, social customs, and deliberate choices that are peculiar to some particular group. And our scientific studies of color perception must combine quantitative methods of objectified science with the qualitative experience of human subjects expressed in language.

Such scientific study of the emergent complexity of life is lost in Kass's assumption that Descartes's reductionism "sets the program of all modern science."

Leon Kass on Science and Religion

Leon Kass has written an article for Commentary (April 2007)on "Science, Religion, and the Human Future." Steven Pinker and others have written responses to the article. Since Kass's article is a good summary of his ideas about modern science and its limitations, reading the article has stirred me to ponder my points of agreement and disagreement with his thinking. I will begin with the points of agreement. (The next five paragraphs are taken from my article on "Darwinian Liberal Education" in the fall 2006 issue of Academic Questions.)

As a young man, I decided that what Leo Strauss called 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 conscious experience as autonomous in its separation from the causal order of the natural sciences. And the social sciences are torn between these two contradictory positions.

We might overcome this dilemma, I thought, 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 I found that many of those influenced by Strauss assumed that Darwinian biology must deny the fundamental premises of Aristotelian natural right in denying the uniqueness of human beings as set apart from the rest of animal nature and in denying the cosmic teleology that sustains human purposefulness.

Reading Leon Kass's Towards a More Natural Science helped me to see how I might answer these Straussian objections. Kass suggested that Darwinian biology could recognize human uniqueness as a product of emergent evolution, and it could recognize the internal teleology of living beings as goal-directed. Darwin failed to see how his own biology allowed "that certain differences of degree--produced naturally, accumulated gradually (even incrementally), and inherited in an unbroken line of descent--might lead to a difference in kind (or at least its equivalent), say, in mental capacity or inner life." So it seemed that Darwinian biology could support an emergent naturalism in which novel traits arise in evolutionary development at each higher level of organization in an "unbroken line of descent" leading to differences in kind. Differences in degree passing over a critical threshold of evolution could produce differences in kind (Towards a More Natural Science, 271; The Hungry Soul, 12, 14, 39, 59-63, 76-79).

On the question of teleology, I was impressed by Kass's distinction between "external teleology" and "immanent teleology." External teleology is the conception of all of nature as an organic whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or creator. By contrast to such cosmic teleology, Kass suggested that "the primary home of teleological thought is the internal and immanent purposiveness of individual organisms, in their generation, their structure, their activities." This immanent teleology of living things was what Aristotle had in mind, Kass observed, when he spoke of natural teleology. And while Kass recognized that Darwinism was generally regarded as rejecting cosmic teleology, he noted that Darwinian biology implicitly assumed the immanent teleological nature of organisms. Even if evolution by natural selection is not purposeful, it produces organic beings that are purposeful. Plants and animals grow to maturity, and once grown, they act for ends set by the functional nature of the species (ibid., 253-64).

I was inspired by Kass's striving for "a more natural science" that would require the kind of biological understanding of nature that could account for the ethical and intellectual purposefulness of human life as an expression of nature. Like Kass, I sought a biological science that recognizes "the tacit ethical dimension of animal life," and thus the "natural, animal bases for the content of an ethical life." Like Kass, I believed that a science of living nature would reject both reductionist monism, which reduces life to homogeneous matter, and transcendentalist dualism, which sees human mental and moral experience as simply separated from the rest of nature. Like Kass, I decided that such a science could bring together Aristotle and Darwin (ibid., 277, 284, 295, 347; Kass, The Hungry Soul, 62.)

In recent years, however, Kass has moved away from his Aristotelian/Darwinian naturalism, because he doubts the sufficiency of human reason unaided by Biblical revelation of nature as created (see Kass's Life, Liberty, and Defense of Dignity, 277-97; and his Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, xiv-xv, 1-4, 15, 68). In his new article in Commentary, he continues in this direction by arguing that modern science assumes a materialism that reduces all knowledge to quantifiable objectification that denies the qualitative subjectivity of "lived experience" and the "inwardness of life." As transformed into "scientism," which assumes that such scientific objectification is the only true form of knowledge, this modern scientific project threatens human freedom and dignity. Kass then wonders whether philosophy or religion can provide an adequate philosophy of nature to challenge the false claims of modern scientism.

Although I see some partial truth in almost everything Kass says in his article, he fails to recognize here (as he did in his earlier writing) that Darwinian biology refutes the Cartesian vision of science. Kass's fundamental presupposition is that Rene Descartes' writing is normative for all of modern science. Again and again, he quotes from or refers to Descartes as the authoritative spokesman for all of modern science. Here he implicitly takes for granted a view of the history and philosophy of early modern science that came out of the German phenomenological tradition, which was transmitted to the curriculum of St. John's College by Jacob Klein, and which has influenced Kass in his years at St. John's and the University of Chicago.

But I am not convinced that Descartes' philosophical writing is canonical for all of modern science. Kass cites Hans Jonas's The Phenomenon of Life, but he ignores Jonas's argument in that book that Darwinism refuted Descartes dualistic separation of objective matter and subjective mind. "Evolutionism undid Descartes' work," Jonas explained, because "the continuity of descent now established between man and the animal world made it impossible any longer to regard his mind, and mental phenomena as such, as the abrupt ingression of an ontologically foreign principle at just this point of the total flow," and so "with the last citadel of dualism there also fell the isolation of man, and his own evidence became available again for the interpretation of that to which he belongs" (57).

In fact, many Darwinian scientists now recognize that Darwinism affirms the continuity of animal minds as products of emergent evolution. For example, Steven Pinker shows how Darwinian science refutes Descartes' dualism (The Blank Slate, 8-10). But then Kass criticizes Pinker as a materialist who does not recognize the reality of the soul as "the integrated powers of the naturally organic body" that arise as "emergent properties" from the formal organization of living matter. Pinker responds to this charge by saying that he has always argued for the reality of such psychic "emergent properties." In his defense, Pinker could have quoted from his book How the Mind Works, where he speaks of "consciousness in the sense of sentience" as a "mystery" for which there is no scientific explanation. "But saying that we have no scientific explanation of sentience is not the same as saying that sentience does not exist at all. I am as certain that I am sentient as I am certain of anything, and I bet you feel the same" (148). Kass makes exactly the same point about the certitude of our subjective experience of "inwardness," although it cannot be studied externally.

In following the St. John's/phenomenological tradition, Kass assumes that "mathematical physics is the jewel and foundation" of all science, and biology is reducible to mathematical physics. But this ignores the autonomy of biology and biological phenomena as an emergent realm of study that must be consistent with but cannot be fully reducible to physics and chemistry. Ernst Mayr and other modern biologists have argued this position very well.

Kass says that genetics cannot tell us "how the life of a cockroach differs from that of a chimpanzee." But this ignores the whole field of animal behavior and cognitive ethology. Primatologists like Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal observe the natural lives of primates either in the wild or in captivity, and in explaining their behavior, they infer the emotional and cognitive experiences that constitute their subjective lives. Much of the debate in primatology today is about how far we can infer "animal minds" from our own subjective experiences as self-conscious beings. To say, as Kass does, that all biologists assume that man is "a freakish speck of mind in a mindless universe" restates Descartes' view, but this is contradicted by those many biologists who reject Cartesian dualism and recognize the necessity to explain animal behavior as shaped by subjective consciousness.

So what does religion contribute to this discussion? Kass is evasive about this. In his interpretation of Genesis 1, he rejects both "creation science" and "intelligent design," because he assumes that the Creation story is not really a literal description of how the universe came into being. Rather, the Creation story teaches "self-evident truths" about the "existential condition" of human beings that "do not rest on biblical authority."

It is not clear whether Kass thinks he is learning something from Biblical revelation that he could not know by philosophic reason alone, or whether the Bible offers an account of the human condition that confirms what we might already know by reason. In fact, when Kass refers to "the mysterious source of being itself," he seems to be following Martin Heidegger's existential philosophy of how human Dasein faces the mystery of Being.

Kass's reading of Genesis 1--like all of his readings of the Bible--is thoughtful, imaginative, and elegant. But it is not clear to me that this is the way Biblical believers read the Bible. Clearly, Kass is reading the Bible under the influence of philosophical commentators like Immanuel Kant and Leo Strauss. There is surely much to ponder in such a reading. But this seems to be more philosophic than it is religious.

If Kass were to return to his original project for a "more natural science" that would be both Aristotelian and Darwinian, he could argue for a Darwinian naturalism that would recognize the importance of religion insofar as it reinforces our natural moral sense.

My next post will continue this discussion of Kass.