Today's New York Times has a front page article by Patricia Cohen on Darwinian Conservatism, which can be found here. Cohen is the "Arts and Ideas" editor for the Times, and one of their best writers. Her article is well-written and accurate.
She attended the AEI debate on Darwinian conservatism, and much of her article picks out points from that debate. But she has also been reading widely to see how this debate has played out among conservatives.
The AEI debate was generally quite good, and it's worth the time to watch the AEI webcast of the whole debate including the question and answer period. But I must say that I was disappointed in George Gilder, whose remarks were scattered and vapid. As far as I could tell, the only substantive point he suggested was the irreducibility of information. Otherwise, he was in a fog.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Friday, May 04, 2007
Webcast of AEI Debate on Darwinian Conservatism
Last Saturday, I debated John West at the national meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Philadelphia. Yesterday, we continued our debating at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. John West and George Gilder were on one side of the debate, while I and John Derbyshire were on the other side. AEI has a webcast video of the entire debate, which you can find here.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Liberty Begins at Sumer
The Liberty Fund is an educational foundation in Indianapolis that was established through the philanthropy of Pierre Goodrich. Liberty Fund is best known for their publishing program and for their conferences (170-180 a year)on various topics related to the idea of liberty.
The logo for Liberty Fund is a cuneiform script (amagi) that is thought to be the first written symbol for "liberty," which was found in an ancient writing dating from 2,300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
I assume that Goodrich picked this up from his reading of Samuel Noah Kramer's book History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History, first published in 1956 and reissued in a 3rd edition in 1981 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
The story told in the original Sumerian text illustrates my claim that the conservative commitment to ordered liberty can be supported as rooted in the natural desires of evolved human nature.
The story is in Chapter 7: "Social Reform: The First Case of Tax Reduction." The ruler of the city-state of Lagash--the ishakku--had raised taxes on almost every article of property to the point that the wealth of the palace grew while the people of the city were impoverished as the tax collectors appeared everywhere to collect their assessments. The oppression became so great that the people were willing to recognize a new ruler--Urukagina.
According to the Sumerian text, "He removed the inspector of the boatmen from the boats. He removed the cattle inspector from the cattle, large and small. He removed the fishers inspector from the fisheries. He removed the collector of the silver which had to be paid for the shearing of the white sheep. When a man divorced his wife, neither the ishakku nor his vizier got anything. When a perfumer made an oil preparation, neither the ishakku, nor the vizier, nor the palace steward got anything. When a dead man was brought to the cemetery for burial, the officials received considerably less of the dead man's goods than formerly, in some cases a good deal less than half. Temple property was now highly respected. From one end of the land to the other, . . . there was no tax collector. Urukagina established the freedom of the citizens of Lagash."
Kramer, one of the leading Sumerologists of his day, presents this as evidence that the people of Sumer understood the value of "freedom under law."
In many ways, these ancient Sumerians of 4,500 years ago were like us. They had the same natural desires, including the desires for property and justice as reciprocity. They also showed a desire for political rule, such that a ruling few would desire to dominate, and the subordinate many would desire to be free from exploitative dominance. Although they did not fully achieve it, it seems that the ancient Sumerians were moving towards limited and balanced government in which the power of the ruling few would be checked to secure the liberty of the ruled in their private economic, familial, and religious lives.
It is not too much of an overstatement to see the whole history of the world over the past 5,000 years as a movement towards free societies in which the natural desires of human beings could be satisfied through a delicate balance of governmental authority and individual liberty. Such an account of history has been elaborated in Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of History's Destiny (2000). He argues that human history shows a directionality towards ever wider and more intricate cooperation to secure the potential benefits in non-zero-sum games. For that to happen, human beings had to emerge through biological evolution to have the natural propensities for social cooperation based on kinship, mutualism, and reciprocity. But then we needed thousands of years of cultural evolution to develop the technology and social institutions that now allow us to cooperate today at a global level.
There is nothing in this Darwinian logic of biological and cultural evolution that would dictate that history had to follow the exact path that it did. But given human nature and the opportunities of cultural history, it was highly likely that human history would move towards the sort of ordered liberty that is achieved in modern constitutional republics.
In that sense, human history is the history of the unfolding of human liberty through the coevolution of human nature and human culture.
The logo for the Liberty Fund is appropriate, therefore, because it suggests that the work of the Liberty Fund is to understand the natural and cultural logic of the history of liberty from ancient Sumer to the present, and thus to understand the conditions for liberty in the world.
It is poignant to observe that Sumer was located in what is now southern Iraq. This reminds us that even if there is a broad historical movement towards liberty, the actual achievement of liberty in particular circumstances is difficult, because it depends on complex cultural conditions that emerge by spontaneous order and not by human design. That's why the American ambition for democratic "nation-building" through military occupation in Iraq is so imprudent, because it is based on a utopian fantasy that constitutional liberty can be created through the rational design of bureaucratic planners with little regard for the cultural conditions.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Reason and Emotion in the Stem Cell Research Debate
Extracting stem cells from a human blastocyst destroys the blastocyst. Those who defend this (like Michael Sandel) say this is not murder because a blastocyst is not actually human, and therefore to destroy a blastocyst is not killing a human being. A blastocyst is no more a human being than an acorn is an oak tree. (A statement from Sandel can be found here.) Those who oppose this (like Robert George) say that from the moment a human egg is fertilized, a human life exists, and therefore to destroy it is murder. (George's argument can be found here and here. His response to Sandel can be found here.)
Although we agree on the morality of protecting human life against unjustified attack, we disagree about exactly when human life begins, or whether different stages of human life deserve different levels of protection.
There are many conflicting scientific views on the question of when human life begins. According to the metabolic view, the development of human life is a continuous process with no definite point at which human life begins. Even fertilization is not a single event, because after the sperm penetrates the egg, it takes about 24 hours before the chomosomes are combined to form a diploid organism.
According to the genetic view, human life begins at fertilization, because at that point, there is a genetically unique individual that is internally driven by genetic programming to develop into a mature human being if the external conditions (such as implantation in a suitable uterus) are right. This is George's view.
According to the embryological view, human life originates at gastrulation, which beings in the third week of pregnancy, when the embryo is implanted in the uterus, and the cells are differentiated into three primary germ layers--ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm--from which the human body will develop. What's significant about this point in development is that from this point twining cannot occur. But during the first two weeks of a pregnancy, it is possible for a zygote to divide into genetically identifical twins. This suggests that there is no single individual identity present, if there is the potentiality for twinning, and thus creating two distinct individuals. (In rare cases, it is even possible for two zygotes to fuse into one zygote with two full sets of chromosomes.)
According to the neurological view, what is distinctive to human life is brain activity. We acknowledge this when we use the standard of "brain death" to define death as the lost of a recognizable cerebral entroencephalogram (EEG). This kind of brain activity is not possible in human development prior to 25 weeks of gestation.
According to the viability view, human life requires self-sustaining viability that does not depend on the mother's uterus, and even with the most advanced medical procedures and equipment, a fetus cannot survive outside the uterus until after 25 weeks of gestation at the earliest.
Good scientific arguments can be made for any of these views of when human life begins. Unfortunately, there is no way to resolve this disagreement by pure reason alone. Because here--as is always the case with moral arguments--we need a combination of reason and emotion, so the the dispute is not just logical but psychological as well. Because we are naturally social animals, and because we feel a natural desire to protect and care for children, we feel a moral emotion of concern for helpless children and indignation against those who would harm children. Leon Kass acknowledges this inescapable emotional element of moral experience when he invokes the moral significance of repugnance and what he calls our "prearticulate human moral sense."
When we argue about the beginnings of human life, we enter a fuzzy borderline where it is hard to see when we are dealing with a human child and when not. In trying to draw a borderline, we can use scientific reasoning to gather and assess the facts of early human development, but deciding what point is crucial is a matter of human emotion. When do we see something that looks enough like a human child to elicit our moral emotion of protection for children?
And yet Robert George takes a rationalistic pro-life position in claiming that this is a purely scientific and rational issue, with no moral emotion involved. He argues that it is simply a scientific fact that "fertilization produces a new and complete, though immature, human organism," and therefore "a human embryo is--already and not merely potentially--a human being." This is so because "the combining of the chomosomes of the spermatozoon and of the oocyte generates what every authority in human embryology identifies as a new and distinct organism."
Against George, some assert that this view contradicts the facts of embryological science, because the possibility of twining during the first 14 days of development shows that there is no single individual human identity until after that point. George responds to this twining argument with an analogy first offered by philosopher Alan Holland. A flatworm cut into two becomes two individual worms, and yet we presumably would agree that the worm was a single individual before it was cut up. Similarly, we should agree that the possibility of a zygote dividing into twins does not deny the fact that the zygote was an individual before the division.
But this is confusing. George says that one possible explanation of twining is that the individual life in the original zygote dies and is replaced by the two individual lives created by the split into two separate zygotes. But George's preferred explanation is that twining is actually a case of asexual reproduction--the original zygote continues to live but it generates a second zygote by splitting.
By the first explanation, one individual must die to produce two totally new individuals. By the second explanation, one individual produces a second individual through asexual budding. This explanation that is preferred by George is strange because it suggests that one twin is actually the parent of the other.
Yet none of this reasoning is sufficient to settle the moral question of how much respect we should give to human zygotes. Deciding whether a zygote is enough like a child to deserve the protection that we would normally give to a child is as much a matter of emotion as it is of reason. As a result of in vitro fertilization procedures, in which far more embryos are produced than are implanted in a womb, hundreds of thousands of embryos have been discarded. Perhaps as many as 400,000 embryos are now frozen in IVF clinics, and most of them will never be implanted. George says that this is mass murder. But even President Bush doesn't agree with this. And in fact, I suspect that most human beings would not agree, because most don't feel the same moral emotional concern for a fertilized egg frozen in an IVF clinic that they feel for a newborn child.
In a statement that can be found here, James Q. Wilson captures this point well. He writes:
"A fertilized cell has some moral worth, but much less than that of an implanted cell, and that has less than that of a fetus, and that less than that of a viable fetus, and that the same as of a newborn infant. My view is that people endow a thing with humanity when it appears, or even begins to appear, human; that is, when it resembles a human creature. The more an embryo resembles a person, the more claims it exerts on our moral feelings. Now this last argument has no religious or metaphysical meaning, but it accords closely, in my view, with how people view one another. It helps us understand why aborting a fetus in the twentieth week is more frightening than doing so in the first, and why so-called partial birth abortions are so widely opposed. And this view helps us to understand why an elderly, comatose person lacking the ability to speak or act has more support from people than a seven-week-old fetus that also lacks the ability to speak or act."
"Human worth grows as humanity becomes more apparent. In general, we are profoundly grieved by the death of a newborn, deeply distressed by the loss of a nearly born infant or a late-month miscarriage, and (for most but not all people) worried but not grieved by the abortion of a seven-week-old fetus. Our humanity, and thus the moral worth we assign to people, never leaves us even if many elements of it are later stripped away by age or disease."
I have written another post on the related issue of abortion.
Although we agree on the morality of protecting human life against unjustified attack, we disagree about exactly when human life begins, or whether different stages of human life deserve different levels of protection.
There are many conflicting scientific views on the question of when human life begins. According to the metabolic view, the development of human life is a continuous process with no definite point at which human life begins. Even fertilization is not a single event, because after the sperm penetrates the egg, it takes about 24 hours before the chomosomes are combined to form a diploid organism.
According to the genetic view, human life begins at fertilization, because at that point, there is a genetically unique individual that is internally driven by genetic programming to develop into a mature human being if the external conditions (such as implantation in a suitable uterus) are right. This is George's view.
According to the embryological view, human life originates at gastrulation, which beings in the third week of pregnancy, when the embryo is implanted in the uterus, and the cells are differentiated into three primary germ layers--ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm--from which the human body will develop. What's significant about this point in development is that from this point twining cannot occur. But during the first two weeks of a pregnancy, it is possible for a zygote to divide into genetically identifical twins. This suggests that there is no single individual identity present, if there is the potentiality for twinning, and thus creating two distinct individuals. (In rare cases, it is even possible for two zygotes to fuse into one zygote with two full sets of chromosomes.)
According to the neurological view, what is distinctive to human life is brain activity. We acknowledge this when we use the standard of "brain death" to define death as the lost of a recognizable cerebral entroencephalogram (EEG). This kind of brain activity is not possible in human development prior to 25 weeks of gestation.
According to the viability view, human life requires self-sustaining viability that does not depend on the mother's uterus, and even with the most advanced medical procedures and equipment, a fetus cannot survive outside the uterus until after 25 weeks of gestation at the earliest.
Good scientific arguments can be made for any of these views of when human life begins. Unfortunately, there is no way to resolve this disagreement by pure reason alone. Because here--as is always the case with moral arguments--we need a combination of reason and emotion, so the the dispute is not just logical but psychological as well. Because we are naturally social animals, and because we feel a natural desire to protect and care for children, we feel a moral emotion of concern for helpless children and indignation against those who would harm children. Leon Kass acknowledges this inescapable emotional element of moral experience when he invokes the moral significance of repugnance and what he calls our "prearticulate human moral sense."
When we argue about the beginnings of human life, we enter a fuzzy borderline where it is hard to see when we are dealing with a human child and when not. In trying to draw a borderline, we can use scientific reasoning to gather and assess the facts of early human development, but deciding what point is crucial is a matter of human emotion. When do we see something that looks enough like a human child to elicit our moral emotion of protection for children?
And yet Robert George takes a rationalistic pro-life position in claiming that this is a purely scientific and rational issue, with no moral emotion involved. He argues that it is simply a scientific fact that "fertilization produces a new and complete, though immature, human organism," and therefore "a human embryo is--already and not merely potentially--a human being." This is so because "the combining of the chomosomes of the spermatozoon and of the oocyte generates what every authority in human embryology identifies as a new and distinct organism."
Against George, some assert that this view contradicts the facts of embryological science, because the possibility of twining during the first 14 days of development shows that there is no single individual human identity until after that point. George responds to this twining argument with an analogy first offered by philosopher Alan Holland. A flatworm cut into two becomes two individual worms, and yet we presumably would agree that the worm was a single individual before it was cut up. Similarly, we should agree that the possibility of a zygote dividing into twins does not deny the fact that the zygote was an individual before the division.
But this is confusing. George says that one possible explanation of twining is that the individual life in the original zygote dies and is replaced by the two individual lives created by the split into two separate zygotes. But George's preferred explanation is that twining is actually a case of asexual reproduction--the original zygote continues to live but it generates a second zygote by splitting.
By the first explanation, one individual must die to produce two totally new individuals. By the second explanation, one individual produces a second individual through asexual budding. This explanation that is preferred by George is strange because it suggests that one twin is actually the parent of the other.
Yet none of this reasoning is sufficient to settle the moral question of how much respect we should give to human zygotes. Deciding whether a zygote is enough like a child to deserve the protection that we would normally give to a child is as much a matter of emotion as it is of reason. As a result of in vitro fertilization procedures, in which far more embryos are produced than are implanted in a womb, hundreds of thousands of embryos have been discarded. Perhaps as many as 400,000 embryos are now frozen in IVF clinics, and most of them will never be implanted. George says that this is mass murder. But even President Bush doesn't agree with this. And in fact, I suspect that most human beings would not agree, because most don't feel the same moral emotional concern for a fertilized egg frozen in an IVF clinic that they feel for a newborn child.
In a statement that can be found here, James Q. Wilson captures this point well. He writes:
"A fertilized cell has some moral worth, but much less than that of an implanted cell, and that has less than that of a fetus, and that less than that of a viable fetus, and that the same as of a newborn infant. My view is that people endow a thing with humanity when it appears, or even begins to appear, human; that is, when it resembles a human creature. The more an embryo resembles a person, the more claims it exerts on our moral feelings. Now this last argument has no religious or metaphysical meaning, but it accords closely, in my view, with how people view one another. It helps us understand why aborting a fetus in the twentieth week is more frightening than doing so in the first, and why so-called partial birth abortions are so widely opposed. And this view helps us to understand why an elderly, comatose person lacking the ability to speak or act has more support from people than a seven-week-old fetus that also lacks the ability to speak or act."
"Human worth grows as humanity becomes more apparent. In general, we are profoundly grieved by the death of a newborn, deeply distressed by the loss of a nearly born infant or a late-month miscarriage, and (for most but not all people) worried but not grieved by the abortion of a seven-week-old fetus. Our humanity, and thus the moral worth we assign to people, never leaves us even if many elements of it are later stripped away by age or disease."
I have written another post on the related issue of abortion.
The Shameful Glorification of the Va Tech Murderer
The Virginia Tech murderer carefully prepared videos and photographs to glorify his murderous rampage. He sent them to NBC News with the expectation that they would be widely broadcast in the media to appeal to mentally disturbed young men like himself. Of course, he was right, because he knew that journalists in the news media are shameless in their eagerness to broadcast such sensational images.
There are stories now that some of the parents of the victims at Virginia Tech are refusing to give interviews to NBC News as a protest against their complicity in promoting these images. I applaud them. Even if it is impossible in today's world to keep such material from being widely distributed, we should still express our moral outrage when journalists help to glorify a murderer.
As I have indicated, young unmarried men who feel they have no social recognition are tempted to socially disruptive behavior as a way of winning glory for themselves. It's not surprising at all that the Virginia Tech killer referred to the Columbine High School killers as "martyrs" who inspired his behavior. Now we can expect that many more young men who feel isolated and scorned will want to emulate this behavior.
It has been noticed that the Virginia Tech killer's videos seem to have been staged to resemble the videos made by Islamic suicide terrorists to memorialize themselves. After all, most of the suicide terrorists are unmarried young men who are attracted to suicide terrorism as a way of glorifying themselves as religious martyrs.
As a product of evolutionary history, young men are drawn to such murderous behavior. And thus any healthy society must check the turbulent dispositions of young men by channeling them in socially acceptable ways.
Unfortunately, modern state universities like Virginia Tech scorn the traditional idea that schools should act in loco parentis in supervising the behavior of students to form good character. At the very least, students with mental and moral problems should be required to go into counseling with the threat of dismissal from school if they refuse.
There are stories now that some of the parents of the victims at Virginia Tech are refusing to give interviews to NBC News as a protest against their complicity in promoting these images. I applaud them. Even if it is impossible in today's world to keep such material from being widely distributed, we should still express our moral outrage when journalists help to glorify a murderer.
As I have indicated, young unmarried men who feel they have no social recognition are tempted to socially disruptive behavior as a way of winning glory for themselves. It's not surprising at all that the Virginia Tech killer referred to the Columbine High School killers as "martyrs" who inspired his behavior. Now we can expect that many more young men who feel isolated and scorned will want to emulate this behavior.
It has been noticed that the Virginia Tech killer's videos seem to have been staged to resemble the videos made by Islamic suicide terrorists to memorialize themselves. After all, most of the suicide terrorists are unmarried young men who are attracted to suicide terrorism as a way of glorifying themselves as religious martyrs.
As a product of evolutionary history, young men are drawn to such murderous behavior. And thus any healthy society must check the turbulent dispositions of young men by channeling them in socially acceptable ways.
Unfortunately, modern state universities like Virginia Tech scorn the traditional idea that schools should act in loco parentis in supervising the behavior of students to form good character. At the very least, students with mental and moral problems should be required to go into counseling with the threat of dismissal from school if they refuse.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Sex Differences and the Massacre at Virginia Tech
When I first heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech this morning, I could easily predict the identity of the shooter--an unmarried man between the ages of 18 and 25. When I heard a FBI psychological profiler interviewed by a reporter speak about what "he or she" might have done, I laughed at the strained PC language of gender-neutrality. We all know that young unmarried men are far more likely to be cold-blooded murderers. We haven't yet heard whether the young man who did this is unmarried, but it is easy to predict that.
Darwinian biology confirms our common-sense perception that young men are more inclined to lethal violence than are young women. And young men who have not been domesticated by marriage are even more likely to such violence. Of course, this doesn't mean that all young men are potential murderers. But it does mean that most murders are committed by young men. There are natural differences between men and women that incline men--and particularly young men--to violent aggression.
That's why every society must devote great resources to the taming of young male propensities to violence and socially disruptive behavior. Here is a pattern in human nature that has been shaped by human evolutionary history. Of course, culture can either exacerbate or mitigate this inclination. So, for instance, Canada is generally more peaceful than the United States. But, still, most of the perpetrators of violence in Canada are young men. The pattern of sex differences is universal, even though culture can influence the absolute level of violence.
To assume that all sex differences in behavior are culturally constructed, and therefore that we could eliminate such differences through gender-neutral social conditioning, is a utopian conception contrary to the realistic view of human nature supported by Darwinian science.
Darwinian biology confirms our common-sense perception that young men are more inclined to lethal violence than are young women. And young men who have not been domesticated by marriage are even more likely to such violence. Of course, this doesn't mean that all young men are potential murderers. But it does mean that most murders are committed by young men. There are natural differences between men and women that incline men--and particularly young men--to violent aggression.
That's why every society must devote great resources to the taming of young male propensities to violence and socially disruptive behavior. Here is a pattern in human nature that has been shaped by human evolutionary history. Of course, culture can either exacerbate or mitigate this inclination. So, for instance, Canada is generally more peaceful than the United States. But, still, most of the perpetrators of violence in Canada are young men. The pattern of sex differences is universal, even though culture can influence the absolute level of violence.
To assume that all sex differences in behavior are culturally constructed, and therefore that we could eliminate such differences through gender-neutral social conditioning, is a utopian conception contrary to the realistic view of human nature supported by Darwinian science.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Scruton on Religion
Roger Scruton has posted a statement on religion at the "Right Reason" blog. He prepared this for a debate with Richard Dawkins on the question of whether "we would be better off without religion." Since Scruton is the leading conservative philosopher in Great Britain, I am pleased to see that he largely agrees with what I have written on this blog and in Darwinian Conservatism about religion and evolution.
He agrees with me in accepting the truth of evolutionary science and in seeing that there is no necessary conflict between evolution and religion, because religion answers questions about ultimate meaning and purpose that go beyond the realm of scientific reasoning. Moreover, he also agrees that religion provides support for morality and communal identity that can sustain a healthy community.
He also recognizes, of course, that religion can be harmful, even disastrous, when it promotes fanatical violence and brutality. But this only shows that we need to look to the proper development of the religious urge. Like many human goods, religion can be bad when it is practiced in the wrong way.
That Darwinian evolution and religious belief can be compatible has been the general position of the Catholic Church. But recently some Catholic leaders--such as Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn--have professed allegiance to "intelligent design theory." Now we have a news story about a new book that includes comments by Pope Benedict on this issue. Apparently, Benedict is defending a form of "theistic evolution" that would accept evolutionary history, but see it as guided by God's will. This news story does not provide a clear, detailed statement of the Pope's position. But it does seem that he rejects "intelligent design theory."
He agrees with me in accepting the truth of evolutionary science and in seeing that there is no necessary conflict between evolution and religion, because religion answers questions about ultimate meaning and purpose that go beyond the realm of scientific reasoning. Moreover, he also agrees that religion provides support for morality and communal identity that can sustain a healthy community.
He also recognizes, of course, that religion can be harmful, even disastrous, when it promotes fanatical violence and brutality. But this only shows that we need to look to the proper development of the religious urge. Like many human goods, religion can be bad when it is practiced in the wrong way.
That Darwinian evolution and religious belief can be compatible has been the general position of the Catholic Church. But recently some Catholic leaders--such as Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn--have professed allegiance to "intelligent design theory." Now we have a news story about a new book that includes comments by Pope Benedict on this issue. Apparently, Benedict is defending a form of "theistic evolution" that would accept evolutionary history, but see it as guided by God's will. This news story does not provide a clear, detailed statement of the Pope's position. But it does seem that he rejects "intelligent design theory."
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Darwinian Political Science
In Darwinian Conservatism, I offer an explanation of social order as the product of three kinds of order: natural order, customary (or habitual) order, and rational (or deliberate) order. This analysis of order as natural, customary, and rational was first stated by Aristotle and later adopted by philosophers such as Cicero and Thomas Aquinas. It is also implicit in Darwin's account of the human moral sense. Hayek employs the same analysis, but his stress on customary order obscures the relationship between these three kinds of order as a nested hierarchy. Hayek also fails to see how a Darwinian account of morality and social order includes these three sources of order.
As originally suggested by Aristotle, we can explain both the social order of a community and the moral order of an individual life as the product of nature (physis), custom or habit (ethos), and reason or deliberation (logos). Instead of seeing an antithetical dichotomy of nature versus convention, we should see a three-level nested hierarchy in which custom presupposes nature, and reason presupposes both nature and custom. The fully developed order in a community or an individual arises as the joint product of natural propensities, the development of those propensities through habit or custom, and the rational deliberation about those propensities, habits, and customs.
Using this analysis of the three sources of order, we could develop a Darwinian theoretical framework for political science that would move through three levels: the natural history of politics, the cultural history of politics, and the biographical history of politics. For the natural history of politics, we would study the genetic evolution of human beings as political animals. For the cultural history of politics, we would study the cultural evolution of political institutions as constrained by genetic evolution. For the biographical history of politics, we would study the history of individual decision-makers in politics as constrained by both genetic nature and cultural institutions.
I can illustrate this through the topic of war. Darwin believed that warfare was crucial for the evolution of human social and moral capacities. The evolution of moral and political cooperation could have depended on lethal combat, so that groups with high levels of cooperation would have been more likely to prevail in war against their opponents. Considering the importance of war for politics, we might then explore how Darwinian science would explain the origins of war in general and of wars in particular circumstances--such as, for example, the American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003.
To explain why George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq, we would have to consider not just the naturally evolved dispositions to warfare, but also the cultural institution of the American presidency that gave him the power to make war in the circumstances he faced. It might be a natural propensity of human beings to live in societies with dominance hierarchies and to defer to dominant leaders, particularly in war. The willingness of citizens to risk their lives in war is a heroic manifestation of the human disposition to other-regarding behavior. But that natural propensity in the United States is channeled through the constitutional and scoial history of the American president as commander-in-chief.
Within the constraints set by natural propensities and cultural circumstances, the judgments of unique individuals in positions of responsibility can decisively determine the course of political history. This makes human political science more complex and unpredictable than anything studied by the physicist or chemist.
To explain fully why President Bush launched the American invasion of Iraq, the political scientist would have to consider not only the natural history of war in human evolution and the cultural history of presidential war in the United States, but also the biographical history of President Bush and those who influenced his decision.
This sketch of what a Darwinian political science would look like is briefly elaborated in my recent commentary in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to an article by Herbert Gintis. The article and my commentary can be found here.
As originally suggested by Aristotle, we can explain both the social order of a community and the moral order of an individual life as the product of nature (physis), custom or habit (ethos), and reason or deliberation (logos). Instead of seeing an antithetical dichotomy of nature versus convention, we should see a three-level nested hierarchy in which custom presupposes nature, and reason presupposes both nature and custom. The fully developed order in a community or an individual arises as the joint product of natural propensities, the development of those propensities through habit or custom, and the rational deliberation about those propensities, habits, and customs.
Using this analysis of the three sources of order, we could develop a Darwinian theoretical framework for political science that would move through three levels: the natural history of politics, the cultural history of politics, and the biographical history of politics. For the natural history of politics, we would study the genetic evolution of human beings as political animals. For the cultural history of politics, we would study the cultural evolution of political institutions as constrained by genetic evolution. For the biographical history of politics, we would study the history of individual decision-makers in politics as constrained by both genetic nature and cultural institutions.
I can illustrate this through the topic of war. Darwin believed that warfare was crucial for the evolution of human social and moral capacities. The evolution of moral and political cooperation could have depended on lethal combat, so that groups with high levels of cooperation would have been more likely to prevail in war against their opponents. Considering the importance of war for politics, we might then explore how Darwinian science would explain the origins of war in general and of wars in particular circumstances--such as, for example, the American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003.
To explain why George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq, we would have to consider not just the naturally evolved dispositions to warfare, but also the cultural institution of the American presidency that gave him the power to make war in the circumstances he faced. It might be a natural propensity of human beings to live in societies with dominance hierarchies and to defer to dominant leaders, particularly in war. The willingness of citizens to risk their lives in war is a heroic manifestation of the human disposition to other-regarding behavior. But that natural propensity in the United States is channeled through the constitutional and scoial history of the American president as commander-in-chief.
Within the constraints set by natural propensities and cultural circumstances, the judgments of unique individuals in positions of responsibility can decisively determine the course of political history. This makes human political science more complex and unpredictable than anything studied by the physicist or chemist.
To explain fully why President Bush launched the American invasion of Iraq, the political scientist would have to consider not only the natural history of war in human evolution and the cultural history of presidential war in the United States, but also the biographical history of President Bush and those who influenced his decision.
This sketch of what a Darwinian political science would look like is briefly elaborated in my recent commentary in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to an article by Herbert Gintis. The article and my commentary can be found here.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Darwin's Vicar
As we enter the Easter season, we should notice the continuing debate over the relationship between Darwinian science and Biblical religion. For example, last November, Time magazine published a debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, with Dawkins claiming that Darwinism refutes religious belief and Collins claiming that Darwinism and religion are compatible.
The fundamental difficulty manifest in this debate is one that I have taken up in my books and this blog. It's the problem of ultimate explanation. In the search for ultimate causes, we must appeal to some final ground of explanation that cannot itself be explained. Either we look to Nature as the final ground. Or we look to God as the supernatural ground of Nature. I cannot see any way around this problem, which shows the limits of human reason.
As I have argued on this blog, Darwin himself saw no necessary conflict between evolutionary science and Biblical religion. He appealed to the traditional conception of "two books": God speaks both through the Book of Nature as studied by human reason and the Book of Scripture as revealed to the faithful.
In his personal religious views, Darwin moved from being an orthodox Christian in the earlier parts of his life to being a skeptic or agnostic at the end of his life. Unlike Dawkins, Darwin never attacked religion or denied that there were fundamental mysteries that left an opening for religious belief.
Darwin's stance on the relationship between science and religion is illustrated in his personal life by his friendship with the Reverend J. Brodie Innes. When Darwin moved to the village of Downe in 1842, Innes was curate of the adjoining parish of Farnborough, and Innes became the vicar of Downe in 1846. Innes moved to Scotland in 1862. For over 30 years, they were close friends.
The correspondence between Darwin and Innes was published in the Annals of Science (December, 1961), as edited by Robert Stecher. This correspondence shows a remarkable friendship between two men who respected one another despite their disagreeing about almost everything. Innes was a Tory. Darwin was a Whig who supported the Liberal Party. Innes was a devout theologian of the Church of England. Darwin was not a church-goer, although he supported the Church in its parish activities. Innes read Darwin's books with great interest, and he shared Darwin's interest in natural history, but Innes was never persuaded by Darwin's evolutionary theory.
When religious leaders attacked Darwin, Innes defended him by saying, "I never saw a word of his writings which was an attack on religion. He followed his own course as a naturalist, and he leaves Moses to take care of himself." Like Darwin, Innes used the "two books" idea to separate the Book of Revelation from the Book of Nature, so that nature could be studied scientifically without necessarily denying the claims of revelation.
One particularly interesting disagreement between them was on slavery. After Innes had read the Descent of Man, he wrote to Darwin: "I have today finished reading your charming book, . . . full of the most interesting facts of natural history. I am not a convert to the theory you found on them. I hold to the old belief that a man was made a man though developed into niggers who must be made to work and better men able to make them, if those radicals did not interfere with the salutary chastisement needful, neglecting the lesson taught by the black ants slaves to the white." Darwin wrote back: "my views do not lead me to such conclusions about negroes & slavery as yours do; I consider myself a good way ahead of you, as far as this goes."
This exchange shows that Innes recognized that attacking slavery and refuting racist science was one of the main purposes of Darwin's writing in the Descent. It also shows the possible conflict between Biblical morality and Darwin's natural moral sense. As I have indicated in some of my posts, the Bible seems to endorse slavery, and that's why many of the proslavery thinkers could defend slavery as biblically grounded. But Darwin regarded slavery as contrary to natural moral principles of justice as reciprocity (see my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right).
While some Biblical believers claim that morality without Biblcial religion is impossible, this dispute over slavery shows that sometimes we must appeal to our natural moral sense to correct the teachings of the Bible.
The fundamental difficulty manifest in this debate is one that I have taken up in my books and this blog. It's the problem of ultimate explanation. In the search for ultimate causes, we must appeal to some final ground of explanation that cannot itself be explained. Either we look to Nature as the final ground. Or we look to God as the supernatural ground of Nature. I cannot see any way around this problem, which shows the limits of human reason.
As I have argued on this blog, Darwin himself saw no necessary conflict between evolutionary science and Biblical religion. He appealed to the traditional conception of "two books": God speaks both through the Book of Nature as studied by human reason and the Book of Scripture as revealed to the faithful.
In his personal religious views, Darwin moved from being an orthodox Christian in the earlier parts of his life to being a skeptic or agnostic at the end of his life. Unlike Dawkins, Darwin never attacked religion or denied that there were fundamental mysteries that left an opening for religious belief.
Darwin's stance on the relationship between science and religion is illustrated in his personal life by his friendship with the Reverend J. Brodie Innes. When Darwin moved to the village of Downe in 1842, Innes was curate of the adjoining parish of Farnborough, and Innes became the vicar of Downe in 1846. Innes moved to Scotland in 1862. For over 30 years, they were close friends.
The correspondence between Darwin and Innes was published in the Annals of Science (December, 1961), as edited by Robert Stecher. This correspondence shows a remarkable friendship between two men who respected one another despite their disagreeing about almost everything. Innes was a Tory. Darwin was a Whig who supported the Liberal Party. Innes was a devout theologian of the Church of England. Darwin was not a church-goer, although he supported the Church in its parish activities. Innes read Darwin's books with great interest, and he shared Darwin's interest in natural history, but Innes was never persuaded by Darwin's evolutionary theory.
When religious leaders attacked Darwin, Innes defended him by saying, "I never saw a word of his writings which was an attack on religion. He followed his own course as a naturalist, and he leaves Moses to take care of himself." Like Darwin, Innes used the "two books" idea to separate the Book of Revelation from the Book of Nature, so that nature could be studied scientifically without necessarily denying the claims of revelation.
One particularly interesting disagreement between them was on slavery. After Innes had read the Descent of Man, he wrote to Darwin: "I have today finished reading your charming book, . . . full of the most interesting facts of natural history. I am not a convert to the theory you found on them. I hold to the old belief that a man was made a man though developed into niggers who must be made to work and better men able to make them, if those radicals did not interfere with the salutary chastisement needful, neglecting the lesson taught by the black ants slaves to the white." Darwin wrote back: "my views do not lead me to such conclusions about negroes & slavery as yours do; I consider myself a good way ahead of you, as far as this goes."
This exchange shows that Innes recognized that attacking slavery and refuting racist science was one of the main purposes of Darwin's writing in the Descent. It also shows the possible conflict between Biblical morality and Darwin's natural moral sense. As I have indicated in some of my posts, the Bible seems to endorse slavery, and that's why many of the proslavery thinkers could defend slavery as biblically grounded. But Darwin regarded slavery as contrary to natural moral principles of justice as reciprocity (see my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right).
While some Biblical believers claim that morality without Biblcial religion is impossible, this dispute over slavery shows that sometimes we must appeal to our natural moral sense to correct the teachings of the Bible.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
D'Sousa's Strange Alliance of Theocons and Islamists
One sign of the present confusion in American conservatism is that the Conservative Book Club is promoting both Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel and Dinesh D'Sousa's The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.
As I have indicated in a previous post, Hirsi Ali defends the Western tradition of liberty and limited government against the oppressive theocracy of fundamentalist Islam, and many American conservatives have rightly embraced her position. But D'Sousa is trying to persuade American conservatives that they should ally themselves with fundamentalist Muslims. I agree with Andrew Sullivan's review of this book as a disturbing attempt to unite American theoconservatism and Islamic fundamentalism.
D'Sousa argues that "conservatives must move closer to the traditional Muslims" (287). His fundamental claim is that moral debate today is divided sharply between two positions. On the one side, conservatives believe in a religious morality as rooted in "an external moral order" and "external commands." On the other side, liberals believe in a secular morality of the inner self, "the morality of self-fulfillment" (18-20). The liberals' secular morality of self-fulfillment promotes moral corruption through hedonistic self-indulgence and materialism. Traditional Muslims believe that this liberal morality will destroy their religion and their way of life. And American conservatives, D'Sousa insists, should admit that they are right. America really is morally corrupt insofar as liberal morality has prevailed in American life. American conservatives should join with fundamentalist Muslims in fighting against the corruption of such secular morality.
I would say, however, that D'Sousa has created a false dilemma in assuming that our choice is between a religious morality of theocracy and a secular morality of hedonism. Darwinian conservatism respects religious belief insofar as it supports our natural moral sense. But that natural morality stands on its own--as rooted in human nature--regardless of our religious beliefs. We do not have to choose between a morality of "external commands" or a morality of "the inner self." We can recognize traditional morality as founded in our evolved human nature.
If our morality is rooted in human nature, then we can trust family life and the mediating institutions of private life to cultivate moral virtue without statist coercion. We do not need a theocratic state to coercively enforce morality.
But, of course, the Darwinian conception of natural morality would be rejected by fundamentalist Muslims who scorn Darwinian science as contrary to their Creationist conception of human origins. Many American conservatives agree with them about this.
It is not surprising, therefore, that D'Sousa's book has been endorsed by George Gilder, a conservative critic of Darwinian science who works for the Discovery Institute. In the New York Times Book Review (February 4), Gilder wrote:
"D'Souza raises the alarm that the anti-religious, sexual liberationist, anti-natalist and feminist thrust of American foreign, cultural, and free-speech global Internet policies threaten and estrange all the traditional cultures of the third world, whether Muslim or Christian, Hindu or Buddhist. Poor people cannot afford the epidemics, abortions, and divorces of Hollywood liberalism, and uphold a monotheist God as the foundation of their moral codes and worthy of respect."
"The American global cultural campaign pushes a billion non-militant Muslims to condone the jihad and thus threatens the existence of Israel and the survival of vulnerable American cities like New York."
That the "American global cultural campaign" is responsible for Islamic terrorism is only one of many absurdities to arise from this proposed alliance of theoconservatism and Islamic fundamentalism.
As I have indicated in a previous post, Hirsi Ali defends the Western tradition of liberty and limited government against the oppressive theocracy of fundamentalist Islam, and many American conservatives have rightly embraced her position. But D'Sousa is trying to persuade American conservatives that they should ally themselves with fundamentalist Muslims. I agree with Andrew Sullivan's review of this book as a disturbing attempt to unite American theoconservatism and Islamic fundamentalism.
D'Sousa argues that "conservatives must move closer to the traditional Muslims" (287). His fundamental claim is that moral debate today is divided sharply between two positions. On the one side, conservatives believe in a religious morality as rooted in "an external moral order" and "external commands." On the other side, liberals believe in a secular morality of the inner self, "the morality of self-fulfillment" (18-20). The liberals' secular morality of self-fulfillment promotes moral corruption through hedonistic self-indulgence and materialism. Traditional Muslims believe that this liberal morality will destroy their religion and their way of life. And American conservatives, D'Sousa insists, should admit that they are right. America really is morally corrupt insofar as liberal morality has prevailed in American life. American conservatives should join with fundamentalist Muslims in fighting against the corruption of such secular morality.
I would say, however, that D'Sousa has created a false dilemma in assuming that our choice is between a religious morality of theocracy and a secular morality of hedonism. Darwinian conservatism respects religious belief insofar as it supports our natural moral sense. But that natural morality stands on its own--as rooted in human nature--regardless of our religious beliefs. We do not have to choose between a morality of "external commands" or a morality of "the inner self." We can recognize traditional morality as founded in our evolved human nature.
If our morality is rooted in human nature, then we can trust family life and the mediating institutions of private life to cultivate moral virtue without statist coercion. We do not need a theocratic state to coercively enforce morality.
But, of course, the Darwinian conception of natural morality would be rejected by fundamentalist Muslims who scorn Darwinian science as contrary to their Creationist conception of human origins. Many American conservatives agree with them about this.
It is not surprising, therefore, that D'Sousa's book has been endorsed by George Gilder, a conservative critic of Darwinian science who works for the Discovery Institute. In the New York Times Book Review (February 4), Gilder wrote:
"D'Souza raises the alarm that the anti-religious, sexual liberationist, anti-natalist and feminist thrust of American foreign, cultural, and free-speech global Internet policies threaten and estrange all the traditional cultures of the third world, whether Muslim or Christian, Hindu or Buddhist. Poor people cannot afford the epidemics, abortions, and divorces of Hollywood liberalism, and uphold a monotheist God as the foundation of their moral codes and worthy of respect."
"The American global cultural campaign pushes a billion non-militant Muslims to condone the jihad and thus threatens the existence of Israel and the survival of vulnerable American cities like New York."
That the "American global cultural campaign" is responsible for Islamic terrorism is only one of many absurdities to arise from this proposed alliance of theoconservatism and Islamic fundamentalism.
Monday, March 19, 2007
The Women's War
The New York Times Magazine for March 18 has an article by Sara Corbett on "The Women's War on the experience of women returning from the Iraq war. Corbett reports that many of these women have been thrown into "post-traumatic-stress-syndrome"(PTSD) by the combination of combat violence and sexual assault.
The Iraq war is a remarkable experiment in the attempt to integrate women into combat. According to Corbett, 1 in 10 of the American soldiers in Iraq are women. 160,000 women have been sent to Iraq and Afganistan, as compared with 7,500 female soldiers in the Vietnam war and 41,000 in the gulf war.
In Darwinian Conservatism, I claim that war is predominantly a male activity. My claim would be refuted if this experience of sending so many women to war showed there was no difference between men and women in combat activity. But if this article is accurate, there is some evidence that women suffer from combat in a way that men do not.
Given our evolved human nature, it should not surprise us that when young women are put in military units in combat with young men that the women are exposed to male predatory sexuality. Neither should it surprise us that women are especially traumatized by combat.
If the behavioral differences between men and women are culturally constructed and not natural, then we should expect that eventually women and men will be socialized into a gender-neutral pattern, so that men and women react to war and combat in the same way. I doubt this. The reports in this article suggest that I am right--that the evolved natural differences between men and women make it dangerous for women to be treated the same as men when it comes to war.
The Iraq war is a remarkable experiment in the attempt to integrate women into combat. According to Corbett, 1 in 10 of the American soldiers in Iraq are women. 160,000 women have been sent to Iraq and Afganistan, as compared with 7,500 female soldiers in the Vietnam war and 41,000 in the gulf war.
In Darwinian Conservatism, I claim that war is predominantly a male activity. My claim would be refuted if this experience of sending so many women to war showed there was no difference between men and women in combat activity. But if this article is accurate, there is some evidence that women suffer from combat in a way that men do not.
Given our evolved human nature, it should not surprise us that when young women are put in military units in combat with young men that the women are exposed to male predatory sexuality. Neither should it surprise us that women are especially traumatized by combat.
If the behavioral differences between men and women are culturally constructed and not natural, then we should expect that eventually women and men will be socialized into a gender-neutral pattern, so that men and women react to war and combat in the same way. I doubt this. The reports in this article suggest that I am right--that the evolved natural differences between men and women make it dangerous for women to be treated the same as men when it comes to war.
Friday, March 16, 2007
The Brain Imaging Fallacy in Neurolaw and Neuroeconomics
The New York Times Magazine for last Sunday (March 11)has an article on "neurolaw" by Jeffrey Rosen. Advances in the technology for brain-imaging seem to allow us to look into the brain as it's working and thus to literally read the minds of human beings as they think. "Neurolaw" is the use of such brain-imaging in the courtroom and in legal discussions of human behavior. Similarly, "neuroeconomics" is the use of the same technology to study economic behavior.
This research suffers from a fundamental fallacy, which I will call the brain-imaging fallacy. The brain-imaging fallacy is the false assumption that brain-imaging techniques explain and predict human thoughts, actions, and consciousness.
One of the most commonly used techniques is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A fMRI machine uses a magnetic field to detect increases in blood oxygenation that show increased blood flow to active areas of the brain. Computer analysis can generate colored pictures showing patterns of blood flow that presumably indicate which parts of the brain are most active at some point in time. As Rosen's article indicates, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that fMRI allows us to read the human mind. But in fact, all that fMRI shows us is patterns of blood flow in the brain. To infer that these patterns of blood flow explain thoughts, actions, and consciousness requires speculation that goes beyond the evidence of the brain imaging.
For example, Rosen refers to the famous experiments conducted by Elizabeth Phelps who used brain scans to detect unconscious racism. Individuals were shown pictures of white and black faces. When they saw unfamiliar black faces, the fMRI scans showed high activation in their amydalas, which is associated with fear and other strong emotions. But when they saw pictures of familar black faces (such as Denzel Washington or Martin Luther King, Jr.), there was no increase in amygdala activity. This was interpreted as a sign of unconscious racism. If so, this would have legal implications, because we could identify such unconscious racism as a propensity to illegal racist behavior.
But notice how speculative this is. All that the fMRI scan shows us is patterns of blood flow. Increased blood flow to the amydala can be identified as emotional arousal only if we assume that we know exactly how emotion is localized in the amydala and how exactly specific emotions are activated there. We cannot see racist emotions directly. We can only infer such emotions based on elaborate speculation about the underlying neural circuitry. Do we really understand exactly how blood flow to the amydala causes specific emotions? Aren't emotions likely to arise from complicated interactions of many elements of neural circuitry that are not well understood?
Can we be sure that this amydala activity shows racist emotions? As indicated in Rosen's article, some researchers doubt this. The amydala activity in response to seeing black faces might indicate our awareness that black people are socially disadvantaged.
Moreover, even if we could be certain that we could locate specific emotions in specific brain areas like the amygdala, we still could not be sure that this would predict actions. People might often have racist emotions without ever acting on those emotions.
It is also false to assume that we can see human consciousness in these brain scans. We all have direct access to our own consciousness. But none of us has direct access to the consciousness of others. When people come out of the fMRI machines, they are interviewed. We need their verbal reports about what they were consciously doing, because the machines cannot record consciousness. The machines can only record brain activity that might be correlated with conscious experience. But this correlation is not identity.
Rosen makes a lot of the claim that brain imaging throws doubt on the traditional belief in moral responsibility. If people's thoughts, actions, and consciousness are determined by their brains, then we might conclude that human beings are not capable of free choice.
But as I have argued in Darwinian Conservatism, brain imaging shows that human beings have the power to make choices that actually change their brain circuitry. In the book, I cite the work of Jeffrey Schwartz. Working with patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Schwartz has showed them how to use "directed mental force" to change their brains. Those with this disorder can be locked into repetitive behavior--such as washing their hands over and over again--that they cannot control because the brain's neuronal circuits for this behavior are overactive. Dr. Schwartz has helped these people by training them to concentrate their minds to divert their attention away from the obsessive-compulsive behavior. So when they feel compelled to wash their hands, for example, they might concentrate on an alternative behavior such as tending the flowers in their garden. As this mental exercise becomes habitual, it becomes easier to resist their obsessive-compulsive behavior. Using brain-imaging, Dr. Schwartz has discovered that this therapy actually changes the neuronal activity of the brain so that the activity of the frontal cortex exerts a mental force to activate one circuit rather than another. So it seems that the mind that emerges from the human brain can change the brain itself. This emergent power of the brain for mental attention is the natural ground for human freedom and moral responsibility. Here we see the emergent evolution of the human soul in the human brain.
This research suffers from a fundamental fallacy, which I will call the brain-imaging fallacy. The brain-imaging fallacy is the false assumption that brain-imaging techniques explain and predict human thoughts, actions, and consciousness.
One of the most commonly used techniques is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A fMRI machine uses a magnetic field to detect increases in blood oxygenation that show increased blood flow to active areas of the brain. Computer analysis can generate colored pictures showing patterns of blood flow that presumably indicate which parts of the brain are most active at some point in time. As Rosen's article indicates, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that fMRI allows us to read the human mind. But in fact, all that fMRI shows us is patterns of blood flow in the brain. To infer that these patterns of blood flow explain thoughts, actions, and consciousness requires speculation that goes beyond the evidence of the brain imaging.
For example, Rosen refers to the famous experiments conducted by Elizabeth Phelps who used brain scans to detect unconscious racism. Individuals were shown pictures of white and black faces. When they saw unfamiliar black faces, the fMRI scans showed high activation in their amydalas, which is associated with fear and other strong emotions. But when they saw pictures of familar black faces (such as Denzel Washington or Martin Luther King, Jr.), there was no increase in amygdala activity. This was interpreted as a sign of unconscious racism. If so, this would have legal implications, because we could identify such unconscious racism as a propensity to illegal racist behavior.
But notice how speculative this is. All that the fMRI scan shows us is patterns of blood flow. Increased blood flow to the amydala can be identified as emotional arousal only if we assume that we know exactly how emotion is localized in the amydala and how exactly specific emotions are activated there. We cannot see racist emotions directly. We can only infer such emotions based on elaborate speculation about the underlying neural circuitry. Do we really understand exactly how blood flow to the amydala causes specific emotions? Aren't emotions likely to arise from complicated interactions of many elements of neural circuitry that are not well understood?
Can we be sure that this amydala activity shows racist emotions? As indicated in Rosen's article, some researchers doubt this. The amydala activity in response to seeing black faces might indicate our awareness that black people are socially disadvantaged.
Moreover, even if we could be certain that we could locate specific emotions in specific brain areas like the amygdala, we still could not be sure that this would predict actions. People might often have racist emotions without ever acting on those emotions.
It is also false to assume that we can see human consciousness in these brain scans. We all have direct access to our own consciousness. But none of us has direct access to the consciousness of others. When people come out of the fMRI machines, they are interviewed. We need their verbal reports about what they were consciously doing, because the machines cannot record consciousness. The machines can only record brain activity that might be correlated with conscious experience. But this correlation is not identity.
Rosen makes a lot of the claim that brain imaging throws doubt on the traditional belief in moral responsibility. If people's thoughts, actions, and consciousness are determined by their brains, then we might conclude that human beings are not capable of free choice.
But as I have argued in Darwinian Conservatism, brain imaging shows that human beings have the power to make choices that actually change their brain circuitry. In the book, I cite the work of Jeffrey Schwartz. Working with patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Schwartz has showed them how to use "directed mental force" to change their brains. Those with this disorder can be locked into repetitive behavior--such as washing their hands over and over again--that they cannot control because the brain's neuronal circuits for this behavior are overactive. Dr. Schwartz has helped these people by training them to concentrate their minds to divert their attention away from the obsessive-compulsive behavior. So when they feel compelled to wash their hands, for example, they might concentrate on an alternative behavior such as tending the flowers in their garden. As this mental exercise becomes habitual, it becomes easier to resist their obsessive-compulsive behavior. Using brain-imaging, Dr. Schwartz has discovered that this therapy actually changes the neuronal activity of the brain so that the activity of the frontal cortex exerts a mental force to activate one circuit rather than another. So it seems that the mind that emerges from the human brain can change the brain itself. This emergent power of the brain for mental attention is the natural ground for human freedom and moral responsibility. Here we see the emergent evolution of the human soul in the human brain.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Conservative Infidel--Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel is a fascinating autobiography that touches on many of the issues that I have taken up in defending Darwinian conservatism. (I have not yet read her other book--The Caged Virgin.)
I agree with her attack on the moral relativism of multiculturalism and her moral defense of individual liberty and limited government against the theocratic tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. Darwinian conservatism would show how her defense of liberty can be justified as conforming to the natural desires of a universal human nature as shaped by evolutionary history.
But I disagree with her claim that fundamentalist Islam is the only true version of Islam. In taking such a position, she actually agrees with the fundamentalist Islamists that their reading of the Quran is the only correct reading, which is a big mistake.
In this post, I continue with some of the points that I made last year in another post on "Do the Bible and the Koran Support Theocracy?".
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia. She was raised as a Muslim, living in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. As a child, her genitals were mutilated by family members practicing "female circumcision" as a way of ensuring female virginity by excising the clitoris and sewing up the vagina. In 1992, she fled to Holland as she ran away from a forced marriage to a cousin who was a Somali Canadian. Working as an interpreter in Holland, she saw that many Muslim women in Holland were being beaten--and some even killed--by their male relatives who believed that Islam dictated the submission of women as part of an Islamic tradition of male domination and honor. She studied political science and then went to work for the Labor Party in Holland. She became famous as a campaigner for the human rights of Muslim women. She switched to the "People's Party for Freedom and Democracy"--VVD for the Dutch: Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie--which is a "conservative liberal" party in the tradition of classical liberalism that favors free markets and individual liberty. She was elected as a Member of the Dutch Parliament. She worked with Theo van Gogh to produce a short film--Submission--that dramatized the oppression of Muslim women as sanctioned by the teachings of the Quran. This brought death threats from anry Islamic fundamentalists. In 2004, van Gogh was brutally murdered on a street in Amsterdam by a Muslim fanatic, which shocked not only the Dutch, but people across Europe, who had assumed that such violence to suppress free speech was impossible in modern Europe. Hirsi Ali had to be surrounded by body guards. Eventually, she left Parliament, and then left Holland in 2006 to join the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C. She calls herself an "infidel," because she has rejected Islam and become an atheist. But as a Fellow at AEI, she might be called a "conservative infidel."
In Darwinian Natural Right, I have a long section on female genital mutilation (pp. 149-160). I use this to illustrate the dangers of multicultural relativism. Multiculturalists argue that since all moral standards are culturally constructed, there is no universal standard for judging cultural traditions as better or worse, good or bad. So if female circumcism is a deeply rooted cultural tradition in some social groups, we cannot properly condemn it without showing the "cultural imperialism" of imposing Western cultural values on a non-Western culture. Against this, I argue that female genital mutilation can be rightly condemned as frustrating the natural desires of the women who suffer from this practice. These natural desires are universal insofar as they manifest a universal human nature. If the good is the desirable, then we can condemn cultural practices that unreasonably frustrate our natural desires.
Hirsi Ali confirms much of what I say about female circumcism being based on false beliefs that impose unnecessary suffering on women who have had this done to them (see, for example, Infidel, pp. 31-34, 112-13, 140). But she seems less inclined than I am to rely on gradual reforms. She notes that the Quran does not mandate female circumcism, and that most Muslims do not circumcise their daughters. To me, this suggests that a reform campaign could stress that this practice is not really dictated by Islam. In fact, Hirsi Ali's father opposed the practice as barbaric and was shocked when he discovered that her grandmother had done this to her. And yet, Hirsi Ali does not see much room for gradual reform, because she is convinced that all of Islam is a brutal denial of human liberty and happiness, particularly the liberty and happiness of women.
Hirsi Ali's father argued that the Quran did not support Islamic fundamentalism, because the Quran could be interpreted as compatible with democratic liberty. But she disagreed, because she had been persuaded by the fundamentalist Muslims--like the Muslim Brotherhood--that the Quran cannot be properly interpreted this way (see pp. 179, 347-48). She is convinced that Islam in its "purest form" as dictated by the actual words of the Quran requires the sort of theocratic tyranny and denial of individual liberty sought by fundamentalist Islam as practiced in countries like Saudi Arabia and promoted by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. This then leads her to the conclusion that to embrace the libertarian principles of the European Enlightenment, which denies theocratic tyranny by promoting religious liberty and toleration, she had to totally reject Islam and become an atheist.
But the Quran is more ambiguous on these matters than she is willing to admit. It declares that "there is no compulsion in religion" (2:256). And some Muslims see this as Quranic authority for religious liberty and toleration. Some argue for "minding one's own business," and they cite the Quranic verse that says: "O you who believe! Guard your own souls: If you follow right guidance, no hurt can come to you from those who stray" (5:108).
The ambiguity of the Quran on whether belief can be coerced by law is similar to the ambiguity of the Bible. A big part of the Enlightenment argument for toleration and religious liberty turned on interpretations of the Bible. Although much of the Old Testament seems theocratic, the New Testament can be read as favorable to religious liberty. The Christians of the New Testament do not use government to enforce their Christian beliefs. Proponents of religious toleration could cite the New Testament as supporting their position, and this was crucial for promoting toleration as compatible with Biblical religion.
By contrast, Hirsi Ali leaves her reader with the impression that the Enlightenment defense of toleration requires atheism. One reason for this is that she seems to identify the Enlightenment with the French Enlightenment and its scorn for religious belief. But this ignores the British and American Enlightenments, which were more favorable to religious belief. (Gertrude Himmelfarb has defended this analysis of the Enlighenment in The Roads to Modernity.)
As Hirsi Ali indicates, the crucial issue is whether morality is separable from religious belief. Fundamentalist Islamists--like fundamentalist Christians--assume that without religious belief, there can be so solid morality. Consequently, the moral order of any society requires the enforcement of religious belief, which then tends to support theocratic tyranny. But if there is a natural moral sense rooted in human nature, then we can judge good and bad without necessarily requiring any specific religious doctrines. In the British and American Enlightenments, it was generally assumed that this natural moral sense would be shared by all healthy religious traditions. We could allow for religious liberty and thus religious multiplicity with the confidence that the natural moral sense would prevail even without agreement on religious doctrines.
Darwin's biological account of the moral sense as a product of natural evolution supports this position. Although some religious believers scorn this Darwinian morality as atheistic, there is nothing in the Darwinian argument that dictates atheism. Saying that morality is part of "Nature's Law" leaves open the possibility that behind this Nature is "Nature's God."
According to Hirsi Ali, "Darwin said creation stories were a fairy tale" (p. 239). But that's not quite right. Darwin certainly denied the theory of "special creation" of each species. But he left open the possibility that the original laws of the universe were impressed on matter by the Creator (as he suggested at the end of The Origin of Species).
Hirsi Ali says that "Spinoza . . . was the first modern European to state clearly that the world is not ordained by a separate God. Nature created itself, Spinoza said" (p. 282).
Perhaps so. But this points to the problem of ultimate explanations. If we ask why nature exists and exists with the kind of order that it has, the naturalist might say that nature is just a brute fact that is self-contained and self-explanatory. That's just the way it is! But such an assumption that "Nature created itself" cannot be proven, because such an assumption is the starting point of any proof. And yet the transcendentalist might appeal to the Divine Creator as the uncaused cause of Nature as an alternative starting point. The choice between these two stances on First Causes cannot be resolved by pure reason alone. And this leaves room for religious faith.
So I generally agree with Hirsi Ali that there is a universal human nature that allows us to judge cultural traditions as better or worse in conforming to that human nature, and therefore that multicultural relativism is wrong. I also agree with her that this gives us a natural ground for morality that does not absolutely depend on religious belief.
But I do not agree with her that this leads us to atheism. Rather than a dogmatic atheism, we might better be left with a skeptical openness to fundamental mysteries that allows for religious faith even as it allows us to condemn theocratic tyranny. Darwinian conservatism neither affirms nor denies the theological truth of religious belief. But it does respect the practical truth of religious traditions that foster social cooperation and healthy morality.
I agree with her attack on the moral relativism of multiculturalism and her moral defense of individual liberty and limited government against the theocratic tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. Darwinian conservatism would show how her defense of liberty can be justified as conforming to the natural desires of a universal human nature as shaped by evolutionary history.
But I disagree with her claim that fundamentalist Islam is the only true version of Islam. In taking such a position, she actually agrees with the fundamentalist Islamists that their reading of the Quran is the only correct reading, which is a big mistake.
In this post, I continue with some of the points that I made last year in another post on "Do the Bible and the Koran Support Theocracy?".
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia. She was raised as a Muslim, living in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. As a child, her genitals were mutilated by family members practicing "female circumcision" as a way of ensuring female virginity by excising the clitoris and sewing up the vagina. In 1992, she fled to Holland as she ran away from a forced marriage to a cousin who was a Somali Canadian. Working as an interpreter in Holland, she saw that many Muslim women in Holland were being beaten--and some even killed--by their male relatives who believed that Islam dictated the submission of women as part of an Islamic tradition of male domination and honor. She studied political science and then went to work for the Labor Party in Holland. She became famous as a campaigner for the human rights of Muslim women. She switched to the "People's Party for Freedom and Democracy"--VVD for the Dutch: Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie--which is a "conservative liberal" party in the tradition of classical liberalism that favors free markets and individual liberty. She was elected as a Member of the Dutch Parliament. She worked with Theo van Gogh to produce a short film--Submission--that dramatized the oppression of Muslim women as sanctioned by the teachings of the Quran. This brought death threats from anry Islamic fundamentalists. In 2004, van Gogh was brutally murdered on a street in Amsterdam by a Muslim fanatic, which shocked not only the Dutch, but people across Europe, who had assumed that such violence to suppress free speech was impossible in modern Europe. Hirsi Ali had to be surrounded by body guards. Eventually, she left Parliament, and then left Holland in 2006 to join the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C. She calls herself an "infidel," because she has rejected Islam and become an atheist. But as a Fellow at AEI, she might be called a "conservative infidel."
In Darwinian Natural Right, I have a long section on female genital mutilation (pp. 149-160). I use this to illustrate the dangers of multicultural relativism. Multiculturalists argue that since all moral standards are culturally constructed, there is no universal standard for judging cultural traditions as better or worse, good or bad. So if female circumcism is a deeply rooted cultural tradition in some social groups, we cannot properly condemn it without showing the "cultural imperialism" of imposing Western cultural values on a non-Western culture. Against this, I argue that female genital mutilation can be rightly condemned as frustrating the natural desires of the women who suffer from this practice. These natural desires are universal insofar as they manifest a universal human nature. If the good is the desirable, then we can condemn cultural practices that unreasonably frustrate our natural desires.
Hirsi Ali confirms much of what I say about female circumcism being based on false beliefs that impose unnecessary suffering on women who have had this done to them (see, for example, Infidel, pp. 31-34, 112-13, 140). But she seems less inclined than I am to rely on gradual reforms. She notes that the Quran does not mandate female circumcism, and that most Muslims do not circumcise their daughters. To me, this suggests that a reform campaign could stress that this practice is not really dictated by Islam. In fact, Hirsi Ali's father opposed the practice as barbaric and was shocked when he discovered that her grandmother had done this to her. And yet, Hirsi Ali does not see much room for gradual reform, because she is convinced that all of Islam is a brutal denial of human liberty and happiness, particularly the liberty and happiness of women.
Hirsi Ali's father argued that the Quran did not support Islamic fundamentalism, because the Quran could be interpreted as compatible with democratic liberty. But she disagreed, because she had been persuaded by the fundamentalist Muslims--like the Muslim Brotherhood--that the Quran cannot be properly interpreted this way (see pp. 179, 347-48). She is convinced that Islam in its "purest form" as dictated by the actual words of the Quran requires the sort of theocratic tyranny and denial of individual liberty sought by fundamentalist Islam as practiced in countries like Saudi Arabia and promoted by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. This then leads her to the conclusion that to embrace the libertarian principles of the European Enlightenment, which denies theocratic tyranny by promoting religious liberty and toleration, she had to totally reject Islam and become an atheist.
But the Quran is more ambiguous on these matters than she is willing to admit. It declares that "there is no compulsion in religion" (2:256). And some Muslims see this as Quranic authority for religious liberty and toleration. Some argue for "minding one's own business," and they cite the Quranic verse that says: "O you who believe! Guard your own souls: If you follow right guidance, no hurt can come to you from those who stray" (5:108).
The ambiguity of the Quran on whether belief can be coerced by law is similar to the ambiguity of the Bible. A big part of the Enlightenment argument for toleration and religious liberty turned on interpretations of the Bible. Although much of the Old Testament seems theocratic, the New Testament can be read as favorable to religious liberty. The Christians of the New Testament do not use government to enforce their Christian beliefs. Proponents of religious toleration could cite the New Testament as supporting their position, and this was crucial for promoting toleration as compatible with Biblical religion.
By contrast, Hirsi Ali leaves her reader with the impression that the Enlightenment defense of toleration requires atheism. One reason for this is that she seems to identify the Enlightenment with the French Enlightenment and its scorn for religious belief. But this ignores the British and American Enlightenments, which were more favorable to religious belief. (Gertrude Himmelfarb has defended this analysis of the Enlighenment in The Roads to Modernity.)
As Hirsi Ali indicates, the crucial issue is whether morality is separable from religious belief. Fundamentalist Islamists--like fundamentalist Christians--assume that without religious belief, there can be so solid morality. Consequently, the moral order of any society requires the enforcement of religious belief, which then tends to support theocratic tyranny. But if there is a natural moral sense rooted in human nature, then we can judge good and bad without necessarily requiring any specific religious doctrines. In the British and American Enlightenments, it was generally assumed that this natural moral sense would be shared by all healthy religious traditions. We could allow for religious liberty and thus religious multiplicity with the confidence that the natural moral sense would prevail even without agreement on religious doctrines.
Darwin's biological account of the moral sense as a product of natural evolution supports this position. Although some religious believers scorn this Darwinian morality as atheistic, there is nothing in the Darwinian argument that dictates atheism. Saying that morality is part of "Nature's Law" leaves open the possibility that behind this Nature is "Nature's God."
According to Hirsi Ali, "Darwin said creation stories were a fairy tale" (p. 239). But that's not quite right. Darwin certainly denied the theory of "special creation" of each species. But he left open the possibility that the original laws of the universe were impressed on matter by the Creator (as he suggested at the end of The Origin of Species).
Hirsi Ali says that "Spinoza . . . was the first modern European to state clearly that the world is not ordained by a separate God. Nature created itself, Spinoza said" (p. 282).
Perhaps so. But this points to the problem of ultimate explanations. If we ask why nature exists and exists with the kind of order that it has, the naturalist might say that nature is just a brute fact that is self-contained and self-explanatory. That's just the way it is! But such an assumption that "Nature created itself" cannot be proven, because such an assumption is the starting point of any proof. And yet the transcendentalist might appeal to the Divine Creator as the uncaused cause of Nature as an alternative starting point. The choice between these two stances on First Causes cannot be resolved by pure reason alone. And this leaves room for religious faith.
So I generally agree with Hirsi Ali that there is a universal human nature that allows us to judge cultural traditions as better or worse in conforming to that human nature, and therefore that multicultural relativism is wrong. I also agree with her that this gives us a natural ground for morality that does not absolutely depend on religious belief.
But I do not agree with her that this leads us to atheism. Rather than a dogmatic atheism, we might better be left with a skeptical openness to fundamental mysteries that allows for religious faith even as it allows us to condemn theocratic tyranny. Darwinian conservatism neither affirms nor denies the theological truth of religious belief. But it does respect the practical truth of religious traditions that foster social cooperation and healthy morality.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Darwin's God
The New York Times Magazine for March 4th has an article on "Darwin's God", which surveys the current debate over Darwinian explanations for religious belief. This debate supports my claim that the desire for religious understanding is part of the evolved nature of human beings.
It is said that Darwinian scientists studying the evolution of religion "agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain."
The "byproduct theorists"--like Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer--argue that while religious belief has never served any adaptive purpose--it has never enhanced survival and reproduction--it has arisen as an accidental consequence of mental propensities that were adaptive in human evolutionary history. For example, it was probably adaptive for human ancestors to have an evolved capacity for causal reasoning--to be able to explain events in the world through cause-and-effect logic, because this would have allowed them to be more successful in the natural world. But then when they faced unusual or mysterious events, they might have looked for mysterious superpowers to explain these events, and thus they would have found religious belief comforting.
Moreover, it was probably adaptive for human ancestors to detect intentional agents (animals and other human beings) and to be able to imagine what other people were thinking. Such natural tendencies to see the world as governed by intentional agents and thinking beings might then have led human beings to assume the existence of disembodied agents or minds as spiritual beings that intervene in the world.
On the other side of this debate, the adaptationists--like David Sloan Wilson--would say that religious belief was not just a side effect of mental adaptations but was itself an evolutionary adaptation. Wilson would say that religious belief helps to bind believers together into cooperative groups that outcompete groups that are not so tightly bound together. Religious beliefs and rituals are commitment devices by which religious people show that they can be trusted to cooperate with their fellow believers. Such group selection enhances the Darwinian fitness of religious groups.
In arguing for "Darwinian conservatism," I would say that there is some truth in both positions. My list of 20 natural desires rooted in evolved human nature includes the natural desire for religious understanding. Human beings generally desire to understand the world through religion or spirituality. Religious doctrines about human relationships with divine powers or spiritual feelings of self-transcending union with the universe satisfy this longing to make sense of things. Driven to fear and despair by their experience of pain and death, human beings impagine themselves surrounded by mysterious forces that determine their fate. Driven to hope and pride by their feeling of spiritual exaltation, human biengs image that their existence can be redeemed by ecstatic union with the divine.
Religious understanding satisfies our natural desire to make sense of things, to explain the order of the universe in which so much seems mysterious to us. Ultimately, we are driven to ask about the first causes of everything, and such questions have no final answer except by invoking some transcendent causal order of things.
Religious understanding also serves to unite us into a community of believers who can trust one another to be cooperative, even when this requires individual sacrifice for the good of the group. That's why conservatives tend to see religion as necessary for social order. Regardless of what one thinks about the theological claims of religious belief, religion can have a practical benefit in holding believers together in cooperative communities.
That's why even skeptical conservatives (like Friedrich Hayek) paid tribute to traditional religion as an evolved, spontaneous order that supports social cooperation.
Darwinian science sustains this conservative understanding of religion by showing how religion could have evolved as part of human nature to satisfy our natural desires for understanding and cooperation.
It is said that Darwinian scientists studying the evolution of religion "agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain."
The "byproduct theorists"--like Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer--argue that while religious belief has never served any adaptive purpose--it has never enhanced survival and reproduction--it has arisen as an accidental consequence of mental propensities that were adaptive in human evolutionary history. For example, it was probably adaptive for human ancestors to have an evolved capacity for causal reasoning--to be able to explain events in the world through cause-and-effect logic, because this would have allowed them to be more successful in the natural world. But then when they faced unusual or mysterious events, they might have looked for mysterious superpowers to explain these events, and thus they would have found religious belief comforting.
Moreover, it was probably adaptive for human ancestors to detect intentional agents (animals and other human beings) and to be able to imagine what other people were thinking. Such natural tendencies to see the world as governed by intentional agents and thinking beings might then have led human beings to assume the existence of disembodied agents or minds as spiritual beings that intervene in the world.
On the other side of this debate, the adaptationists--like David Sloan Wilson--would say that religious belief was not just a side effect of mental adaptations but was itself an evolutionary adaptation. Wilson would say that religious belief helps to bind believers together into cooperative groups that outcompete groups that are not so tightly bound together. Religious beliefs and rituals are commitment devices by which religious people show that they can be trusted to cooperate with their fellow believers. Such group selection enhances the Darwinian fitness of religious groups.
In arguing for "Darwinian conservatism," I would say that there is some truth in both positions. My list of 20 natural desires rooted in evolved human nature includes the natural desire for religious understanding. Human beings generally desire to understand the world through religion or spirituality. Religious doctrines about human relationships with divine powers or spiritual feelings of self-transcending union with the universe satisfy this longing to make sense of things. Driven to fear and despair by their experience of pain and death, human beings impagine themselves surrounded by mysterious forces that determine their fate. Driven to hope and pride by their feeling of spiritual exaltation, human biengs image that their existence can be redeemed by ecstatic union with the divine.
Religious understanding satisfies our natural desire to make sense of things, to explain the order of the universe in which so much seems mysterious to us. Ultimately, we are driven to ask about the first causes of everything, and such questions have no final answer except by invoking some transcendent causal order of things.
Religious understanding also serves to unite us into a community of believers who can trust one another to be cooperative, even when this requires individual sacrifice for the good of the group. That's why conservatives tend to see religion as necessary for social order. Regardless of what one thinks about the theological claims of religious belief, religion can have a practical benefit in holding believers together in cooperative communities.
That's why even skeptical conservatives (like Friedrich Hayek) paid tribute to traditional religion as an evolved, spontaneous order that supports social cooperation.
Darwinian science sustains this conservative understanding of religion by showing how religion could have evolved as part of human nature to satisfy our natural desires for understanding and cooperation.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Hayek and Fusionism
The TCS Daily has an essay by Edward Feser on "Hayek and Fusionism". I have written some posts on Hayek. And I agree with Feser that Hayek's political thought offers the best ground for "fusionism"--the understanding of conservatism as combining traditionalism and libertarianism. But I would also argue that Darwinian conservatism offers the best way to support this shared commitment to individual liberty and traditional morality that constitutes fusionist conservatism.
Like Feser, I think it's significant that Hayek identified himself as a Burkean Whig, which suggests a union of the classical liberalism that began with the Whigs and the traditional conservatism that began with Burke.
I also agree with Feser in seeing this Hayekian union of liberty and tradition as rooted in Hayek's view of human knowledge as radically limited. Because human knowledge is limited, we cannot rely on central planning to secure either economic order or moral order. Free markets and moral traditions embody the dispersed knowledge and experience of millions of individuals over time in a way that is beyond the rational design of any economic planner or moral innovator.
Feser rightly points to Hayek's fundamental claim that economic and moral order arises from the working out of "the contingent facts of biological and cultural evolution." But Feser objects to Hayek's evolutionary account of order as denying the view "that traditional morality rests on a set of objective metaphysical truths knowable through reason."
As I have argued in previous posts, I don't see that conservatism requires a belief in eternal, cosmic purposes as sustaining economic and moral order. We can defend economic liberty and traditional morality as conforming to our evolved human nature. Whether that evolved human nature manifests the intelligent design of "Nature's God" is an open question that points to a fundamental mystery. Religious conservatives will see that evolved order of nature as manifesting a cosmic teleology of transcendent purposefulness. But skeptical conservatives like Hayek will be content to affirm that "life has no purpose but itself."
Like Feser, I think it's significant that Hayek identified himself as a Burkean Whig, which suggests a union of the classical liberalism that began with the Whigs and the traditional conservatism that began with Burke.
I also agree with Feser in seeing this Hayekian union of liberty and tradition as rooted in Hayek's view of human knowledge as radically limited. Because human knowledge is limited, we cannot rely on central planning to secure either economic order or moral order. Free markets and moral traditions embody the dispersed knowledge and experience of millions of individuals over time in a way that is beyond the rational design of any economic planner or moral innovator.
Feser rightly points to Hayek's fundamental claim that economic and moral order arises from the working out of "the contingent facts of biological and cultural evolution." But Feser objects to Hayek's evolutionary account of order as denying the view "that traditional morality rests on a set of objective metaphysical truths knowable through reason."
As I have argued in previous posts, I don't see that conservatism requires a belief in eternal, cosmic purposes as sustaining economic and moral order. We can defend economic liberty and traditional morality as conforming to our evolved human nature. Whether that evolved human nature manifests the intelligent design of "Nature's God" is an open question that points to a fundamental mystery. Religious conservatives will see that evolved order of nature as manifesting a cosmic teleology of transcendent purposefulness. But skeptical conservatives like Hayek will be content to affirm that "life has no purpose but itself."
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Chimpanzee Political Science
In Darwinian Conservatism (pp. 79-84), I write about the "Darwinian politics of chimpanzees and human beings," particularly as it helps us to understand dominance hierarchies among primates and the need for a "balance of power" to avoid despotic dominance.
Most people--and certainly most political scientists--would ridicule the idea that we can understand anything important about human politics from comparing the behavior of human beings and chimps. Most political scientists assume that human beings are so radically unique in their political behavior that comparisons with other primates is fruitless, if not downright silly. But I believe there are important commonalities across the primate species in their propensities to dominance and deference, so that we learn something about the biological roots of politics by seeing human status hierarchies as manifesting patterns shared with other primates.
I would even go so far as to assert that if political science ever becomes a science, it will be a Darwinian science of political animals. Such a political science would be the scientific study of political life across all the species that show political behavior, and especially those primate species most closely related to human beings.
As I argue in Chapter 3 of Darwinian Natural Right, this conception of political science as the study of all political animals--nonhuman as well as human--began with Aristotle. According to Aristotle, some animals are solitary and others gregarious. Of the gregarious animals, some are political. Some of the political animals have leaders, but others do not. The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for some common work or function. Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense.
Aristotle believes human beings are more political, however, than these animals because of the uniquely human capacity for language. Other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain. But human beings can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good. Human beings are the most political animals, it seems, because through speech human beings cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive that is possible for other animals. Through speech human beings can deliberate about the "common advantage" as the criterion of justice (Rhetoric, 1362a15-63b5). A just political community can be judged to be one that sereves the common advantage of all its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its ruling group (Nicomachean Ethics, 1160a13-14; Politics, 1279a17-19).
Darwinian biology and the study of primate social systems essentially confirm Aristotle's insights. Although Aristotle did not identify chimpanzees as political animals, he did recognize that the apes were closely related to human beings, because the apes "share in the nature of both man and the quadrupeds," and he supported this with extensive anatomical comparisons of monkeys, apes, and human beings in his biological works.
Despite the common assumption that dominance structures among nonhuman animals are determined purely by physical combat and the rule of the stronger over the weaker, chimpanzees show a primate tendency towards forming dominance structures cooperatively and peacefully rather than through violent competition. Although physical strength is important, the dominance of an alpha male depends on forming coalitions with other adult males and winning the support of the females and the children. (This is made clear in the writings of Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall.)
The tendency to form face-to-face groups organized around a structure of dominance and deference is evident across the primate species, including human beings. A good survey of the evidence for this is Allan Mazur's book Biosociology of Dominance and Deference (2005). But even as he shows the commonality of human beings and other primates in their dominance hierarchies, Mazur also shows the uniqueness of human beings in their capacity for language.
When human beings acquired the capacity for language about 200,000 years ago--perhaps because of the evolution of a few genes supporting neural mechanisms for speech--they then had a capacity for complex cultural learning far surpassing the other primates. Then, with the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, the warmer climate provided the conditions for the development of agriculture--with domestication of plants and animals. This allowed for a settled urban existence rather than the unsettled, hunting-gathering way of life of the earliest human ancestors. Human beings could then live in large civizations with millions of people, and they could use language to elaborate cultural rules of formal organization and socioeconomic stratification. Such formal and socioeconomic hierarchies are not found among nonhuman primates.
But even in such civilizations, human beings still show the same face-to-face dominance hierarchies that they share with other primates. The functioning of large organizations depends upon the behavior of small groups within the organization that structure themselves through face-to-face interaction.
Although the formal, bureaucratic structure of government transcends anything found among nonhuman primates, political rivalry as the competition for control of the government shows the same pattern of dominance contests that human beings share with other primates. Sometimes that rivalry for dominance is violent--as in wars, revolutions, and assasinations. But in a stable political community, most of the political rivalry for power can be channelled peacefully through institutional procedures such as elections and debate.
The comparative study of chimpanzee and human politics should show us that in every community there will be a few people with a strong dominance drive that can become despotic if their ambition is not checked by the ambition of others. That's why I defend balanced and limited government as a fundamental principle of "Darwinian conservatism."
The fundamental insight of conservative constitutionalism is that because power-seeking is rooted in human nature, the power of one person or group can only be controlled by the power of another. Conservatives reject the principle of sovereignty--the idea that in any social order there must be some one supreme power. Instead, conservatives defend the principle of countervailance--the idea that social order can arise from a network of independent entities that check and balance one another. To secure liberty, it is not enough that the people be sovereign, because any power that is sovereign will be abused. That's the lesson of the French Revolution, which brought about the popular election of Napoleon as Imperial Emperor. Liberty requires a system of limited government based on countervailing powers.
This principle of balance is manifested in chimpanzee groups in which the alpha male is checked by the power of others. But human beings can use language to elaborate this principle of balance as a constitutional regime that allows the ambitious few to fill the highest offices while protecting the multitude of people from being exploited by those ruling few. And thus, as Aristotle suggested, human beings can devise constituional arrangements for promoting the common good of all rather than just the private interests of the few.
Most people--and certainly most political scientists--would ridicule the idea that we can understand anything important about human politics from comparing the behavior of human beings and chimps. Most political scientists assume that human beings are so radically unique in their political behavior that comparisons with other primates is fruitless, if not downright silly. But I believe there are important commonalities across the primate species in their propensities to dominance and deference, so that we learn something about the biological roots of politics by seeing human status hierarchies as manifesting patterns shared with other primates.
I would even go so far as to assert that if political science ever becomes a science, it will be a Darwinian science of political animals. Such a political science would be the scientific study of political life across all the species that show political behavior, and especially those primate species most closely related to human beings.
As I argue in Chapter 3 of Darwinian Natural Right, this conception of political science as the study of all political animals--nonhuman as well as human--began with Aristotle. According to Aristotle, some animals are solitary and others gregarious. Of the gregarious animals, some are political. Some of the political animals have leaders, but others do not. The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for some common work or function. Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense.
Aristotle believes human beings are more political, however, than these animals because of the uniquely human capacity for language. Other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain. But human beings can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good. Human beings are the most political animals, it seems, because through speech human beings cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive that is possible for other animals. Through speech human beings can deliberate about the "common advantage" as the criterion of justice (Rhetoric, 1362a15-63b5). A just political community can be judged to be one that sereves the common advantage of all its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its ruling group (Nicomachean Ethics, 1160a13-14; Politics, 1279a17-19).
Darwinian biology and the study of primate social systems essentially confirm Aristotle's insights. Although Aristotle did not identify chimpanzees as political animals, he did recognize that the apes were closely related to human beings, because the apes "share in the nature of both man and the quadrupeds," and he supported this with extensive anatomical comparisons of monkeys, apes, and human beings in his biological works.
Despite the common assumption that dominance structures among nonhuman animals are determined purely by physical combat and the rule of the stronger over the weaker, chimpanzees show a primate tendency towards forming dominance structures cooperatively and peacefully rather than through violent competition. Although physical strength is important, the dominance of an alpha male depends on forming coalitions with other adult males and winning the support of the females and the children. (This is made clear in the writings of Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall.)
The tendency to form face-to-face groups organized around a structure of dominance and deference is evident across the primate species, including human beings. A good survey of the evidence for this is Allan Mazur's book Biosociology of Dominance and Deference (2005). But even as he shows the commonality of human beings and other primates in their dominance hierarchies, Mazur also shows the uniqueness of human beings in their capacity for language.
When human beings acquired the capacity for language about 200,000 years ago--perhaps because of the evolution of a few genes supporting neural mechanisms for speech--they then had a capacity for complex cultural learning far surpassing the other primates. Then, with the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, the warmer climate provided the conditions for the development of agriculture--with domestication of plants and animals. This allowed for a settled urban existence rather than the unsettled, hunting-gathering way of life of the earliest human ancestors. Human beings could then live in large civizations with millions of people, and they could use language to elaborate cultural rules of formal organization and socioeconomic stratification. Such formal and socioeconomic hierarchies are not found among nonhuman primates.
But even in such civilizations, human beings still show the same face-to-face dominance hierarchies that they share with other primates. The functioning of large organizations depends upon the behavior of small groups within the organization that structure themselves through face-to-face interaction.
Although the formal, bureaucratic structure of government transcends anything found among nonhuman primates, political rivalry as the competition for control of the government shows the same pattern of dominance contests that human beings share with other primates. Sometimes that rivalry for dominance is violent--as in wars, revolutions, and assasinations. But in a stable political community, most of the political rivalry for power can be channelled peacefully through institutional procedures such as elections and debate.
The comparative study of chimpanzee and human politics should show us that in every community there will be a few people with a strong dominance drive that can become despotic if their ambition is not checked by the ambition of others. That's why I defend balanced and limited government as a fundamental principle of "Darwinian conservatism."
The fundamental insight of conservative constitutionalism is that because power-seeking is rooted in human nature, the power of one person or group can only be controlled by the power of another. Conservatives reject the principle of sovereignty--the idea that in any social order there must be some one supreme power. Instead, conservatives defend the principle of countervailance--the idea that social order can arise from a network of independent entities that check and balance one another. To secure liberty, it is not enough that the people be sovereign, because any power that is sovereign will be abused. That's the lesson of the French Revolution, which brought about the popular election of Napoleon as Imperial Emperor. Liberty requires a system of limited government based on countervailing powers.
This principle of balance is manifested in chimpanzee groups in which the alpha male is checked by the power of others. But human beings can use language to elaborate this principle of balance as a constitutional regime that allows the ambitious few to fill the highest offices while protecting the multitude of people from being exploited by those ruling few. And thus, as Aristotle suggested, human beings can devise constituional arrangements for promoting the common good of all rather than just the private interests of the few.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Lectures for Philadelphia Society and AEI
On April 28, I will be lecturing at the national meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Philadelphia. My lecture will be entitled "Darwinian Conservatism as the New Fusionism." I will elaborate some points I have made on this blog about how Darwinian conservatism could support a fusion of libertarian and traditionalist principles in conservative thought. John West will be on the same program to debate me.
On May 3, West and I will continue our debate at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. On the side of anti-Darwinism, West will be joined by George Gilder. On the side of defending Darwinism, I will be joined by John Derbyshire.
On May 3, West and I will continue our debate at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. On the side of anti-Darwinism, West will be joined by George Gilder. On the side of defending Darwinism, I will be joined by John Derbyshire.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Incest and Human Kin Detection
Previously, I have written a post on the incest taboo, which can be found
here. My argument is that the moral abhorrence aroused by incest is one of the clearest examples of a moral judgment that can be explained as rooted in human evolutionary nature. We are naturally inclined to abhor sex with those with whom we have been raised, and this natural propensity was probably shaped in evolutionary history as a mechanism to avoid the deleterious effects of inbreeding. Edward Westermarck elaborated this Darwinian account of the incest taboo, and a wide range of evidence supports it.
Now we have an article in the February 15th issue of the British science journal Nature that adds more evidence and reasoning in favor of the Westermarck hypothesis. The article is Debra Lieberman, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, "The Architecture of Human Kin Selection." The abstract of the article can be found here.
At the University of California at Santa Barbara, Debra Lieberman conducted studies of over 600 students, measuring their reactions to sibling incest and sibling altruism. (I first met Debra in 1998 in Helsinki, Finland, at a conference on Westermarck; and I have been following her work ever since.) From these studies, she concludes that human beings have an evolved system for detecting genetic relatedness. Older children identify younger children as their siblings if the younger children have been associated with their mother from birth. Younger children identify older children as their siblings if they have lived together over a long time. Lieberman discovered that these kin detection cues were correlated with feeling disgust at sibling incest and feeling inclined to give altruistic help to siblings.
An interesting finding is that even when the students believed that their siblings were step-siblings or adoptive-siblings, they still felt a strong repugnance towards sibling incest and a strong propensity towards altruistic behavior with their siblings.
The assumption is that the human brain is endowed with a kin recognition mechanism that works through these two cues--association with one's mother in infancy and living together in childhood--to prompt the moral emotions of the incest taboo and sibling altruism.
There remain many gaps in this research. We don't know exactly the genetic basis for this or the precise neural mechanisms for it. But still this looks like a scientifically plausible account of how a natural moral judgment that is universal to all human societies has been shaped by our evolved human nature.
here. My argument is that the moral abhorrence aroused by incest is one of the clearest examples of a moral judgment that can be explained as rooted in human evolutionary nature. We are naturally inclined to abhor sex with those with whom we have been raised, and this natural propensity was probably shaped in evolutionary history as a mechanism to avoid the deleterious effects of inbreeding. Edward Westermarck elaborated this Darwinian account of the incest taboo, and a wide range of evidence supports it.
Now we have an article in the February 15th issue of the British science journal Nature that adds more evidence and reasoning in favor of the Westermarck hypothesis. The article is Debra Lieberman, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, "The Architecture of Human Kin Selection." The abstract of the article can be found here.
At the University of California at Santa Barbara, Debra Lieberman conducted studies of over 600 students, measuring their reactions to sibling incest and sibling altruism. (I first met Debra in 1998 in Helsinki, Finland, at a conference on Westermarck; and I have been following her work ever since.) From these studies, she concludes that human beings have an evolved system for detecting genetic relatedness. Older children identify younger children as their siblings if the younger children have been associated with their mother from birth. Younger children identify older children as their siblings if they have lived together over a long time. Lieberman discovered that these kin detection cues were correlated with feeling disgust at sibling incest and feeling inclined to give altruistic help to siblings.
An interesting finding is that even when the students believed that their siblings were step-siblings or adoptive-siblings, they still felt a strong repugnance towards sibling incest and a strong propensity towards altruistic behavior with their siblings.
The assumption is that the human brain is endowed with a kin recognition mechanism that works through these two cues--association with one's mother in infancy and living together in childhood--to prompt the moral emotions of the incest taboo and sibling altruism.
There remain many gaps in this research. We don't know exactly the genetic basis for this or the precise neural mechanisms for it. But still this looks like a scientifically plausible account of how a natural moral judgment that is universal to all human societies has been shaped by our evolved human nature.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
The Islamic Creationist Attack on Darwinism
For some years now, Islamic creationists have been attacking Darwinian science as atheistic and immoral. One of the leaders in this movement is the Turkish author Harun Yahya. His website can be found here.
Like the Discovery Institute historian Richard Weikart, this Islamic creationist insists on the connection "from Darwin to Hitler." Beyond that, he even blames Darwinism for terrorism, because he claims that this follows from Darwin's "survival of the fittest" thought. Islam is a religion of peace, he argues, but Islam has been distorted as promoting terrorism by people shaped by Darwinian ideas.
Recently, there has been a controversy in France over the distribution of Harun Yahya's writings in French schools. A story on this can be found here.
This fanatical fear of Darwinian science as contrary to a literal reading of both the Bible and the Koran is misguided, but it seems to have a broad popular appeal to many Muslims as well as Christians.
Like the Discovery Institute historian Richard Weikart, this Islamic creationist insists on the connection "from Darwin to Hitler." Beyond that, he even blames Darwinism for terrorism, because he claims that this follows from Darwin's "survival of the fittest" thought. Islam is a religion of peace, he argues, but Islam has been distorted as promoting terrorism by people shaped by Darwinian ideas.
Recently, there has been a controversy in France over the distribution of Harun Yahya's writings in French schools. A story on this can be found here.
This fanatical fear of Darwinian science as contrary to a literal reading of both the Bible and the Koran is misguided, but it seems to have a broad popular appeal to many Muslims as well as Christians.
Darwin, Lincoln, and Slavery
At this time of the year, we celebrate the remarkable coincidence of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin being born on the same day--February 12, 1809. Last year, I wrote a post on their intellectual similarities, which can be found here.
As I said then, there are at least five points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln. (1) Both believed in a universe governed by natural causes. (2) Both were accused of denying the Biblical doctrine of Creation. (3) Both spoke of God as First Cause. (4) Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion. (5) And both abhorred slavery as immoral.
From his voyage on the "Beagle," Darwin was horrified by the brutal treatment of slaves in South America, and this reinforced an abolitionist disposition that ran through his family.
Proslavery fanatics in the American South and elsewhere found support for slavery in the Bible and in science. The argument for scientific racism rested on the claim that the human races were actually separate species, and that the black species was naturally inferior to the white species. In March of 1861, Alexander Stephens, the new vice-president of the Confederate States of America, insisted that Thomas Jefferson's belief in natural equality had been refuted by modern science. "Our new government," he declared, "is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not the equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition."
Against this "polygenist" claim of the scientific racists that the human races were separate species, Darwin defended the "monogenist" position that the races are only varieties or sub-species of the same race. This meant that he had to explain the evolution of racial differences. And he tried to do this by developing his idea of "sexual selection": just as human plant and animal breeders can select for desirable traits, animals act as self-breeders in selecting mates. So the observable differences in the human races could be the product of aesthetic differences in human racial populations.
The importance that Darwin gave to sexual selection is indicated by the fact that over half of The Descent of Man is devoted to sexual selection. In the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Descent of Man, James Moore and Adrian Desmond argue that Darwin's primary motivation for writing the whole book was to attack slavery and racist science.
The Rev. John Brodie Innes--Darwin's vicar--saw this when he first read Darwin's book. He wrote to Darwin: "I hold to the old belief that a man was made a man though developed into niggers who must be made to work and better men able to make them, if those radicals did not interfere with the salutary chastisement needful, neglecting the lesson taught by the black ant slaves to the white." To which Darwin replied: "my views do not lead me to such conclusions about negroes & slavery as yours do: I consider myself a good way ahead of you, as far as this goes."
Innes' reference to ant slavery is revealing. In my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right, I argue that considering the similarities and differences between ant slavery and human slavery illuminates the biological nature of slavery. The similarities suggest that in both cases slavery arises as a natural form of social parasitism in which slavemakers exploit their slaves through coercion and manipulation. But the differences between ant slavery and human slavery suggest that human beings are naturally inclined to detect and resist exploitation through slavery.
Among human beings, the coercion of slaves by masters cannot be based on a natural complementarity of desires. The master's desire to exploit the slave clashes with the slave's desire to be free from exploitation.
Darwin and Lincoln saw this as showing that slavery is contrary to human nature and thus contrary to natural right.
As I said then, there are at least five points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln. (1) Both believed in a universe governed by natural causes. (2) Both were accused of denying the Biblical doctrine of Creation. (3) Both spoke of God as First Cause. (4) Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion. (5) And both abhorred slavery as immoral.
From his voyage on the "Beagle," Darwin was horrified by the brutal treatment of slaves in South America, and this reinforced an abolitionist disposition that ran through his family.
Proslavery fanatics in the American South and elsewhere found support for slavery in the Bible and in science. The argument for scientific racism rested on the claim that the human races were actually separate species, and that the black species was naturally inferior to the white species. In March of 1861, Alexander Stephens, the new vice-president of the Confederate States of America, insisted that Thomas Jefferson's belief in natural equality had been refuted by modern science. "Our new government," he declared, "is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not the equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition."
Against this "polygenist" claim of the scientific racists that the human races were separate species, Darwin defended the "monogenist" position that the races are only varieties or sub-species of the same race. This meant that he had to explain the evolution of racial differences. And he tried to do this by developing his idea of "sexual selection": just as human plant and animal breeders can select for desirable traits, animals act as self-breeders in selecting mates. So the observable differences in the human races could be the product of aesthetic differences in human racial populations.
The importance that Darwin gave to sexual selection is indicated by the fact that over half of The Descent of Man is devoted to sexual selection. In the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Descent of Man, James Moore and Adrian Desmond argue that Darwin's primary motivation for writing the whole book was to attack slavery and racist science.
The Rev. John Brodie Innes--Darwin's vicar--saw this when he first read Darwin's book. He wrote to Darwin: "I hold to the old belief that a man was made a man though developed into niggers who must be made to work and better men able to make them, if those radicals did not interfere with the salutary chastisement needful, neglecting the lesson taught by the black ant slaves to the white." To which Darwin replied: "my views do not lead me to such conclusions about negroes & slavery as yours do: I consider myself a good way ahead of you, as far as this goes."
Innes' reference to ant slavery is revealing. In my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right, I argue that considering the similarities and differences between ant slavery and human slavery illuminates the biological nature of slavery. The similarities suggest that in both cases slavery arises as a natural form of social parasitism in which slavemakers exploit their slaves through coercion and manipulation. But the differences between ant slavery and human slavery suggest that human beings are naturally inclined to detect and resist exploitation through slavery.
Among human beings, the coercion of slaves by masters cannot be based on a natural complementarity of desires. The master's desire to exploit the slave clashes with the slave's desire to be free from exploitation.
Darwin and Lincoln saw this as showing that slavery is contrary to human nature and thus contrary to natural right.
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