The Darwinian Emergence of Aristotle's Political Animals and de Waal's Moral Animals: A Reply to Cheryl Abbate

In various publications (Arnhart 1990, 1994, 1998, 2009), and in some blog posts, I have argued that a Darwinian science of animal behavior can support Aristotle's biological science of political animals.  Aristotle's statement that "man is by nature a political animal" is famous.  But it is often falsely assumed to mean that human beings are by nature the only political animals.  As Aristotle explains in his biological writings, the political animals include ants, bees, wasps, and cranes.  But even if humans are not the only political animals, Aristotle indicates, they are distinctive in that they are more political than the other political animals, because humans have a biological capacity for logos, which allows them to organize their political communities through shared symbolic conceptions of justice.

In his biological works, Aristotle sees that 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.

The uniquely human capacity for speech or rhetorical persuasion makes humans more political than the other political animals, because while other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain, humans can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good.  Through speech, humans cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive than is possible for other animals.  Through speech, humans can deliberate about the common interest as the standard of justice.  A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common interest of all or most of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private interest of its ruling group.

I have argued that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality and animal social life supports Aristotle's biopolitical science.  I have also argued that the biological study of animal behavior over the past 60 years (beginning with Jane Goodall's arrival at the Gombe Stream Preserve in 1960) has largely confirmed this Aristotelian science of animal politics.

Recently, I noticed that Cheryl Abbate (2016) has disagreed with my reasoning in what is essentially a critique of my 1990 article in Social Science Information.  I also noticed that Edward Jacobs (2018) has written a response to Abbate's article, and Abbate (2018) has replied to him.

Abbate's critique consists of two arguments.  First, she claims that my defense of Aristotle's teaching contradicts the Darwinian principle of the psychic continuity between humans and animals--the idea that humans differ from other animals only in degree and not in kind.  Second, she claims that recent studies of animal behavior show that some highly social nonhuman animals have a sense of justice, and so Aristotle is wrong in thinking that this is unique to human beings.

As you might expect, I believe she's mistaken on both points.

DARWIN ON EMERGENT DIFFERENCES IN KIND

Abbate correctly quotes from the crucial passage in Aristotle's Politics (1253a) where Aristotle declares that a human is much more a political animal than other political animals, because "man alone among the animals has speech [logos]," and through speech, "he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust," which is the uniquely human basis of human politics (Abbate 2016, 57).

She then claims that this contradicts the Darwinian principle of "evolutionary continuity"--that all differences between species are only differences in degree and not in kind (Abbate 2018, 160).  She correctly quotes from Darwin's apparent endorsement of this idea in The Descent of Man:

"Nevertheless, the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.  We have seen the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals" (2004, 151).

Abbate is silent, however, about the fact that despite Darwin's explicit statement that humans differ only in degree, not in kind, from other animals, he implicitly recognized human differences in kind.  That is to say, Darwin saw that human beings have some moral and mental traits that other animals do not have at all.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted that self-consciousness is uniquely human: "It may be freely admitted that no animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied, that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth" (105).  Morality is also uniquely human: "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them.  We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity. . . . man . . . alone can with certainty be ranked as a moral being" (135).  And language is uniquely human: "The habitual use of articulate language is . . . peculiar to man" (107).

Darwin was thrown into self-contradiction--both affirming and denying that humans are different in kind from other animals--because he failed to see how he could affirm emergent differences in kind without affirming any radical differences in kind.  Emergent differences in kind can be explained by evolutionary science as differences in kind that naturally evolve from differences in degree that pass over a critical threshold of complexity.  So, for example, we can see the uniquely human capacities for self-consciousness, morality, and language as emerging from the evolutionary development of the primate brain, so that at some critical point in the evolution of our hominid ancestors, the size and complexity of the brain (perhaps particularly in the frontal cortex) reached a point where distinctively human cognitive capacities emerged at higher levels of brain evolution that are not found in other primates.  With such emergent differences in kind, there is an underlying unbroken continuity between human beings and their primate ancestors, so there is no need to posit some supernatural intervention in nature--the divine creation of the human soul--that would create a radical difference in kind in which there is a gap with no underlying continuity of natural causes.

Edward Jacobs points to this when he describes the evolution of the human mind.  "The moment a certain threshold of mental development was reached (and logos is as good a placeholder name for this threshold as any), we became able to make and grasp persuasive accounts," which made humans more political than the other political animals (155).

Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka (2019) have shown how an evolutionary neuroscience could explain this emergence of the human mind as passing through the three levels of mind identified by Aristotle in De Anima (On the Soul). The basic nutritive and reproductive soul belongs to all living things--plants and animals.  The second level--the sensitive soul--belongs to all animals.  The third level--the rational or symbolizing soul--is specific to humans.  The crucial evolutionary transition marker of the rational soul is language.  The rational soul gives humans the capacity for grasping and sharing the abstract symbolic values of the good and the just that make human politics unique.  Ginsburg and Jablonka suggest that all three levels can be explained by evolutionary biology.

I have written some previous posts on emergent evolution (here and here).;

BEKOFF AND DE WAAL ON THE MORAL LIVES OF ANIMALS

Abbate relies heavily on two cognitive ethologists--Marc Bekoff and Frans de Waal--for providing the evidence that some nonhuman animals have a sense of justice, and therefore Aristotle is wrong in saying that humans alone have a moral sense, which makes them more political than the other political animals.  For Abbate, this proves that humans differ only in degree, not in kind, from other animals.

Bekoff is best known for his studies of canid social carnivores--wolves, dogs, and coyotes--and his argument that their social play shows that they have "codes of conduct" that indicate a moral life of "wild justice" (Bekoff 1995; Bekoff and Pierce 2009; Pierce and Bekoff 2012).

De Waal is best known for his Chimpanzee Politics and other studies of primate colonies in captivity.  He has endorsed what he calls my "Darwistotelian" view of human politics and morality as showing an evolved political nature shared with chimps and other primates. A sample of my many posts on de Waal can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

She does not notice, however, that Bekoff and de Waal show the same self-contradiction that one can see in Darwin.  On the one hand, Bekoff says that "animal morality is different in degree but not in kind from human morality."  On the other hand, he says there are "bona fide differences in kind" (Bekoff and Pierce 2009, 139-40).  He admits that "human morality is unique," because humans are unique in their capacities of language and judgment (Bekoff and Pierce 2009, 132, 139-42).  Similarly, de Waal sometimes seems to say that morality is not unique to human beings, but then he concedes that morality at the level of judgment and reasoning is uniquely human (de Waal 2006, 20, 173-75).

Abbate might say, however, that this is not necessarily contradictory.  If de Waal is right about there being three levels of human morality, and if nonhuman animals show some elements of the lower levels but not of the higher levels, then the fullest expression of human morality is uniquely human, although some animals show some features of the moral life.  Thus, there is both continuity and discontinuity in the moral psychology of animals.  At some levels of morality, there is only a difference in degree.  At other levels, there is a difference in kind.  This is exactly what one would expect from the emergent evolution of animal morality.  And, I suggest, this is Aristotle's position, even though his biology did not have a fully developed evolutionary theory.

According to de Waal, the moral sentiments constitute the first level of morality--the emotional building blocks of morality that include empathy, reciprocity, retribution, a sense of fairness, and reconciliation to resolve conflicts and restore harmonious relationships (de Waal 2006, 166-75).  All of this can be seen in some form in other animals

In stressing the importance of the moral sentiments for moral psychology, de Waal belongs to the philosophic tradition of sentimentalist ethics that includes David Hume, Adam Smith, Darwin, and Edward Westermarck--a tradition that is set against the Kantian tradition of rationalist ethics.  I have written many posts on this, including here, here, here., and here.

De Waal identifies social pressure as the second level of morality.  Through social pressure, individuals are habituated to conform to the social rules of their group that maintain the good order of the community.  These rules are enforced through reward, punishment, and reputation.  In these ways, morality serves as a social contract for a cooperative society. Some of this can be seen in some nonhuman animals.  For example, high-ranking males in chimpanzee groups show "policing behavior"--males break up fights among others, and their intervention seems to be remarkably evenhanded.  Nevertheless, the human morality of social pressure goes beyond animal morality by formulating social rules that are more abstract and systematic than is the case for other animals.

Finally, judgment and reasoning constitute a third level of morality, and this is uniquely human.  So, for example, we are like other social animals in that we care about our reputations--how we appear in the eyes of others--so that we want to be praised and not blamed by others; but we can also use our distinctively human capacity for abstraction and imagination to see ourselves mirrored in the eyes of an "impartial spectator" (as Adam Smith said), so that we can want to do what is praiseworthy, regardless of whether we are actually praised by anyone. We care not only about our real reputation but also about our imaginary reputation.  From this we develop an internal sense of self-esteem or conscience.  There is no evidence for anything like this in nonhuman animals.  (I have written about Smith's concept of the "impartial spectator" here.)

Like de Waal, Aristotle saw both continuity and discontinuity between human beings and other animals in their moral psychology.  In his History of Animals (588a15), he wrote:

"In most of the other animals, there are traces of the qualities of soul that are more evidently differentiated in human beings.  For there are both gentleness and savagery, mildness and harshness, courage and timidity, fear and confidence, spiritedness and trickery, and, with respect to intelligence [dianoia], something like judgment [sunesis], similar in many ways. . . . For some of these qualities differ only more or less with reference to human beings. . . . For nature passes little by little from the inanimate to animals, so that this continuity prevents one from seeing a border or perceiving on which side an intermediate form lies."

Aristotle argues that the moral psychology of wild animals is like that of children: they can have natural virtue and habitual virtue, but they cannot have the deliberative virtue that requires fully developed logos (Politics, 1332b1; Nicomachean Ethics, 1144b1-1145a5).  They can have the natural virtue that comes from being born with a good natural temperament that inclines them to do the right actions.  And they can have the habitual virtue that comes from obeying social rules so that they habitually do the right actions.

Only human adults are capable of deliberative virtue, which requires logos. And logos is the capacity for grasping explanatory accounts--for understanding both theoretical and practical syllogisms (Moss 2014).  In ethics and politics, explanatory accounts do not just prescribe right actions, they also explain why these are right.  Children and animals can be trained to know what they ought to do but without understanding why they ought to do it.  Virtue in the strict sense requires deliberate choice and prudential judgment with full knowledge of both what should be done and why it should be done.  This deliberative virtue with prudence corresponds to what de Waal identifies as the third level of morality--reasoning and judgment.

Because of their unique capacity for logos, human beings are more political than the other political animals--and more moral than the other moral animals--because this capacity for grasping explanatory accounts means that rather than just habitually obeying social rules of justice in their group, human beings will want to know why these are the rules, and they will argue over whether there might be better rules.  For that reason, human politics is always a rhetorical activity in which people have to persuade one another that what their community is doing is just, right, or noble.  That's why Aristotle's Rhetoric is a crucial text for his moral and political philosophy.

The importance of rhetorical speech for human politics and human morality explains why language is the critical marker in the evolutionary transition to uniquely human symbolism and rationality, as Ginsburg and Jablonka have indicated.

ADDENDUM--SEPTEMBER 3, 2025

Abbate's article has been recently reprinted in a book edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey--Animal History: History as If Animals Mattered (Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2025).  In this new version of her paper, she makes no attempt to answer my objections.  Is that because my objections are irrefutable?

REFERENCES

Abatte, Cheryl E. 2016. "'Higher' and 'Lower' Political Animals: A Critical Analysis of Aristotle's Account of the Political Animal." Journal of Animal Ethics 6:54-66.

Abatte, Cheryl E. 2018. "Redefending Nonhuman Justice in Complex Animal Communities: A Response to Jacobs."  Journal of Animal Ethics 8:159-165.

Arnhart, Larry. 1990. "Aristotle, Chimpanzees, and Other Political Animals." Social Science Information 29:479-559.

Arnhart, Larry. 1994. "The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle's Political Animals."  American Journal of Political Science 38:464-485.

Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Arnhart, Larry. 2009. Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question.  Ed. Kenneth Blanchard. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic Press.

Bekoff, Marc. 1995. "Play Signals as Punctuation: The Structure of Social Play in Canids." Behaviour 132:419-429.

Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce. 2009. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man.  Second edition. Ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond. London: Penguin Classics.

de Waal, Frans. 2006. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Ginsburg, Simona, and Eva Jablonka. 2019. The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jacobs, Edward. 2018. "Aristotle and the Zoon Politikon: A Response to Abbate." Journal of Animal Ethics 8:150-158.

Moss, Jessica. 2014. "Right Reason in Plato and Aristotle: On the Meaning of Logos." Phronesis 59:181-230.

Pierce, Jessica, and Marc Bekoff. 2012. "Wild Justice Redux: What We Know About Social Justice in Animals and Why It Matters." Social Justice Research 25:122-139.

Hobbes, Aristotle, and the Sociobiology of Political Animals

The debate between Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes over whether human beings are political animals by nature is another example of a fundamental issue in the history of political philosophy that depends on empirical natural science.  Aristotle's account of political animals was rooted in his biological science.  In criticizing Aristotle, Hobbes relied on his understanding of the new natural science being developed by Galileo, William Harvey, and others.  When Richard Cumberland wrote in 1672 in defense of Aristotle against Hobbes, Cumberland argued that the biological science of Harvey and Thomas Willis supported Aristotle.  Although Aristotle did not specifically identify apes as political animals, he did conclude from his anatomical studies that apes were an intermediate species close to human beings.  When Edward Tyson in 1699 wrote the first modern anatomical comparison of human beings and apes, he saw that Aristotle was right in identifying chimpanzees as halfway between monkeys and human beings.  Now, I argue, the new Darwinian sciences of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and animal behavior sustain Aristotle's position rather than Hobbes's.

Aristotle would agree with the Hobbesian claim that human politics is uniquely human insofar as it manifests uniquely human capacities for language, conceptual abstraction, and shared intentionality.  But Aristotle thought that an adequate political science should understand both the continuity and the discontinuity between human politics and the politics of the other political animals.  We see continuity if we understand that human beings are like the other political animals in cooperating for some common end or function (koinon ergon), in showing social cooperation as an extension of the natural impulses to sexual coupling and parental care of the young, in organizing their social life based on kinship, mutualism, and reciprocity, and in having political leaders that either direct a community to its common ends or divide it into factions.  We see discontinuity if we understand that human beings do all of this in a uniquely human way because their cognitive capacities for reason and speech (logos) allow them to organize their social life around authoritative concepts of expediency, justice, and goodness.  Consequently, human beings are more political than the other political animals, because human cooperation and competition is more complex and extensive in its shared intentionality than is the case for the other political animals.

In De Homine (ch. 10), De Cive (ch. 5, par. 5), and Leviathan (ch. 17), Hobbes makes various arguments against Aristotle, which depend upon three fundamental claims.  First, in the state of nature, human beings are solitary animals.  Second, among the naturally political animals, social cooperation is completely harmonious because there are no conflicts of interest to create competition, but this is not true for human beings.  Third, nature and instinct are necessarily antithetical to artifice and learning, so that social order cannot be natural or instinctive if it depends in any way on artificial or learned activity; and therefore human politics cannot be natural because it arises from cultural learning.

In some of his most famous words, Hobbes describes the state of nature as a lawless anarchy in which human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  But as many of his critics have pointed out, this cannot be true, because it ignores the fact that human beings have always lived as social animals.  Even when there is no centralized state, human beings have lived in bands and tribes organized by social norms of kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity.

Oddly, Hobbes admits this, because he recognizes that even in the state of nature, one sees the "government of small families," as among the American Indians.  Parents were the original sovereigns, who enforced customary rules of behavior within their families, and who selected arbitrators or judges to settle disputes between families.  The customary rules of social life in primitive bands constitute what Hobbes calls "the laws of nature," and these natural laws correspond largely to what evolutionary anthropologists have seen among foraging bands, showing the kind of life lived by our evolutionary ancestors.  So, clearly, the state of nature for human beings must be a naturally political state.

Hobbes was right, however, about the centralized state being a uniquely human contrivance based on a social contract.  But this social contract is natural in the sense that it fulfills the natural human inclinations to social cooperation based on kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity.

Human social cooperation is never perfect because it is always disrupted by conflicts of interest.  Contrary to Hobbes, this is true for other political animals like bees and ants.  As E. O. Wilson has observed, the only perfect society free from conflict might be found among colonial invertebrates--that is, colonies of genetically identical individuals.  Since the social insects are not genetically identical, there can be conflicts of interest.  Reproductive competition between individual insects can create aggressive encounters and dominance hierarchies.  There can be conflicts between colonies, between queens, between workers, or between queens and workers.  This requires some means of conflict resolution in which dominant individuals enforce their will over others.  So human beings are not the only political animals who need "a common power to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the common benefit."

Of course, the establishment and maintenance of a human political order requires a tradition of cultural learning for the transmission of the rules of political authority.  Contrary to what Hobbes claims, culturally learned order is not uniquely human.  Aristotle recognized that many animals have natural instincts for social learning, which can create cultural traditions.  Recent studies of animal culture suggest that Aristotle was right about this.

And yet, Aristotle and Hobbes also saw that human social learning is unique insofar as it shows a human capacity for symbolic understanding that makes possible concepts of political authority based on shared intentionality, which is not possible for the other political animals.

I will have more to say about "shared intentionality" as unique to human political psychology.

I have elaborated my points here in three publications:

Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (SUNY Press, 1998)

"Aristotle, Chimpanzees, and Other Political Animals," Social Science Information 29 (1990): 479-559.

"The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle's Political Animals," American Journal of Political Science 38 (1994): 464-485.

The Biology of Animal Culture Supports Aristotle Against Hobbes

One of the big debates in the history of political philosophy is over the question of whether human beings are political animals by nature comparable to other political animals.  Aristotle said yes, because he thought human beings could be rightly compared with other political animals such as ants, bees, wasps, and cranes.  Hobbes said no, because he thought that while the social insects were instinctively inclined to cooperate for the good of their colony, human political cooperation was learned rather than instinctive, and it had to overcome the natural human tendency to conflict.  Twenty years ago, I argued that modern biological research supported Aristotle's position (Arnhart 1990, 1994, 1998).  The research over the past twenty years provides even more evidence for my argument.

This dispute between Aristotle and Hobbes has been critical for the history of political science.  Most modern political scientists have followed Hobbes in assuming an anthropocentric view of political science, with no comparative study of nonhuman political animals.  In recent years, a few political scientists have revived Aristotle's conception of a biopolitical science as a comparative science that studies all political animals, with human beings understood as the most political animals because of their political use of language or symbolism (logos).

Against Aristotle, Hobbes contended, in both De Cive (chap. 5, par. 5) and the Leviathan (chap. 17), that there were six differences between social animals (like bees and ants) and human beings.  (1) Unlike social animals, human beings compete for honor and prestige. (2) Among social animals, there is no conflict between the private good and the common good, as there is among human beings, because the natural appetites of the social animals incline them as individuals to do what is good for all. (3) Social animals lack reason, which human beings use to criticize the administration of common business and thus create civil conflict. (4) Social animals lack the art of words, which human beings use to argue about what is good and evil and thus fall into sedition and war. (5) Social animals do not distinguish between injury (breach of covenant) and damage; and therefore, unlike human beings, they are not offended with one another as along as their physical appetites are satisfied.  In these five respects, uniquely human attributes create social conflicts not found among the social animals.  A sixth difference between human beings and social animals, according to Hobbes, follows as a consequence of the other five. (6) "Lastly, the agreement of these creatures is natural; that of men, is by covenant only, which is artificial; and therefore it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required, besides covenant, to make their agreement constant and lasting; which is a common power, to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the common benefit" (Leviathan, chap. 17).

Hobbes's six arguments presuppose two fundamental premises (compare De Homine, chap. 10).  First, among the naturally social animals, social cooperation is completely harmonious because there are no conflicts of interest to create competition.  Second, nature and instinct are necessarily antithetical to artifice and learning, so that social order cannot be natural or instinctive if it depends in any way on artificial or socially learned activity.  The research done today by Darwinian biologists studying the social behavior of animals denies both premises.

Consider the second premise--the contrast between natural instinct and social learning and the claim that only among human beings does social order depend on social learning.  Aristotle thought that many animals acted not just by unlearned instinct but also by individual and social learning.  Recent studies of animal behavior confirm this.  Among insects, individual learning affects feeding, predator avoidance, social interactions, and sexual behavior (Dukas 2010).  Most insects are solitary, and they show little social learning, except in a few cases such as offspring learning food preferences from their parents.

Social learning is more extensive among social insects, and particularly among the social bees, ants, and wasps (hymenoptera) (Leadbeater and Chittka 2007).  Thus, Aristotle was correct to identify these social insects as political animals.  Today, the most celebrated example of social learning among honeybees is their waggle dance.  Aristotle observed this behavior, and he inferred that it must be some form of social communication.  But it was not until the early 1960s that Karl von Frisch decoded the language of the waggle dance (von Frisch 1967). 

Foraging bees who have found new flower patches return to their nest to recruit their nest mates.  Inside the hive, the forager moves upward while waggling her body from side to side and vibrating her wings.  At the end of each dance, she circles back to the starting point, alternating between clockwise and counterclockwise turns, so that she moves in a figure eight pattern.  The angle of the waggle run relative to the upward direction gives the angle of the flower patch relative to the Sun's position in the sky.  The duration of the dance run is positively correlated to the distance of the flower patch from the hive.  The overall number of waggle runs is positively correlated with the quality of the food in the flower patch.

The same waggle dance is used when honeybees need to decide where to go for a new nest site.  Scouts that have examined a site return to the nest to recruit others to visit the site.  The waggle dance conveys the location and the quality of the potential site.  Different scouts represent different sites.  The better sites recruit more bees to dance for them than the sites of lesser quality.  Eventually, over a period of days, a consensus develops for one site, and the colony moves there.  This is what Tom Seeley calls "honeybee democracy" (Seeley 2010).

It's not clear whether social learning among social insects can create behavioral traditions.  There is some evidence that bees can be trained to forage at certain times of the day, and that once learned, this daily pattern of a colony can be passed down to the next generation of bees (Leadbeater and Chittka 2007).

By contrast to the skimpy evidence for behavioral traditions among social insects, the evidence for socially learned traditions among vertebrates, and particularly chimpanzees, is impressive.  In a famous survey of seven chimp study sites in Africa, it was shown that there were 39 behavior patterns customary in some communities but absent in others, so that each chimp community has its distinctive profile of behavioral patterns, which looks a lot like the cultural diversity of human communities (Whiten et al. 1999).  (As indicated in a previous post, using tools for cracking nuts is one example of a behavioral tradition found in some chimp communities but not others.)

The problem, however, is deciding whether the social learning of behavioral traditions should be identified as "culture," comparable to human culture.  In some previous posts from a few years ago, I have indicated that I have been leaning towards the position of those like Eva Jablonka and Kim Hill (2010), who argue that while the social learning of behavioral traditions is a building block of culture, it is not sufficient, and that human culture is uniquely human insofar as it arises from language and symbolism that can create moral norms supported by moral emotions.

This seems to be Aristotle's position.  On the one hand, some nonhuman animals are political in that they can organize their collective lives through the social learning of behavioral traditions.  On the other hand, human beings are more political than these other political animals, because human beings have a capacity for conceptual abstraction and language (logos) that they can use to formulate and communicate communal standards for the just and the good.  On this  point, Hobbes seems to agree with Aristotle about the uniqueness of human language in allowing human beings to argue about good and evil.

Hill argues that while chimps can have the social regularities of behavioral traditions--such as subordinates deferring to alpha males--only human beings can use symbolic thought and language to create socially recognized norms of good behavior enforced by third-party punishment--such as recognizing that some leaders have the right to rule.

Oddly enough, Hill indicates, the only nonhuman animals that seem to show the third-party enforcement of social norms are honeybees and ants that have individuals who act as "police" in punishing cheaters (Liebig, Peters, and Holldobler 1999; Ratnicks and Wenseleers 2005; Smith, Holldobler & Liebig 2009).

Moreover, the honeybees' waggle dance does seem to be an abstract form of communication that looks like a kind of language.  And yet even this dance language refers to observable realities in the world, and it does not allow bees to conceptualize and agree upon imaginary mental constructions.

REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 1990. "Aristotle, Chimpanzees, and Other Political Animals." Social Science Information 29:479-559.

Arnhart. 1994. "The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle's Political Animals." American Journal of Political Science 38:464-485.

Arnhart. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Dukas, R. 2010. "Insect Social Learning." In Michael D. Breed and Janice Moore, eds., Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, 3 vols., 2:176-179.

Hill, Kim. 2010. "Experimental Studies of Animal Social Learning in the Wild: Trying to Untangle the Mystery of Human Culture." Learning & Behavior 38:319-328.

Leadbeater, Ellouise, and Lars Chittka. 2007. "Social Learning in Insects--From Miniature Brains to Consensus Building." Current Biology 17:R703-R713.

Liebig, J., C. Peeters, and B. Holldobler. 1999. "Worker Policing Limits the Number of Reproductives in a Ponerine Ant." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 266:1865-1870.

Ratnicks, Francis, and Thomas Wenseleers. 2005. "Policing Insect Societies." Science 307:54-56.

Seeley, Thomas. 2010. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Smith, A. A., B. Holldobler, J. Liebig. 2009. "Cuticular Hydrocarbons Reliably Identify Cheaters and Allow Enforcement of Altruism in a Social Insect." Current Biology 19:78-81.

von Frisch, Karl. 1967. The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Whiten, A., et al. 1999. "Cultures in Chimpanzees." Nature 399:682-685.


Some of my previous posts on these topics can be found here, here, here., here, and here.

The Limitations of Behavioral Biopolitical Science

Last year, the University of Chicago Press published Man Is by Nature a Political Animal: Evolution, Biology, and Politics, edited by Peter Hatemi and Rose McDermott.  This is a collection of papers by some of the leading political scientists in biopolitical research.  The book is designed to persuade other political scientists to adopt the ideas and methods of biopolitics in their research.  It illustrates how the study of political behavior might be illuminated by evolutionary theory, primatology, genetics, psychophysiology, endocrinology, and neuroscience.

What one sees here is what I call behavioral biopolitical science.  The unstated presupposition underlying almost all the research in this book is the behavioralist view of political science.  Behavioralists assume that the only way to scientifically study politics is through building simple theoretical models that generate hypotheses that are empirically testable.  They assume that this new political science must break away from an older political science that relied on political philosophy and political history.  And they assume that this new science must be value-free, because science is the study of facts, not of values, of what is, not of what ought to be.  Therefore, the political scientist must not engage in moral argument.  This book shows how biological science can advance this project for a behavioral political science.

The book manifests both the power and the limitations of such an approach.  I see here two kinds of limitations.  The first is that the simplifying models of behavioral biopolitical science are limited in their explanatory and predictive power by the emergent complexity of political animals, due to the individuality, contingency, and historicity of their behavior.  The second is that the value-free methodology of behavioral biopolitical science cannot grasp human political experience as an activity of moral judgement and argument, because it cannot grasp the normative structure of animal movement.


BIOPOLITICAL ETHICS

The authors in this book might have noticed the second limitation if they had thought about the title of their book.  Man Is by Nature a Political Animal is taken from a famous passage at the beginning of Aristotle's Politics, which points to Aristotle's biological writings, where he studies the biology of political animals.  Remarkably, Hatemi and McDermott say nothing about their title, and no one in the book shows any evidence of having read Aristotle, although he was the first biopolitical scientist.

The only reference to Aristotle in this book is at the end of Darren Schreiber's chapter on "neuropolitics."  He writes:

Aristotle contended that we are, by nature, political animals.  This assessment continues to be  borne out as SCAN [social cognitive and affective neuroscience] develops our understanding of the human brain.  We observe politics, however, in a wide variety of animals . . . and the deeper question of precisely what kind of political animal we are remains.  Neuropolitics has the potential to aide in our answering that question.  Exploring the function of the brain will reveal more about the mind and illuminate the political context it operates on. (290-91)

Schreiber seems to be unaware of Aristotle's answer to the question of "precisely what kind of political animal we are" and of how evolutionary biology supports Aristotle's answer.

In his biopolitical writings, Aristotle observed that political animals cooperate for some common work or function; their social lives are directed to some collective goods.  Human beings are by nature more political than other political animals because of the uniquely human capacity for speech or conceptual reasoning (logos).  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, because through speech or language, they cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive that is possible for other political animals.  Through speech, human beings can deliberate about the common good as the standard of justice.  A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common interest of all or most of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private interest of its ruling group.

While the strongest bonds of common interest arise among individuals related by kinship, other social bonds arise from mutualistic and reciprocal cooperation.  Although human beings display a complexity in their social bonding through nepotism, mutualism, and reciprocity that indicates the unique complexity of human speech and cognition, Aristotle believes other animals show traces of all the psychic dispositions and capacities that are more clearly manifested in human beings.

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin continued this tradition of Aristotelian biopolitics by explaining the evolutionary roots of human social and political life.  (Remarkably, there are no references to Darwin's Descent in the book edited by Hatemi and McDermott.)  Like Aristotle, Darwin saw the continuity of human beings with other social animals, but he also saw the uniqueness of human social life as shaped by language and the moral sense.

From Aristotle to Darwin, we see an intellectual tradition of striving for an empirical biological science of ethics and politics.  Recently, Edward O. Wilson has pointed to this tradition as part of his project for "consilience"--a unity of knowledge that would embrace the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.  Arguing that political science is "primarily the study of applied ethics," Wilson suggests that we need to unite ethics and political science through a biology of human nature, which would include a biology of the moral sentiments (Consilience, 248, 255). 

Some of the early proponents of evolutionary psychology have criticized Wilson for this, because they see this as violating the fact/value dichotomy.  And yet, over the past 15 years, there has been a vigorous intellectual movement towards biological explanations of morality as crucial for any science of human behavior.

As indicated by the Hatemi/McDermott book, behavioral biopolitical scientists reject anything like Wilson's proposal, because they take for granted the fact/value dichotomy as supporting a separation of political science from ethics and the assumption that there cannot be a science of ethics.  At various points in this book, however, one can see the inseparability of ethics and politics, and thus the need for a biopolitical science of ethics.

Darby Proctor and Sarah Brosnan have written a chapter on "Political Primates: What Other Primates Can Tell Us about the Evolutionary Roots of Our Own Political Behavior."  Without recognizing the extent to which they are restating Aristotle's observations, they explain the problem of cooperation among primates: "Given that natural selection is about the promotion of individual fitness, an evolutionary account of cooperation must explain how working together with another individual can lead to increased fitness for both individuals.  There are currently three explanations for this behavior--mutualism, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism--although more recent thought emphasizes the necessity of broadening this approach" (51-52).  They report that monkeys and chimpanzees often refuse to cooperate with individuals who do not share the best resources, and they also detect and punish cheaters who violate the norms for social cooperation (55-64).  Thus, they agree with Frans de Waal and other primatologists who see something like a sense of justice and injustice in primates.

Nevertheless, Proctor and Brosnan indicate, human beings are different, because human beings can use language to extend their political life through symbolic communication in a manner that goes far beyond what other primates can do (64-65).  Once again, evolutionary theory confirms and deepens Aristotle's biopolitics.

We can see here the normative structure of animal movement.  As Aristotle indicates in The Movement of Animals, the natural history of goodness arises from animal movement as the interaction of knowing, desiring, and evaluating.  In their intentional behavior, animals gather information related to their needs and then act according to their assessment of the information in relation to their needs.  Consequently, the biological explanation of animal behavior requires teleological or functional concepts.  Animals act in a goal-directed manner to satisfy their natural needs based on their information about the changing environments in which they live.  Animal movement is thus inherently normative or value-laden insofar as animals cannot live without choosing between alternative courses of action as more or less desirable. 

For political animals, this normative structure of movement includes a concern for enforcing social expectations for cooperation and punishing cheaters.  Human politics differs in that this enforcement of cooperation and punishment of cheaters is extended and formalized for large communities through symbolic rules and deliberate judgments about the common good.

Although the normative structure of human political behavior is manifest in much of what is studied in the Hatemi/McDermott book, the only explicit recognition of the ethical character of politics is at the end of the concluding chapter written by Hatemi and McDermott:

We suggest that political scientists have a moral and ethical obligation to undertake research into the biological and genetic bases of political choice because such work is already being undertaken by governmental, corporate, and private interests.  Only when scholars who do not remain beholden to private or financial interests engage in such research can the findings be widely disseminated, evaluated, and publicly discussed.  Only when such factors become part of the public debate can such knowledge become transparent, and potentially be used for the public good, as opposed for the public ill or private political financial gain without the knowledge of those who might be exploited.  (304)

Here is the only passage in the book that recognizes the value-laden character of political phenomena as based upon a continuing debate over how best to promote the public good by enforcing norms of social cooperation.  They recognize that their scientific research can be used to advance private interests contrary to the public good and for the sake of exploitation.  (Should we be reminded of the morally repugnant activities of eugenics, for example?)  And yet they suggest that political scientists can be trusted because they are guided by "a moral and ethical obligation" to use their research in proper ways.  Do they thus assume that scientific knowledge is good, because it is guided by "a moral and ethical obligation"?  Does that mean that scientific research is always value-laden, and thus the fact-value dichotomy is misconceived?  If so, then should a biopolitical science include a biopolitical account of morality?  We must wonder why they never indicate the need for such a scientific study of morality in this book.

Every political regime is defined by its distinctive conception of the best way of life as serving the common good of all individuals.  The authors in the Hatemi/McDermott book do not engage in any kind of comparative regime analysis, because they take for granted the liberal democratic principles of the American regime.  Most of the political behavior they study turns on the the typically American debates over the principles of liberty and equality.

So, for example, some of the authors suggest that a biological exploration of political behavior can illuminate the controversy over affirmative action policies.  There is disagreement over whether a history of past discrimination against black Americans justifies an affirmative action policy of preferential treatment for black individuals over white individuals in employment and in admission to institutions of higher education.  Those who oppose such a policy justify their opposition by appealing to principles of equal treatment without racial preferences, but they are often accused of being motivated by irrational racial prejudices rather than principled arguments.  Some neurophysiological researchers claim that they can identify biological markers of racial prejudice such as increased activity in the autonomic nervous system and in the amygdala of the brain in response to black faces as compared to white faces.

Kevin Smith and John Hibbing report an experiment from their physiology laboratory studying the correlation between physiological reaction to racial stimuli and opposition to race-conscious policies.  They explain:

These physiological responses are, for the most part, not under conscious control and as such could constitute deep-seated, gut-level responses rather than conscious and cognitively elaborated self reports.  One way to test whether deeply help prejudices or principled ideology is driving policy preferences is thus to empirically assess the correlation between attitudes on race conscious issues and physiological responses to racial stimuli. (240) 

They conclude:

Ideology, measured on a standard 1 = strongly liberal to 7 = strongly conservative scale, is a consistent predictor of opposition to race-conscious policies, independent of any gut level orientations picked up by the physiological measures.  This provides at least some mild support for the principled conservatism argument, though the hint of an independent effect for physiological reactions to black images means the matter remains far from settled. (242)

Schreiber reports that neuroimaging studies of reactions to racial images suggest that the emotional responses of the amygdala can be repressed by the intentional action of frontal lobe processes (284-85).

Does this show that in political debate there is a conflict between reason and emotion, and that sometimes reason can rule over emotion?  Or should we see this as a reciprocal relationship in which reason influences emotion and emotion influences reason?  Do we see here evidence for intentional repression of racial emotions that might illustrate our capacity for moral choice in which the mind changes the brain?  Does this provide evidence for what Jeffrey Schwartz has called "directed mental effort"?  This is important because it bears on the question of whether neuroscience is compatible with legal standards of responsibility. 

It seems to be implied here that acting through "principled ideology" is better than acting through "deeply held prejudices."  But is that always true?  Can't "principled ideology" often be mistaken, and "deeply held prejudices" be warranted? 

The question of the proper relationship between reason and emotion in moral and political judgment is an old issue in political philosophy.  Some of the today's researchers in evolutionary moral psychology (like Jonathan Haidt) argue that David Hume has been proven correct:  reason really is the slave of the passions, because most of the time, our moral judgments are rationalizations of our moral emotions.  But other researchers think that reason plays its own independent role.

Another great question of political philosophy that comes up in Darwinian moral psychology is the question of whether our standards of right and wrong can be rooted in nature, or whether they are purely conventional or artificial.  Aristotelian natural right, Thomistic natural law, and Lockean natural rights all appeal to human biological nature: as mammalian animals, we care for ourselves first, but we also extend ourselves into our offspring, our sexual mates, our kin, and our wider social groups; and as rational animals, we can formulate these biological propensities to mammalian care as natural norms for social cooperation and moral concern. 

Evolutionary neuroscience confirms this biological moral naturalism by showing how the neurochemistry of mammalian attachment provides the natural ground for human morality and social order.  In his chapter on "neuropolitics," Schreiber refers to some of the neuroscientific research on brain regions that support self-awareness as embracing empathic concern for others perceived to be connected to oneself (285-86).  But he does not indicate how this might provide a ground in evolved human nature for morality, which shows that our nature as political animals is inseparable from our nature as moral animals. 

Thus, biological science might help to clarify, if not answer, some very old philosophical questions.  On the other hand, this biological research might only confirm the irreducible complexity of moral and political questions that makes it impossible to find final answers.

This problem of complexity in the Hatemi/McDermott book will be the subject of my next post.

Some of my posts on related themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Aristotelian Liberalism (6): The Morality of Commercial Friendship

In his zoological writings, Aristotle distinguishes solitary animals and gregarious animals. Of the gregarious animals, some are political. Some of the political animals have leaders, but others do not. The political animals cooperate for some some work or function (koinon ergon). Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense (History of Animals, 488a7-14).

Human beings are more political, however, than these animals because of the uniquely human capacity for speech (logos). 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 (Politics, 1253a1-18). 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 than is possible for other political animals. Through speech, human beings can deliberate about the "common advantage" (koinon sumpheron) as the criterion of justice (Rhetoric, 1362a15-63b5). A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common advantage of all of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its rulers (Nicomachean Ethics, 1160a13-14; Pol., 1279a17-19).

But how is it possible for a large-scale political community (like the United States, for example) to be organized around a common end or purpose? The problem in achieving a common end in such a community arises not just from the size of the population but also from the diversity of ends in the individual lives of human beings.

Ancient political philosophers like Plato and Aristotle seemed to argue that the only solution to this problem was for a government to impose a single moral end or way of life on the whole community. This required severe limits on the size of the community, and so it would not work for large political communities like modern nation-states. This imposition of a single moral end also required a coercive enforcement of morality that would deny individual liberty. For such a regime, statecraft would be soulcraft.

By contrast, modern liberal political philosophers have argued that coercive enforcement of a single moral end cannot work, and the attempt to make it work brings about a tyrannical suppression of individual liberty. As an alternative, liberal thinkers have argued for defining the common good of a political community as securing the liberty of individuals to pursue their diverse moral ends. But the critics of liberalism have charged that this promotes a hedonistic atomism that dissolves the communitarian conditions necessary for moral excellence.

In their defense of Aristotelian liberalism, Rasmussen and Den Uyl claim that this debate is misconceived, because there is a failure here to make some crucial distinctions. We need to distinguish state and society. And we need to distinguish procedural ends and determinate ends.

When Aristotle says that our nature as political animals is fulfilled in the "city" (polis), he doesn't distinguish between the "city" as a state or government and the "city" as a society. The social life of human beings requires not only a legal/political order of the state, but also a social order of civil society. Once we see this, we can see how the social cultivation of morality might be carried out in civil society--in families and various kinds of social groups--without any need for the legal/political order to coercively impose a single moral order. The legal/political order can be understood as limited to securing the conditions for moral order to arise in diverse forms in civil society.

Rasmussen and Den Uyl also distinguish between procedural and determinate ends:

"A procedural end is the object of a human purpose, the function of which is to define the conditions under which the pursuit of other (determinate) ends will occur but which does not specify what those ends will be or when and how they will be realized. A determinate end, on the other hand, is a the object of a human purpose with identifiable characteristics which can be used to help specify appropriate and inappropriate courses of action for the realization of that end. The procedural ends that characterize a political community represent the conditions under which any and all specific forms of human activity can take place. They must, therefore, be as open as possible with respect to the determinate ends they will allow" (LAN, 163).

So, Rasmussen and Den Uyl explain, while a liberal political community like the United States does not have one determinate conception of the human good, it does have procedural norms of legal conduct that secure the conditions in which individuals are free to form families and social groups based upon determinate conceptions of the human good. Such a liberal regime can be understood as promoting the Aristotelian idea of actualizing the natural human potential for moral and intellectual virtue. But it does this through the procedural protections of a legal/political order within which civil society flourishes as a social realm of moral education.

Another way of seeing this fusion of Aristotelian ethics and liberal politics, Rasmussen and Den Uyl suggest, is to see how liberalism fosters social cooperation through Aristotelian friendship.

The longest section of the Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle's study of "friendship" (philia), which is the word that Aristotle uses for any kind of social bond. He distinguishes three kinds of friendship as based on virtue, pleasure, or advantage. Friendships of virtue are the highest kind, and they are based on the friends resembling one another in their virtuous character. Such friendships are the most intimate and the most enduring. Friendships of pleasure last only as long as people find some pleasure in one another. Friendships of advantage arise when people find one another useful in some way.

If one believes that statecraft is soulcraft, then one might assume that "political friendship"--the friendship that binds together citizens in a political community--would be a friendship of virtue based on sharing a single moral end. But, in fact, Aristotle indicates that friendships of virtue are possible only with a few people, because such friendships require knowing one another intimately over a long life. Political friendships are actually friendships of advantage, because citizens should be held together by some conception of their political life as mutually advantageous (NE, 1155a23-27, 1160a11-15, 1167a27-30). A liberal regime could be founded on such political friendships of common advantage.

Moreover, in modern liberal commercial societies, Rasmussen and Den Uyl argue, commercial relationships can foster advantage-friendships and thus contribute to the moral order of civil society. In explaining how commercial exchanges can sustain friendship, they quote the following passage from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations:

"Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them . . . and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of."

They observe:

"What this passage shows is that market transactions require an interest in others. It is true that this interest is a means of satisfying one's own interest, but it is an interest in others nonetheless. Suppose then . . . that what all friendships have in common is an interest in others. Some of these (the highest types) have this interest in an unself-interested sense. Other types, however, carry a genuine interest in others, but not for their own sake. Market exchanges require a genuine interest in others, because one's own success depends upon getting others to see one's interest as their interest; in other words, sharing an interest.

"Oddly enough, command economies do not require an interest in others, for obedience, and not persuasion, is their mode of eliciting cooperation. Command structures can, and often do, embody selfishness (understood as a lack of concern for the interests of others) in a pure form, since those issuing the commands need pay no heed to anyone's interests but their own. Voluntary market transactions, on the other hand, will not occur if both parties do not see the relationship as mutually advantageous. This shared interest and advantage, at least for the duration of the transaction, embodies several features that can be found in higher forms of friendship: mutual advantage, mutual interest, cooperation, unity of purpose, and even good will" (LAN, 179).

It's worth noting that in appropriating Smith's account of commercial friendships as supporting moral cooperation, Rasmussen and Den Uyl accept Smith's moral psychology of social life, which they reject later in their book when they denigrate Smith's "moral sociology" (LAN, 214-19).

This Smithian understanding of how commercial exchanges promote friendships of advantage and thus social norms of cooperation has been confirmed by studies in the evolution of cooperation of how "market integration" fosters social norms of fairness in cooperation. Some of this research is surveyed in Joseph Heinrich's recent article in Science and in the book Moral Markets (2008), edited by Paul Zak.

Aristotelian Regime Analysis and Darwinian Group Selection

In Moral Minds, Marc Hauser tries to explain the evolution of human morality from traits shared with other animals. Although he does show how many of the components of human morality can be seen in other animals that cooperate with one another, he recognizes the uniqueness of human cooperation and morality: "We are the only animal that cooperates on a large scale with genetically unrelated individuals and that consistently shows stable reciprocity" (378, 411).

Hauser concludes that explaining the evolution of human morality requires group selection. Here he follows in the tradition of Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man: "It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe . . . an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another." The problem, then, is that a social group cannot succeed unless its members cooperate for the good of the group, and yet within the group, it is almost always advantageous for individuals to become cheaters who advance their selfish interests at the expense of the common good. The solution to the problem arises when competition between groups is more intense than competition within groups. Although selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups.

While the idea of group selection has been out of favor among most evolutionary theorists over the past 40 years, recently there has been a revival of group selection thinking. David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson have written an article for The Quarterly Review of Biology surveying the recent research supporting group selection and arguing that group selection should provide the theoretical foundation for sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. An abridged version of this article appeared in the New Scientist.

My interest here is in considering the common ground between this Darwinian group-selection explanation of human morality and Aristotle's account of political regimes.

As Hauser indicates, other animals show differences between groups based on differing cultural traditions. But with other animals these cultural differences don't carry much emotional weight. With human beings, by contrast, cultural differences carry the weight of competing moral conceptions of what is good and right. Human beings don't just cooperate as do other animals. Human beings cooperate based on explicit recognition of rules and procedures of cooperation that have moral authority. Thus, groups form around distinctive symbolic markers that constitute moral communities based on some shared conception of what is good and right. Human group selection arises from the competition between these symbolically constituted moral communities. With language, cultural group selection can operate on cultural variation.

Similarly, Aristotle saw that human beings were not the only political animals. But he also saw that human beings were more political than other political animals because of the uniquely human capacity for speech--logos. 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 than is possible for other political animals. Through speech human beings can deliberate about the "common advantage" as the criterion of justice. Political communities can be distinguished as different kinds of regime based on how they structure the order of rule to conform to some moral conception of the way of life of the community. A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common advantage of all of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its ruling faction. The political problem, then, is that although people are naturally inclined to cooperate for a common life, they are also thrown into factional conflict by their selfish desires. In the long run, Aristotle suggests, the more just regimes tend to be more stable because they avoid or at least moderate factional conflict.

Could the Darwinian evolution of morality through group selection be understood as an Aristotelian evolution of regimes? Could we see this in the history of government? Certainly, American statesmen like Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln believed that the modern republican regime based on limited government by consent of the governed, the rule of law, and private property promised a major advance in political history. For Lincoln, the Civil War was a test of whether such a regime, conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality, could long endure. Do we see here a ground for moral progress through the evolutionary group selection of political regimes?

Political Animals and the Social Intelligence Hypothesis

Aristotle saw a connection between social complexity and animal intelligence. He noted that the more intelligent animals tended to be those with the most intensive and prolonged parental care, because the complexity of the social interaction between parents and offspring requires high intelligence. Similarly, he identified the political animals--those who cooperate for some common work or function--as highly intelligent. Human beings are by nature more political than these other political animals, because of the uniquely human capacity for speech (logos). 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 than is possible for other political animals.

This Aristotelian idea of the connection between sociality and intelligence seems to resemble the "social intelligence hypothesis" that has become popular with many evolutionary theorists today. This hypothesis explains the evolution of complex cognition and enlarged brains as an adaptive response to the complexity of social life, so that we can explain the greater intelligence if primates, for example, as an evolutionary adaptation to the greater social complexity of primate life.

Although this idea is supported by a lot of evidence and reasoning, a few researchers are beginning to question its adequacy. I was recently reminded of this in reading a paper by one of my graduate students--Jennifer Soss--who argues that the social intelligence hypothesis cannot explain the differences between rhesus macaques and chimpanzees. Although chimps are superior to monkeys in cognitive abilities, and although chimp brains are larger and more complex than monkey brains, it's not clear that chimp social life and social cognition is more complex than that of monkeys. So there must be other factors to explain the evolution of higher intelligence in chimps.

A good survey of this argument is in an article by Kay Holekamp--"Questioning the Social Intelligence Hypothesis". Holekamp is a zoologist specializing in the study of spotted hyenas. She argues that social carnivores like spotted hyenas are remarkably similar in their social complexity to primates, although primates are clearly superior in some higher cognitive functions, which suggests that the adaptation of intelligence for social complexity can't be the whole story. She accepts the social intelligence hypothesis as well-supported. But her claim is that there must be other factors interacting with social complexity to explain the evolution of high intelligence.

Actually, Holekamp's argument takes us back to Aristotle. Because while he emphasized the importance of social complexity as connected to intelligence, he also stressed the importance of intelligence in allowing animals to better manipulate their nonsocial environment in devising tools and strategies for gathering food and protecting against predators.

Although we don't see any evolutionary account of the ultimate origins of intelligence in Aristotle's biological writings, we do so an understanding of how intelligence must be explained biologically as a natural adaptation to the lives of animals who need the cognitive tools for living in complex social and physical environments.

The de Waal/Tomasello Debate in Primate Studies

As hard as it is to read the minds of our fellow human beings, it is even harder to read the minds of other animals.

Aristotle's biological works are full of observations about animal minds that qualify him as the first animal psychologist. His general conclusion was that there were traces of almost every human mental ability in other animals, which included emotions, parental care, social learning, communication, imagination, practical judgment, and even something close to intellect. He argued that some animals were capable of voluntary action like that of human children, although they lacked the capacity for deliberate choice that arises in human adults. Some animals are solitary and others gregarious. Of the gregarious animals, some are political. Some of the political animals have leaders. The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for some common work or function (koinon ergon). Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense (HA, 488a7-14).

So while human beings are not the only political animals, they are the most political animals, because through speech or reason (logos), they share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good (Pol, 1253a1-18). Through speech, human beings cooperate for shared ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive that is possible for other political animals. Through speech, human beings can deliberate about the "common advantage" (koinon sumpheron) as the criterion of justice (Rh, 1362a15-63b5). A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common advantage of all its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its ruling group (NE, 1160a13-14; Pol, 1279a17-19).

Aristotle's comparative animal psychology includes the observation that monkeys and apes belong to intermediate species close to human beings in that they "share in the nature of both a human being and the quadrupeds" (HA, 502a16). From his anatomical comparisons, which included dissections of monkeys and apes, he concluded that in their feet, legs, hands, face, teeth, and internal parts, the apes are humanlike (HA 502a17-b27; PA, 689b1-35).

And yet, in relying on direct observations of animal behavior and anatomical dissection, Aristotle, like any animal psychologist, had no direct access to the animal mind. With human beings, he had the data of speech, and thus he could study human politics through the study of political rhetoric in which human beings debate their opinions about political life. Other animals communicate in other ways, but this animal communication is often not as rich as human speech, although Aristotle observed the waggle dance of bees, which we now know to be a remarkably complex form of abstract communication.

The fundamental problem is that the social reality of animal life--including human life--is a mental construction of the animal mind that goes beyond the physical reality of the directly observable world. To understand that mental construction of social reality, we have to draw from our inward subjective experience of our minds and our intersubjective world of symbolism. From our observation of animal behavior, we can project some of our mental experience onto them, but we can never be sure how accurate this is.

We have to assume, as Aquinas said, that "the internal passions of animals can be gathered from their outward movements" (ST, I-II, q. 34, a. 4). But then, as Darwin observed in The Descent of Man, in trying to understand the evolution of human mental abilities from the mental powers of our animal ancestors, we face "the impossibility of judging what passes through the mind of an animal" (Penguin ed., 105).

Over the past hundred years, we have had more systematic study of primate behavior and cognition than was done previously. And over the last forty years, we have seen some methodologically sophisticated studies of primates both in the wild and in captivity, and the captive studies have included controlled, and often ingenious, experimentation. But with all of this primate research, we still face the same problem: primate social reality is a construction of animal minds, and judging what passes through those minds is always speculative and uncertain.

Consider, for example, the many news reports this week--in the New York Times and elsewhere--of new experiments that appear to show chimpanzee generosity. Frans de Waal and his colleagues at Emory University claim to show "spontaneous prosocial choice by chimpanzees." Experiments by other groups suggest that chimpanzees are not very helpful to one another, although observations of chimpanzees in the wild suggest the opposite. De Waal has trained his chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center to exchange tokens for food. In this experiment, chimpanzees were paired up and placed in adjoining cages. One chimp could choose a token from a bucket, with tokens of two different colors. One color would exchange for food for oneself but not for the other chimp. The other color would exchange for food for oneself and for the other chimp. In a majority of cases, the chimp would choose the generous option.

Notice the odd features of this experiment. The participants were seven adult female chimps. We must wonder how much we can conclude from the behavior of seven individuals. We must also wonder why only females were tested, particularly since much of the seemingly cooperative behavior among chimps in the wild is male behavior--such as group hunting and warfare. We might question how much generosity we really see here. The report is that the generous tendency for each individual chimp ranged from 52.9% to 66.7%. That suggests that for some of these individuals the choice of tokens was almost random. And even those showing the more generous tendency are not bearing any costs in their generosity.

As indicated in the New York Times article, this research report has been criticized by Michael Tomasello, Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Anyone who follows this kind of research knows that Tomasello and de Waal have been on opposite sides of a debate for many years. Most recently, Tomasello and his colleagues have published a study in Nature arguing that "collaboration encourages equal sharing in children but not in chimpanzees." They show that children around the age of three show equitable distribution of resources with those engaged in collaborative activities, but chimps do not exhibit such equal sharing with collaborative partners. They offer this as evidence for a general theory of human evolution: the uniquely human propensity for social norms of fairness and equity arose among human ancestors who shared resources after collaborative foraging, and the ancient evolutionary propensity arises early in the development of children as an evolutionarily natural trait.

De Waal and Tomasello agree in general that human nature can be explained as a product of evolutionary primate history, so that human beings are similar to their closest living relatives--chimpanzees and bonobos--but also quite different in humanly unique ways. And yet de Waal and Tomasello disagree in their emphasis--de Waal emphasizing the similarities, Tomasello emphasizing the differences--a disagreement that runs through much of the primate research.

This disagreement was evident a few years ago when de Waal and his colleague Sarah Brosnan gained wide publicity for a report in 2003 entitled "Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay," which seemed to show that capuchin monkeys had a "sense of fairness." Having been trained to exchange tokens for food, the monkeys seemed to be engaged in economic exchange, which is why this kind of research has gained attention from economists. In an experiment to test for "inequity aversion," monkeys who offered a token for food would receive either a slice of cucumber or a grape, and the monkeys clearly favored the grape as more desirable. If one monkey got a slice of cucumber, while seeing that another monkey nearby got a grape, the monkey apparently protested against this, either by refusing to exhange the tokens or by throwing away the cucumber. It seemed as though the monkey was protesting "unequal pay."

But again we might wonder about some of the features of this research. The report was based on the behavior of only five females. Apparently, males had not shown "inequity aversion." We have to wonder then how far we can go in drawing general conclusions from this experiment.

Moreover, as some critics noticed, it was possible that the monkeys weren't showing "inequity aversion" but only frustrated expectations. If a monkey receives a cucumber slice, while noticing that grapes are available, she might feel frustration at not getting the more desirable food, but this would have nothing to do with "unequal pay." Other critics suggested that a monkey perceiving inequity in the distribution of food would want more cucumber slices, not less, to compensate for the inequity.

We might also ask whether these monkeys were really showing a sense of fairness. Even if we are persuaded that the monkey receiving the less favored food was showing indignation in protesting the inequity from the other monkey getting the more favored food, there is no evidence that the monkey getting the unfair advantage felt any guilt. If the monkeys receiving grapes were to throw away their grapes to show sympathy for those receiving only cucumbers, that would be a far more impressive display of a sense of justice.

A few years later, de Waal and Brosnan tried to answer some of these criticisms with new experiments using chimpanzees. They reported that chimps also showed inequity aversion, although chimps in close social relationships were more tolerant of inequity. And yet, once again, Tomasello and other critics pointed out weaknesses in this report. For example, of the 20 individuals studied, 14 refused inequitable exchanges in less than 2% of the trials, which is not very impressive.

Tomasello and his colleagues did a study of their own with 7 orangutans, 6 gorillas, 4 bonobos, and 13 chimpanzees in which the behavior seemed to show that there was no inequity aversion, and thus contradicting de Waal and Brosnan's research.

Some of the details in this debate are surveyed in an article by Kenneth Krause for eSkeptic.

As compared with what de Waal does, Tomasello's research is more interesting in that he performs similar experiments with chimpanzees and young children to see how and at what age the children surpass the chimpanzees. This allows him to argue that the early development of human children replicates human evolutionary history: we see the children starting out with chimpanzee-like abilities but then quickly moving to the uniquely human capabilities that arose early in human evolution. In this way, ontogeny might recapitulate phylogeny.

Some good videos of this research with both chimpanzees and children can be found here. There is also a good PBS Nova video on this and related research by Tomasello and others.

Tomasello's work is embedded within a general social theory of cooperation, which is well summarized in his book Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009). One can see the influence on Tomasello of John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality (Free Press, 1995). Searle argues that we need to understand how social reality differs from physical reality, because social reality is a construction of the mind through the "collective intentionality" of "we consciousness" as opposed to the "I intentionality" of "I consciousness." In social life, we collaborate with one another as we create institutional practices in acting intentionally for shared goals. We thus create "institutional facts" that are just as real as "brute facts" or physical facts, although these institutional realities depend on the work of our minds, and they are not directly observable the way physical reality is directly observable. Tomasello picks up this idea in arguing that human beings are unique in their capacity for "shared intentionality," which allows human beings through their symbolic capacities to engage in cultural niche construction in ways that far surpass chimpanzees and other primates.

What Tomasello is doing is that he's exploring in experimental ways the evolutionary basis for what Aristotle and Aquinas saw--that we are similar to other social and political animals, and yet we are unique in our capacity to use our conceptual and linguistic abilities to create social worlds of shared intentionality that go beyond anything seen in the rest of the animal world.

Tomasello's comparative studies of chimpanzees and children follows in the tradition of Darwin, who methodically studied one of his infant children and compared the child with monkeys and apes to see when the child showed the moral sense that Darwin thought was uniquely human.

If you really want to probe into de Waal's mind, you'll have to go to the video of his interview on "The Colbert Report."

I will be writing more posts this month on the de Waal/Tomasello debate.

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

REFERENCES
Brauer, Juliane, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello, "Are Apes Really Inequity Averse?" Proceedings of the Royal Society B 273 (2006): 3123-3128.

Brosnan, Sarah F., and Frans de Waal, "Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay," Nature 425 (18 September 2003): 297-99.

Brosnan, Sarah F., Hillary C. Schiff, and Frans de Waal, "Tolerance for Inequity May Increase with Social Closeness in Chimpanzees," Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 272 (2005): 253-58.

Hamann, Katharina, Felix Warneken, Julia Greenberg, and Michael Tomasello, "Collaboration Encourages Equal Sharing in Children But Not in Chimpanzees," Nature, early online publication, July, 2011.

Horner, Victoria, J. Devyn Carter, Malini Suchak, and Frans de Waal, "Spontaneous Prosocial Choice by Chimpanzees," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, early edition, August, 2011.

Darwinian Evolution in Four Dimensions

People often question me about why I stress the importance of reading Charles Darwin's writings rather than relying on modern textbook presentations of evolutionary biology. After all, hasn't there been great progress in biological science since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species a 150 years ago? This is certainly true. But it is also true that in many respects Darwin's original understanding of evolution is superior to the prevailing views of today's "Neo-Darwinians." Contemporary proponents of Darwinism like Richard Dawkins tell us that biological evolution is ultimately reducible to the natural selection of random genetic mutations. More and more critics are pointing out the flaws in such a genetic reductionist view of evolution, and they are arguing that we need to explain the complex interaction of multiple levels of evolution that cannot be reduced to the gene-centered view of Neo-Darwinism. But if one studies Darwin's writings, one notices that what these critics are proposing is actually a return to Darwin's original theory.

Consider Darwin's summary of his theory in the last paragraph of the Origin:

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing a Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Notice that Darwin states his "laws" of evolution in a very general and abstract way--the laws of reproduction, inheritance, variability, and struggle for life. If some entities can reproduce themselves, if these entities show heritable variation, and if some of this heritable variation affects their chances of surviving and reproducing in the competitive struggle for existence, then evolution by natural selection will occur. Stated in such a general way, these laws could apply as well to the evolution of human culture as to the evolution of animal anatomy. And, in fact, much of Darwin's Descent of Man is a study of the cultural evolution of human morality.

Notice also that Darwin thinks that heritable variation can arise from "the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse." This means that Darwin embraces Lamarck's idea of the inheritance of acquired characters. So the common story that Darwin overthrew Lamarckianism is false.

In the 1930s, the "Modern Synthesis" of evolutionary biology combined a Neo-Darwinism that rejected all Lamarckianism with Mendelian genetics. It was assumed that genes were the only units of heredity, that variations in genes are random and not affected by the developmental history of the individual, and that selection favors individuals with genes that make them more adapted to their environment than others. Consequently, evolution was understood as some change in the genetic composition of some group of organisms.

In recent decades, empirical research and theoretical arguments have thrown this Modern Synthesis of Neo-Darwinism into doubt, because it seems that a gene-centered theory cannot fully account for the evolution of life. Some people are even saying that this is an intellectual revolution that will destroy Darwinism.

One of the best critiques of Neo-Darwinism is by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (MIT Press, 2005). But rather than overturning Darwinism, Jablonka and Lamb see their critique as a renewal of Darwin's Darwinism.

The argument of Jablonka and Lamb is that in evolution the genetic system of inheritance is only one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance, and that these multiple dimensions of inheritance show a Lamarkian evolution of acquired characters, just as Darwin believed.

To illuminate their general point, Jablonka and Lamb use an analogy to show how different systems of heredity can work along with the genetic system. We can think of a piece of music that is represented by a score, the notes written on paper. This score can be copied as it is passed on through the generations. Although a few mistakes in copying might occur over time, generally the score will be accurately transmitted. We might then see the relationship between the musical score and the musical performance as analogous to the relationship between a genotype and a phenotype in biology. Although mutations in the genotype will be transmitted to future generations, changes in the phenotype will not be transmitted, and so the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters does not occur.

But with the invention of new means of transmitting music--such as musical recordings and broadcasts--it becomes possible to transmit the musical performance (the "phenotype") by inheritance. It is also possible that popular performative interpretations of the music might bring notational changes in the score, and in this way the musical "phenotype" would change the musical "genotype."

In a similar way, Jablonka and Lamb argue, there are systems of inheritance beyond the genetic system that allow phenotypic variations to be transmitted across generations. All organisms have two systems of inheritance--the genetic system and the epigenetic system. Many animals have a third system--the behavioral system. Human beings are unique in that they have not only these three systems, but also a fourth--the symbolic system. The full complexity of evolution arises from the intricate interaction of these four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance, which correspond to various levels of complexity from the genome to cells to organisms to groups.

The genetic inheritance system is the foundation for the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. Jablonka and Lamb accept this as true, but they also criticize genetic reductionism and determinism for failing to see how gene action depends on the complexity of interacting causes within the genome, within cells, within organisms, within groups of organisms, and within ecological circumstances. Except for a few single-gene genetic disorders, "genetic astrology"--the idea that genes directly control specific traits--must be dismissed as foolish.

The epigenetic inheritance system is evident in the differences between specialized cells. Brain cells, liver cells, and skin cells are very different, although the nucleus of each cell has the same genome. Their differences are epigenetic, rather than genetic, because they have arisen through their developmental history in which there were different patterns of gene activation and interaction within the cell. This developmental information is passed on as these cells divide to produce more cells of the same kind. It is possible for evolution to occur through heritable epigenetic variation even without genetic variation. Just as a musical recording transmits interpretations in musical performances of a musical score, so does an epigenetic inheritance system transmit interpretations of the information in DNA, so that there is a Lamarkian inheritance of phenotypes instead of genotypes. One version of such inheritance that is now under active study is DNA methylation: strands of DNA are chemically modified during development, and these modifications can be transmitted through reproduction.

The behavioral inheritance system is the transmission of information among animals through social learning. For example, among some animals (including human beings) mothers transmit food preferences to their offspring, because information about what mother is eating is transmitted either in the womb or through suckling, so that the offspring inherits a preference for that food. More complex forms of social learning come through animal culture. For example, some chimpanzees can discover how to open nuts with a stone, and then pass on this practice within their group so that it becomes a social tradition. Different communities of chimps in Africa have different cultures based on distinctive profiles of traditional practices transmitted by social learning. As opposed to genetic evolution, cultural evolution is not blind but targeted to functional change.

The symbolic inheritance system is uniquely human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was probably crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions that have little to do with concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. These symbolic constructions are often fictional and future-oriented. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution. What Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age (600-200 B.C.) would be an example of a turning point in the symbolic evolution of humanity, in which Confucius, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, and Plato acted as agents of symbolic innovation that has been inherited across the generations for the last two thousand years.

Neo-Darwinian theorists can hardly deny the reality of symbolic or cultural evolution. So they have developed their own theories of how this works. Dawkins is famous for his theory of "memetics"--the idea that "memes" (units of cultural replication) can evolve as "viruses of the brain." The evolutionary psychologists (like John Tooby and Leda Cosmides) explain cultural evolution as a historical process of social learning constrained by the genetically evolved biases of the brain. Although Jablonka and Lamb see some partial truth in these approaches, they also see them as inadequate for explaining the uniqueness of symbolic evolution as shaped through the constructive activities of individual and social agents in history.

The four-leveled account of evolution could explain Aristotle's biological studies of political animals. Human beings are not the only political animals, Aristotle observed, but human beings are more political than the other political animals because the human capacity for logos--speech or conceptual reasoning--allows human beings to organize their political life around shared conceptions of the good and the just. Jablonka and Lamb might say that while human beings share with other animals a capacity for political culture based on behavioral inheritance, only human beings have a capacity for political symbolism that creates a shared symbolic meaning for political life.

I will be writing more posts on these four dimensions of evolution.