From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Fri Nov 19 1999 - 22:30:06 MST
Robert Owen wrote,
>I thought I might provoke a little controversy by mentioning
>the Field of "Theoretical Biology" and stimulate some painful
>feelings only to be relieved by posting an opinion of Stuart
>Kauffman who studies the origin of life and the origins of
>molecular organization. Twenty-five years ago, he developed
>the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting
>a kind of self-organization that he terms "order for free."
Keven Kelly has a nice essay about Kaufman's Order For Free at:
http://panushka.absolutvodka.com/kelly/ch20-a.html
This page, and the four subsequent web pages, comprise Chapter 20 of _Out of
Control_, "The Butterfly Sleeps."
>I hope at least one or two readers are sufficiently outraged, or at
>least exasperated, that they will post their devastating critique.
>For example, do you detect an odor of "teleology"? Or do you
>espy "The Anthropic Principle" sneaking through the back door?
>Some kind of neo-Begsonian or Lamarckian decadence? Worse yet,
>is this some weird kind of "closet creationism"?
No, I don't see any of that. I see techniques informally known as parallel
distributed processing, Boolean nets, neural nets, spin glasses, cellular
automata, classifier systems, genetic algorithms, and swarm computation, all of
which contribute to Kaufman's work on autocatalytic autopoesis. (But not nearly
as well as Kaufman and Langton see them.)
>Well, say the issue is: can highly qualified biologists study the biological
>determinants of anthropoid social behavior and on the of level conceptual
>mentation in our species expand our understanding of the biogenetic roots
>of our value- and belief-systems without the "conflation" to which Athena
>refers? That is, without dragging-in the non-empirical disciplines of
>"Comparative Cultural Anthropology", "Sociology", and purely theoretical
>models derived from "Depth Psychology"and your infamous "Cultural Studies"?
>My "rhetorical" position is one of abject skepticism, but I am ready to learn!
By way of an answer, I direct to to the following:
"Do we invent our moral absolutes in order to make society workable? Or are
these enduring principles expressed to us by some transcendent or Godlike
authority? Efforts to resolve this conundrum have perplexed, sometimes inflamed,
our best minds for centuries, but the natural sciences are telling us more and
more about the choices we make and our reasons for making them."
"The Biological Basis of Morality"
by Edward O. Wilson:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98apr/biomoral.htm
"A Scientific Approach to Moral Reasoning":
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98apr/bio2.htm
"The general empiricist principle takes this form: Strong innate feeling and
historical experience cause certain actions to be preferred; we have experienced
them, and have weighed their consequences, and agree to conform with codes that
express them. Let us take an oath upon the codes, invest our personal honor in
them, and suffer punishment for their violation. The empiricist view concedes
that moral codes are devised to conform to some drives of human nature and to
suppress others. Ought is the translation not of human nature but of the public
will, which can be made increasingly wise and stable through an understanding of
the needs and pitfalls of human nature. The empiricist view recognizes that the
strength of commitment can wane as a result of new knowledge and experience,
with the result that certain rules may be desacralized, old laws rescinded, and
formerly prohibited behavior set free. It also recognizes that for the same
reason new moral codes may need to be devised, with the potential of being made
sacred in time."
The Origin of Moral Instincts
IF the empiricist world view is correct, ought is just shorthand for one kind of
factual statement, a word that denotes what society first chose (or was coerced)
to do, and then codified. The naturalistic fallacy is thereby reduced to the
naturalistic problem. The solution of the problem is not difficult: ought is the
product of a material process. The solution points the way to an objective grasp
of the origin of ethics.
A few investigators are now embarked on just such a foundational inquiry. Most
agree that ethical codes have arisen by evolution through the interplay of
biology and culture. In a sense these investigators are reviving the idea of
moral sentiments that was developed in the eighteenth century by the British
empiricists Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith.
What have been thought of as moral sentiments are now taken to mean moral
instincts (as defined by the modern behavioral sciences), subject to judgment
according to their consequences. Such sentiments are thus derived from
epigenetic rules -- hereditary biases in mental development, usually conditioned
by emotion, that influence concepts and decisions made from them. The primary
origin of moral instincts is the dynamic relation between cooperation and
defection. The essential ingredient for the molding of the instincts during
genetic evolution in any species is intelligence high enough to judge and
manipulate the tension generated by the dynamism. That level of intelligence
allows the building of complex mental scenarios well into the future. It occurs,
so far as is known, only in human beings and perhaps their closest relatives
among the higher apes.
A way of envisioning the hypothetical earliest stages of moral evolution is
provided by game theory, particularly the solutions to the famous Prisoner's
Dilemma. Consider the following typical scenario of the dilemma. Two gang
members have been arrested for murder and are being questioned separately. The
evidence against them is strong but not irrefutable. The first gang member
believes that if he turns state's witness, he will be granted immunity and his
partner will be sentenced to life in prison. But he is also aware that his
partner has the same option, and that if both of them exercise it, neither will
be granted immunity. That is the dilemma. Will the two gang members
independently defect, so that both take the hard fall? They will not, because
they agreed in advance to remain silent if caught. By doing so, both hope to be
convicted on a lesser charge or escape punishment altogether. Criminal gangs
have turned this principle of calculation into an ethical precept: Never rat on
another member; always be a stand-up guy. Honor does exist among thieves. The
gang is a society of sorts; its code is the same as that of a captive soldier in
wartime, obliged to give only name, rank, and serial number.
In one form or another, comparable dilemmas that are solvable by cooperation
occur constantly and everywhere in daily life. The payoff is variously money,
status, power, sex, access, comfort, or health. Most of these proximate rewards
are converted into the universal bottom line of Darwinian genetic fitness:
greater longevity and a secure, growing family.
And so it has most likely always been. Imagine a Paleolithic band of five
hunters. One considers breaking away from the others to look for an antelope on
his own. If successful, he will gain a large quantity of meat and hide -- five
times as much as if he stays with the band and they are successful. But he knows
from experience that his chances of success are very low, much less than the
chances of the band of five working together. In addition, whether successful
alone or not, he will suffer animosity from the others for lessening their
prospects. By custom the band members remain together and share equitably the
animals they kill. So the hunter stays. He also observes good manners in doing
so, especially if he is the one who makes the kill. Boastful pride is condemned,
because it rips the delicate web of reciprocity.
Now suppose that human propensities to cooperate or defect are heritable: some
people are innately more cooperative, others less so. In this respect moral
aptitude would simply be like almost all other mental traits studied to date.
Among traits with documented heritability, those closest to moral aptitude are
empathy with the distress of others and certain processes of attachment between
infants and their caregivers. To the heritability of moral aptitude add the
abundant evidence of history that cooperative individuals generally survive
longer and leave more offspring. Following that reasoning, in the course of
evolutionary history genes predisposing people toward cooperative behavior would
have come to predominate in the human population as a whole.
Such a process repeated through thousands of generations inevitably gave rise to
moral sentiments. With the exception of psychopaths (if any truly exist), every
person vividly experiences these instincts variously as conscience,
self-respect, remorse, empathy, shame, humility, and moral outrage. They bias
cultural evolution toward the conventions that express the universal moral codes
of honor, patriotism, altruism, justice, compassion, mercy, and redemption.
The dark side of the inborn propensity to moral behavior is xenophobia. Because
personal familiarity and common interest are vital in social transactions, moral
sentiments evolved to be selective. People give trust to strangers with effort,
and true compassion is a commodity in chronically short supply. Tribes cooperate
only through carefully defined treaties and other conventions. They are quick to
imagine themselves the victims of conspiracies by competing groups, and they are
prone to dehumanize and murder their rivals during periods of severe conflict.
They cement their own group loyalties by means of sacred symbols and ceremonies.
Their mythologies are filled with epic victories over menacing enemies.
The complementary instincts of morality and tribalism are easily manipulated.
Civilization has made them more so. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, a tick in
geological time, when the agricultural revolution started in the Middle East, in
China, and in Mesoamerica, populations increased tenfold in density over those
of hunter-gatherer societies. Families settled on small plots of land, villages
proliferated, and labor was finely divided as a growing minority of the populace
specialized as craftsmen, traders, and soldiers. The rising agricultural
societies became increasingly hierarchical. As chiefdoms and then states thrived
on agricultural surpluses, hereditary rulers and priestly castes took power. The
old ethical codes were transformed into coercive regulations, always to the
advantage of the ruling classes. About this time the idea of law-giving gods
originated. Their commands lent the ethical codes overpowering authority -- once
again, no surprise, in the interests of the rulers.
Because of the technical difficulty of analyzing such phenomena in an objective
manner, and because people resist biological explanations of their higher
cortical functions in the first place, very little progress has been made in the
biological exploration of the moral sentiments. Even so, it is astonishing that
the study of ethics has advanced so little since the nineteenth century. The
most distinguishing and vital qualities of the human species remain a blank
space on the scientific map. I doubt that discussions of ethics should rest upon
the freestanding assumptions of contemporary philosophers who have evidently
never given thought to the evolutionary origin and material functioning of the
human brain. In no other domain of the humanities is a union with the natural
sciences more urgently needed.
When the ethical dimension of human nature is at last fully opened to such
exploration, the innate epigenetic rules of moral reasoning will probably not
prove to be aggregated into simple instincts such as bonding, cooperativeness,
and altruism. Instead the rules will most probably turn out to be an ensemble of
many algorithms, whose interlocking activities guide the mind across a landscape
of nuanced moods and choices.
Such a prestructured mental world may at first seem too complicated to have been
created by autonomous genetic evolution alone. But all the evidence of biology
suggests that just this process was enough to spawn the millions of species of
life surrounding us. Each kind of animal is furthermore guided through its life
cycle by unique and often elaborate sets of instinctual algorithms, many of
which are beginning to yield to genetic and neurobiological analyses. With all
these examples before us, we may reasonably conclude that human behavior
originated the same way.
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