On Friday we had a fine “Where do you begin” moment, thanks to Alan Moran of the Institute of Public Affairs. As it happens, I was particularly sensitised to such moments, thanks to chapter 2 of Cassandra Wilkinson’s Don’t Panic, “Civil Society and the Selfish Gene” (also reviewed here).
In this chapter, Wilkinson takes on claims that we are becoming a more selfish, less caring society. She sets herself an intersting challenge, by attacking the belief on two fronts. On one front she looks to popular science to show that human the human brain is biologically endowed with both selfishness and altruism. On the other front she takes on the social sciences and, drawing on recent social science research, attempts to show that the various studies that have been presented paint far too gloomy a picture.
The result, on the popular science front is an entertaining sequence of howlers. Wilkinson begins her exposition by revisiting an old controversy - the argy-bargy in the 1970s over the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. It’s evident that Wilkinson gets her understanding second hand - Dawkins’ himself isn’t referenced and Wilkinson repeats the error made by many of Dawkins’ detractors of assuming that by The Selfish Gene Dawkins meant a gene for selfishness. He didn’t.
Dawkins’ “selfish gene” is a metaphor - an unfortunately anthropomorphic one. Dawkins’ basic thesis is that to the extent that genes “care” about anything, the only thing they care about is their own survival and propagation. In fact, when you consider what a gene is - a particular sequence of DNA codons that specify the sequence of amino acids in a polypeptide or protein - it’s evident that genes don’t give a damn about anything. Because they can’t.
They certainly can’t and don’t, give a damn about you, although Wilkinson would have you believe otherwise:
Your genes want you to live long and prosper but they don’t know much about where you’ll be born or what challenges you will face so they set you up with an adaptive system designed to accomodate new information and grow your brain in response to what you find when you arrive.
Try telling that one to a male praying mantis while his mate is, quite literally, chewing his head off during copulation - in fact any imago - or a salmon of either sex swimming its way back up a North American river to spawn and then die of exhaustion. Once the genes of these creatures have got what they “want” - propagation into the next generation - the organism is done with. Their genes don’t give a rat’s arse what happens next and neither do your genes give a rat’s arse what happens to you once your kids are able to survive on their own. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are species of animals who start life - in the larval stage - by eating their way out of their own mothers. They’ll be either insects, fish or sessile deuterostomia (I was going to say coelenterata, but apparently that classification scheme is old hat).
Here are two more choice excerpts from Wilkinson’s exposition of the popular science. Exposing the errors in these excerpts is left as an exercise for the reader - I really can’t be bothered:
In The Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley argues that our capacity to recognise large numbers of people, to keep score of debts, to evaluate trustworthiness and form alliances is integral to human success and therefore rewarded in evolutionary terms. Altruism and reciprocity have become so essential to our genetic success as self-preservation because we have mutual interest in living in big communities where we can, through specialisation, increase exponentially the resources to all… Nobody can fully prosper making their own clothes, killing their own food and defending their own territory but if we form a group and each does one thing well, we can have more of everything than we need.
Humans struggle with reciprocity more than some other species because we are less closely related. Ants, for instance, are genetically closer to each other so they have clearer cooperative instincts - they are all preserving the same genetic legacy.
Where does Wilkinson get this guff? Some it comes from her reading of popularisers like Matt Ridley and Stephen Pinker, author of The Blank Slate. Wilkinson’s account of human biology and behaviour is, in essence, a popularisation of the popularisers. Wilkinson’s other source is TEH INTERTUBES: there are at least as many references to URLs in the notes for this chapter as there are references to printed works. Yes, that’s right - the book is a blog in print but Wilkinson was fortunate enough to skip the blogging part.
How does Wilkinson do on the other front, that is, dealing with the social research. Later, maybe. I’ve had all I can take for today. Don’t you hate it when you get hold of a bad book that you know you’re going to read through to the very end in the blighted hope that it might actually get better later on?
No. I never finish reading books I hate. Life is short. You could be reading The Tempest or ‘Frost at Midnight’ or Vikram Seth’s Two Lives or the essays of Christopher Hitchens before he Turned.
No, scrap that last one, it’s too sad-making. But still.
(NB — all of the above remain undamaged. Even Hitchens.)
Or certain works of Robert Louis Stevenson that are sitting around the place. Once I get over this silly notion* that you should give an author’s ideas fair consideration before you dismiss them out of hand, I might just do that - about, say, five minutes from now.
Alternatively, I might read some real anthropology by real anthropologists.
* - not generally silly, but silly in this particular instance.
Oh dear, no, I have no quarrel with giving ideas fair consideration. For me it’s not the content as such that’s the problem — it’s the general quality of the writing and thinking. Which, with convincing illustrations, you have amply bagged there in your post.
That’s why I still, even now, read Hitchens, because I have so much respect for his writing and the quality of his thought — though said respect was admittedly acquired in earlier, happier times.
Gummo: you said:
Actually, humans are very related given the restriction of numbers around the time of "Mitochondrial eve". Also, does that mean chimps are more noble beings than we humans, given that they are as altruistic towards humans as 15 month-old humans are? The following paper describes chimpanzees being altruistic to human experimenters:
Spontaneous Altruism by Chimpanzees and Young Children Warneken F, Hare B, Melis AP, Hanus D, Tomasello M (2007) PLoS Biol 5(7): e184 includes the following from the abstract:
… and in the body of the text ….
I’ve found an amphibian who eats the mother’s skin, although it is not fatal- more like an amphibian version of breastfeeding.
On the other side of the equation I remember an example of interspecies altruism from a few years ago - I think a hippo chased a crocodile away from a wildebeest or something like that. Someone was reading me bits out of Kropotkin at the time so the incident stuck in my memory.
David,
I’ll have to check out the links later. Trying to get my head out of the intertubes today.
The problem with Wilkinson’s ant comparison (because it’s, ahem, bugging me right now) is the anthropomorphism. Ant behaviour is very deterministic - last I heard, the way ants “know” what to do is that as they age, their brains switch from one instinctual behaviour to another.
And contrary to the myth that ants are busy, self-sacrificing little critters, if an ant that’s in the egg-tending phase of its life cycle (for example) can’t find any eggs to tend, it will quite contentedly skive off. Whoops - just slipped into anthropomorphism myself!
Su, that hippo/croc/wildebeest scenario is fascinating. I’ve seen a domestic version among family pets — my folks had an old cat who went blind, and the other cat and the dog went to extraordinary lengths to help her out and make allowances for her.
On the other hand again, Norman Swan made — only in passing, while in pursuit of another question — a really interesting point during an Adelaide Festival of Ideas session here last week about altruism and selfishness as a false dichotomy (can’t get away from them, seemingly), by pointing out that it is often in one’s own best interests to act unselfishly. I wonder what a wildebeest has that a hippo might want.
Maybe the hippo just wanted a crocodile-free environment.
All books should be viewed with great suspicion, more so their authors. Take the Bible for instance. It set the trend, allowed mankind’s fantasies and fibs to fill countless scrolls, gave them substance, legitimacy. Since then it’s all been downhill!
Perhaps book burning, once popular, should be resurrected!
Well, if your a lonely Hippo….
Oh look it was an impala and there is a video for the sturdy [link]
(awful commentary warning)
I see what you mean about the false dichotomy, Pavlov’s Cat. Another way of looking at it is that, in order to be able to predict what other animals will do, you need to be able to see things from their perspective, even if only fleetingly. Maybe altruism (if there is a kind of altruism that is ‘pure’ and not connected in any way to one’s own wellbeing) is an unintended consequence of an empathy that evolved for survival reasons.
A recent American study has identified that their is such thing as “pure altruism” in humans, and interestingly, even more so in people who were categorized as egoists. The study was reported and outlined quite well in the New York Times.
As for specialization: insects specialize; we’re not insects.
Eek that isn’t the fMRI study of charity donors? Be exceptionally sceptical of people who think an image of the brain says anything very meaningful about complex behaviour.
Could it be that altruism is being bandied about here in less than the observations by hearing and watching and recording could deem it ,the word, suitable…… to describe a certain doctor who sends his children to private schools and has access to more than one income stream to do what parents and doctors do with their selfish genes as a form of education !!!!???? Tell me forever that Swann is altruistic and I will give up being polite!? Thank all those deceived Christians in the past for our present laws..because I can see myself with a loudhailer standing outside the Swann residence…I am being polite Norman !? Repeated endlessly until someone here reviews their thoughts.
Dave Bath
“Mitochondrial Eve” says nothing specific about humans. Most species would consist of a small number of individuals at the time the species initially buds, (or “speciates”). Groups of humans will tend to be less related than most species:-
1) Groups of humans often much larger.
2) Many species are quite polygamous - a few males breed most of the offspring - so they are more closely related.
The chimps in these studies are described as “semi wild”, which means they have had a lot of contact with humans and experienced a lot of simple interractions like this with humans. Their behaviour tells us little or nothing about the altruistic behaviour of genuinely wild animals.
Pavolv’s Cat
I don’t think you are a very close reader of Hitchens. He has spent his entire life opposing and fighting fascism and religious nutters. He has not turned at all. Perhaps you need to look a little closer to home to understand this.
What I think, JG, is that you need to stop telling other people they don’t understand things.