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How does an atheist address the problem of evil atrocities in humanity? Is it evolutionarily reasonable to torture, rape and conquer in modern times?
This is a great question, which can be judged by the needed length of my reply:The short answer to the question “Is it evolutionarily reasonable to torture, rape and conquer in modern times?” is no. But to see why we can’t restrict the issue to just modern times needs further explanation. Any theory of life has to deal with human behavior over all our history. It is a fact of history that people are able to do appalling things. How and why does that happen? As a theory about the physical origins and constituency of our minds, evolutionary theory can only go so far in dealing with the moral implications of our actions.
As I noted in the “NOMA Reconsidered” posting, all ethical actions fall into the domain of “undecidable” propositions that scientific reasoning has limits to what insights it can offer. If you look at animals that have no complex conscious minds like our own, their world is a mixture of ruthless eat or be eaten predator-prey interactions along with a more benign dynamic of cooperation and “you scratch my fin and I’ll scratch yours” direct reciprocity altriusm. Martin Nowak explains the evolutionary science behind all this in his 2011 book, “Super Cooperators” (which is available at the Spokane Public Library).
Many of the violent things we put moral labels on occur in nature, especially among the brightest of our nonhuman relatives: the very intelligent dolphins engage in gang rape, chimpanzees make war on neighboring chimp enclaves (unlike their gentle “make love not war” bonobo evolutionary cousins), and killer whales (the largest of the dolphin species) callously “play with their food” when going after seals in a way that can creep out human observers.
So how and why do we differ from animals in seeing a problem here? (If individual chimps or dolphins have any moral qualms about their actions they have no means to communicate them to us.) Religions naturally have their own explanations (though as genocide and violent acts are not unknown from these traditions, that’s not necessarily a happy place to go), but you’re asking about the evolutionary view.
While you don’t even need a nervous system to engage in direct reciprocity altruism (it happens in yeast), our much more complex brains, where we have language as well as memory, expand the range into indirect reciprocity: I’ll do good to you because it builds my reputation and I get returns in kind, or avoid doing bad to you again because of the effect it will have on my reputation. “As you sow, so shall you reap,” “do unto others…” or “what goes around comes around” are all ways of thinking about this issue that pervades human culture.
So if we have a natural propensity for cooperation as much as conflict, why do evolved human societies still do nasty things? Science has only recently begun to unravel the actual brain systems that we use to make moral choices. One is a snap judgment system drawing on our ancient emotional filter, the amygdala, while another independent one uses the more analytical frontal cortex. The two systems don’t always agree, and resolving conflict there leads to many inconsistencies and moral dilemmas, abetted by our natural ability to rationalize and dissemble.
Sociopaths and psychopaths don’t face those problems, as their lack of empathy and a malfunctioning amygdala can lead to calculated violence at the drop of a hat. Put those people in charge of a country where societal dogmas about enemies include the idea of killing as a way of resolving problems, though, and you have a recipe for terror, from the Spanish Inquisition to the French Revolution, and more recently, the industrialized atrocities of Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, or the more down and dirty insanity of Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
The idea that those 20th century examples were due to “Darwinist survival of the fittest” thinking has been a common trope among antievolutionists lately (the “Expelled!” video a few years back helped popularize it) but things are not nearly so simple as that. The Nazis never got their anti-Semitism from Darwin, nor did the Soviet Union follow cutting edge evolutionary thinking (otherwise they would never have junked genetics in favor of the “socialist agronomy” of Lysenko, who managed to screw up their agricultural system for 30 years).
Darwin himself thought war of any sort was inherently dangerous from an evolutionary point of view, since it involved randomly trimming the range of human variety in way that you could never tell what potentially useful attributes for the future you were obliterating without realizing it. For the same reason the glib eugenics programs of the early 20th century that people all over the political and cultural map liked (from Teddy Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger to Calvin Coolidge and even William Tinkle, one of the founders of the modern creationist movement) disappeared from modern evolutionary thinking precisely because after 1953 the structure of DNA was discovered showed the problems in the basic idea (and we also had the gory example of applied eugenics in the Holocaust as bitter object lesson).
Decades of scientific research have made it increasingly obvious that only a scientific blockhead could think they could tell in advance what “favorable” collection of gene packets you needed to select for to “better” humanity, when rampant alternative splicing in the genome (we shuffle pieces of our 20,000 genes around to produce 100,000 proteins) meant that, even if you managed to localized a desirable trait to a selectable gene, whatever you did filter would inevitably have who knows what impact downstream. It’s the same reason that many evolutionists rightly caution about the potential pitfalls of GMO crops.
It should also tell us something important that the only people today actively promoting eugenics are the xenophobic antievolutionist super conservatives behind “The Occidental Quarterly” journal (which you may read online if you have the stomach for it) and the best place to spot a living example of a “Social Darwinist” (Herbert Spencer didn’t think you should interfere with the “natural” system with things like public schools or welfare programs) is at a Tea Party convention, where the notions of Ayn Rand (minus her atheism of course) are still circulating and an evolutionist will be hard to find.
The upshot is that “evolutionary theory” can say nothing at all about the good or evil that humans can do apart from providing insights into what biological baggage we carry around with us that we have to watch out for in setting our social priorities and especially when it comes to minimizing the likelihood of dangerous people getting into positions of authority in countries where they might lead the people off a moral gangplank.
This big picture is both a plus and a minus for science and religion. There is a potentially deadly yin-yang going on here. The physicist Steven Weinberg once reminded us that bad people do bad things pretty much on their own, but for good people to do bad things you need religion. I would amend that to say “or social systems (even ostensibly “atheistic” ones like the particularly vicious Stalinist theme park of North Korea) where respect for individual conscience and freedom are suppressed by official dogma and so function like an extremist religion.”
On the flip side, one could argue that good people do good things pretty much on their own, but for bad people to do good things you may need religion (or again, a secular social system where respect for individual freedom is so engrained that bad actions that get out of the gate are not encouraged).
Some issues fall apart even more completely if you reflect on the broadest effects. No reasonable person (evolutionist or not) should be moved to justify torture not only because it is ethically vicious (violating the deepest of reciprocity concerns), but from an informational point of view it is of problematic utility: like as not you will get only what you want to be told, and so the continued use of it only reinforces preconceived thinking (again the Spanish Inquisition offers a sad object lesson here).
To riff off a line of dialogue from “The African Queen”: To be fully human, our nature is what we must rise above, but we can only do that once we truly understand what our nature is, and here evolutionary science does have quite a lot of useful things to say.
Thanks for the great, well thought out reply. I still am left wondering why such actions would be considered wrong in a survival of the strongest ethic. What I determine is right for me can’t be reduced to the two extremes. There’s a whole human experience between those two poles. Is everyone who rapes a sociopath and everyone who feeds the poor a saint?
As I don’t defend a “survival of the strongest ethic” I will only note that the flaw in that side’s approach is the presumption that the “best” is necessarily the strongest, begging the question of which strong does one have in mind: physically, mentally, morally? And beyond that, the questionable presumption that a society composed only of those “strong” will be the best to cover all circumstances. Those smart ass Aryans got their bad ass code machine cracked by a gay mathematician in Britain armed with a room full of overheating vacuum tubes.
Eric has hit the nail on the final point though: how much tidier it would be if rapists were all sociopaths, or poor feeders all saints. But in the real world of human variety there will be so wide a range of combinations that no amount of either/or categorizing will go very far.
Hi Jim,
Nice contextual framework. If appropriate, might I pick your knowledge bank? I have a few curiosities possibly relevant to this line in inquiry?
One, do you believe psychology will eventually join the ranks of ‘hard’ science?
Two, in general terms, are you aware of any scientific findings relating our capabilities governing the spectrum of human emotions as compared to such capacities in animals?
And, three, are you aware of any specific research into variance in human capabilities responding to the emotion of fear, specifically?
I have no specific knowledge of any such studies. Have you encountered any in your intellectual travels? Why I ask is because I carry hunches that neurological evolution follows increase in such capacities which I believe (‘HUNCH’) DO effect ‘moral’ choices.
By the way, I like when you use ‘undecidable’ in a specific context of ‘inconclusive according to the established scientific method.’ And, how did you know I’m half way through seeing ‘African Queen’ for the FIRST time on Netflix?
In many ways psychology has already moved into the hard science category, though a lot of the old guard (“let’s talk about your problem…”) have trouble with the near breed of “think about that for me while we observe your brain in this MRI…” neuroscientists.
A power failure hit just as I was replying to this, so I am giving it a second swing.
There’s a huge literature on all the questions you asked. Marian Dawkins (Dec. 2000) “Animal minds and animal emotions.” in “Integrative and Comparative Biology” vol. 40 (pp. 883-888) may be as good place to start as any. We have much more in common with primates emotionally than we do in other areas (we have language and they don’t), and a lot of the emotional substrate tracks back way before even the primates in our evolutionary history.
On the neurobiology of fear, the big players include our hippocampus memory gatekeeper and our amygdala emotional resonator coopted from our reptile progenitors, mediated by cascades of neurotransmitters (some of which can be affected by medical intervention). Some recent papers would be:
Choi et al. (9 February 2010) “Prelimbic cortical BDNF is required for memory of learned fear but not extinction or innate fear.” in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” vol. 107 (pp. 2675-2675)
Ciocchi et al. (11 November 2010) “Encoding of conditioned fear in central amygdala inhibitory circuits.” in “Nature” vol. 468 (pp. 277-282)
Bissiere et al. (7 Jan. 2011) “Electrical Synapses Control Hippocampal Contributions to Fear Learning and Memory.” in “Science” vol. 331 (pp. 87-91).
As for neurobiological factors affecting our moral judgments, Joshua Greene & Joseph Paxton (28 July 2009) “Patterns of neural activity associated with honest and dishonest moral decisions.” in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” vol. 106 (pp. 12506-12511) will bring up that topic as well as the PNAS site showing subsequent works that have cited it (true also for the “Integrative and Comparative Biology” article) and the full text of the pieces will be free as well. Abstracts at “Science” will also show subsequent citing papers (“Nature” doesn’t do that) and the original papers would be available though at the public and college libraries.
I’ll close with the quote (as near as I recall from memory) from the preacher’s sister played by Hepburn in “African Queen” expressing her disappointment with the alcoholism of her rescuer: “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put on earth to rise above.”
“Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put on earth to rise above.”
Why should we rise above nature? Does nature rise above nature?
Wow, you’re fast. (How do you do that?)
Thanks! I will investigate.