No Austrolipithicus is an Island

Not too long ago I finished Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds, which tries to summarize the impact of the latest science on the idea of an innate moral sense – from neuroscience to evolutionary biology. This should have been absolutely fantastic, and as a bibliographic summary of the research it is. However, he proceeds from the odd premise that a Chomsky-like language analogy can be used to derive some sort of (explicitly) Rawlsian instinct for “fairness” as the driving force behind human behavior. Here are the shock studies, here are the killed-by-a-trolley scenarios, the chimpanzee experiments, and even rats reducing the suffering of other rats. Only none of it is ever tied convincingly back to fairness – or a “moral sense as language sense” idea. So much for academic trendiness.

There’s an end note that really struck a chord:
A growing group of evolutionary biologists, led to a large extent by the work of David Sloan Wilson [..] have articulated a different view of group selection, what they refer to as “multilevel selection theory.” The basic idea here is that group selection refers to the differential success of one group over another due the differences in the proportion of altruists or cooperators. This view acknowledges the importance of selfish behavior but also argues that when the distribution of genes within a group promotes acts that are mutually beneficial to all or most members of the group, then these genes will preferentially spread, thereby leading to between-group differences in fitness. (Cpt. 7, Note 3.)

For some time the idea of Group Selection (even as a key to ethics) has fascinated me. The problem with the Lockes of the world and their states of nature has always been that the race just didn’t evolve that way. Forget political economy for a moment and just think about the world according to James Frazer; life as people has always been a group affair. Rituals, magic, ceremony, taboo, and custom have been the basic stuff of mankind as far back as we know. Small clan groups (lots of cognitive research here too) seem to be the unit that the structure of the animal is built around. The biology makes sense – how else could the ridiculous gestation period, total helplessness for years, and multiple years of learning have worked in groups of ones or twos? Only as a cooperative clan can the odd creature of man work at all.

Which means what for culture? Either the group (or most of it) survives or nobody does. Ergo, the whole enterprise becomes structured around the all-important survival of the group. Not the fittest, most attractive, swiftest, or other individual of any kind. Without his fellows he’s toast. While there may be some intra-group competition (although surely not the self-destructive crap that’s always observed in chimps) the place in and contribution to the clan becomes the first value. (For the comic movie people: go watch 300 again and think about the whole self-sacrifice-as-clan-survival wrinkle – especially when the character says “yes, but I have another son.”) This is what Uncle Friedrich was trying to say with Good and Bad (i.e. what leads to clan survival) versus Good and Evil (the rules skewed to preserve the priesthood.)

Lots of ground here for further research. I’m dying to read what Wilson has to say.