Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

460 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY Friedrich Nietzsche's Just So Stories 461
9, in which circumstances do permit a "selfish" competition between genes
to arise—and arise it does, leading to escalating arms races. But under most
circumstances, the "time to be selfish," for genes, is strictly limited, and once
the die—or the ballot—is cast, those genes are just along for the ride until
the next election. 2
Skyrms shows that when the individual elements of a group—whether of
whole organisms or their parts—are closely related ( clones or near-clones)
or are otherwise able to engage in mutual recognition and assortative "mating,"
the simple game-theory model of the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which the
strategy of defection always dominates, does not correctly model the circumstances.
That is why our somatic cells don't defect; they are clones. This
is one of the conditions under which groups—such as the group of my "host"
cells—can have the "harmony and coordination" required to behave, quite
stably, as an "organism" or "individual." But before we give three cheers and
take this to be our model for how to make a just society, we should pause to
notice that there is another way of looking at these model citizens, the
somatic-line cells and organs: their particular brand of selflessness is the
unquestioning obedience of zealots or zombies, exhibiting a fiercely
xenophobic group loyalty that is hardly an ideal for human emulation.
We, unlike the cells that compose us, are not on ballistic trajectories; we
are guided missiles, capable of altering course at any point, abandoning
goals, switching allegiances, forming cabals and then betraying them, and so
forth. For us, it is always decision time, and because we live in a world of
memes, no consideration is alien to us, or a foregone conclusion. For this
reason, we are constantly faced with social opportunities and dilemmas of
the sort for which game theory provides the playing field and the rules of
engagement but not the solutions. Any theory of the birth of ethics is going
to have to integrate culture with biology. As I have said before, life, for
people in society, is more complicated.
2. The parallel was perhaps first noted by E. G. Leigh: "It is as if we had to do with a
parliament of genes: each acts in its own self-interest, but if its acts hurt the others, they
will combine together to suppress it. The transmission rules of meiosis evolve as increasingly
inviolable rules of fair play, a constitution designed to protect the parliament against
the harmful acts of one or a few. However, at loci so closely linked to a distorter that the
benefits of 'riding its coattails' outweigh the damage of its disease, selection tends to
enhance the distortion effect. Thus a species must have many chromosomes if, when a
distorter arises, selection at most loci is to favor its suppression. Just as too small a
parliament may be perverted by the cabals of a few, a species with only one, tightly linked
chromosome is an easy prey to distorters" (Leigh 1971, p. 249). See also Buss 1987, pP-
180ff., for a discussion of germ-line sequestration as basically a political innovation that
permitted multicellular life.
2. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE'S JUST SO STORIES
The first impulse to publish something of my hypotheses concerning the
origin of morality was given me by a clear, tidy, and shrewd—also
orecocious—little book in which I encountered distinctly for the first
time an upside-down and perverse species of genealogical hypothesis,
the genuinely English type, that attracted me—with that power of
attraction which everything contrary, everything antipodal possesses.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 1887, preface
It is in perfect accordance with the scheme of nature, as worked out by
natural selection, that matter excreted to free the system from superfluous
or injurious substances should be utilised for [other] highly
useful purposes.
—CHARLES DARWIN 1862, p. 266
Friedrich Nietzsche published his Genealogy of Morals in 1887. He was
the second great sociobiologist, and, unlike Hobbes, he was inspired (or
provoked) by Darwinism. As I noted in chapter 7, Nietzsche probably never
read Darwin. His contempt for the "English type" of genealogy was directed
against the Social Darwinists: Herbert Spencer in particular, and Darwin's
fans on the continent. One fan was Nietzsche's friend Paul Ree, whose "tidy"
book, Origin of the Moral Sensations (1877), provoked Nietzsche's untidy
masterpiece. 3 The Social Darwinists were sociobiologists, but certainly not
great ones. In fact, their efforts almost did in the memes of their hero, by
popularizing second-rate (per)versions of them.
The "survival of the fittest," Spencer proclaimed, is not just Mother Nature's
way, but ought to be our way. According to the Social Darwinists, it is
"natural" for the strong to vanquish the weak, and for the rich to exploit the
poor. This is simply bad thinking, and Hobbes has already shown us why. It
is equally "natural" to die young and illiterate, without benefit of eyeglasses
for myopia, or medicine for illness—for that is how it was in the state of
nature—but surely this counts for nothing when we ask: Ought it, then, be
that way now? Alternatively, since it was (in an extended sense ) entirely
natural—it wasn't supernatural—for us to step out of the state of nature and
adopt a host of societal practices for our mutual benefit, we may simply deny
that there is anything universally natural about the strong dominating
3. Ree was Nietzsche's dearest friend, close enough to be entrusted with the task of
conveying Nietzsche's proposal of marriage to Lou Salome in 1882, but she refused, and t
Ree fell in love with her. Life is complicated.