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

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472 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
find some "Thou Shalt Go No Farther" boundary to human cognition. He
thinks, however, that evolutionary biology has shown that "the individual's
self-interests can only be realized through reproduction, by creating descendants
and assisting other relatives," and that a consequence of this is that no
one ever acts out of genuine beneficence or altruism. As he puts it:
... this "greatest intellectual revolution of the century" tells us that, despite
our intuitions, there is not a shred of evidence to support this view
of beneficence, and a great deal of convincing theory suggests that any
such view will eventually be judged false [Alexander 1987, p. 3].
But, like Wilson and the Social Darwinists, he commits a subtle, attenuated
version of the genetic fallacy, and emphasizes the very passage (p. 23)
in which he does it.
Even if culture changes massively and continually across multiple generations,
even if our problems and promises arise out of the cultural process
of change, even if there are no genetic variations among humans that
significantly affect their behavior, it is always true that the cumulative
history of natural selection continues to influence our actions by the set
of genes it has provided humanity.
This is indeed true, but it does not establish the point he thinks it does. As he
insists, no matter how potent cultural forces are, they always have to act on
the materials genetic forces have shaped for them, and will go on shaping,
but they can just as readily redirect or exploit or subvert those genetically
endorsed designs as attenuate or combat them. Sociobiologists, overreacting
to the cultural absolutists (those crazy skyhookers) in much the way Darwin
overreacted to the Catastrophists, like to emphasize that culture must have
grown out of our biological inheritance. Indeed it must have, and it is also
true that we grew from fish, but our reasons aren't the reasons of fish just
because fish are our ancestors.
The sociobiologists are also right to stress that our unique capacity to
adopt and act on a different set of reasons does not prevent us from being
inconvenienced or even tortured or betrayed by our "animal" urges. Long
before Salome did her dance of the seven veils, it was already obvious to
members of our species that innate procreative urges can be made to assert
themselves at the most inopportune times, just as sneezes and coughs can,
seriously threatening the welfare of the body in which those urges are
asserted. As in other species, many is the woman who has perished to save
her children, and many is the man who has gone to an early death eagerly
pursuing one perilous course or another, driven on by the faint hope of
procreation. But we must not turn this important fact about our biological
Some Varieties of Greedy Ethical Reductionism 473
limitions into the massively misleading idea that the summum bonum at
the source of every chain of practical reasoning is the imperative of our
genes. A counterexample shows why not: Larry, heartsick at being spurned
by Lola, the love of his life, joins the Salvation Army in order to try to forget
her to put an end to his torment. It works. Years later, St. Larry the Sublimated
wins the Nobel Peace Prize for all his good deeds, and Richard
Alexander, at the ceremony in Oslo, throws a wet blanket on the proceedings
by reminding us that this all grew out of Larry's basic reproductive
urges. So it did. So what? We make a big mistake if we think the way to
understand the bulk of Larry's life is to try to interpret his every move as
designed, one indirect way or another, to ensure that he has grandchildren.
The possibility that a meme or complex of memes can redirect our
underlying genetic proclivities is strikingly illustrated by a four-centurylong
human experiment in sociobiology that has recently been vividly
drawn to the attention of evolutionary theorists by David Sloan Wilson and
Elliot Sober:
The Hutterites are a fundamentalist religious sect mat originated in Europe
in die sixteenth century and migrated to North America in the nineteenth
century to escape conscription. The Hutterites regard themselves as the
human equivalent of a bee colony. They practice community of goods ( no
private ownership ) and also cultivate a psychological attitude of extreme
selflessness__Nepotism and reciprocity, the two principles that most
evolutionists use to explain prosocial behavior in humans, are scorned by
the Hutterites as immoral. Giving must be without regard to relatedness
and without any expectation of return. [Wilson and Sober 1994, p. 602]
Unlike most sects, the Hutterites have been quite successful at propagating
their groups over the centuries, enlarging their range and increasing their
global population, according to Wilson and Sober: "In present-day Canada,
Hutterites thrive in marginal farming habitat without the benefit of modern
technology and almost certainly would displace the non-Hutterite population
in the absence of laws that restrict their expansion" (p. 605).
The Hutterites may be over four centuries old, but that is no time at all on
the genetic calendar, so it is not likely that any of the striking differences
between their groups and the groups the rest of us belong to are genetically
transmitted. (Exchanging Hutterite infants for others would presumably not
interfere noticeably with the "group fitness" of Hutterite colonies. Hutterites
simply exploit, thanks to a heritage of cultural transmission, dispositions
that are part of the common human stock.) So the Hutterites are an
example of how cultural evolution can create new group effects, and what is
particularly delicious, from an evolutionist's point of view, is their method of
fission: