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

480 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
The simple situations explored by Axelrod's initial tournament have given
way to much more complex and realistic scenarios. Nowak and Sigmund
(1993) have found a strategy that outperforms Tit for Tat under an important
variety of circumstances. Kitcher (1993) examines a world of noncompulsory
Prisoner's Dilemma games (if you don't fancy a particular
opponent, you can decline to play ). Kitcher shows, in careful mathematical
detail, how "discriminating altruists" (who keep a tally on who has defected
in the past) can flourish under certain—not all—conditions, and also begins
to sort out the conditions under which varying policies of forgiveness and
forgetfulness can hold their own against the ever-present prospect of a
resurgence of antisocial types. Particularly fascinating in the directions
opened up by Kitcher's analysis is the emergence of groups in which the
strong and the weak would tend to segregate themselves and prefer to
cooperate with their own sort.
Could this set the stage for something like the Nietzschean transvaluation
of values? Stranger things have happened. Stephen White (unpublished) has
begun to investigate the important further complexities of the multi-person
Prisoner's Dilemma. (This is the game that leads to the tragedy of the
commons, creating both depleted fish stocks in our oceans and forests of tall
trees.) As Kitcher points out, the simple scenarios are analytically tractable—
the equations of interaction and their expected yields can be solved directly
by mathematical calculation—but as we add more realism, and hence
complexity, the direct solution of the equations becomes unfeasible, so we
have to turn to the indirect methods of computer simulation. In such a
simulation, you just set up hundreds or thousands of imaginary individuals,
endow them with dozens or hundreds or thousands of strategies or other
properties, and let the computer do all the work of having them play thousands
or millions of games against each other, keeping track of the results. 9
This is a branch of sociobiology or evolutionary ethics that no one should
deride. It directly tests the hunches, such as those of Hobbes and Nietzsche,
that there are natural, evolutionarily enforceable paths to where we are
today. We may be quite sure that this is true, for here we are, but what this
research promises to clarify is how much R-and-D work, of what sorts, was
9. If you want to know the odds of being dealt a straight flush in poker, one way is to solve
the equation provided by probability theory; you get a definitive answer. Another way is
to deal yourself a few billion poker hands, shuffling well between each, and simply
counting the straight flushes and dividing by the total number of hands dealt. That gives
you a very reliable estimate, but it is not officially foolproof. The latter method is the only
feasible way to study the complicated scenarios of evolutionary ethics, but, as we already
saw in the discussion (in chapter 7 ) of Conway's reactions to the ways in which his Game
of Life is being explored, the results of such simulations can be misleading, and should
often be taken with a grain of salt.
Sociobiology: Good and Bad, Good and Evil 481
required to get us here. At one extreme, it could turn out that there is an
impressive bottleneck; a quite improbable but crucial series of happy accidents
were required. (White's analysis offers some plausible reasons for
believing that the conditions are really quite stringent.) At the other extreme
it might turn out that there is a rather wide "basin of attraction" that will lead
almost any cognitively sophisticated creatures, whatever their circumstances,
into societies with recognizable ethical codes. It will be fascinating to see
what large-scale computer simulations of these complex social interactions
tell us about the constraints on the evolution of ethics. But we can already be
virtually certain that mutual recognition and the capacity to communicate a
promise—stressed by both Hobbes and Nietzsche—are necessary conditions
for the evolution of morality. It is conceivable if unlikely on present
evidence, that whales and dolphins, or the great apes, meet these necessary
conditions, but no other species come close to exhibiting the sorts of social
cognition that true morality depends on. (My pessimistic hunch is that the
main reason we haven't yet ruled out dolphins and whales as moralists of the
deep is that they are so hard to study in the wild. Most of the evidence about
the chimpanzees—some of it self-censored by researchers for years—is that
they are true denizens of Hobbes' state of nature, much more nasty and
brutish than many would like to believe.)
4. SOCIOBIOLOGY: GOOD AND BAD, GOOD AND EVIL
... the human brain works however it works. Wishing for it to work in
some way as a shortcut to justifying some ethical principle undermines
both the science and the ethics (for what happens to the principle if the
scientific facts turn out to go the other way?).
—STEVEN PINKER 1994, p. 427
Sociobiology has two faces. One looks toward the social behavior of
nonhuman animals. The eyes are carefully focused, the lips pursed
judiciously. Utterances are made only with caution. The other face is
almost hidden behind a megaphone. With great excitement, pronouncements
about human nature blare forth.
—PHIUP KITCHER 1985b, p. 435
Another part of our inquiry into human nature, as a naturalistic basis for
sound ethical thinking, would begin with the undisputable fact that we
human beings are products of evolution, and consider what limitations we
are born with and what variations there are among us that might have ethical
relevance. Many people apparently think that ethics is in deep trou-