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

484 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY Sociobiology: Good and Bad, Good and Evil 485
might evolve—a "prediction" stunningly confirmed by the subsequent studies
of the amazing South African naked mole rats (Sherman, Jarvis, and
Alexander 1991). This was such an astonishing triumph of adaptationist
reasoning that it deserves to be more widely known. As Karl Sigmund
describes it, Hamilton's ideas
led to a most remarkable discovery when, in 1976, the American biologist
R. D. Alexander lectured on sterile castes. It was well known that these
existed for ants, bees, and termites, but not for any kind of vertebrate.
Alexander, in a kind of thought experiment, toyed with the notion of a
mammal able to evolve a sterile caste. It would, like the termites, need an
expandable nest allowing for an ample food supply and providing shelter
from predators. For reasons of size, an underbark location [like that of the
presumed insect ancestors of termites] was no good. But underground
burrows replete with large tubers would fit the bill perfectly. The climate
should be tropical; the soil ( more than a hint of Sherlock Holmes here!)
heavy clay. An ingenious exercise in armchair ecology altogether. But after
his lecture, Alexander was told that his hypothetical beast did indeed live
in Africa; it was the naked mole rat, a small rodent studied by Jennifer
Jarvis. [Sigmund 1993, p. 117.]
Naked mole rats are surpassingly ugly and strange, a thought experiment
of Mother Nature's to rival any of the fantasies of philosophy. They are
genuinely eusocial. The single queen mole rat is the sole female breeder, and
she keeps the rest of the colony in line by releasing pheromones that suppress
the maturation of the other females' reproductive organs. Naked mole rats are
coprophagous—they regularly eat their own feces—and when the
grotesquely swollen pregnant queen cannot reach her own anus, she begs
feces from her attendants. (Had enough? But there's much, much more,
highly recommended to all whose curiosity exceeds their squeamish-ness.) A
bounty has been learned from the study of naked mole rats, and other
nonhuman species, using the techniques of Darwinian reverse engineering—
using adaptationism, in other words—and there is surely more to come. E. O.
Wilson's own important work on social insects (1971) is deservedly world
famous, and there are literally hundreds of other fine animal sociobiologists.
(See, e.g., the classic anthologies, Clutton-Brock and Harvey 1978, Barlow
and Silverberg 1980, King's College Sociobiology Group 1982.)
Unfortunately, they all work under a cloud of suspicion, raised by the
escalation of greedy claims by a few human sociobiologists (through their
megaphones, as Kitcher suggests), which is then echoed by the escalation of
blanket condemnations from their opponents. This really is an unfortunate
fallout, for, as in any other legitimate area of science, some of this work is
great, some is good, some is good but false, and some is bad— but none of it
is evil. That serious students of mating systems, courtship
displays, territoriality, and the like in nonhuman species should be tarred
with the same brush as the more flagrant oversteppers in human sociobiology
is both a miscarriage of justice and a serious misrepresentation of science.
But neither "side" has done its duty. Unfortunately, the siege mentality has
made the best of the sociobiologists somewhat reluctant to criticize the
shoddy work of some of their colleagues. Though Maynard Smith, Williams,
Hamilton, and Dawkins can often be found in print firmly setting aright
various innocent flaws in arguments and pointing out complications—in
short, making the corrections that are the normal topics of communication in
all science—they have largely eschewed the deeply unpleasant task of
pointing out more egregious sins in the work of those who enthusiastically
misuse their own good work. Donald Symons (1992 ) is a bracing exception,
however, and there are others. I will point to just one major source of bad
thinking that is ubiquitous in human sociobiology, and is seldom carefully
addressed by sociobiologists themselves, perhaps because Stephen Jay Gould
has made the point in criticism, and they would hate to concede that he is
right about anything. He is right about this point, and so is Philip Kitcher
(1985b), who develops the criticism in much more detail. Here is Gould's
version, which is a little hard to understand. (At first, I didn't see how to read
it sympathetically, and had to ask Ronald Amundsen, an excellent
philosopher of biology, to explain to me what Gould was getting at. He
succeeded.)
The standard foundation of Darwinian just-so stories does not apply to
humans. That foundation is the implication: if adaptive, then genetic—for
the inference of adaptation is usually the only basis of a genetic story, and
Darwinism is a theory of genetic change and variation in population.
[Gould 1980c, p. 259]
What does this mean? Gould is not saying, as he may seem at first to be
saying, that adaptationist inference does not apply to humans. He is saying
that since in the case of humans ( and only humans ) there is always another
possible source of the adaptation in question—namely culture—one cannot
so readily infer that there has been genetic evolution for the trait in question.
Even in the case of nonhuman animals, the inference from adaptation to
genetic basis is risky when the adaptation in question is not an anatomical
feature but a behavioral pattern which is an obviously Good Trick. For then
there is another possible explanation: the general nonstupidity of the species.
As we have seen so often, the more obvious the move, the less secure the
inference that it has to have been copied from predecessors—specifically
carried by the genes. Many years ago, I played my first computer "video
game" at the AI Lab at