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

486 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
MIT: it was called Maze War, and more than one person could play it at once,
each at a separate terminal linked to a central time-sharing computer. On the
screen you saw a simple perspective line drawing of a maze, in which you,
the viewer, were situated. Corridors could be seen up ahead leading off to left
and right, and by pressing keys on the keyboard you could move forward and
back, or turn ninety degrees to the left or the right. Another key on the
keyboard was the trigger of your gun, which fired straight ahead. All the
other players were in the same virtual maze, wandering around, looking for
someone to shoot, and hoping not to be shot. If one of the other players
crossed your path, he would show up as a simple cartoon figure, whom you
would hope to shoot before it turned, saw you, and shot you. After a few
minutes of frantic play, in which I was "shot" from behind several times, I
found my mounting paranoia so uncomfortable that I sought relief: I found a
cul-de-sac in the maze, backed myself into it, and just sat there, relatively
calmly, with my finger on the trigger. It struck me then that I had adopted the
policy of a moray eel, patiently waiting in its well-protected hole for
something strike-worthy to swim by.
Now, does my behavior on this occasion give us any reason to suppose
there is a genetic predisposition to moray-eel behavior in Homo sapiens? Did
the stress of the occasion dredge up some ancient policy, lying dormant in
my genes since the days when my ancestors were still fish? Of course not.
The strategy is just too obvious. It felt like a forced move, but it was at least a
Good Trick. We would not be surprised to find Martians backing themselves
self-protectively into Martian caves, and the likelihood that Martians had
morays for ancestors would presumably not be adjusted upwards from zero
by the discovery. It is true that I am distantly related to moray eels, but the
fact that I found this strategy in this environment is surely just a matter of its
obvious excellence, given my needs and desires and my own assessment of
my limitations at the time. This illustrates the fundamental obstacle—not
insuperable, but much larger than is commonly acknowledged—to inference
in human sociobiology: showing that a particular type of human behavior is
ubiquitous or nearly ubiquitous in widely separated human cultures goes no
way at all towards showing that there is a genetic predisposition for that
particular behavior. So far as I know, in every culture known to
anthropologists, the hunters throw their spears pointy-end-first, but this
obviously doesn't establish that there is a pointy-end-first gene that
approaches fixation in our species.
Nonhuman species can exhibit a similar, if reduced, capacity to reinvent
the wheel, even though they lack culture. Octopuses are remarkably intelligent,
and although they show no signs of cultural transmission, they are
smart enough so that we should not be surprised to discover them individually
hitting upon lots of Good Tricks that had never been posed as specific
problems to their ancestors. Any such uniformity might be misread by
Sociobiology: Good and Bad, Good and Evil 487
biologists as signs of a special "instinct," when in fact it was just their
general intelligence that led them again and again to hit upon the same bright
idea. The problem of interpretation for Homo sapiens is multiplied many
times over by the fact of cultural transmission. Even if some individual
hunters are not bright enough to figure out for themselves that they should
throw the pointy end first, they will be told to do so by their peers, or will
just notice their practice, and will appreciate the results immediately. In other
words, if you are not totally idiotic, you don't need a genetic basis for any
adaptation that you will pick up from your friends in any case.
It is hard to believe that sociobiologists can make the mistake of ignoring
this omnipresent possibility, but the evidence is striking that they have done
so, again and again ( Kitcher 1985 )• Many instances could be listed, but I will
concentrate on a particularly visible and well-known case. Although E. O.
Wilson (1978, p. 35) states clearly that the human behaviors to be accounted
for by specific genetic hypotheses should be the "least rational of the human
repertoire— In other words, they should implicate innate, biological
phenomena that are the least susceptible to mimicry by culture," he goes on
(pp. 107ff.) to claim, for instance, that the evidence of territoriality in all
human cultures (we human beings like to call a bit of space our own) is clear
proof that we, like very many other species, have a genetic predisposition
wired in at birth for the defense of territory. That may be true—in fact, it
would not be at all surprising, since many species manifestly do exhibit innate
territoriality, and it is hard to think of what force there might be to remove
such a disposition from our genetic makeup. But the ubiquity of territoriality
in human societies is by itself no evidence at all for this, since territoriality
makes so much sense in so many human arrangements. It is, if not a forced
move, close to it.
The very considerations that in other parts of the biosphere count for an
explanation in terms of natural selection of an adaptation—manifest utility,
obvious value, undeniable reasonableness of design—count against the need
for any such explanation in the case of human behavior. If a trick is that good,
then it will be routinely rediscovered by every culture, without need of either
genetic descent or cultural transmission of the particulars. 11 We saw in
chapter 12 that it is the prospect of convergent cultural evolution—
reinventing the wheel—that plays havoc with our attempts to turn memet-ics
into a science. The same difficulty besets all attempts to infer genetic
11. A useful exercise when considering any such case is to imagine creating a roomful of
roughly rational robots ( smart, but with no genetic ancestry at all) and asking yourself if
they would soon settle into the behavior in question. (If the case is complex, a computer
simulation should be used, as a prosthetic guide to your imagination.) If so, it is not so
surprising that human beings everywhere do it, too, and it probably has nothing to do
with their primate heritage, their mammalian heritage, even their vertebrate heritage.