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

490 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY Sociobiology: Good and Bad, Good and Evil 491
about threats and other social exchanges, and other ubiquitous problemtypes:
hazards, rigid objects, and contagion. Instead of having a single, central
general-purpose reasoning machine, we have a collection of gadgets, all
pretty good (or at least pretty good in the environments in which they
evolved), and readily exaptable for new purposes today. Our minds are like
Swiss-army knives, Cosmides says. Every now and then, we discover curious
gaps in our competence, strange lapses that give us clues about the particular
history of R and D that explains the machinery that underlies the glittering
facade of culture. This is surely the right way for psychologists to reverseengineer
die human mind, always watching out for QWERTY phenomena.
I consider Cosmides and Tooby to be doing some of the best work in
Darwinian psychology today, which is why I chose them for my example, but
I must temper my recommendation with some constructive criticism. The
ferocity of the attacks they have encountered from the fans of Gould and
Chomsky is breathtaking, and, embattled as they are, they, too, tend to
caricature the opposition, and are sometimes too hasty in dismissing skepticism
about their arguments as flowing from nothing more presentable than
the defensive territoriality of old-fashioned social scientists who still haven't
got the word about evolution. This is often, but not always, the case. Even if
they are right—and I am confident that they are—that such rationality as we
human beings have is the product of the activities of a host of special-purpose
gadgets designed by natural selection, it does not follow that this "Swissarmy
knife" of ours cannot have been used, time and time again, to reinvent
the wheel. It still has to be shown, in other words, that any particular
adaptation is not a cultural product responding quite directly ( and rationally)
to quite recent conditions. They know this, and they carefully avoid the trap
we have just seen E. O. Wilson fall into, but in the heat of battle they
sometimes forget.
Like Darwin overlooking the innocuous possibility of sudden extinctions
because he was so intent on fleeing from Catastrophism, Tooby and
Cosmides, and the other evolutionary psychologists, tend to overlook the
bland possibility of the independent rediscovery of forced moves, so intent
are they on replacing the "Standard Social Science Model" with a properly
Darwinian model of the mind. The Standard Social Science Model has among
its precepts:
Whereas animals are rigidly controlled by their biology, human behavior is
determined by culture, an autonomous system of symbols and values. Free
from biological constraints, cultures can vary from one another arbitrarily
and without limit __ Learning is a general-purpose process, used in all
domains of knowledge. [Pinker, 1994, p. 406; see also Tooby and Cosmides
1992, pp. 24-48.]
This, of course, is wrong, wrong, wrong. But compare it with my Only
Slightly Nonstandard Social Science Model:
Whereas animals are rigidly controlled by their biology, human behavior is
largely determined by culture, a largely autonomous system of symbols
and values, growing from a biological base, but growing indefinitely away
from it. Able to overpower or escape biological constraints in most regards,
cultures can vary from one another enough so that important portions of
the variance are thereby explained __ Learning is not a general-purpose
process, but human beings have so many special-purpose gadgets, and
learn to harness them with such versatility, that learning often can be
treated as if it were an entirely medium-neutral and content-neutral gift of
non-stupidity.
This is the model I have argued for in this book; it is no defense of skyhooks;
it simply acknowledges that we now have cranes of more general power than
the cranes of any other species. 12
There is plenty of good work in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology,
and there is plenty of bad work, as in any field. Is any of it evil? Some
of it is at least dismayingly heedless of the misuses to which it might be put
by ideologues of one persuasion or another. But, here again, the escalation of
charges typically produces more heat than light. One instance can stand in
for a survey of the whole sorry field of battle. Do ducks rape? Sociobiologists
have uncovered a common pattern in which males in some species—
such as ducks—violently mate with obviously unwilling females. They have
called it rape, and this terminology has been decried by critics, most vigorously
by the feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling (1985).
She has a point. I said we wouldn't call the sibling-cide that many species
engage in "murder," since they know not what they do. They kill, but do not
murder, each other. It is impossible for one bird to murder another bird—
"murder" is reserved for the intentional, deliberate, wrongful killing of one
human being by another. (You can kill a bear, but not murder it, and if it kills
you, that isn't murder either.) Now, can one duck rape another? Fausto-
12. Even Donald Symons ( 1992, p. 142) slips slightly, succumbing to a luscious slogan:
"There is no such thing as a 'general problem solver' because there is no such thing as a
general problem." Oh? There is no such thing as a general wound either; each wound has
a quite specific shape, but there can still be a general wound-healer, capable of healing
wounds of an almost limitless variety of shapes—simply because it is cheaper for Mother
Nature to make a (quite) general wound-healer than a specialist wound-healer (G.
Williams 1966, pp. 86-87; see also Sober 1981b, pp. 106 ff.). How general any cognitive
mechanism is, or can be made to be through cultural enhancement, is always an open
empirical question.