Robert Ardrey and the Amity/Enmity Complex

Robert Ardrey

Most of the ideas Ardrey presented weren’t really original.  He made that clear himself.  In addition to his other talents, he had a rare grasp of history, and was well able to follow the intellectual paths leading from his own theories back to their sources.  His books were very popular at the time they were published, and enlightened many.  As a result, used copies are easily available on eBay and elsewhere.  Some are still in print.  They also made him many enemies, because his theories flew in the face of cherished ideological certainties posing as science.  Those enemies reacted with a vehemence and bitterness that had little to do with disinterested logic, but which I’m sure Ardrey understood very well himself. One can still trace the effects of their malice on the web today, where Ardrey’s “biographers” continue to absurdly bowdlerize his thought as “The Killer Ape Theory.”   Ironically, they proved his point.  By threatening the shibboleths of the ideological boxes they lived in, Ardrey put himself squarely in their out-groups, and elicited all the rage that he himself had so clearly described and predicted. 

Writing in 1966, Ardrey described the Amity-Enmity Complex as “the resolution of a paradox posed by Darwin, solved by Wallace, explored by Spencer and Sumner, revived and extended by Keith, and for the last twenty years cast aside under the pretense it does not exist.  The paradox may be simply stated:  If the evolutionary process is a merciless struggle among individuals to survive, with natural selection determining the fittest, then how could such human qualities as altruism, loyalty, charity, and mercy have ever come into existence?  If Darwinian evolution presents a picture of dog eat dog, then how did dogs ever get together?”

After describing some of the behaviorist and other psychological myths that, being more in tune with the preferred ideological narratives of the day, suppressed the theory for so long, Ardrey goes on;

“All, of course, are false.  What seems to have occurred to no one, excepting possibly Keith, is that the animal is a moral being, and that human morality is a simple evolutionary extension of a form of conduct which has existed in nature for many hundreds of millions of years.  But unless we inspect both the history of the falsehood and the history of the truth, we shall not in least part grasp our contemporary predicament.”

He goes on to do just that with compelling arguments based on a profound knowledge of the history of evolutionary thought.  He gives us thumbnails of the ideas of some of the great thinkers who contributed to the development of the theory.  One of them already mentioned above, Sir Arthur Keith, is almost forgotten today.  It would be well if we recalled some of his words, and took them to heart.  In one passage of exceptional insight cited by Ardrey he said,

“Human nature has a dual constitution; to hate as well as to love are parts of it; and conscience may enforce hate as a duty just as it enforces the duty of love.  Conscience has a two-fold role in the soldier:  it is his duty to save and protect his own people and equally his duty to destroy their enemies… Thus conscience serves both codes of group behavior; it gives sanction to practices of the code of enmity as well as the code of amity.”

It grieves me to think that ideas as seemingly simple and self-evident as this have not become commonplaces of human knowledge.  They explain so much, and could help us to understand and control so much that is destructive and self-defeating in our nature.  Must we eternally experience the misery, pain and death accompanying each new manifestation of the complex, slowly come to the realization that it is an evil that must be controlled, and then invent some new “ism,” whether racism, anti-Semitism, or what have you, to finally categorize the behavior as an evil and place it in its own out-group in turn?  Instead of dealing with each one of these manifestations of a common behavioral trait piecemeal, one-by-one, and applying palliatives after they have already done their damage, would it not be better to finally grasp and understand the unifying phenomenon that is the basis of them all? 

Sometimes it takes a long time for our species to grasp the obvious.  Actually, we have come a long way since Ardrey’s day.  Nowadays one begins to see many of his ideas accepted as commonplaces in the popular media.  Montagu and the other behaviorists who vilified him as a “fascist” and “pop ethologist” are now well along on their path to the garbage heap of history.  Still, it is unfortunate that it has taken us so long to come this far.  I am confident that, as long as research into uncovering the secrets of the human mind can go on freely without ideological suppression of inconvenient truths, we will eventually see the light.  I hope that day comes sooner rather than later.

Scientists Don’t Really Know it All

As a scientist, I’m gratified by our current high favor in the court of public opinion.  I must admit, though, sometimes our omniscience is overrated.  In the first place, scientists tend to have narrow areas of specialization.  As a result, they are not remarkably superior to other mortals in seeing the big picture.  In the second, we simply lack the knowledge and/or adequate data in some areas to justify positive opinions one way or the other.  Finally, scientists are human beings, subject to human needs.  It is not out of the question that their research results may occasionally be influenced by such mundane considerations as the desire to eat.

To illustrate the potential liabilities of narrow specialization, let us consider the issue of nuclear power, with which I have some passing familiarity.  If it’s a question of solving the neutron transport equation for a particular core design, a scientist is definitely the guy you want to talk to.  However, if it’s a question of deciding whether the nation should prefer nuclear power to the various competing sources of energy, it ain’t necessarily so.  To address such overriding issues, one must be well informed not just in a narrow technical area, but also in a host of environmental, political, economic, other matters of relevance.  I have seen anti-nuclear advocates from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) defeat nuclear engineers hands down in debates over the merits of nuclear power, because they were better informed on such matters.  That doesn’t necessarily imply the anti-nukers were right.  Rather, it illustrates the fact that narrow expertise is not adequate for deciding every issue.  I’ve known scientists who were brilliant within their own technical bailiwick, but shockingly ignorant if they ventured outside it.

Then there’s the matter of technical uncertainty.  Here, one might cite global warming as exhibit A.  It happens that my personal opinion on the matter is that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases do inhibit the re-radiation of solar energy back into space, and, as a result, we are likely to see significant increases in global temperature and sea levels over the next century.  However, I have a problem with those who claim they know with certainty exactly what the effects of global warming on our climate will be and how long it will take before it’s “too late” to do anything about it.  They can heap scientific opinion on scientific opinion ad nauseum.  It doesn’t matter.  Given the current state of the art, we cannot predict with certainly what will happen one way or another. 

In order to accurately predict the future behavior of a system, it is necessary to have means of accurately measuring all the data relevant to the response of that system.  In the case of climate modeling, the necessary data, ideally from many billions of data points, is inadequate.  The data we do have is subject to significant measurement uncertainties, or “noise.”  Furthermore, we’re not even sure what data we need, assuming it were even available, to accurately solve the problem.  Finally, even if the necessary data were forthcoming, no perfect mathematical models would be available to use it.  With the biggest and fastest computers that exist now or in the foreseeable future, only dominant or critical climate effects could be modeled.  Such models are prone to leave out “minor” effects that may actually turn out to have a critical effect on the accuracy of the outcome.  Even the effects that are included must be modeled with approximations that are never perfect. 

Climate modeling today is not and cannot be based on any deterministic model.  Significant uncertainty is built in to the current ensemble and Monte Carlo forecasting models.  Scientists know they can’t even be sure they have accurate knowledge of the starting conditions to plug into their models.  As a result, they often just come up with an “ensemble” of plausible ones, and run them all through the model.  Then they use interpolation and approximation methods based on all the outcomes to decide which one is “best.”  In other words, while it would certainly behoove us to take what effective steps we can to avoid potentially harmful climate changes, we have no way of knowing “for sure” what those climate changes will be.  Our mathematical models are even less capable of predicting exactly what the impact will be of the steps we might take to limit greenhouse gas emissions.  It is inadvisable to mandate extremely expensive but highly visible measures to limit global warming if they are unlikely to have any significant impact on the problem one way or another.

A third weakness of “scientific expertise” is the human tendency of scientists to tell customers what they want to hear.  There is intense competition for research grants and awards.  There is also a wide and probably accurate perception among scientists that the sponsors of the limited available research funds are more interested in positive and striking findings than in null results, and are, therefore, more likely to reward those who produce positive results with more funding.  I leave the effects this might have on the result, for example, of studies of global climate change to the imagination of the reader.

We scientists can be proud of our contributions to the welfare of society.  However, we have our limitations, and we need to keep them in mind.  Do not even the lawyers the same?

GM and Profitability in the Emerald City

I suspect GM will need to do something more drastic than change its logo to return to profitability. They might start by seeking to recover the lost art of making head gaskets and intake manifold gaskets that don’t leak. My Mom just had to fork over $700 to fix a leaky gasket on the lemon they sold her. The mileage, you ask? 30,000!

All the evidence I can gather on this issue seems to indicate that the ancients actually found a solution to this problem, but the knowledge was lost during the ensuing decades. I recommend an archeological expedition to recover it. New generations of highly sensitive metal detectors could be used to find ancient dump sites. If an intact fossil of a Model T could be found, the key to the gasket riddle might be rediscovered via reverse engineering. GM would truly have taken a giant step back on the road to economic recovery.