Ingroups and Outgroups: All Things Old are New Again

According to an article I just ran across on the World Science website, scientists have just “discovered” that “Human prejudice may date back 25 million years or more.” On closer reading, one finds that what they have just “discovered” has been obvious since the days of Darwin; that we humans group others of our species into ingroups and outgroups. Sir Arthur Keith summarized earlier work on the subject and put it on a firm theoretical basis well over half a century ago. As Robert Ardrey, who called it the Amity/Enmity Complex, wrote of it a couple of decades later, it was, “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 (by the “Blank Slaters”, ed.) under the pretense it does not exist.”  Ardrey went on to say, “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.”

In this “enlightened” age, when an increasing stream of books like Wild Justice:  The Moral Lives of Animals by Bekoff and Pierce and Primates and Philosophers:  How Morality Evolved by Frans de Waal et. al., are rolling off the presses, one would think that brilliant thinkers like Ardrey and Keith, triumphantly vindicated, would receive the tardy recognition they deserve.  If so, one would be very mistaken.  You see, Ardrey was a mere playwright, guilty of the unpardonable lèse-majesté of challenging the entire establishment of behavioral scientists of his day and proving them wrong, and Keith was presumptuous in writing down such ideas before the official “beginning” of Evolutionary Psychology as set forth in the mythical histories of the science set forth in the modern textbooks on the subject.

Of Ingroups, Outgroups, and Global Climate Change

As I pointed out in my last post, “The outgroup have ye always with you.” Of all the very good reasons for mankind to give up the cobbling together of new moral systems once and for all, it’s probably the best. It’s more likely you’ll find a unicorn browsing in your back yard than one of the pathologically pious among us suffused with the milk of human kindness. One typically finds them in their “ground state,” frothing at the the mouth with virtuous indignation over the latest sins of their preferred outgroup.

So it is with Eugene Robinson, one of their number who happens to pen an occasional column in the Washington Post. He recently delivered himself of some observations concerning the phenomenon of global warming. As anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the last decade will be aware, no branch of the sciences has been more afflicted of late by the attentions of the professionally righteous than climatology. Robinson gives us a good example of how the neat separation of climate scientists into good guys and bad guys works in practice.

Hero of his piece is one Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley who, we learn, once dismissed “climate alarmism” as “shoddy science.” Not to worry. Though once lost, he is now found, and though once blind, he now sees. It turns out the scales fell from his eyes after he “launched his own comprehensive study (referred to as the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, or BEST, study, ed.) to set the record straight,” and discovered that, lo and behold, “Global warming is real.” Well, perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t. I happen to believe that the arguments as to why it should be real are plausible enough, but that’s beside the point as far as this post is concerned.

What is to the point is Robinson’s reaction to all this. For him, Muller’s study isn’t just another batch of data points relating to a very complex scientific issue. For him, global warming is an absolute and incontrovertable certainty, because it represents the “good.” Muller’s study is, therefore, not just a scientific study, but a victory in the eternal battle of good versus evil. In Robinson’s own words,

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.

Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention.

But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer,” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.

and so on. As it happens, not all of the “skeptics” have been reduced to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence. Take, for example, Judith Curry, a distinguished climate researcher and Chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. She was actually a member of Muller’s team, and so is presumably familiar with the copious data Robinson was so enthused about. However, in an interview for the Daily Mail, Curry accuses Muller of “trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.” She also says that, “Prof. Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis,” and goes so far as to compare the affair to “Climategate.” This is strong stuff, but Prof. Curry has the goods. She notes that, in carefully sifting through, as Robinson informs us, “1.6 billion records,” Muller somehow failed to mention that, according to BEST’s own data, “there has been no significant increase in world temperatures since the end of the 90′s.” The following two graphs from the website of the Global Warming Policy Foundation summarize that data:

Source: Global Warming Policy Foundation

It would seem that the good Prof. Muller, who had much to say about the first graph, complete with “hockey stick,” somehow forgot to mention the data in the second. In fact, as Prof. Curry put it, “…in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.”

The Daily Mail article contains much else in the way of less than pleased reactions by a number of other climatologists at what was apparently a premature release of the BEST data before the peer review process was complete. Of course, all this fits very ill with the lurid picture of good triumphing over evil painted for us by Mr. Robinson. Predictably, while he was apparently observant enough to turn up any number of “grumbling and stunned” warming deniers, when it came to Prof. Curry and her equally chagrined colleagues, he didn’t notice a thing.

It should come as no surprise. Mr. Curry is merely acting as one might expect of a member of a species endowed with certain innate behavioral characteristics. Some of those traits give rise to what is commonly referred to as moral behavior, and none of us are free of their emotional grip. That’s why Hollywood still makes movies about good guys and bad guys. It is our subjective nature to perceive sublime good, but the yin of sublime good cannot exist without the yang of despicable evil. Every ingroup implies an outgroup. There is little we can do to change our nature, and we would probably be unwise to try given our current intellectual endowments. We can, however, while accepting it for what it is, seek to find ways of channeling its expression in ways less destructive than we have experienced in the past. At the very least we need to understand it and develop an awareness of how it affects our behavior. The results of failing to do so in the past have been destructive enough, and have certainly made a hash of the science of climatology. The results of failing to do so in the future are unlikely to be any more encouraging.

Of Karl Radek, Communism and Human Nature

In 1935, a collection of essays by the Soviet journalist Karl Radek was published under the title Portraits and Pamphlets.  Radek was, by all accounts, a brilliant man.  At the time he was one of the editors of Izvestia, a frequent writer for Pravda, and was reputed to be the foremost propagandist in the Soviet Union.  He had been connected with various workers movements since the age of 14, and had become editor of The Red Flag, the organ of the Social Democratic Party in his home country of Poland, at the age of 20.  The book was published near the apogee of the love affair of public intellectuals in the “bourgeois” democracies with Communism.  Impressed by the Soviet Union’s apparent success in realizing its bold economic aspirations in the midst of a lingering Great Depression, mainstream journals such as The Nation, The New Republic, and The American Mercury were publishing articles that were unabashedly pro-Communist, marked by the tacit assumption that a transition to socialism was inevitable.  The only question remaining was how that transition would occur.  The book reflected this state of affairs.  In an introduction contributed by the normally phlegmatic historian A. J. Cummings we read,

The Soviets have proved beyond any reasonable doubt not only the stability of their regime, but their capacity, in the face of an incredulous world, to carry into effect a large part of their gigantic economic conceptions. They have also made abundantly clear their intention to keep the peace and their desire to organize an international peace system. The entrance of Russia into the League of Nations, more even than her series of agreements with individual states, marks a turning point in European history.

Five years later, of course, the Soviets demonstrated their “abundantly clear intention to keep the peace” by invading and seizing large parts of Finland, annexing the Baltic states, and partitioning Poland with Nazi Germany.  No matter, all that belonged to the future.  Radek’s essays began with a groveling panegyric dedicated to Stalin.  At the time, “The Great Helmsman” had already begun to bare his teeth.  Former leading Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev had been arrested as early as December, 1934, and were soon to appear in the second of the carefully rehearsed show trials that would lead to their execution.  The Great Purge Trials were only a few years off.  Radek was much too astute not to sense what was in the air.  He knew he was at risk because of an earlier flirtation with Stalin’s bete noir Trotsky over the issue of socialism in one country.  The tone of the essay was accordingly abject and fawning.  In keeping with the spirit of the times, all this was neatly rationalized by English Communist Alec Brown, who provided notes to the essays.  In his words,

We mostly see only what we have been trained to see by upbringing, environment and habit. Thus, the average British reader of Radek’s paper on Stalin is, until he gives it more thought, bound to be inclined to see hero-worship, and to be quite blind to what Radek really is about. But as this paper on Stalin turns on the essential harmony between communism and individuality – on the way the one necessitates and breeds the other – it is worth while drawing attention to the basic feature of the Marxist-Leninist Party, ignorance of or misunderstanding of which leads to the rather comical confusion made by the average non-Marxist student of the civilization of the future… Further it cannot be made too clear that this Marxist non-individualist scientific approach to social problems does not stultify individual life… And it follows that since the ‘man at the top’ owes his position not to any ‘personal magnetism’ or sex appeal, but to the very same qualities which make a great leader of science, plus tested personal courage, it makes possible really honest praise of a great man, a praise which is the very opposite to hero-worship.

Be that as it may, Radek’s “really honest praise” didn’t sway Stalin.  He was arrested and tried for “treason” two years after the book was published, and was shot by the NKVD in 1939.  How is it that seemingly grownup, sober people could be taken in by these deadly charades over and over again?  The same way they have always been taken in – by virtue of ardently believing in something that is palpably untrue.  Historically, that something has typically been a religion.  “Scientific” Communism was, for all practical purposes, a religion as well, and has been easily recognizable as such from the earliest days.  Astute observers have likened Communist and socialist bigwigs to so many cardinals, bishops, and popes since long before the days of Lenin.  The fact that Communism was different from its more traditional analogs by virtue of being secular rather than spiritual altered nothing in its fundamental nature.  That fact was appreciated as early as the first half of the 19^th century by the brilliant British essayist, Sir James MacKintosh.  It happens that the ideology of “class struggle” was already highly developed in his day, well before the time of Marx.  Presciently, he pointed out that such doctrines were eventually bound to fail, because they promised an illusory paradise on earth, rather than in the hereafter.  Having the advantage of not being dead, the “liberated” people were bound to eventually look around and take notice of the fact that the promised paradise was nowhere to be seen. 

Eventually, that’s just what happened in the Soviet Union, and its demise meant the end of Communism as a messianic world view, although the name lingers on.  The paradise went bankrupt.  We are left with the question of why, if an astute Englishman could see it all coming almost two centuries ago, so many seemingly intelligent and highly educated people were so completely taken in by Communism for so long, in spite of purge trials, mass slaughter, and human misery on a vast scale.

The answer lies in human nature.  Of Communism as a framework for social organization, E. O. Wilson once famously quipped, “Great theory, wrong species.”  That was certainly true as far as its outcome and practicality are concerned, but far off the mark in terms of its power as a messianic world view.  Indeed, its compelling power in the latter capacity was a reflection of its perfect harmony with human nature. 

Specifically, Communism was extremely effective at exploiting those aspects of human nature we associate with morality.  Its adherents sought to achieve the ultimate “good,” in the form of the future felicity of mankind, or, as latter day architects of the latest moral systems might put it, “human flourishing.”  They achieved all the emotional satisfaction that human beings have always derived from serving a cause they believe is noble and good, in company with other, like-minded individuals, the fellow members of what one might call their tribe, or ingroup.  They derived an emotional satisfaction just as powerful by opposing the ultimate “evil,” which, in their case, was represented by the bourgeoisie.  Any opposition outside the ingroup or heresy within was associated with the bourgeois outgroup.  No matter if the enemy of the moment had no perceptible control over the social means of production.  In that case, one merely added a qualifier, such as “petty” bourgeoisie, and the association with evil was complete.  Eventually, the whole movement came under the control of the ultimate high priest in the person of Stalin, who disposed of his rivals, including Radek and all the rest of the old Bolsheviks of any talent who had actually carried out the “proletarian” revolution, by transmuting them, in turn, into “bourgeoisie.” 

And therein lays the fundamental fallacy of most of the modern cobblers of novel, revamped, and refurbished moralities.  In spite of the fact that all human history dangles it in front of their faces, somehow they always seem to manage to ignore the dual nature of human morality.  Every good implies an evil.  Every ingroup implies an outgroup.  Their fond hopes of “dialing up the knobs” controlling who we include in our ingroups to all mankind are doomed to failure because they ignore these fundamental truths about human nature.  There will always be a “bourgeoisie.”  Its identities are legion.  The Jews, heretics, global corporations, racial and ethnic minorities by the score; all these and many others have played the role of outgroup at one time or another.  Our nature predisposes us to identify an outgroup, and to treat those we identify with it with all the scorn, spite, and contempt that human beings have always reserved for outgroups.  We’ve been running a repeatable experiment that has abundantly confirmed this easily falsifiable fact for the last 5,000 years.  It’s called history.  Communism is merely one of the most recent of a mountain of data points that all point to this same fundamental truth.  Great thinkers like Arthur Keith, Konrad Lorenz, and Robert Ardrey have all pointed to this seemingly obvious aspect of our nature, and suggested that, instead of trying to wish it away, we seek to understand and control it.  I would suggest that the clever young scientists in fields such as evolutionary psychology and neuroscience who have already brought about a paradigm shift in the behavioral sciences in recent years heed their advice.  We would do well to learn to understand ourselves.  Failing that, I expect there will be a great many more Karl Radeks in our future.

Karl Radek

In the Garden of the Amity/Enmity Complex

Behavioral scientists of the old school would call the Amity/Enmity Complex a “just so story.”  In other words, it’s a universal phenomenon, observable in countless instances in both humans and other animals, inexplicable other than as a manifestation of an innate behavioral trait, but something that they find inconvenient for ideological reasons and therefore choose to deny and ignore.  To justify this seemingly irrational denial of the obvious, they demand a standard of proof that such traits exist immeasurably stronger than that they apply to “proved scientific facts,” by which they mean far flimsier hypotheses that happen to have the virtue of  agreeing with a preferred narrative.   

Briefly put, the Amity/Enmity Complex refers to our innate tendency to categorize others of our species into in-groups and out-groups, favoring the former and hating and despising the latter. As the great anatomist and anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith put it, “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.”  Today the Complex is commonly referred to as in-group/out-group behavior, but I see no need to conform to the constantly shifting nuances of jargon in the behavioral sciences.

China’s Great Cultural Revolution was a great tragedy.  It was also a perfect illustration of the Complex in action.  In 1966 the bored old man who happened to run China at the time decided that the Chinese Communist Party and society at large were permeated by a “bourgeois spirit,” and that what the country needed was more revolutionary spirit.  He decided to shake things up a bit.  What happened next is summed up in Wikipedia as follows:

On August 8, 1966, the Central Committee of the CPC passed its “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (also known as “the 16 Points”). This decision defined the GPCR as “a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a new stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country, a deeper and more extensive stage”:

“Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds, and endeavor to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do just the opposite: It must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.”

The decision thus took the already existing student movement and elevated it to the level of a nationwide mass campaign, calling on not only students but also “the masses of the workers, peasants, soldiers, revolutionary intellectuals, and revolutionary cadres” to carry out the task of “transforming the superstructure” by writing big-character posters and holding “great debates.”

In the intervening years many eyewitnesses have published vignettes of what happened next including Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng, Red Scarf Girl by Ji-Li Jiang, and China’s Son by Da Chen.  One of the most interesting is Born Red, a fine piece of writing by Gao Yuan.  It is a case study in how new in-group/out-group relationships emerged in the supposedly “classless” society that was established in the wake of the Communist victory, how easy it was to inflame them against each other, how seemingly insignificant and incomprehensible differences between them were magnified until they assumed earthshaking importance in the minds of the opposing factions, how loyalty to the in-group inspired acts of fearless bravado, “heroism,” and even martyrdom, and, in the end, how all the resulting chaos and mayhem were finally stopped and society returned to “normal.”  In short, the Revolution was an experiment in human psychology on a massive scale, demonstrating the manifestation of an ancient and innate human behavioral trait in a world  far different from the one in which it evolved.

The Amity/Enmity Complex describes the interplay of in-groups and out-groups and, of course, Communism has always had its own idiosyncratic out-group.  It is the bourgeoisie, technically the private owners of the social means of production, but a term that has often been expanded to include peasants with slightly more land or slightly more productive and affluent than their neighbors, workers who were somewhat better off than average, people whose houses were larger than a certain size, or anyone else with some kind of a real or imagined privilege.  So it was that, when the Great Cultural Revolution was launched, it began with the posting of innumerable “dazibao,” or “big character posters,” attacking the “bourgeoisie.”  It couldn’t be just a vague, general bourgeoisie.  Individuals were needed.  The party helped things along with its suggestion that the “criticism” start with “reactionary bourgeois academic authorities.”  Thus, teachers and school administrators were among the first victims of the dazibao smears.  They were associated with a host of evil traits that have been associated with out-groups since the dawn of time.  For example, they were “impure” and “dirty,” by virtue of “bourgeois” parents, grandparents or other associations.  They were the essence of evil by virtue of their opposition to the embodiment of good, in the person of Mao and his “revolutionary line.”  They were guilty by virtue of association with evil incarnate in the person of Chiang Kai Shek and his Guomintang Party.  All these charges were usually baseless slander, but the “revolutionary masses” of students made them stick.  After all, in-groups must have out-groups, even if it’s necessary to invent them out of whole cloth.     

Eventually, the in-groups began to turn their wrath against each other.  Nothing was easier than to convince themselves that the “others,” too, were “dirty,” “impure,” and “evil” distorters of the pure revolutionary line of Mao, just like the school authorities.  They began to “struggle” against each other.  Starting with dazibao, the means of “struggle” became ever more violent and destructive, escalating to fists, spears and slingshots with crude armor, homemade grenades, and, eventually firearms.  Captured opponents, people who had formerly been friends, schoolmates and neighbors, were beaten, viciously tortured, maimed, and occasionally killed.  The author tells of one young girl who, on the point of being captured by the “enemy,” committed suicide by throwing herself from an upper story window rather than be “defiled” by contact with the out-group.  Anyone who failed to take part in these sanguinary and seemingly senseless battles, or who sought to “desert,” became the target of all the opprobrium traditionally heaped on “traitors.” 

And so it continued until Mao, finally tiring of the sport or deciding his political goal of consolidating power had been accomplished, called the whole thing off in 1969.  The active phase of the revolution sputtered on for a while, ending for good only with the death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976.  Their mortal deity having passed from the scene, the contending factions forgot all the reasons for their mutual hatred that had formerly seemed of such earth shattering importance.  Disavowed by the powers that had called them into existence, and having no legitimacy but that conferred by a man who was now dead, the in-groups collapsed, and their members disbanded and went back to their “normal” lives.  In the epilogue, the author, who had emigrated to America in the meantime, recounts how he went back to visit some of his former enemies and torturers.  All acted as if the whole thing had been a bad dream.

We have all seen it happen over and over and over again, across nations, cultures, tribes and societies of all stripes.  We have seen the incarnations of the Complex in the form of racism, religious bigotry, anti-Semitism, and countless other “isms.” The details change, but the fundamental nature of the behavior is always the same.  Isn’t it time to recognize the fact that our five thousand years of recorded history of the same phenomenon over and over again wasn’t just a coincidence?  If there is any reason for optimism about the Chinese experience, it is that it was neither inevitable that the Complex become active and virulent as it did, nor was it impossible to suppress and control once people with the necessary authority finally realized how destructive it had become.   If that experience is any guide, surely we are intelligent enough to control an innate behavioral trait that exists because it promoted our survival at some point in the distant past, but has now become the most likely source of our potential self-destruction.  We cannot, however, effectively control it until we recognize it for what it is, accept its existence, and stop covering our eyes, stopping up our ears, and shouting “just so story” because the Amity/Enmity Complex doesn’t fit in the “nice” world of our fond imaginations.  It’s time to end the denial.  We’ve graduated far beyond dazibao and slingshots to nuclear weapons.  It has become much too dangerous to refuse to understand ourselves in the name of preserving a world that never was.

“Demonic Males” and the Original Sin of the Apes

I can imagine little that it is more important for us to learn the truth about than our own nature.  If we fail to learn that truth we literally put our survival at risk.  Under the circumstances, it is all the more disturbing that we have a history of obfuscating the path to that truth with pleasant ideological myths.  We have been making progress.  One of the most pernicious, tenacious, and dangerous myths, that of the Blank Slate, seems finally to have collapsed, buried by common sense and a mountain of evidence that, in the end, became so great that it couldn’t be hand-waved away, even by the time-honored tactic of demonizing the messengers. 

Some of the most damning evidence came from primatologists, who finally began to give us accurate information on our closest animal relatives, the great apes.  Less than half a century ago, our “scientific” knowledge of their behavioral traits was a farrago of the most ridiculous fairy tales.  As recently as 1968, blank slater Ashley Montagu could write with a perfectly straight face, and without fear of contradiction,

The field studies of Schaller on the gorilla, of Goodall on the chimpanzee, of Harrison on the orang-utan, as well as those of others, show these creatures to be anything but irascible. All the field observers agree that these creatures are amiable and quite unaggressive, and there is not the least reason to suppose that man’s prehuman primate ancestors were in any way different.

Alas, in the fullness of time, the apes, too, were roused from their reverie in the Garden of Eden and shown the door.  I recommend Demonic Males by primatologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson to anyone who wants to read the details of how we finally discovered that they had actually been munching the forbidden apples all along.  The book was originally published in 1996, but I hadn’t actually read it until recently.  Peterson cites a blurb from Publisher’s Weekly that sums it up nicely:

Contradicting the common belief that chimpanzees in the wild are gentle creatures, Harvard anthropologist Wrangham and science writer Peterson have witnessed, since 1971, male African chimpanzees carry out rape, border raids, brutal beatings and warfare among rival territorial gangs. In a startling, beautifully written, riveting, provocative inquiry, they suggest that chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human warfare, which would make modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression.

The books main virtue is the wealth of observations and studies it pulls together of the behavior of both apes and human hunter-gatherers.  Some excerpts:

That male orangutans regularly rape must be one of the best-kept secrets in the literature of popular zoology.

(Referring to gorillas) When a male kills her infant, the female is an established member of an existing troop, while the killer male is a stranger. If she has seen him before, it has been only during violent interactions when he challenged her mate – a patent threat to her infant, a blur of power as he rammed through the vegetation before being stopped, outfought, and repelled by the resident silverback. And now he has succeeded in his aim. He has managed to get past the defenses of her mate. He has charged directly up to her, even as she screamed and fought back, and in a terrifying show of mastery, he has torn her baby from her and killed it in an instant.

Fists can also grasp invented weapons. Chimpanzees today are close to using hand-held weapons. Throughout the continent, wild chimpanzees will tear off and throw great branches when they are angry or threatened, or they will pick up and throw rocks. Humphrey, when he was the alpha male at Gombe, almost killed me once by sending a melon-size rock whistling less than half a meter from my head. They also hit with big sticks. A celebrated film taken in Guinea shows wild chimpanzees pounding meter-long clubs down on the back of a leopard.

The latter paragraph is of particular significance in view of a remarkable taphonomic finding by South African Prof. Raymond Dart regarding the prevalence of antelope humerus bones among those taken from a cave in the Makapan Valley.  The bones, found in association with those of Australopithecus africanus, represented no less than 11% of the all the identifiable types.  They would have made ideal double headed clubs, and there was other evidence to indicate that is exactly what they were used for.  Another anomalously prevalent bone present was  the lower jaw of a small antelope that would have been ideal as a slashing or cutting tool.  Published in 1953, Dart’s masterful statistical study was “refuted” in a later work by C. K. Brain, who, not bothering to address Dart’s statistical anomalies, naively claimed that all the bones had been dragged into the cave by leopards and other large predators.  Brain has been busily publishing refutations of his “refutation” in recent years.  Apparently he realizes that others can look at the evidence for themselves and, if they do, are likely to find gaping holes in his work that they’re not quite as likely to be silent about as they might have been a couple of decades ago.  In spite of that, as far as I know he has never apologized for the damage he did to Dart’s reputation.  At the time it was published, of course, Brain’s flawed work was eagerly lapped up by blank slaters far and wide as “proof” that Dart had been wrong.  If you look around on Google, you can still find a few of their productions, most of them remarkable for the trademark pious indignation they reserve for anyone who dares to threaten their ideological certainties.  To this day, no one has ever succeeded in explaining away Dart’s statistical argument.  It has simply been ignored.  Perhaps it is time the data was revisited.

The book is thought provoking on many levels, and is one of the few recent works on innate human behavior that seriously discusses the issue of aggression, a major theme of early opponents of the blank slate like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz.  Many of them are flawed attempts to “emphasize the positive,” and cobble together new moral systems based on misguided notions of “dialing up” the level of human altruism, accommodating modern political correctness to dubious versions of innate behavior in the same way the blank slate used to accommodate Marxism.  It would be well if we could finally pull our heads out of that particular hole in the sand once and for all.

Demonic Males includes several of Wrangham’s fanciful hypotheses, such as the “bulb eating” transition from ape to man, and the notion that human warfare is the result of “pride.”  The latter is remarkable, in view of the inevitable vagueness of the term “pride,” but more importantly because Wrangham is clearly aware of and understands what seems to me (not to mention Ardrey and Lorenz) a much more likely explanation; namely ingroup-outgroup behavior, or, as Ardrey referred to it, the Amity/Enmity Complex.   The book actually includes a very interesting and quite detailed discussion of the phenomenon, with some data that I had not previously seen, all of it a seemingly compelling argument in favor of its role in warfare.  In spite of that, the author somehow managed to convince himself that warfare is all about “pride.”  “Pride,” in the sense that Wrangham uses it, is far more plausible in the context of intra-group struggles for status than as an explanation of inter-group warfare.  Regardless, it in no way detracts from the significance of the book, which is important because of the source material it makes accessible to a popular audience more than for Wrangham’s theories.

The significance of books like this is nicely summed up by Wrangham himself;

Our Pleistocene ancestors were beleaguered by their own demonic males, surely. But they didn’t have automatic rifles, fertilizer bombs, dynamite, nerve gas, Stealth bombers, or nuclear weapons. We do, and therein lies the danger.

Those words might have been taken directly from one of Ardrey’s books.  Indeed, the source material presented in Demonic Males is a triumphant vindication of Ardrey, whose core ideas were always that innate factors influence human behavior, and not all of them predispose us to be kind and inoffensive.  As a reward for being right on those fundamental truths, his legacy has been distorted beyond recognition, and his name has been nearly forgotten.  But I digress.  I will have more to say about Ardrey in later posts. 

Another interesting phenomenon is discussed at length in Demonic Males; the remarkable behavioral differences between chimpanzees and bonobos.  That, however, is also a topic for another day.

Morality: The Persistent Delusion of Objective Good

Morality is a set of human emotional traits. The emotional responses we associate with morality exist because they evolved. Morality is, by its very nature, subjective. It can exist only in the form of feelings in individual minds, and has no independent existence as a thing in itself outside of individual minds. Its existence in our minds does not depend on any rational thought process or series of logical deductions. Rather, it is fundamentally emotional in nature. We consider a thing good because we feel that it is good. Computers can execute rule-based logical algorithms and arrive at true conclusions. However, they do not experience emotions. Therefore, they are not moral beings. The perception that something is “really” good corresponds to a fundamentally emotional response. Without emotion, there can be no morality, and without it we would not make moral judgments.  We do not perceive the good as a real, objective thing because it actually is real. We perceive the good as a real, objective thing, because perceiving it in that fashion made it more likely that our ancestors would survive and reproduce. Because the good is not a real, objective thing, it is not possible for moral judgments to be legitimate in themselves or in any way objectively valid.

The above conclusions are, in my opinion at least, the bottom line. In other words, they are true. We can reason about them and come to logical conclusions about whether they will have negative or positive consequences as they relate to some goal or aspiration we might have for ourselves, or for mankind in general, but the truth is indifferent to our goals and aspirations. It remains true regardless. In this post-”Blank Slate” world, as we sit on the shoulders of Darwin and gaze about us, it would seem these truths would be obvious. After all, if we see some rule violated that we associate with “the good,” our minds do not respond by executing a logical algorithm leading to the dispassionate conclusion that it is true that the rule has been violated. Rather, we respond emotionally. We may experience outrage, or become indignant. If we go to a movie, and see the bad guy bite the dust, our response is not limited to the rational observation that a human animal acted in a way that had a less than zero probability of leading to that outcome, and, as one of a set of potential outcomes, that outcome (biting the dust) actually did happen. Rather, we again respond emotionally. We may experience gratification, or, if we are really involved in the plot, exultation at the victory of “the good.”  In claiming the objective legitimacy of moral judgments, we are really claiming that emotions that evolved in animals with large brains for perfectly understandable reasons, and that are analogous to similar emotions in other animals, have now, for no apparent reason at all, magically come to life on their own, and become objective things independent of the minds that experience them.  Logically, that notion is absurd.

These truths, however, are not obvious.  They are not obvious to most of the people on the planet, nor are they obvious to those to whom it would seem they should be self-evident; the evolutionary psychologists, neuroanthropologists, ethologists, and others whose research is daily adding to the overwhelming evidence that morality is the result of innate features that are hard wired in our brains.  It’s not surprising, really.  If we shed the illusion of objective, legitimate good, there is much to be lost along with it.  We must free ourselves of the overwhelmingly powerful feeling that what we perceive as good is a real thing.  With it we must give up once and for all any claim to a logical basis for the immensely satisfying feeling that we are morally superior to others.  We must give up all the claims to wealth, status and power that claims to moral superiority or to a superior knowledge of the “real” good imply, whether as religious leaders, partisans of messianic ideologies, or recognition as ethics “experts.”  No wonder then, that the delusion of objective good is so hard for us to give up.  The problem is that it simply doesn’t exist.  No matter how passionately we embrace this falsehood, it will not be transmuted into truth.

Allow me to suggest that it would be wise for us to throw aside our blinkers and embrace the truth instead.  By doing so we will not suddenly plunge the world into chaos.  We are moral creatures, and will continue to act as moral creatures because that is our nature.  Understanding why we act as moral creatures, and the true nature of our moral emotions will not alter the fact.  In our day-to-day interactions with each other, we must act as moral creatures, if only because we lack the cognitive capacity to carefully reason out the logical consequences of every move we make in real time.  However, my personal opinion, and one which, it seems to me, follows logically from what I have stated above, is that we should stop trying to apply morality in politics, international relations, or any other modern form of collective interaction between large numbers of people that had no analog at the time our moral emotions evolved.  We should also resist attempts by others to apply morality in such situations, other than to the extent that we must take our own nature, and with it our moral nature, into account in constructing a society that is suited to the kind of creatures we are.  I suggest that this is a reasonable course of action, not because it is “really good,” but because I consider life a wonderful thing that I wish to savor while I have it, and because I cannot savor it if I am constantly threatened by other human beings.

How is it that I am threatened, or, for that matter, how is it that we are all threatened by continued attempts to apply morality in politics or to any of the other forms of mass social arrangements that have emerged in the modern world, and which are utterly different from anything that existed at the time morality evolved?  In the first place, quite obviously, because morality evolved for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the goals that massive political and other organizations, such as modern states, set for themselves.  Consequently, there is no apparent reason to expect that acting according to moral emotions will be an effective way of pursuing those goals.  There is abundant evidence in the recent history of our species to confirm that they are not only ineffective in pursuing those goals, but potentially extremely dangerous.

Consider, for example, Communism.  It was embraced by millions of the most intelligent and idealistic people on the planet as the path to “human flourishing,” confirmed as such by the most advanced “scientific” theories.  It was a quintessential attempt to apply morality in the context of modern states.  For its adherents it represented the incarnation of ”the good,” transcending the petty minds of individuals.  It ended in disaster, after having caused the deaths of tens of millions of people.  In many of the countries it controlled, those killed included a grossly disproportionate number of the most intelligent and productive members of society.  These countries, for all practical purposes, beheaded themselves.  How is it that this noble attempt to achieve a perfect state of human happiness via the revolutionary imposition of “the good” ended in a debacle?  For the same reason that most such attempts always fail.  Human morality is dual in nature.  Where ever there is an ultimate ”good,” there is always an ultimate “evil” to go right along with it.  In the case of Communism, the “evil” was the bourgeoisie.  To insure the triumph of the “the good,” it was necessary to wipe out “the evil.”  As a result, tens of millions who were unfortunate enough to have a little more than their neighbors, or whose clothes were a little too nice, or whose farms were  a little too productive, were murdered.  The lives of tens of millions of children were poisoned because their parents were supposed to have been in the wrong class.  They were often brutally punished for not taking care to be born into the right social class.

The other obvious example that dominated the 20th century is Nazism.  In this case, the German people and their welfare became “the good.”  Hitler hardly considered himself an evil man whose goal in life was to deliberately make everyone else as miserable as possible.  He passionately believed he represented the ultimate good, and that it was his destiny to lead the German people to a different version of “human flourishing,” thereby acting for the ultimate good of all mankind.  In this case, too, the “good” implied an “evil.”  The “evil” was the Jews, and the result was the Holocaust.

What about attempts to impose religious versions of morality on society?  Ask the tens of millions of victims of religious wars.  Ask the countless heretics who were burned.  Ask the hundreds of thousands of innocent women who were hung outside the gates of European cities over the centuries as “witches.”  Ask the miserable inhabitants of the Papal States in the 19th century.  Ask anyone in Iran today who happens not to be a devout Muslim.  Ask the victims of Islamic terrorism.

In spite of the monotonous repetition of these disasters, those of us who should know better still don’t get it.  They are so devoted to the illusion of their own moral goodness that, instead of coming to the seemingly obvious conclusion that morality itself is the problem, or, more accurately, the attempt to apply it in situations that are utterly divorced from those in which it came into existence in the first place, for reasons that have nothing to do with the reasons that it evolved, they conclude, against all odds, that the solution is merely a matter of “getting it right.”  They are cocksure that they are smarter than the myriads who have tried exactly the same nostrums for achieving “human flourishing” before them.  Finally, at long last, they fondly believe they have discovered the “real good,” and it remains only to stuff it down the throats of the rest of us poor benighted souls.  Open wide!

I have a better idea.  Let’s stop playing with fire.  What is the alternative to imposing some bright, new, freshly cobbled together version of morality on society?  We have large brains.  For starters, we might try using them.

Evolutionary Psychology: Do the Psychologists really Get It?

Robert Kurzban has an interesting (and revealing) post at the blog he writes for the journal Evolutionary Psychology.  He cites the following comment that turned up on one of his earlier posts:

The criticism of social scientists for failing to accept an evolutionary explanation for many of the psychological functions they research and teach has been made many many times during the last couple of decades…this criticism usually appears in general terms and without quotations from or citations of published work…Is this criticism now a straw man?

and wonders,

So when didn’t social scientists say that evolutionary psychology was relevant? How would we show, for instance, that they always didn’t accept evolutionary explanations? How can one document being ignored, an act that more or less by definition leaves no traces?

I know! Say what!? That was my reaction, too, but you have to remember this is a relatively young professor speaking. He probably wasn’t even born when Ashley Montagu published Man and Aggression, a whole collection of essays by himself and other luminaries in the social sciences, all saying quite explicitly that what is now called evolutionary psychology was, not only irrelevant, but bunk. When Richard Lewontin published a whole book to that effect, Not in our Genes, in 1985, it is likely Robert ignored it in favor of the far more improving and enlightening comic books available at the time. In a word, he was born too late to experience all the interesting twists and turns relating to the study of human nature during the last half century, and since, to the best of my knowledge at least, no one has ever written a credible history of the relevant events, it’s a “blank slate” (to coin a phrase) as far as he’s concerned.

Alas, I can offer no guidance on how one might document the fact that one is being ignored, but I rather suspect there’s something behind the suspicion.  After all, social scientists were once quite brazen about rejecting any influence of the innate on human behavior, and it stands to reason that they would be somewhat chastened by being put to shame by, among others, a mere playwright by the name of Robert Ardrey.  In the meantime they’ve been buried by such a mountain of evidence that they can’t afford to be quite so brazen any more, but at least they can still pout.  A tendency to ignore evolutionary explanations of human behavior in their work would be an unsurprising manifestation thereof. 

My advice to Prof. Kurzban:  Don’t worry, it’s all good.  The phenomena he’s referring to are an interesting collection of data points on human behavior in their own right, and, in any case, the pouters-in-chief are growing increasingly long in the tooth, and will eventually die off.  Meanwhile, we’ve just experienced a paradigm shift in acceptance of the evolutionary wellsprings of human behavior.  Again, Prof. Kurzban was probably born a bit to late to really grasp what has just happened, but at the moment, books are pouring off the presses in rapid succession that describe the impact of the innate on morality, decision making, and many other aspects of human behavior.  Their reception today is utterly unlike that accorded to books with similar themes in the 60′s and 70′s.  Their authors are not condemned as fascists and racists by their fellow “scientists,” and in the popular media.  Glitzy documentaries do not appear on PBS demonstrating that they are right wing evildoers.  On the contrary, glitzy documentaries appear on PBS praising their conclusions.  They are not ridiculed, as they once were, as “pop ethologists.”  In a word, today’s crop of social scientists may ignore innate behavior, but they are no longer sufficiently suicidal to claim, as they once did, that it doesn’t exist.  Therein lies the paradigm shift. 

We’re hardly out of the woods yet.  Read the comments on Robert’s blog, and you will find some interesting artifacts of ingroup-outgroup behavior and territoriality, in the form of evolutionary psychologists who fondly believe that only they have the right to speak to issues that are of vast significance in philosophy, theology, political science, and, for that matter, to our very survival as a species by virtue of the fact that they have published x number of papers in peer reviewed journals and have been cited x to some exponent number of times by their peers in response.  I have a doctorate in nuclear engineering, and I have worked most of my career in physics.  I would never dare to claim that someone without a Ph.D. in either of those fields is incapable of uttering anything of relevance relating to them.  In fact, I know the contrary to be true.  The most brilliant scientists tend to be focused very narrowly on their research, and are often poor at seeing the big picture.  I find the idea that someone without a certified and approved academic pedigree should not presume to express an opinion regarding behavior dependent on an organ whose workings we are not even close to understanding, namely, the human brain, to be ridiculous.  After the abject debacle of the blank slate?  Please!  Back in the Vietnam days, there was a PFC in my unit named Douglas Littlejohn.  Whenever I made some comment that stretched his credulity to the breaking point, he had a standard reply that seems appropriate here.  “Sir, you must be trying to bullshit me!”

Of John Locke and Atheist Billboards

Apropos John Locke, he’s usually considered an Enlightenment avatar of tolerance. Author of the famous A Letter Concerning Toleration, he argued that toleration of multiple religious sects deterred civil unrest and promoted an orderly society. However, he added some caveats to his plea for diversity. One of them applied to atheists. For example, from An Essay concerning Human Understanding:

And perhaps, if we should with attention mind the lives and discourses of people not so far off, we should have too much reason to fear, that many, in more civilized countries, have no very strong and clear impressions of a Deity upon their minds, and that the complaints of atheism made from the pulpit are not without reason. And though only some profligate wretches own it too barefacedly now; yet perhaps we should hear more than we do of it from others, did not the fear of the magistrate’s sword, or their neighbor’s censure, tie up people’s tongues; which, were the apprehensions of punishment or shame taken away, would as openly proclaim their atheism as their lives do.

Atheists have generally been a minority with “different” beliefs, and, as such, a predictable outgroup in a species, such as our own, with an innate tendency to hate, ostracize and despise outgroups. Specious “good-sounding” reasons have always been invented to justify that hate, and Locke had his own, but the Amity-Enmity Complex has always been the real reason. Fortunately, we have been making encouraging progress towards gaining an understanding of human nature in recent years. There is some hope that society at large will finally grasp the significance of the Complex and its disastrous role in promoting the war and violence against minorities that has been so ubiquitous in human history. Perhaps the day will come when most of us will be able to immediately recognize irrational manifestations of ingroup-outgroup behavior, and ostracize and condemn those who fail to control that most destructive aspect of our nature instead of their victims. However, that day has not yet come, and so we remain on the treadmill of trying to stamp out each of the potentially infinite ways in which the Complex can manifest itself as if it were something new under the sun. We invent new names for each of them as the evil they cause becomes intolerable, whether racism, or anti-Semitism, or xenophobia, or homophobia, never seeming to realize that they all have the same root cause, and new isms and phobias will always be waiting just around the corner to take their place until we finally tear up the root itself.

So it is with atheists. Things being as they are, we too must fight our own little piece of the battle in detail. Billboards are one recent manifestation of that struggle. The Friendly Atheist notes a typical reaction to them, in this case from Marcia Segelstein at OneNewsNow:

I guess I just don’t understand. Christians (along with Jews and Muslims) gather in groups to worship. Atheists don’t gather not to worship, so why seek out members? What’s there to be a member of? And why should atheists care about stopping worshippers who are just “going through the motions”? Do they think they might get their hands on money once pledged to churches?

Trying to tear down the belief system of the world’s foremost religion — Christianity — is what seems intolerant to me. Placing prominent ads declaring the birth of Christ to be a myth seems downright hostile. To my mind, these campaigns feel defensive, as though atheists are weighted down with chips on their shoulders, or feel left out of some club.

Well, Marcia, atheists gather in groups for the same reason other people with like interests gather in groups; because we are by nature social animals.   The billboard campaigns certainly are defensive, and rightly so.  If you still don’t understand why, read Locke’s remark above about the “magistrate’s sword,” or peruse the history of Spain under the Inquisition.  If you think “it can’t happen here,” Sinclair Lewis wrote a book with that title that might interest you.  There is nothing hostile about disputing Christian or any other religious beliefs.  Is it really unimportant whether we base our lives and actions on the truth or not?  If the truth is important, how are we ever to approach it unless we are allowed to think about and discuss it?

The Amity/Enmity Complex: A Data Point in Kyrgyzstan

The postmortems of the June outbreak of ethnic violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan continue. As usual, they are full of as many proximate causes as you please, and ignore the ultimate cause: the Amity/Enmity Complex. Briefly put, it is our innate tendency to categorize others of our species into in-groups and out-groups, favoring the former and hating and despising the latter. As the great anatomist and anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith put it, “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.” Elaborating on the significance of the phenomenon, the great and now forgotten Robert Ardrey wrote, “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.” The “falsehood” he referred to was, of course, the prevailing orthodoxy of his day that there was no such thing as innate human nature.

Since he wrote those words we have made great progress in the behavioral sciences. The role of the innate in our behavior is commonly recognized and heavily researched. In spite of that, we somehow continue to fail to “grasp our contemporary predicament.” We’ve finally begun to look at ourselves in the mirror, but have a persistent inability to focus on the blemishes. Thus, even as hundreds of papers are published about our innate fairness, altruism, and the other “kind” aspects of our behavior that we reserve for in-groups, when it comes to analyzing and understanding the consequences of our behavioral predispositions relating to out-groups, our heads are almost as firmly buried in the sand as they were decades ago. As each new Kyrgyzstan pops up on the radar screen, in spite of the constant, dreary repetition of the same phenomenon over and over and over again throughout our history, we paradoxically act as if we’d been blindsided. We cast about for good guys and bad guys, come up with all kinds of proximate causes in the form of good sounding explanations, and resolutely, firmly, and blindly refuse to recognize the ultimate cause; the Complex.

It is the ultimate cause of racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. It is the ultimate cause of religious bigotry, class hatred, ethnic violence, and terrorism. Perhaps most significantly, it is the ultimate cause of virtually every one of the countless wars we have fought throughout our history. By our continuing failure to recognize it and take steps to control it, we are putting ourselves at grave risk.

Genetic determinism was the chimera of an earlier generation of behavioral scientists. In fact, there is nothing “programmed” in our behavior that we can’t learn to understand and control. Men lust after women, but they do not commonly rape them in the street. We covet the possessions of others, but we do not routinely steal them. We hunger in a society that provides easy access to food, but, somehow, a declining but still respectable number of us manage to resist the urge to overeat and become obese. Our continued failure to recognize the existence of the Complex and somehow find a way to similarly control its constant destructive manifestations is comparably dangerous. It is high time that we stopped pretending that each new Kyrgyzstan was something new under the sun, and started looking for a way out.

E. O. Wilson, PBS, and the “Big Bang” Theory of Sociobiology

The “Blank Slate” is dead. As a dogma of the orthodoxy that passed for science among the academic and professional experts in human behavior, its final collapse is quite recent. Its epitaph was only written in 2002 in Steven Pinker’s book of that name. As often happens when an old dogma passes, a brand new one was concocted to take its place. According to the narrative now prevailing among the faithful, the Blank Slate reigned supreme until 1975. Then, E. O. Wilson said “Let there be light,” and a “Big Bang” occurred, marked by his publication of Sociobiology. Only after that epiphany did anyone have the slightest inkling that there was such a thing as human nature, and our mental wiring predisposes us to behave in certain ways, and not in others.

This refurbished dogma is faithfully reflected in Pinker’s book. He managed to write over 400 pages about the Blank Slate with hardly a mention of the very authors who had been most influential in debunking the theory, and insuring its eventual demise. The two whom the true believers in the Blank Slate themselves considered most influential and significant were Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz. Pinker comically dismissed them as “totally and utterly wrong” even though every thought of any significance in his book might have been lifted from what they had written many years before. Anyone who takes the trouble to glance through the collection of essays written by proponents of the Blank Slate attacking the two in Ashley Montagu’s Man and Aggression will quickly see they weren’t as “confused” as Pinker about what the real debate was all about, or about which of their opponents were striking the most telling blows.

Wilson’s Sociobiology and On Human Nature were significant only as restatements of the basic theme of books they had published more than a decade earlier; that innate influences on human nature are real and important. With all due respect to Wilson, a great and brilliant man in his own right, nothing he wrote about innate behavior in humans was original. It happens, however, that he served as a perfect fig leaf for the expert community as it retreated from the Blank Slate. Saintly in appearance and otherwise impeccably politically correct, he was perfect candidate for enshrinement in the mythical role of “inventor” of innate human behavior.

Wilson’s canonization can be seen firsthand in “Lord of the Ants,” an episode of PBS that appeared a couple of years ago and can be seen online here. At the beginning of the program we are informed with all due solemnity that only in a blue moon does something really great emerge on the stage of science; something that “transcends the narrow boundaries of a particular line of research and alters our perspective of the world.” That “transformational event,” it turns out, was the publication of Sociobiology. Apparently, it took awhile to have the salutary effect of “altering our perspective of the world,” at least as far as PBS is concerned, because that organization, eminently respectable defender of the true faith that it is, was stoutly defending Blank Slate orthodoxy as recently as a decade ago.

As the program continues, we find that remarkably little time is required to inform us about that “really great something that transcends the boundaries of science.” We learn that nothing in evolutionary biology has caused such heated debate as the idea of innate behavior since the time of Charles Darwin, and that Wilson was “physically attacked” by Blank Slate zealots, who doused him with a pitcher of ice water, but that he nobly enduring all and prevailed in the end. With that, skirting unpleasantnesses about PBS’ former role as a huge supporter of the Blank Slate, and indelicate allusions to anything that might have happened before the “Big Bang,” Nova moves on to a glowing account of Wilson’s effort to preserve biodiversity, which takes up the lion’s share of the program.

In a word, the narrative hasn’t gone anywhere. It just changes from time to time. Still, a most important point has been gained. Innate behavior can no longer be denied with impunity by anyone with a claim to scientific respectability, and research will continue in the field. Knowledge and understanding of human behavior, and human moral behavior in particular, will continue to expand as a result. Unfortunately, we will still have to bear with the annoyance of periodic infestations of a pathologically pious priesthood of “experts” on ethics and morality for the time being, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.