human evolution – Page 2

Morality and Reason – Why Do We Do the Things We Do?

Consider the evolution of life from the very beginning. Why did the first stirrings of life – molecules that could reproduce themselves – do what they did? The answer is simple – chemistry. As life forms became more complex, they eventually acquired the ability to exploit external sources of energy, such as the sun or thermal vents, to survive and reproduce. They improved the odds of survival even further by acquiring the ability to move towards or away from such resources. One could easily program a machine to perform such simple tasks. Eventually these nascent life forms increased the odds that they would survive and reproduce even further by acquiring the ability to extract energy from other life forms. These other life forms could only survive themselves by virtue of acquiring mechanisms to defend themselves from these attacks. This process of refining the traits necessary to survive continues to this day. We refer to it as natural selection. Survival tools of astounding complexity have evolved in this way, such as the human brain, with its ability evoke consciousness of such things as the information received from our sense organs, drives such as thirst, hunger, and sexual desire, and our emotional responses to, for example, our own behavior and the behavior of others. Being conscious of these things, it can also reason about them, considering how best to satisfy our appetites for food, water, sex, etc., and how to interpret the emotions we experience as we interact with others of our species.

A salient feature of all these traits, from simple to complex, is the reason they exist to begin with. They exist because at the time and in the environment in which they evolved, they enhanced the odds that we would survive, or at least they did to the extent that they were relevant to our survival at all. They exist for no other reason. Our emotions and predispositions to behave in some ways and not others are certainly no exception. They are innate, in the sense that their existence depends on genetic programming. Thanks to natural selection, we also possess consciousness and the ability to reason. As a result, we can reason about what these emotions and predispositions mean, and how we should respond to them. They are not rigid instincts, and they do not “genetically determine” our behavior. In the case of a subset of them, we refer to the outcome of this process of reasoning about and seeking to interpret them as morality. It is these emotions and predispositions that are the root cause for the existence of morality. Without them, morality as we know it would not exist. They exist by virtue of natural selection. At some time and in some environment, they promoted our survival and reproduction. It can hardly be assumed that they will accomplish the same result at a later date and in a different environment. In fact, it is quite apparent that in the drastically different environment we live in today, they often accomplish the opposite. For a sizable subset of the human population, morality has become maladaptive.

The remarkable success of our species in expanding from a small cohort of African apes to cover virtually the entire planet is due in large part to our ability to deal with rapid changes in the environment. We can thrive in the tropics or the arctic, and in deserts or rain forests. However, when it comes to morality, we face a very fundamental problem in dealing with such radical changes. Our brain spawns illusions that make it extremely difficult for us to grasp the nature of the problem we are dealing with. We perceive Good, Evil, Rights, etc., as real, objective things. These illusions are extremely powerful, because by being powerful they could most effectively regulate our behavior in ways that promoted survival. Now, in many cases, the illusions have become a threat to our survival, but we can’t shake them, or see them for what they really are. What they are is subjective constructs that are completely incapable of existing independently outside of the minds of individuals. Even those few who claim to see through the illusion are found defending various “Goods,” “Evils,” “Rights,” “Duties,” and other “Oughts” in the very next breath as if they were referring to real, objective things. They often do so in support of behaviors that are palpably maladaptive, if not suicidal.

An interesting feature of such maladaptive behaviors is the common claim that they are justified by “reason.” The Scotch-Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson explained very convincingly why moral claims can’t be based on reason alone almost 300 years ago. As David Hume put it somewhat later, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Reason alone can never do anything but chase its own tail. After all, computers don’t program themselves. There must be something to reason about. In the case of human behavior the chain of reasons can be as long and as elaborate as you please, but must always and invariably originate in an innate predisposition or drive, whether it be hunger, thirst, lust, or what is occasionally referred to as our “moral sense.” Understood in that way, all of our actions are “unreasonable,” because reason can never, ever serve as the cause of our actions itself. Reasoning about good and evil is equivalent to reasoning about the nature of God. In both cases one is reasoning about imaginary things. Behavior can never be objectively good or evil, because those categories only exist as illusions. It can, however, be objectively described as adaptive or maladaptive, depending on whether it enhances the odds of genetic survival or not.

In the case of morality, maladaptive behavior is seldom limited to a single individual. Morality is always other-regarding. The illusion that Good, Evil, etc., exist as independent, objective things implies that, not just we ourselves, but everyone else “ought” to behave in ways that embrace the “Good,” and resist “Evil.” As a result we assume a “right” to dictate potentially maladaptive and/or suicidal behavior to others. If we are good at manipulating the relevant emotions, those others may quite possibly agree with us. If we can convince them to believe our version of the illusion, they may accept our reasoning about what our moral emotions are “really” trying to tell us, and become convinced that they must act in ways detrimental to their own survival as well. They may clearly see that they are being induced to behave in a way that is not to their advantage, but the illusion would tend to paralyze any attempt to behave differently. The only means of resistance would be to manipulate the moral sense so as to evoke different illusions of what good and evil “really” are.

If, as noted above, there is nothing objectively good or evil about anything, it follows that there is nothing objectively good or evil about any of these behaviors. They are simply biological facts that happen to be observable at a given time and in a given environment. However, whatever one seeks to accomplish in life, they will be more likely to succeed if they base their actions on facts rather than illusions. That applies to the illusions associated with our moral sense as much as to any others. The vast majority of us, including myself, have an almost overwhelming sense that the illusions are real, and that good and evil are objective things. However, it is becoming increasingly dangerous, if not suicidal, to continue to cling to these illusions, assuming one places any value on survival.

Most of us have goals in life. In most cases those goals are based on illusions such as those described above. Human beings tend to stumble blindly through life, without a clue about the fundamental reasons they behave the way they do. Occasionally one sees them jumping off cliffs, stridently insisting that others must jump off the cliff too, because it is “good,” or it is their “duty.” Perhaps Socrates had such behavior in mind when he muttered, “The unexamined life is not worth living” at his trial. Before jumping off a cliff, would it not be wise to closely examine your reasons for doing so, following those reasons to their emotional source, and considering why those emotions exist to begin with? I, too, have goals. Paramount among my personal goals is survival and reproduction. There is nothing intrinsically or objectively better about those goals than anyone else’s, including the goal of jumping off a cliff. I have them because I perceive them to be in harmony with the reasons I exist to begin with. Those who do not wish to survive and reproduce appear to me to be sick and dysfunctional biological units. I do not care to be such a unit. As corollary goals I wish for the continued evolution of my species to become ever more capable of survival, and beyond that for the continued existence of biological life in general. I have no basis for claiming that my goals are “correct,” or that the goals of others are “wrong.” Mine are just as much expressions of emotion as anyone else’s. Call them whims, if you will, but at least they have the virtue of being whims that aren’t self destructive.

Supposing you have similar goals, I suggest that it would behoove you to shed the illusion of objective morality. That is by no means the same thing as dispensing with morality entirely, nor does it imply that you can’t treat a version of morality you deem conducive to your survival as an absolute. In other words, it doesn’t imply “moral relativism.” It is our nature to perceive whatever version of morality we happen to favor as absolute. Understanding why that is our nature will not result in moral nihilism, but it will have the happy effect of pulling the rug out from under the feet of the moralistic bullies who have always assumed a right to dictate behavior to the rest of us. To understand morality is to realize that the “moral high ground” they imagine they’re standing on doesn’t exist.

It is unlikely that any of us will be able to resist or significantly influence the massive shifts in population, ideology and the other radical changes to the world we live in that are happening at an ever increasing rate merely by virtue of the fact that we recognize morality and the illusions of objective good and evil associated with it for what they really are. However, it seems to me that recognizing the truth will at least enhance our ability to cope with those changes. In other words, it will help us survive, and, after all, survival is the reason that morality exists to begin with.

Touching on the Dangers of Living Among the Morally Delusional

A major theme of all I have written about morality is that it is subjective. Assuming I am right, this fact has major implications regarding human behavior. It follows, for example, that good and evil do not exist as objective things. Since they are almost universally imagined to actually be objective things, it follows that good and evil are subjective illusions. This begs the question of why the illusions exist. The obvious reason is that they exist by virtue of natural selection. As a result of the natural process of evolution we have brains that construct these illusions because, at some time and in some environment that was likely vastly different from the present, the illusions happened to improve the odds that the responsible genes would survive and reproduce. They are an aspect of human nature, if you will, and one that gives rise to what we commonly refer to as morality. Absent this particular aspect of human nature, morality as we know it would not exist.

Morality predisposes us to imagine that we ought to do some things, and ought not to do others. However, since the mental traits responsible for morality are the result of a natural process, it is impossible that there can be anything that we ought or ought not to do from an objective point of view. To imagine otherwise is to fall victim to the naturalistic fallacy. However, a life lived in complete indifference to what we ought or ought not to do would certainly be boring, and probably impossible for creatures such as ourselves, with a powerful predisposition to imagine that good and evil are real things. The question is, how do we come up with our oughts and ought nots? More broadly speaking, how do we come up with a “meaning of life” to which all of our other oughts and ought nots would presumably be subordinated? The obvious answer is that we assign these things to ourselves.

From a purely personal point of view I consider it expedient to consider rationally this matter of what ultimate goals to assign myself, and what I ought and ought not to do in pursuit of these goals. I have decided that my own personal goals should include survival and reproduction. There is no objective reason for pursuing such a goal, anymore than there is an objective reason for pursuing any other goal. I have chosen these goals because of my conclusion that virtually all of my essential physical and mental traits exist because they enhanced the odds that I would survive and reproduce. I prefer to act in a way that is in harmony with the natural processes that are responsible for my existence. If I were to do otherwise, I would have the impression that I had become “sick” or “dysfunctional” as a biological unit. In keeping with this goal, I have the additional goals of ensuring the survival of my species, and promoting its continued evolution to become ever more capable of surviving in any environment it is likely to encounter, and of ensuring the survival of biological life itself. I consider these additional goals reasonable because I deem them preconditions for my original goal of survival and reproduction, extended into the indefinite future. None of these goals are justifiable from an objective point of view, independent of my subjective mind. It is impossible for any goal to have that attribute. Call them whims, if you will, but there you have them. I have laid my cards on the table.

I would certainly like to see the other members of my species lay their cards on the table in a similar fashion, but that is not likely to happen. The problem is that almost all of them are delusional. They actually believe that the illusions of good and evil are real. Many of them also believe that their meaning and purpose are supplied by imaginary gods that don’t actually exist. Unfortunately, all this has a severe impact, not just on themselves, but on those around them as well. It can do a lot of what those others may perceive, and what I personally certainly perceive, as harm.

Consider, for example, the case of morality. There has always been widespread recognition of the harm done by those who blindly follow their moral whims. Shakespeare referred to them as “devils of Puritans.” More recently, they have been contemptuously referred to as the Uplift, or do gooders, or Social Justice Warriors. Seldom if ever, however, has anyone been able to put their finger on the reason why the behavior of such people is dangerous and harmful. The main reason for this is that they have always suffered from the same delusion as the do gooders. They, too, have imagined that good and evil exist as objective things. They merely believe in different versions of these imaginary things. As a result, they cannot simply point out that the pathologically pious among us are blindly following an emotional whim that is harmful to the rest of us. They are generally reduced to coming up with an alternative grab bag of goods and evils, and engaging in futile arguments over whose grab bag is better. Since the do gooders are generally a great deal more adept at manipulating moral emotions, they commonly win these arguments.

Consider what the outcome of this state of affairs has been concerning, for example, the integrity of national borders. In recent years, much of Europe, North American, and parts of east Asia had reached a state of affairs in which the birthrates of the indigenous populations was below replacement level. Eventually, this would have caused their populations to begin shrinking. In some cases they have already begun to shrink. From my personal point of view, this is an extremely good state of affairs. I would be the first to admit that alarmists have exaggerated many of the environmental problems we face. However, considering that earth is the only boat we have to live in at the moment, why rock it? Virtually every environmental problem you could name would go away with substantial reductions in population. With fewer others to compete with for limited resources, there would be more elbow room for my descendants. We are told that the economy will only be good as long as the population continually increases. Obviously, this can’t go on forever. The planet can only sustain so many people, and its limits are already being strained in many areas. To the extent that survival is a goal we have in common, it would be much better, not only for me, but for our species in general, if at least a few enclaves could be preserved with sustainable populations. Worrying about or tweaking the economy amounts to little more than an exercise in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We have far more substantial problems to worry about.

However, we are told by the pathologically pious that we cannot continue to protect these potentially sustainable enclaves of ours because it is immoral. We must open our borders and allow anyone who pleases to move in, because this is the “moral” thing to do. The result is not hard to foresee. The amount of environmental damage these immigrants will cause will be vastly greater than if they had stayed in their own countries. Our population will no longer begin decreasing to more sustainable levels. Those coming in are culturally and ethnically different from the population already here. In view of the invariable human tendency to view others in terms of ingroups and outgroups, this will inevitably lead to social tension, perhaps culminating in civil war. Even in terms of the economy, there is no evidence that allowing cheap labor to flood across the border, placing huge demands on our health, educational, and social welfare resources, will have a beneficial effect, even in the short term. Our population will begin to look more and more like the populations of South American countries such as Brazil and Venezuela that have been notably unsuccessful in sustaining a level of affluence similar to the one we enjoy, in spite of their control over vast natural resources. These obvious objections are commonly rationalized away with specious arguments in the interest of doing “good.”

If I were to ask those who support such a destructive policy to justify their claim that it must be done because it is moral, they would be incapable of responding with a coherent answer. If they actually understood what morality is, the best reply they could give me would be that they want to do it to satisfy an emotional whim. However, that emotional whim evolved at a time when our species never had to deal with such issues. Attempting to solve the complex issues we are faced with now by doing whatever happens to be most emotionally satisfying is not only stupid, but self-destructive. Unfortunately, those who seek to blindly satisfy their emotional whims in this way apply them not just to themselves, but to the rest of us as well. Unless they are allowed to dictate to us what we “ought” or “ought not” to do, not only in the matter of borders, but in everything else, then they will deem us “evil,” and seek to force their emotionally motivated solutions to all the world’s problems down our collective throats.

Unless we wake up and realize what morality actually is, those who hardly have our welfare or interests at heart will continue to manipulate it to lead us around by the nose. Unfortunately, I don’t see our species waking up any time soon. Our situation will remain as it is. Whatever goals and purposes we happen to assign ourselves, we must learn to deal with it.

Tilting at Is/Ought Windmills with Steve Stewart-Williams

Many modern writers on the subject of morality are aware of its connection with emotional traits that exist by virtue of evolution by natural selection. Many of those also acknowledge that morality is a subjective phenomenon, and that good and evil have no existence independent of the minds that imagine them. In a sense, these thinkers have managed to claw their way back to the simple truths Darwin alluded to in his The Descent of Man after they were eclipsed for many years by the Blank Slate debacle. Once they’ve done so, however, a funny thing happens. With the lone exception of Edvard Westermarck who began writing on the subject more than a century ago, none of them, or at least none that I am aware of, has managed to appreciate the seemingly obvious logical implications of these truths. Having glimpsed them, they shrink back, as if stunned by what they’ve seen.

What are the logical implications I refer to? If morality exists by virtue of evolved emotional traits, then,

The traits in question evolved because they happened to increase the odds that individuals carrying the genes that gave rise to them would survive and reproduce.
As Darwin noted, evolution by natural selection is a random process. As a result, it is to be expected that the moral behavior that might evolve in intelligent species other than our own might potentially be quite different from ours.
It follows that morality is subjective, and has no objective existence. Good and evil do not exist as independent, objective things. Rather, they are imagined in the minds of individuals.
The responsible genes must have evolved at times radically different from the present, and even, at least in part, in species that were ancestral to our own.
It follows that morality did not evolve to serve the “purpose” or “function” of promoting the happiness or flourishing of our species, however construed.
There is no guarantee that the traits we associate with morality will have the same effect of enhancing the odds of survival of individuals in the environment we live in now as they did in the one in which the evolved.
It is irrational to blindly rely on these traits to regulate the interactions between and within groups vastly larger and/or utterly different in kind from groups that existed when they evolved.
It is irrational, not to mention potentially dangerous, to blindly rely on these traits to promote social goals that have no connection whatsoever with the reasons they exist to begin with.
It is irrational to assume that the universal tendency to apply a radically different morality to outgroups to the one we apply to our ingroup will disappear if we ignore the former.
It is no more rational to assume that the innate basis of human morality is uniform across all populations, than it is to assume that skin color will be the same across all populations. It is to be expected that there are similarities between different versions of morality, but also that there will be significant differences, which cannot be explained as mere artifacts of “culture.”

A good number of modern moral philosophers accept the first four items in the above list. Then, however, an odd thing happens. Far from accepting the seemingly obvious conclusions that follow from these four, as set forth in the rest of the list, they begin writing as if morality were an ideal vehicle for promoting whatever social goals they happen to favor. They begin speaking of things that they personally perceive as good or evil as if everyone else must necessarily also perceive them in the same way. In the end we find them speaking of these subjective goods and evils for all the world as if they were real, objective things. This powerful illusion, so characteristic of our species, reasserts itself, and the seemingly obvious implications of the evolved nature of morality are ignored.

Why has it been so difficult for modern philosophers to jettison the illusion of objective morality? The answer can be found by examining their ingroup. Most of the public intellectuals and philosophers who write about morality do so in academia and other milieus currently dominated by the “progressive Left.” In other words, they belong to an ingroup that tends to be extremely moralistic, and is typically defined by ideology. Members of such ingroups tend to deem themselves “good,” and anyone who disagrees with the ideology of their ingroup “evil,” in accordance with the nature of human beings since time immemorial. There is no essential difference in this regard between them and a group of hunter/gatherers who deem themselves “good,” and their neighbors in an adjoining territory “evil,” other than the arbitrary features that happen to distinguish ingroup from outgroup. As we have seen so often in the recent past, any member of such ingroups who dares to seriously question any of the shibboleths that define the ideological box these people live in can expect to be ostracized and have their careers destroyed. In short, there is a very powerful incentive not to wander too far off the ideological reservation, and to occasionally virtue signal loyalty to the ingroup.

Beyond that, those who imagine they possess the moral high ground also imagine that this gives them the right to dictate behavior to others. In other words, morality rationalizes power and status, and the desire for these things has always been a very powerful motivator of human behavior. Those who possess them aren’t inclined to give them up without a struggle. Today not only moral philosophers but a host of others base their right to dictate behavior to the rest of us on the illusion that their version of morality is “true.” If the illusion disappears, their power disappears with it. Hence, regardless of what they claim to believe about the evolutionary roots of morality, we commonly find them busily propping up the illusion.

Steve Stewart-Williams is an excellent example of the type referred to above. He devotes a great deal of attention to the subject of morality in his Darwin, God, and the Meaning of Life. On page 203 of my hard cover copy he even quotes E. O. Wilson’s argument “for the necessity of an evolutionary approach to morality.” On page 148 he says more or less that same thing as I pointed out in the fourth item in the above list, although without referring specifically to morality:

Our fear of snakes and spiders is an example of an aspect of human psychology that is poorly matched to modern living conditions, but which would have been useful in the environment of our hunter-gatherer ancestors – the environment in which these fears evolved.

In the following passage on page 291, Stewart-Williams seems to come out very explicitly in favor of the subjective nature of morality:

The second way that Darwin’s theory could undermine morality is that it could undermine the idea that there are objective moral truths – truths that exist independently of human minds, emotions and conventions. In the remaining pages of this book, I’m going to argue that evolutionary theory does indeed undermine this idea, and that morality is, in some sense, a human invention (or, more precisely, a joint project of human beings and natural selection). In other words, in the final analysis, nothing is right and nothing is wrong. This perspective is quite counterintuitive to most people (myself included).

It turns out that, as far as Stewart-Williams is concerned, this perspective is very counterintuitive indeed. Instead of drawing the seemingly obvious conclusions listed above that follow from the evolutionary roots of morality and its subjective nature, he spends much of the rest of the book alternately insisting that he believes in subjective morality, and then contradicting himself with comments that make no sense unless there is an objective moral law. Not surprisingly, this “objective moral law” turns out to be a vanilla version of the one that is currently fashionable in academia. Stewart-Williams realizes that the academic ingroup he belongs to is currently highly moralistic, and is likely to take a very dim view of anyone who seriously challenges the shibboleths that define its territorial boundaries. To placate the “public opinion” of his ingroup, he begins delivering himself of statements that really are “counterintuitive” if he believes in subjective morality as he claims. For starters, he starts dreaming up ways to hop over Hume’s is/ought barrier:

Hume’s law seems to show that facts about evolution can have no bearing on ethical issues, and that factual and ethical reasoning are completely independent domains of discourse. But it does not have this implication at all. The importance of the is-ought fallacy has been drastically overstated. Consider this argument again:

Efforts to aid the weak, sick, or poor go against nature.

Therefore, we ought not to aid the weak, sick or poor.

Clearly, the argument is not deductively valid. This could easily be remedied, however, by including an additional premise that would justify the leap from is to ought. After all, it is possible in principle to construct a valid argument from any premise to any conclusion, given the appropriate intervening premise.

Efforts to aid the weak, sick, or poor go against nature.

We ought not to go against nature.

Therefore, we ought not to aid the weak, sick, or poor.

The argument is now deductively valid, and thus if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true also.

Right. It kind of reminds me of an old Far Side cartoon, in which one mathematician is proudly displaying his proof of some obscure hypothesis to another mathematician. The second replies that he doesn’t quite follow the step in the proof labeled “Miracle happens.” If, as Stewart-Williams claims, morality is subjective, then the reason you can’t just hop over the is/ought barrier is because there is no ought to hop to on the other side. One cannot speak of an unqualified ought as he does above at all, because every ought is simply the expression of some individual’s emotionally motivated subjective opinion. Once you admit it is such an opinion, “valid arguments” of the type given above become entirely superfluous. The only “fact” involved is the experience of a subjective feeling which itself exists by virtue of an natural evolutionary process which has no function or purpose whatsoever. “Moral reasoning” is what happens when individuals attempt to interpret what they imagine these subjective feelings are trying to tell them.

Having justified himself in advance by virtue of this ineffectual quibbling about the is/ought barrier, Stewart-Williams rattles off a whole series of “oughts,” for all the world as if they were unquestionable, objective facts. For example, on page 255,

I think we can agree that preparing for the future generations is a highly desirable value to cultivate.

If morality is subjective, there cannot possibly be any “values,” whether “highly desirable” or not, to cultivate. He could say, “I think everyone else in the world shares my subjective opinion that we ought to prepare for future generations,” but, aside from being clearly false, that statement is entirely different from what he has actually written, implying the existence of “values” as objective things. On page 274, after making it quite clear that he personally considers the “moral dividing line” between humans and animals “is arbitrary,” and that he is opposed to “speciesism,” he writes,

So, the allocation of moral status to humans and humans alone is unjustified.

The above makes sense only if morality is objective. If, as Stewart-Williams claimed earlier, it is actually subjective, it is impossible for anything to be either justified or unjustified, unless one qualifies the statement by admitting that it is merely an expression of personal opinion based on nothing more substantial than feelings that exist by virtue of natural selection. The statement, “So, the allocation of moral status to humans and humans alone is justified,” is every bit as valid as the one given above, by virtue of the fact that the validity of both is zero. Consider what we’re dealing with here; a bag of behavioral traits that exist purely because they happened to improve the odds that the responsible genes would survive and reproduce. I doubt that he is arguing that allocation of equal moral status to other animals will accomplish the same thing today. It’s likely to accomplish the exact opposite. As it stands, the statement is fundamentally irrational. All he is really saying is that he arbitrarily interprets certain emotional feelings to mean that humans and other animals must have equal moral status, and insists that everyone else must interpret their emotional feelings in the same way. A bit later, he doubles down, writing,

However, if we opt for a morality based on a brute human/non-human distinction, we know we’re getting it wrong – some animals will definitely be treated worse than they should be.

Again, absent objective morality, this statement is nonsense. If morality is subjective, it is impossible to make truth statements about it one way or the other. We cannot possibly “know” we are getting something wrong unless an objective criteria exists upon which to base that conclusion. On page 289 he tells us,

When we look at large-scale surveys of everyday believers, we find that in many ways atheists are actually more moral than believers. On average, they are less prejudiced, less racist, and less homophobic; more tolerant and compassionate; and more law-abiding. Admittedly, whether this means atheists are more moral depends on your personal convictions; if you think homophobia is a virtue, for instance, then you’d have to conclude that a greater number of religious than non-religious people possess this particular virtue. Nonetheless, a convincing case can be made that non-religious moral codes are often superior to those traditionally linked with theism. Consider Peter Singer’s Top Three ethical recommendations: do something for the poor of the world; do something for non-human animals; and do something for the environment. This is the ethic of an atheist, a man who accepts that life evolved and has no ultimate meaning or purpose. To my mind, it is vastly superior to moral systems emphasizing trivial issues (or non-issues) such as premarital sex, blasphemy, and the like. Morality is not just about deciding what’s right and wrong, good or bad. it involves getting your moral priorities straight.

Seldom does one find such a jumble of contradictions in one passage. Stewart-Williams tells us that, on the one hand, morality is subjective, and depends on “your personal convictions,” but, on the other hand, non-religious moral codes are superior to traditional ones linked with theism, and, if you don’t agree with the author, you “don’t have your moral priorities straight.” In other words, morality is subjective and objective at the same time. As an atheist, I’m flattered that he thinks I’m “more moral” than believers, but unfortunately there can be no rational basis for such a conclusion. What he is telling us is that we “ought to” jury rig moral emotions to accomplish ends that have no discernable connection with the reasons that those emotions exist to begin with. He calls this “getting our moral priorities straight.” Is it not abundantly obvious by now that exploiting moral emotions to accomplish social goal that could profoundly affect the lives of millions of people is not only counterproductive, but extremely dangerous? Have we really learned nothing from our experiences with Nazism and Communism? If we seek to stuff Singers three ethical recommendations down everyone’s throats as “good,” then everyone who disagrees with them automatically becomes “evil.” They are consigned to the outgroup. They become the Jews, or the “bourgeoisie.” Are we not yet sufficiently familiar with the often violent fate of outgroups in human history? Does he think he can simply wish away that aspect of human nature?

Perhaps the above passage is best interpreted as Stewart-Williams’ triple kowtow to the gatekeepers of his ideologically/morally defined ingroup. In the end, it is apparent that he has been no more capable of freeing himself of the illusion of objective morality than the rest of his academic tribe. He concludes the book with a bombastic passage that confirms this conclusion:

Of course, nothing can be said to argue that people are morally obliged to accept this ethic, for to do so would be inconsistent with the ideas that inspired it in the first place. It is an ethic that will be adopted – if at all – by those who find a certain stark beauty in kindness without reward, joy without purpose, and progress without lasting achievement.

No, I’m sorry. You can’t have your moral cake and eat it too. The only thing we can say with certainty about people who “adopt such an ethic” is that they are seriously delusional. They believe that the solution of all the complex social issues facing mankind is a mere matter of “correctly” tweaking a volatile mix of emotions whose origins have nothing whatever to do with the issues in question, and then just letting those emotions run wild to do their thing. As noted above, their thing” invariably involves dictating behavior to others, lending power and status to the would be dictators in the process.

Allow me to suggest a different version of “getting our moral priorities straight.” In my personal opinion, we ought to limit the sphere of influence of human morality to the bare essentials, namely the regulation of the day to day interactions of human beings that it would be impractical to regulate in any other way because of our limited intelligence. When it comes to matters such as Singers “three ethical recommendations,” or any other social issues involving large numbers of people, let us leave morality strictly out of it to the extent possible for such emotional creatures as ourselves, and lay our cards on the table. No matter what we happen to desire, in the end the fundamental reason we desire it is to satisfy innate feelings and emotions that exist because they evolved. By “laying our cards on the table,” I mean citing the particular emotions we wish to satisfy, making it perfectly clear in the process whether the manner in which those emotions are to be satisfied will have anything to do with the reasons the emotions evolved to begin with or not. It strikes me that something of the sort would be a great deal more rational and less dangerous than continuing to pursue our current approach of allowing such matters to be decided by whatever faction proves most effective at manipulating our moral emotions.

Morality Whimsy: Darwin and the Latter Day Philosophers

It’s hard to imagine how Darwin could have explained morality more clearly, given the Victorian context in which he wrote. In Chapter IV of his The Descent of Man he said in so many words that it is a subjective manifestation of human nature. However, as I pointed out in my last post, even the philosophers of the 19th century who understood natural selection couldn’t draw the obvious conclusions. None of them could free themselves of the illusion that Good and Evil are real, objective things, existing independently of human minds. This was reflected in the various systems of “evolutionary morality” they proposed. They typically assumed that evolved morality had a goal, or purpose, which was usually some version of human flourishing, moral perfection, or “the good of the species.” To all appearances, it never occurred to any of them that, as a natural process, evolution by natural selection cannot have a goal or a purpose. In the 20th century, moral philosophers began to accept some of the more obvious implications of Darwinism. In spite of that, they remained spellbound by the power of the illusion. The only significant exception I’m aware of was Edvard Westermarck, who pointed out some of the obvious implications of Darwin’s claim that morality exists by virtue of evolved behavioral traits as far back as 1906. He was forgotten, and we haven’t recovered the lost ground since.

Today we know a lot more about the mechanics of natural selection than they did in the 19th century. The study of morality suffered as much as any of the other behavioral sciences during the Blank Slate debacle, but we seem to be on the path to recovery, at least for the time being. Today many scientists and philosophers are at least vaguely aware of the fact, obvious as it was to Darwin, that human morality is a manifestation of innate behavioral traits. Some of them have even drawn some of the more obvious conclusions from that fact. However, we live in a highly moralistic era, especially in academia, and what we find written about morality today reflects this moralistic culture.

To illustrate how far we’ve come, and how far we have yet to go, let’s consider the work of the philosopher Michael Ruse, one of the current crop of evolutionary moralists. He has written much on the subject, but I will focus on a paper he co-authored with E. O. Wilson back in 1986 entitled Moral Philosophy as Applied Science and the book Taking Darwin Seriously, published in 1999. First, the good news. Ruse does take Darwin seriously when it comes to the illusion of objective morality:

…human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey.

We believe that implicit in the scientific interpretation of moral behavior is a conclusion of central importance to philosophy, namely that there can be no genuinely objective external ethical premises. Everything that we know about the evolutionary process indicates that no such extrasomatic guides exist.

As these passages imply, Ruse also rejected the Blank Slate:

The evidence from both genetic and cognitive studies demonstrates decisively that the human brain is not a tabula rasa.

The following passage just repeats what Darwin wrote over a century ago in Chapter IV of The Descent of Man:

It is easy to conceive of an alien intelligent species evolving rules its members consider highly moral but which are repugnant to human beings, such as cannibalism, incest, the love of darkness and decay, parricide, and the mutual eating of faeces. Many animal species perform some or all of these things, with gusto and in order to survive. If human beings had evolved from a stock other than savanna-dwelling, bipedal, carnivorous man-apes we might do the same, feeling inwardly certain that such behaviors are natural and correct. In short, ethical premises are the peculiar products of genetic history. And they can be understood solely as mechanisms that are adaptive for the species that possess them. It follows that the ethical code of one species cannot be translated into that of another. No abstract moral principles exist outside the particular nature of individual species.

Ruse explicitly rejects the currently fashionable philosophical conceit that evolved morality somehow tracks “true” morality:

It is thus entirely correct to say that ethical laws can be changed, at the deepest level, by genetic evolution. This is obviously quite inconsistent with the notion of morality as a set of objective, eternal verities. Morality is rooted in contingent human nature, through and through.

Nor is it possible to uphold the true objectivity of morality by believing in the existence of an ultimate code, such that what is considered right corresponds to what is truly right – that the thoughts produced by the epigenetic rules parallel external premises.

Here “epigenetic rules” is a term Ruse and Wilson coined referring to the innate predispositions that are responsible for the existence of morality. In other words, they’re what the 19th century philosophers referred to as “instincts.” It was an unfortunate choice in view of the current bitter disputes about the significance of epigenetic inheritance. They would have done better to stick with the terms already in use.

So where is the fly in this promising ointment? To begin, Ruse isn’t quite on board with his own philosophy. In spite of his insistence on the subjective nature of morality, we constantly find him signaling to his morality-drenched academic peers that he’s “really good.” He suffers from the same morality addiction as the rest of them. Indeed, to get that monkey off his back, he would have to jump right out of his academic ingroup. For example,

Like Huxley, I find these views (Social Darwinism) taken to the extreme to be morally repellant. They are the epitome of all that is immoral, and anything but a guide to proper behavior… This philosophy I believe (generally) to be grossly immoral.

Children with the disease (Tay-Sachs) develop at first in a normal manner. Then at six months they start to collapse into zombies, and die by the age of four. I see nothing immoral about detecting and aborting such children. In fact, I believe we have a positively moral obligation to do so.

John Stuart Mill’s campaign for women’s rights was a good thing, as was Bertrand Russell’s opposition to nuclear weapons.

What we have in the case of Darwinian ethics is a denial of objectivity, which is surely a denial of metaphysical reality by another name, and an affirmation of subjectivity, which is no less a commitment to common sense, in which the subject plays an active creative part. If anything is common sense, it is that rape is simply, totally, wrong.

In spite of having affirmed that morality is a manifestation of innate predispositions, or “epigenetic rules,” Ruse can find nothing wrong with applying it to decide all sorts of issues that could not possibly have contributed to the evolution of those rules. Consider, for example, this passage, which also includes virtue signaling in the form of a wink and a nod to his liberal ingroup.

Darwinism is anything but a gospel for the extreme conservative. Apart from anything else, no one is saying that there are humans towards whom we have no sense of moral obligation whatsoever. Furthermore, the pretense that we need not bother about the Third World is self-refuting. If we ignore it, then through such effects as overpopulation, we shall soon find that it raises all sorts of difficult moral issues which do directly impinge on us.

In case we are left in any doubt about Ruse’s actual commitment to objective morality under a veneer of subjectivism, he adds,

My only hope is to have shown that a Darwinian approach to morality does not call for a repudiation of standards and values cherished by decent people of all nations.

It is beyond me where in Ruse’s philosophy one can find a definition of “decent people.” Indeed, his philosophy excludes the possibility that one can make unqualified reference to “decent people” unless “decency” exists as an independent object. In other words, his use of the term is a blatant non sequitur. All this makes no sense at all unless we are aware that Ruse imagines he has found a way to skip blithely around Hume’s is/ought barrier. It goes something like this:

If morality means anything, it means being prepared to hold out a helping hand to others. Christians, utilitarians, Kantians, and everyone else come together on this.

I guess I’m not one of the above. To me, morality refers to social behavior that is ultimately the result of evolved behavioral traits. The above is yet another example of Ruse’s tendency to objectivize a possible manifestation of that behavior as “good.” Next, we are optimistically informed that a universal human morality is possible based on the dubious assumption that there are no differences in the evolved traits on which it is based among human populations:

When it comes to general shared moral principles, the Darwinian stands firm. Humans share a common moral understanding. This universality is guaranteed by the shared genetic background of every member of Homo sapiens. The differences between us are far outweighed by the similarities. We (virtually) all have hands, eyes, ears, noses, and the same ultimate awareness. That is part of being human. There is, therefore, absolutely nothing arbitrary about morality, considered from the human perspective.

All this is so much hand waving. Given the evidence of vast differences in moral rules and behavior across human populations, the idea that there is absolutely nothing arbitrary about it is nonsense. No matter. Apparently based on this axiom of universality, a miracle happens. Ruse cuts the Gordian knot, and walks right around the is/ought barrier!

To use an American sporting metaphor, the Darwinian does an end-run around the is/ought barrier. He/she realizes that you cannot go through it, but argues that you can go around it, giving morality all of the justificatory insight possible.

In fact, all the “justificatory insight possible” amounts to zero. There is no plausible reason for the claim that the implausible assumption of universal “epigenetic rules” relevant to morality enables an “end-run” around the is/ought barrier. In other words, Ruse is just another modern philosopher attempting to have his cake and eat it, too.

Unfortunately, Ruse has left out a few things in his “universal moral understanding.” Among them is the outgroup. He never mentions its existence in any of his work I’ve read so far, and yet, if there is any universal aspect of human moral behavior, that is one of them. If what Ruse has written above about skipping around the is/ought barrier is true, then it becomes our duty to hate the outgroup with a blind, irrational fury. Beyond that, he never seriously takes into account the vast difference between the environment in which we now live, and the one in which the predispositions responsible for moral behavior evolved. If he did, it would immediately reduce his notion that morality is an appropriate tool for deciding issues about how to deal with the Third World to an absurdity.

Perhaps the most significant thing of all that Ruse has left out of his philosophizing is a very fundamental feature of human morality. We do not apply it to ourselves alone. We apply it to others as well. To the extent that one imagines that he has done an “end-run” around the is/ought barrier, he also imagines that he has acquired the right to dictate behavior to others. After all, who are we to dispute such a noted philosopher’s take on what our “universal human morality” consists of? That is my biggest problem with our latter day “evolutionary moralists.” In reality, they are just as addicted to objective morality as their 19th century precursors, and just as intent on explaining to the rest of us what we “ought” to do.

Do you like to have others dictate to you what you ought and ought not to do? I don’t. I know that we require some form of morality, because as a species we are too stupid to do without it. Under the circumstances, I prefer to keep it as simple as possible, and to reduce its sphere of influence as much as possible. It strikes me that expanding that sphere to include “the Third World,” or anything of the sort, is not only absurd, but extremely dangerous. I cannot give you any objective reason why you ought not to grovel before people who presume to dictate to you what you ought or ought not to do. I can only inform you that I prefer not to grovel myself. That, it seems to me, is one of the great advantages of grasping the truth about the subjective nature of morality. That truth does not imply moral chaos, or the impossibility of a society with “absolute” moral rules. It merely provides some insight into what such an “absolute” morality might look like in the context of whatever goals or purpose you’ve established for yourself in life.

In my next post I will review the work of another modern “evolutionary moralist” who, predictably, has been no more capable of shaking the objective morality illusion than Ruse. Things haven’t changed much since the 19th century. The symptoms of the addiction have just become more subtle.

Morality Whimsy: What the Philosophers “Learned” from Darwin

When he published The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin practically spoon fed the rest of us the truth about human morality. He explained that it was as much a result of evolution by natural selection as any of our more obvious physical features. Similar versions of the heritable mental traits responsible for its existence are also present in other animals. The only difference between us and them is our ability to contemplate what we experience as a result of those traits with our large brains, and communicate our thoughts to others. As the result of a natural process, morality is not fixed, and could potentially be entirely different in other animals that might eventually happen to acquire levels of intelligence close to our own. In other words, it is a purely subjective phenomenon that does not “track” some imaginary “true” version of objective moral law. As a natural phenomenon, there is no reason to expect that it is striving towards some imaginary goal, such as human perfection or ideal virtue. It’s hard to imagine how Darwin could have expressed these facts in simpler or more straightforward terms.

If Darwin’s claim that morality is derived from heritable mental traits that exist by virtue of natural selection is right, it follows that it is not a perfectly malleable manifestation of environment or culture. Human beings cannot be programmed by learning or environment to adopt completely arbitrary versions of morality. It also follows that humans will perceive moral rules as absolutes. Furthermore, human beings are social animals. If morality exists by virtue of evolved mental traits, it follows that it enhances the probability of the survival and reproduction of the responsible genes in a group environment. It would hardly be effective in doing so if it predisposed us to believe that certain of our behaviors are “good” and others “evil” merely as individuals, but that no such rules or categories apply to the behavior of others. In that case altruism would certainly be a losing strategy in the struggle for survival. However, altruism exists. It follows that we must perceive the moral “rules” not only as absolute, and not only as applying to ourselves, but to everyone else as well. In short, belief in objective morality is an entirely predictable illusion, but an illusion regardless. If it were not an illusion, Darwin’s comment that completely different versions of morality could evolve for different intelligent species would necessarily be false. Whatever else one thinks of objective morality, it is certainly un-Darwinian.

In the years that followed, Darwin’s great theory spawned a host of different versions of “evolutionary morality.” One cannot but experience a sinking feeling in reading through them. Not a single one of the authors had a clue what Darwin was talking about. As far as I can tell, every single one of the systems of “evolutionary morality” concocted in the 19th century was based on the assumption of objective moral law. Evolution was merely the “natural” process of mankind’s progress towards the “goal” of compliance with this objective law, and the outcome of this “natural” process would be (of course) human moral perfection, in harmony with assorted versions of “true” morality. In other words, the power of the illusion asserted itself with a vengeance. “Man the wise” proved incapable of putting two and two together. Instead we clung to the old, familiar mirage that good and evil exist as objective things, just as our minds have always portrayed them to us.

One can confirm the above by reviewing some representative samples of the early versions of evolutionary morality. Many of them were described by Charles Mallory Williams in his A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution, published in 1893. By that time such systems were hardly a novelty. As Williams put it,

Now every year and almost every month brings with it a fresh supply of books, pamphlets and magazine articles on The Evolution of Morality. So many are the waters which now pour themselves into this common stream that the current threatens soon to become too deep and swift for any but the most expert swimmers.

Noting that it was already impossible to do justice to all the theories in a single book, Williams limited himself to reviewing the systems proposed by the most prominent authors in the field. These included Ernst Haeckel, who suggested substituting a “nature religion” based on evolution for the old “church religions.” According to Haeckel,

The greatest rudeness and barbarity of custom often goes hand in hand with the absolute dominion of an all-powerful church; in confirmation of which assertion one need only remember the Middle Ages. On the other hand, we behold the highest standard of perfection attained by men who have severed connection with every creed. Independent of every confession of faith, there lives in the breast of every human being the germ of a pure nature religion; this is indissolubly bound up with the noblest sides of human life. Its highest commandment is love, the restraint of our natural egoism for the benefit of our fellow-men, and for the good of human society, whose members we are.

The very un-Darwinian assumptions that evolution had resulted in a moral sense that was in tune with some version of ideal goodness, referred to by Haeckel as “a pure nature religion,” and that this moral sense existed to serve “the good of human society,” or the good of the species, are characteristic of all the early versions of “evolutionary morality.” For example, from the system proposed by Herbert Spencer,

From the fundamental laws of life and the conditions of social existence are inducible certain imperative limitations to individual action – limitations which are essential to a perfect life, individual and social, or in other words essential to the greatest possible happiness. And these limitations following inevitably as they do from undeniable first principles deep as the nature of life itself constitute what we may distinguish as absolute morality… In the ideal state towards which evolution tends, any falling short of function implies deviation from perfectly moral conduct.

Spencer’s friend, John Fiske, imagined that Darwin, “properly understood” pointed in a similar direction:

Man is slowly passing from a primitive social state, in which he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state in which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it. The “original sin” of theology is the brute inheritance, which is being gradually eliminated; and the message of Christianity: “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth” will be realized in the state of universal peace towards which mankind is tending. Strife and Sorrow shall disappear. Peace and Love shall reign supreme. The goal of evolution is the perfecting of man, whereby we see, more than ever, that he is the chief object of divine care, the fruition of that creative energy which is manifested throughout the knowable universe.

Another Englishman, Alfred Barratt, proposed an even more confused version of “Darwinian morality:”

The Moral Sense therefore is merely one of the emotions, though the last of all in the order of evolution. It can only claim a life of some two or three centuries, (!) and there are even some who still doubt its existence. Man, at any rate, is the only animal who possesses it in its latest development, for even in horses and dogs we cannot believe that it has passed the intentional or conscious stage. Good with them has no artificial meaning; it is simply identical with the greatest pleasure. Only by complete and perfect obedience to all emotions can perfect freedom from regret be obtained in the gratification of all desire. Man is at present passion’s slave because he is so only in part, for the cause of repentance is never the attainment of some pleasure, but always the non-attainment of more; not the satisfaction of one desire, but the inability to satisfy all. The highest virtue, therefore, consists in being led not by one desire but by all in the complete organization of the Moral Nature.

According to the abstruce version of “Darwinism” proposed by Austrian philosopher Bartolomäus von Carneri, evolution had a “goal.” Happily, it was “the perfection of man.”

When we do away with all concessions to one sided extravagant desires, abstain from placing mind above the universal law of causality, and are content with the facts made known to us by science, we perceive that the absolute True, Beautiful, and Good bears the character of the Universal. In this universal character it has always finally found expression in human life and in this character it will always find expression… There is no absolute Evil in contrast to the absolute Good. Evil is negative. The perfection of man is identical with the attainment of absolute Good through evolution.

So much for “evolutionary morality” in the 19th century. None of these philosophers had a clue that they were spouting nonsense that flew in the face of what Darwin had actually said about morality. None of them so much as stopped to think that there is no path from a natural process such as evolution by natural selection to objective “oughts.” They could not free themselves of the powerful illusion that good and evil are real things. It took a critic of Darwin who rejected the idea that evolution had anything to do with morality to see the blatant fallacies at the bottom of all these systems of “evolutionary morality.” Such a man was Jacob Gould Schurman, who took occasion to point out some of the gaping holes in all these fine theories in his The Ethical Import of Darwinism, published in 1888. The diehard Schurman commented bitterly that,

It is a historical fact that no one nowadays seems to doubt the validity of the general theory of evolution. However, the same cannot be said of natural selection.

He cited several prominent contemporary scientists, including Alfred Russel Wallace, who rejected Darwin’s theory either in whole or in part. Noting that “Darwin is certainly the father of evolutionary ethics,” Schurman then continued with a scathing attack on the whole idea, pointing out gaping holes in the above theories of “evolutionary morality” that are just as applicable to the tantrums of modern SJWs. For example,

It is worse than idle for mechanical evolutionists to talk of the reason or end or ground of morality.

The mental and moral faculties are both reduced to the rank of natural phenomena.

The absolute ought cannot be the product of (evolution).

Will not evolution, then, as thus interpreted, work revolution in our views of the moral nature of man, since it implies that morality is not grounded in the nature of things, but something purely relative to man’s circumstances; a happy device whereby man’s ancestors managed to cohere in a united society, and so kill out rival and disunited groups.

Exactly! If Darwin was right, then the claims of any system of “evolutionary morality” to represent objective moral truths must be dismissed as absurd. It is impossible for objective Good and Evil to be “grounded in the nature of things” if morality is the outcome of a random natural process. Indeed, it is not out of the question that intelligent life may already have evolved on other planets by a process similar to the one that occurred on earth, resulting in entirely different versions of good and evil. It is a tribute to the power of the illusions that our evolved “moral sense” spawns in our brains that it is only obvious to those who disagree with our preferred version of “moral truth” that we are delusional.

Today we suffer from an infestation of secular “Social Justice Warriors,” who are in the habit of delivering themselves of bombastic moral pronunciamientos, and become furious when the rest of us pay no attention to them. Only Christians and other theists appear capable of noticing that they lack any basis for the legitimacy of their moral claims. In fact, they are behaving just as Darwin would have predicted, blindly responding to innate moral emotions, oblivious to the fact that the consequences of doing so today are highly unlikely to be the same as those that applied in the radically different world in which those emotions evolved. Just as the Darwin critic Schurman immediately recognized that the evolutionary moralists’ fantastic notion that they had discovered a philosopher’s stone to prop up their “absolute ought” was absurd, today’s theists can immediately see that the fine “objective truths” in which secular humanists imagine they’ve arrayed their moralistic emperor are purely figments of their imaginations. Their emperor is naked.

As far as “evolutionary morality” is concerned, little has changed since the 19th century. “Evolutionary moralists” flourish even more luxuriantly now than they did then. Some of them even deny the existence of objective moral truths. None that I am aware of are to be taken seriously when they make that claim. In nearly the same breath in which they announce their belief in subjective morality, they will launch into a morally drenched rant against conservatives, or populists, or nationalists, or capitalists, or whoever else has the honor of belonging to their outgroup. They do this without the least explanation, as if there were nothing at all contradictory about it. They announce that there are no moral truths, and then proceed to furiously defend whatever flavor of moral truth they happen to prefer. Nothing could be further from their minds than explaining just how they imagine the particular “moral truths” they endorse will enhance the odds that the responsible genes they happen to carry will survive and reproduce. Only the great Edvard Westermarck popped for a brief moment out of the prevailing fog and followed the teachings of Darwin to their logical conclusion. He was quickly forgotten.

Why is all this important? I can only answer that question from a personal point of view. It may not be important to some people. That said, it is important to me because I find it expedient to know and base my actions and decisions on the truth. I can’t say with absolute certainty whether anything is true or not, so I settle for what I consider probably true, and I deem it highly probable that there is no such thing as objective moral truth.

Some have argued that acknowledging this particular truth will harm society, because it will lead to moral relativism and moral chaos. Human history in general, and the historical facts I have cited above in particular, demonstrate that this conclusion is false. In view of what Darwin wrote about morality, it would seem perfectly clear and perfectly obvious that no system of objective morality can be based on his theory of evolution by natural selection. This was abundantly clear to many of his opponents. It remains obvious to the theists who reject his theory today. However, almost to a man, those who considered themselves “Darwinians” and proposed systems of morality supposedly based on his theory concluded that there are objective moral truths, and that it is the “goal” of evolution to realize these truths! I can think of no rational explanation for this fact other than the existence of a powerful, innate human predisposition to perceive moral rules as independent, objective facts. The power of this common illusion is demonstrated by the fact that highly intelligent “Darwinian” moral philosophers could not wean themselves from it even after Darwin had, for all practical purposes, told them point blank that they were fooling themselves. In short, our species faces no danger from moral relativism. The opposite is true. We are moral absolutists by nature, and will continue to be moral absolutists regardless of the scribblings of philosophers. The real danger we face is our tendency to blindly follow the promptings of our “moral sense” in an environment that is radically different from the one in which that moral sense evolved.

Demonstrating the truth of the above couldn’t be simpler. Just gather up as many evolutionary moralists, postmodernists, and self-proclaimed believers in subjective morality as you please. Then take a close look at what they’ve actually written. You’ll quickly find that every single one of them has made and continues to make morally loaded pronouncements that make no sense whatever absent the implicit assumption that there are objective moral truths. They will announce that someone in their outgroup is immoral, or that we “ought” to do something, not merely as a matter of utility, but because it is the “right” thing to do, or that we have a “duty” to do something and refrain from doing something else. They will proclaim their desire for “moral progress” or “human flourishing” without feeling in the least embarrassed by their failure to explain how “moral progress” or “human flourishing” will promote the survival of the genes that are the ultimate reason they find these nebulous utopias so attractive to begin with.

I, too, am human, and tend to wander off into such irrationalities myself sometimes. However, if challenged, I will at least admit that I am merely expressing whims spawned by my own “moral sense,” and that I know of no legitimate basis whatever for claiming that my whims have some magical power to dictate to others what they ought or ought not to do.

We are not threatened by moral relativism. We are threatened by the pervasive illusion that the objects we refer to as good and evil are real, and that we and the members of our ingroup have a monopoly on the knowledge of what these imaginary objects look like. We cannot free ourselves of this illusion. We are moral absolutists by nature. Under the circumstances, it might behoove us to construct an “absolute morality” that is as benign, useful, and unobtrusive as possible. If nothing else, it would pull the rug out from under the feet of the pious bullies and self-appointed moral dictators that I personally find an insufferable blight on modern society. With luck, it might even encourage some of our benighted fellow creatures, who are now rushing down “morally pure” paths to extinction, to think twice about the wisdom of what they are doing, or as least to refrain from insisting that the rest of us accompany them on the journey.

Darwin and Morality

It’s not necessary to read all of Darwin’s books and manuscripts to learn what he had to say about morality. Just read Chapter IV of his The Descent of Man. If you haven’t seen those pages yet, they may be a revelation to you, because later generations of behavioral “scientists” have been very coy about mentioning them. They are decidedly out of step with the socialist and egalitarian ideologies that it became the goal of the 20th century behavioral “sciences” to “prove” as corollaries of the Blank Slate. As such they represent a high point in mankind’s search for truth and self-understanding. When it comes to morality, that search was quickly derailed by a combination of ideologically corrupted “science” and sellers of philosophical snake oil. Nearly a century and a half later, it remains derailed. There is little reason to hope that it will recover anytime soon.

The things Darwin had to say about morality were remarkably bold, given that he lived in Victorian England, and was married to an extremely pious Christian wife. Indeed, the first sentences of the chapter in question can be seen as reflection of this less than ideal environment:

I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as (Sir James) Mackintosh remarks, “has a rightful supremacy over every other principle of human action”; it is summed up in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance.

Later authors have attempted to use this passage to prop up their artificial taboo against “anthropomorphism.” In fact, it is best understood as a brief genuflection to the prevailing “moral landscape.” In this heavily cherry-picked chapter, it’s best to read the whole thing. Darwin was anything but a carbon copy of the “co-discoverer” of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, who believed in evolution below the neck, but substituted spiritualistic mumbo-jumbo for the origin of the human mind and conscience. Darwin considered the human brain, mind, and moral sense as much the result of natural evolution as the rest of us. He realized that the same emotions responsible for the moral sense in humans exists in other animals as well. We are exceptional only in our ability to think about what our emotions are trying to tell us, and our ability to use language to communicate our thoughts to others. Darwin hardly considered this an unbridgeable gap, and thought it entirely possible that similarly advanced minds could evolve in other animals. As he put it,

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable – namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.

So much for human exceptionalism!

For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. The services may be of a definite and evidently instinctive nature; or there may be only a wish and readiness, as with most of the higher social animals, to aid their fellows in certain general ways.

In the above we find Darwin clearly distinguishing between the fixed instincts of, for example, insects, and the more “malleable” behavioral predispositions existing in humans and other social mammals. In other words, here Darwin is preemptively debunking the favorite mantra of later generations of Blank Slaters that acceptance of evolved behavioral traits amounts to “genetic determinism.”

But these feelings and services are by no means extended to all the individuals of the same species, only to those of the same association… We have now seen that actions are regarded by savages, and were probably so regarded by primeval man, as good or bad, solely as they obviously affect the welfare of the tribe, – not that of the species, nor that of an individual member of the tribe. This conclusion agrees well with the belief that the so-called moral sense is aboriginally derived from the social instincts, for both relate at first exclusively to the community.

In other words, there are ingroups and outgroups, a fact that it took nearly half a century for Sir Arthur Keith to resurrect and state as a coherent hypothesis. Modern philosophers and behavioral scientists alike have fallen into the extremely dangerous habit of ignoring this aspect of human moral behavior, preferring to emphasize our “altruism” instead.

Secondly, as soon as the mental faculties had become highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual; and that feeling of dissatisfaction, or even misery, which invariably results, as we shall hereafter see, from any unsatisfied instinct, would arise, as often as it was perceived that the enduring and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature, nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression. It is clear that many instinctive desires, such as that of hunger, are in their nature of short duration; and after being satisfied, are not readily or vividly recalled.

In other words, instead of being some unique human trait that suddenly evolved out of nothing, morality exists in nascent form in many other animals. The “unique” features of human morality are merely artifacts of these preexisting traits in creatures with unusually high intelligence.

It may well be first to premise that I do not wish to maintain that any strictly social animal, if its intellectual faculties were to become as active and as highly developed as in man, would acquire exactly the same moral sense as ours. In the same manner as various animals have some sense of beauty, though they admire widely different objects, so they might have a sense of right and wrong, though led by it to follow widely different lines of conduct. If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal, would gain in our supposed case, as it appears to me, some feeling of right or wrong, or a conscience.

How can one read such passages without admiring the genius of Darwin? No one else in his time even came close to writing anything of such brilliance and insight. Consider what is packed into the last of these short passages alone: 1) A blunt denial of human exceptionalism, 2) A debunking of objective morality, and 3) Dismissal of theories that existed then as now that “objective moral truth” somehow manages to “track” morality rooted in mental traits that exist by virtue of evolution by natural selection. Darwin goes on to cite many examples of analogs of human moral behavior in other animals, noting that,

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts, which in us would be called moral; and I agree with (Louis) Agassiz that dogs possess something very like a conscience.

As if in answer to later generations of behaviorists clutching their box mazes with their theories of “conditioning” he writes,

In many instances, however, it is probable that instincts are persistently followed from the mere force of inheritance, without the stimulus of either pleasure or pain. A young pointer, when it first scents game, apparently cannot help pointing. A squirrel in a cage who pats the nuts which it cannot eat as if to bury them in the ground, can hardly be thought to act thus, either from pleasure or pain. Hence the common assumption that men must be impelled to every action by experiencing some pleasure or pain may be erroneous.

Far from believing that evolution by natural selection would result in a universal moral sense, identical in all races, Darwin concluded that the obvious differences in human moral behavior confirmed his theory. As he put it,

Except through the principle of the transmission of moral tendencies, we cannot understand the differences believed to exist in this respect between the various races of mankind.

There is much more in this short chapter bearing on the evolution of human morality. It is truly a must read for anyone interested in the subject. In addition to what he wrote about evolved behavioral traits in man and animals in The Descent of Man, Darwin also wrote a chapter on the subject intended for publication in The Origin of Species. Unfortunately, the full manuscript did not appear in that book. However, Darwin passed it along with much other related material accumulated during the course of his life to his young collaborator, George Romanes. Romanes published the full chapter, along with much of the other material he had received from Darwin, in his Mental Evolution in Animals, which appeared shortly after Darwin’s death. The book is available online, and may be found by clicking the link on the title.

Many authors published theories of morality, supposedly based on Darwin’s theory of evolution, beginning shortly after publication of The Origin of Species. Almost all of them promoted some theory of objective morality, and either ignored or completely failed to grasp the significance of what Darwin had written on the subject. Edvard Westermarck appeared like a ray of light in the fog, publishing his brilliant The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas in 1906. Among major philosophers, he alone appeared to grasp the implications of what Darwin had written about morality. Like the fourth chapter of The Descent of Man, his book was forgotten, and no philosopher or scientist has appeared in the century plus since then who appears to grasp not only what Darwin wrote about the evolved roots of morality, but also the implications of what he wrote regarding the question of objective morality. The lucubrations of some of these “evolutionary moralists” are interesting in their own right, but I must leave them for a later post.

The Pinker Effect: Prof. Pickering’s Violent Agreement with the Hunting Hypothesis

Rough and Tumble by Prof. Travis Pickering is an amazing little book. The author’s ostensible goal was to defend the “hunting hypothesis,” according to which hunting played an important role in the evolution of our species. In spite of that, Pickering devotes much of it to furiously denouncing authors who proposed very similar versions of that hypotheses, in some cases nearly a century earlier. I’ve seen this phenomenon often enough now to coin a phrase for it; The Pinker Effect. The Pinker Effect may be described as proposing a hypothesis combined with a denunciation and/or vilification of authors who proposed the same hypothesis years earlier, often in a clearer, more articulate and accurate form. The quintessential example is Steven Pinker’s denunciation of Robert Ardrey, in his The Blank Slate, in spite of the fact that Ardrey had presented a better and more accurate description of the Blank Slate debacle in books he had published as many as four decades earlier. Interestingly enough, Ardrey is also one of the authors who presented a very similar version of Pickering’s hunting hypothesis in a book, appropriately entitled The Hunting Hypothesis, back in 1976. He is bitterly denounced in Rough and Tumble, along with several other authors, including Carveth Read, who proposed a prescient version of the hypothesis in his The Origin of Man as long ago as 1920. What could explain this counterintuitive phenomenon?

I can only speculate that what we are seeing is a form of ritual appeasement of the powers that control the ideology, not to mention the purse strings, of one’s tribe. In this case we are speaking of academia, now controlled by aging leftists. I suspect that many of them haven’t forgotten the shame and humiliation they experienced when Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and several others made a laughing stock of them back in the 60’s and 70’s in the process of demolishing the Blank Slate orthodoxy. This demolition crew included several authors who were also prominently associated with the hunting hypothesis. Now, nearly half a century later, it would seem that Pickering still doesn’t dare to defend that hypothesis without first performing a triple kowtow before the former high priests of the Blank Slate! The historical background is fascinating.

First, let’s review the striking similarities between Pickering’s version of the hunting hypothesis and those proposed by other authors as much as a century earlier. Keep in mind as you read down the list that he not only borrows their ideas without attribution or even praise, but actually denounces and vilifies every one of them!

Early meat eating

Pickering: Like others before me, I argue that hunting was a primary factor in our becoming fully human – a factor underpinning the completely unique ways in which we organize ourselves and interact with others of our own kind. This means, in turn, that we need to characterize human predation as accurately as possible in order to build the fullest and most realistic understanding of what it is to be human.
Carveth Read: But the ancestor of Man found an object for association and cooperation in the chase. Spencer, indeed, says that a large carnivore, capable of killing its own prey, profits by being solitary; and this may be true where game is scarce: in the Oligocene and Miocene periods game was not scarce. Moreover, when our (ancestral, ed.) ape first pursued game, especially big game ( not being by ancient adaptation in structure and instinct a carnivore), he may have been, and probably was, incapable of killing enough prey single-handed; and, if so, he will have profited by becoming both social and cooperative as a hunter, like the wolves and dogs – in short, a sort of wolf-ape (Lycopithecus).

Early bipedalism

Pickering: “The contrasting (in comparison to Australopithecines, ed.) long legs of Homo (including even those of its earliest species, like Homo erectus) probably made it a more efficient bipedal strider than were the australopithecines. But the anatomy of the ape-man hips, legs, knees, and ankles indicates that its species were also quite capable terrestrial bipeds.”
Raymond Dart: “It is significant that this index, which indicates in a measure the poise of the skull upon the vertebral column, points to the assumption by this fossil group of an attitude appreciably more erect than that of modern anthropoids. The improved poise of the head, and the better posture of the whole body framework which accompanied this alteration in the angle at which its dominant member was supported, is of great significance. It means that a greater reliance was being placed by this group upon the feet as organs of progression, and that the hands were being freed from their more primitive function of accessory organs of locomotion.” (Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa, published in Nature, February 7, 1925.)

Use of weapons

Pickering: Perhaps in an effort to maintain at least a semblance of behavioral distinction between “us and them,” some scientists still insist on clinging to the remaining (seemingly less consequential) disparities. Hunting with weapons was one such vestige of supposed human uniqueness. But, recently primatologist Jill Pruetz saw to toppling even this minor remnant of presumed human exceptionalism. Using their teeth to sharpen the ends of sticks into points, the chimpanzees of Fongoli, in the West African country of Senegal, fashion what are essentially simple thrusting spears into hollows in trees in an effort to stab and extract bushbabies, the small nocturnal primates who sleep in the holes during the day.
Carveth Read: The utility and consequent selection of hands had been great throughout; but their final development may be referred to the making and using of weapons fashioned according to a mental pattern. Those who had the best hands were selected because they made the best weapons and used them best. (The Origin of Man, 1920)

Debunking of human scavenging

Pickering: Like all scientific hypotheses, these that sought to balance the reality of ancient cut marks with the idea of passive scavenging generated testable predictions. And, time and again, they failed their archaeological tests. In failing, they also effectively falsified the overarching hypothesis of passively scavenging hominins.
Robert Ardrey: I wondered from an early date about the popularity of the scavenger hypothesis. If we were incapable of killing large prey animals such as wildebeest and waterbuck, then how were we capable of stealing their remains from their rightful and more dangerous killers? If we had been concerned with only a few stray bones, then luck could account for it. But the impressive accumulations at early hominid living sites must indicate either that we had been even more adept thieves than we are today, or that the great carnivores in those times were unaccountably lazy at guarding their kills.

Hypothesis of ambush hunting:

Pickering: Along this tactical continuum, hunting from a tree-stand is fairly simple, but it still conveys many benefits to the hunter. In addition to the disadvantaging nature of hunting from above (again, ungulates do not typically look up when scanning for predators), attacking an animal from above also takes the hunter out of potentially harmful physical contact with the prey.
Carveth Read: We may, indeed, suppose that at first prey was sometimes attacked by leaping upon it from the branch of a tree, as leopards sometimes do.
Robert Ardrey: The rare waterhole, the occasionally trickling stream, were the only places where they (other animals, ed.) could come to drink. So water became a natural trap. We did not need the long-striding foot: we could wait with our ambush for the game to come to us.

I could cite many other examples. The fact that Pickering devotes much of his book to denouncing these authors who agree with him seems odd enough, but it’s not so surprising if you happen to be familiar with the history of the Blank Slate debacle. Let’s review some of the salient details.

Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey were two authors singled out by Pickering as paragons of villainy. To hear him tell it, they both must have wracked their brains each morning to come up with a list of bad deeds they could do that day. Oddly enough, it happens that they were also the twin betes noire of the Blank Slaters of old. They were loathed and hated, not because of anything they had to say about hunting, but because they insisted there is such a thing as human nature, and it is not only significant and important, but extremely dangerous for us to ignore. During a period of several decades before they appeared on the scene, it had gradually become anathema for scientists in fields relevant to human behavior to suggest that we were possessed of innate behavioral traits of any kind. Marxism and the other fashionable egalitarian ideologies of the time required it. Instead, reality was ignored in favor of the myth that all our behavior is a result of learning and experience. The result was what we now refer to as the Blank Slate. During the 60’s and 70’s Ardrey and Lorenz published a series of books that revealed to an amused lay audience the absurd nonsense that passed for “science” among these “experts.” As one might expect, this provoked a furious reaction, as documented, for example, in books like Man and Aggression, edited by Blank Slate high priest Ashley Montagu, which appeared in 1968. It’s still available for just two dollars at Amazon, and is required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the affair. It didn’t help. The Blank Slate charade slowly began to unravel. As increasing numbers of the more honest members of the academic and professional tribe began to break ranks, it eventually collapsed. Clearly, the shame of the Blank Slaters of old still rankles because, after all these years, Pickering still found it necessary to appease them by coming up with a ludicrously contrived rationalization for claiming that his “good” version of the hunting hypothesis was different from the “evil” version proposed by Ardrey, Lorenz, and company long ago.

As it happens, the reason Pickering gives for smearing Ardrey, Lorenz, and the rest, who are conveniently no longer around to defend themselves, is their supposed support for the so-called “Killer Ape Theory.” It is commonly defined as the theory that war and interpersonal aggression were the driving forces behind human evolution. It is usually associated with “genetic determinism,” the notion that humans have an irresistible and uncontrollable instinct to murder others of their kind. None of the authors Pickering denounces believed any such thing. This “theory” was a strawman invented by their Blank Slate enemies. Its genesis is of historical interest in its own right.

Raymond Dart is usually cited as the author of the theory. The basis for this claim is a paper he published in 1953 entitled The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man. The paper is available online. Read it, and you will see that it contains nothing even approaching a coherent “theory that war and interpersonal aggression were the driving forces behind human evolution.” To the extent that an “theory” is present in the paper at all, it is just what the title claims; that pre-human anthropoid apes hunted and ate meat. The problem with the paper, seized on years later by the Blank Slaters to prop up their “Killer Ape Theory” strawman, was that it appeared to have been written by a somewhat unhinged junior high school student who had been watching too many Friday night creature features. Some of the more striking examples include,

Either these Procrustean proto-human folk tore the battered bodies of their quarries apart limb from limb and slaked their thirst with blood, consuming the flesh raw like every other carnivorous beast; or, like early man, some of them understood the advantages of fire as well as the use of missiles and clubs.

A microcephalic mental equipment was demonstrably more than adequate for the crude, carnivorous, cannibalistic, bone-club wielding, jawbone-cleaving Samsonian phase of human emergence.

On this thesis man’s predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers: carnivorous creatures, that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh.

To characterize this class B movie stuff as a “theory” is a bit of a stretch. When it comes to human nature, there is nothing in the paper in the form of a coherently elaborated theory at all. The only time Dart even mentions human nature is in the context of a sentence claiming that “recognition of the carnivorous habit as a distinctive australopithecine trait” has implications for understanding it. Based on this flimsy “evidence” that the “Killer Ape Theory” strawman was real, and Dart was its author, Pickering goes on to claim that,

Ironically, it was Robert Ardrey, an American dramatist (and Dart’s mouthpiece in four popular books), who provided the voice closest to cool detachment when he abstracted the “killer ape hypothesis” thusly: ‘Man is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon.’ In no subtle way, predation and aggression were coupled as the ultimate propellants of human evolution.

Here we must charitably assume that Pickering has never actually read Ardrey’s books, because otherwise we would be forced to conclude that he is a bald-faced liar. The theme of all Ardrey’s books, which reviewed the work, not only of Dart, but of hundreds of other scientists, was that there is such a thing as human nature, and it is significant and important. The idea that he was nothing but “Dart’s mouthpiece” is beyond absurd. His books are easily available today, and anyone can confirm that fact who takes the trouble to actually read them. In the process, they will see that when Ardrey wrote that “Man is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon,” he had nothing even remotely similar to the “Killer Ape Theory” in mind. Pickering himself amply documents in his book that not only human beings but our hominin ancestors were predators, that they killed, and that they did so with weapons. That leaves only the term “instinct” as the basis for all Pickerings fulminations against Ardrey and the rest.

In order to pull off this feat, he had to come up with a fairy tale according to which they all believed that humans were driven to hunt by some kind of a genetically induced rage, directed both against their animal prey and other human beings. He, on the other hand, while generously admitting that some emotions were relevant to hunting behavior, prefers a more cerebral version of hunting behavior characterized by cool calculation rather than emotion. This is really the only significant difference he comes up with between their version of the hunting hypothesis and his own, and apparently is the basis of his conclusion that they were “evil,” whereas he is “good.” According to Pickering, those earlier, “evil” proponents of the hunting hypothesis believed in a version of hunting behavior that was actually more characteristic of chimpanzees. He goes to a great deal of trouble to distinguish their “emotional” style hunting with our own, “cerebral” version. To quote from the book,

Expertise in hunting the large, warily dangerous prey of human foragers and cashing in on its concomitant evolutionary rewards does not mature from the hell-bent approach employed by chimpanzees to dispatch their prey. Application of brute physicality is an efficient means for chimpanzees to kill because they hunt in groups, they concentrate on much smaller animals than themselves, and the rely on their superhuman strength and agility to overpower their victims… A human has no hope of out-muscling, out-running, or out-climbing his typical prey, but, if his mind stays clear, he can absolutely count on out-thinking those animals.

…all the brain power and fine motor control in the world aren’t worth a damn to a human hunter if his brain’s commands are overridden by emotion. Clear thinking in survival situations – and what is a hunting and gathering life if not a daily struggle for survival? – is dependent on control of emotion.

General emotional control in hominins may not have yet developed by the time of Homo erectus. But, the archaeological record of Homo erectus implies strongly that the species applied emotional control, at least situationally, when it hunted…

So much for Pickering’s version of the difference between his ideas and the “Killer Ape Theory” he attributes to Ardrey, Lorenz, et. al. Even as it stands it’s a pathetic excuse, not only for failing to attribute the many “original” ideas in his book about human hunting to the virtually identical versions presented by Ardrey in his The Hunting Hypothesis, not to mention years earlier by Carveth Read in his The Origin of Man, but for actually denouncing and vilifying those authors. However, the “difference” itself is imaginary, as can be easily seen by anyone who takes the trouble to read what Ardrey and the rest actually wrote.

Pickering’s deception is particularly obvious in the case of Lorenz. He made it perfectly clear that he didn’t associate Pickering’s version of “emotion” with hunting behavior. Indeed, he was dubious about associating “aggression” with hunting at all. For example, in On Aggression, he wrote,

In yet another respect the fight between predator and prey is not a fight in the real sense of the word: the stroke of the paw with which a lion kills his prey may resemble the movements that he makes when he strikes his rival, just as a shot-gun and a rifle resemble each other outwardly; but the inner motives of the hunter are basically different from those of the fighter. The buffalo which the lion fells provokes his aggression as little as the appetizing turkey which I have just seen hanging in the larder provokes mine. The differences in these inner drives can clearly be seen in the expression movements of the animal: a dog about to catch a hunted rabbit has the same kind of excitedly happy expression as he has when he greets his master or awaits some longed-for treat. From many excellent photographs it can be seen that the lion, in the dramatic moment before he springs, is in no way angry. Growling, laying the ears back, and other well-known expression movements of fighting behavior are seen in predatory animals only when they are very afraid of a wildly resisting prey, and even then the expressions are only suggested.

In none of his books did Lorenz ever suggest that hunting behavior in man was any different from that of other hunting animals. That which Ardrey actually wrote on the subject, as opposed to the “killer ape theory” flim flam that is constantly and falsely attributed to him, is much the same. For example, from The Hunting Hypothesis, he discusses what might have given us an advantage as nascent predators as follows,

Yet we had some advantages. There was the innocence of animals, such as Paul Martin has described in North American prey pursued by skilled but unfamiliar intruders from Asia; our Pliocene victims could only have been easy marks. There was our ape brain, incomparably superior to that of any natural predator. If the relatively unintelligent lioness can practice tactical hunting and plan ambushes as Schaller has described, then our talents must have been of an order far beyond lion imagination.

In his Serengeti studies George Schaller shows that any predator taking his prey is cool, calculating, methodical. It is a kind of aggressive behavior radically unlike his defense of a kill against competitors. Then there is overwhelming emotion, rage, and sometimes a lethal outcome unlike normal relations within a species. Such would have been the situation between competing hunters in glacial Europe.

Pickering anointed poor Carveth Read and other early authors honorary proponents of the “killer ape theory” even though they were long dead before Dart ever published his paper. At the beginning of chapter 3 he writes,

The same nauseating waves of cannibalism, unquenchable bloodthirst, cruel misogyny (specifically), and raging misanthropy (generally) that course through the writings of Dart and Ardrey also typify the pre-Dartian ramblings of Morris, Campbell and Read.

Dart may have been a bit over the top in his “seminal” paper, but the above is truly unhinged. Pickering must imagine that no one will take the trouble to excavate Read’s The Origin of Man from some dusty library stack and read it. In fact, it can be read online. Even out of the context of his time, this furious rant against Read is truly grotesque. Read the first few chapters of his book, and you will see that his hypothesis about hunting behavior in early man actually came quite close to the version proposed by Pickering.

In his eagerness to virtue signal to the other inmates of his academic tribe that his version of the hunting hypothesis is “good” as opposed to the “evil” versions of the “others,” Pickering actually pulls off the amusing stunt of using now irrelevant studies once favored by the Blank Slaters of old because they “proved” early man didn’t hunt, to attack Dart, supposed author of the “killer ape theory,” even though the same studies undermine his own hypotheses. In particular, he devotes a great deal of space to describing studies done by C. K. Brain to refute Dart’s claim that statistical anomalies in the distribution of various types of bones in South African caves were evidence that certain bones had been used as weapons and other tools. It was masterful work on cave taphonomy, in which Brain explored the statistics of bone accumulations left by animals as diverse as hyenas, leopards, owls and porcupines. Unfortunately, he chose to publish his work under the unfortunate title; The Hunters or the Hunted? The work was immediately seized on by the Blank Slaters as “proof” that early man hadn’t hunted at all, and was really a meek vegetarian, just as Ashley Montagu and his pals had been telling us all along. Brain was immediately anointed a “good” opponent of hunting, as opposed to the “evil” men whose ideas his work supposedly contradicted. Pickering apparently wanted to bask in the reflected glory of Brain’s “goodness.”

Of course, all that happened in the days when one could still claim that chimpanzees were “amiable vegetarians,” as Ashley Montagu put it. It’s worth noting that when Jane Goodall began publishing observations that suggested they aren’t really all that “amiable” after all, she was vilified by the Blank Slaters just as viciously as Pickering has vilified Dart, Ardrey, Lorenz and Read. Now we find Pickering trotting out Brain’s book even though it “disproves” his own hypotheses. Meanwhile it has been demonstrated, for example, in careful isotopic studies of Australopithecine teeth, that the species Dart first discovered ate a substantial amount of meat after all, as he had always claimed. Clearly, they were also occasionally prey animals. So were Neanderthals, as their remains have been found in predator bone accumulations as well. That hardly proves that they didn’t hunt.

In short, if you like to read popular science books, beware the Pinker Effect. I note in passing that C. K. Brain never stooped to the practice of “proving” the value and originality of his own work via vicious ad hominem attacks on other scientists. He was Dart’s friend, and remained one to the end.

On Steven Pinker’s Second Fairy Tale: The “Hydraulic Theory” of Konrad Lorenz

You have to hand it to Steven Pinker. At least his book about the Blank Slate drew attention to the fact that it ever happened. It would have been nice if he’d gotten the history right as well. Unfortunately, his description of the affair airbrushes the two men most responsible for ending it completely out of the picture. I refer to Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz. Ardrey played by far the most significant role of any individual in smashing the Blank Slate orthodoxy. He was an outsider, a former playwright, whose highly popular and influential books insisting on the existence and significance of human nature made a mockery of the Blank Slate among intelligent lay people. The academic and professional tribe of “scientists” in the behavioral disciplines never forgave him. The humiliation they suffered during their slow, post-Ardrey return to reality following their long debauch with ideologically motivated myths tarted up as “science” rankles to this day. One can still find occasional artifacts of their hatred in the popular media, as I noted in an earlier post. That probably explains why Pinker dropped Ardrey down the memory hole. It can be understood, at least in part, as a belated defense of his academic ingroup. The result was a ludicrous “history” of the Blank Slate affair that studiously avoided mentioning the role of the individual who played the single most important role in ending it.

Pinker’s rationalization for ignoring Ardrey and Lorenz was certainly crude enough. He managed it in a single paragraph in Chapter 7 of The Blank Slate. The first part of the paragraph reads as follows:

The Noble Savage, too, is a cherished doctrine among critics of the sciences of human nature. In Sociobiology, Wilson mentioned that tribal warfare was common in human prehistory. The against-sociobiologists declared that this had been “strongly rebutted both on the basis of historical and anthropological studies.” I looked up these “studies,” which were collected in Ashley Montagu’s Man and Aggression. In fact they were just hostile reviews of books by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, the playwright Robert Ardrey, and the novelist William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies). Some of the criticisms were, to be sure, deserved. Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure and that evolution acted for the good of the species. But far stronger criticisms of Ardrey and Lorenz had been made by the sociobiologists themselves. (On the second page of The Selfish Gene, for example, Dawkins wrote, “The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong.”) In any case, the reviews contained virtually no data about tribal warfare.

That’s for sure! Man and Aggression, published in 1968, was a collection of essays by some of the most prominent anthropologists and psychologists of the day. It’s quite true that it had little to do with tribal warfare, because it was intended mainly as an attempt to refute Ardrey and Lorenz’ insistence on the existence and importance of human nature. As such, it is one of the most important pieces of historical source material relevant to the Blank Slate. Among other things, it demonstrates that Pinker’s portrayal of E. O. Wilson as the knight in shining armor who slew the Blank Slate dragon in Chapter 6 of his book is nonsense. The battle had been joined long before the appearance of Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1975, and the two chapters in that book that had even mentioned human nature were essentially just restatements of what Ardrey, Lorenz, and several other authors of note, such as Robin Fox, Paul Leyhausen, Desmond Morris, Anthony Storr, and Lionel Tiger, had already written, in part, more than a decade earlier.

As can be seen in the paragraph from Pinker’s book, he cites two main reasons for airbrushing Ardrey and Lorenz out of existence. The first is Dawkins’ comment in The Selfish Gene that, “The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong.” If you actually read what Dawkins was talking about, you’ll see this comment had nothing to do with human nature, the Blank Slate, or sociobiology. Indeed, it had nothing to do with the theme of Pinker’s book, or any fundamental theme in the work of either Ardrey or Lorenz, either, for that matter. It turns out Dawkins was referring solely to their favorable comments about group selection! In one of the more amusing ironies of scientific history, E. O. Wilson, Pinker’s heroic debunker of the Blank Slate, later outed himself as a far more devoted advocate of group selection than anything Ardrey or Lorenz ever dreamed of! If they were “totally and utterly wrong,” Wilson must be doubly “totally and utterly wrong,” and himself and candidate for the memory hole. I’ve written at length about this dubious rationale for dismissing Ardrey and Lorenz elsewhere.

However, group selection wasn’t Pinker’s only excuse for creating his fairy tale version of the Blank Slate. His other one (or more correctly, two), is contained in the sentence, “Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure and that evolution acted for the good of the species.” In fact, Lorenz often does discuss whether particular adaptations are for the good of the species or not. He does so mainly to illustrate his point that, while the innate behavioral traits that can result in aggression in human beings were “good for the species,” in the sense that they promoted the survival of our species as a whole, at the time that they evolved, the same traits may now be “not for the good of the species” in the radically different environment we find ourselves in today. One could say in the same sense that our hands, feet and eyes are “for the good of the species,” because we are better off with them than without them. I can only surmise that Pinker falsely imagined that Lorenz was trying to claim that selection operated at the level of the species. In fact, he never claimed anything of the sort. In the few instances he actually spoke of selection in his book, On Aggression, he was careful to point out that it took place at the level of individuals, or perhaps a few individuals.

It turns out that the history behind Pinker’s comment that “Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure” is a great deal more interesting. I seriously doubt that Pinker even knew what he was talking about here. His knowledge of the “hydraulic theory” was probably second or third hand. In the first place, Lorenz never had a “hydraulic theory.” He did have a “hydraulic model,” and referred to it often. An animated version of the model, which he first presented at a conference in 1949, may be found here. Lorenz never referred to it as other than an admittedly crude model, but one which illustrated what he actually saw in the behavior of many different species. Anyone who is capable of raising fish in an aquarium or ducks and geese in their backyard, can read Lorenz and see for themselves that, whether Pinker thinks the model is “archaic” or not, it does nicely illustrate aspects of how these species’ actually behave.

This begs the question of how this simple and accurate model became transmogrified into a “theory.” It turns out that the “authority” the Blank Slaters of old most often used to “refute” Lorenz’ “hydraulic theory” was one Daniel Lehrman, a professor at Rutgers and a purveyor of behaviorist flim flam of the first water. His A Critique of Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Behavior appeared in The Quarterly Review of Biology back in 1953. By all means, have a look at it. To read it is to marvel at how delusional the Blank Slaters had become by the early 50’s. Lehrman denied the existence of instincts, not only in the great apes and human beings, as Ashley Montagu did in the 60’s, but in rats and geese, no less! For example, according to Lehrman, the innate egg retrieving behavior of geese described by Lorenz was not innate, but was a result of “conditioning” while the goose was still in the egg! He cited studies according to which the neck movements used by the goose to retrieve the egg actually began developing a few days after the egg was laid when the “head is stimulated tactually by the yolk sac.” Apparently it never occurred to Lehrman that he was merely kicking the can down the road. Why would the fetal goose move its head one way rather than another in response to this “conditioning?” Indeed, why would it move it’s head at all? As Lorenz put it, there must have been an innate “schoolmarm” to teach the goose these things. Lehrman gives several other examples, explaining innate developmental feedback mechanisms in terms of behaviorist “conditioning.” The following is another example of his “devastating” arguments against Lorenz:

Now, what exactly is meant by the statement that a behavior pattern is “inherited” or “genetically controlled?” Lorenz undoubtedly does not thing that the zygote contains the instinctive act in miniature, or that the gene is the equivalent of an entelechy which purposefully and continuously tries to push the organism’s development in a particular direction. Yet one or both of these preformistic assumptions, or their equivalents, must underlie the notion that some behavior patterns are “inherited” as such.

Quick! Someone run and tell the computer programmers! Everything they’ve done to date is clearly impossible. Are they trying to claim that their video games actually exist in miniature in the software they’re trying to peddle? Lehrman next gives a perfect illustration of what George Orwell was talking about when he spoke of “Newspeak,” in his 1984. Newspeak was a version of the language that would make it impossible to even conceptualize “Crimethink.” As Lehrman puts it,

To lump them (behavioral traits) together under the rubric of “inherited” or “innate” characteristics serves to block the investigation of their origin just at the point where it should leap forward in meaningfulness.

Elsewhere Lehrman makes a similar case for actually expunging the words “innate” and “instinct” from the behavioral science dictionary. To borrow Orwell’s terminology, he considered them “doubleplus ungood.” In retrospect, I think we can see perfectly well at this point what kinds of “investigation” really were blocked for upwards of half a century by the high priests of the Blank Slate, and it certainly wasn’t the kind that was dear to the heart of Prof. Lehrman. But what of the “hydraulic theory?” Here’s what Lehrman has to say about it:

Lorenz (1950) describes in some detail a hydraulic model, or analogy, of the instinct mechanism, including a reservoir of excitation and devices for keeping it dammed up (innate releasing mechanism) until appropriate keys unlock the sluices. Hydraulic analogies have reappeared so regularly in Lorenz’s papers since 1937 as to justify the impression that they are not really analogies – they are actual representations of Lorenz’s conception and channeling of “instinctive energy.”

Got that? You’d better not hum the tune to the Rolling Stone’s “She’s Like a Rainbow” too often, or you’ll find yourself accused of proposing a “theory” of the transformation of women into rainbows. The same goes for “Like the Dawn,” by the “Oh Hello’s.” Heaven forefend that you ever describe a cloud as like a camel, or a whale, or a unicorn, or you might find yourself accused of proposing a “theory” of the transubstantiation of clouds. That, my friends, was the magical process by which Lorenz’ simple model was transmuted into Pinker’s mythical “archaic hydraulic theory.”

So much for Pinker’s “fake but true” history of the Blank Slate. To my knowledge he has never yet shown the slightest remorse for the violence he has done to the history of what is probably the greatest scientific debacle of all time, not to mention to the legacy of the two men most responsible for restoring some semblance of sanity to the behavioral sciences. I would caution those who expect that he ever will not to hold their breath. As for Lehrman, he became a member of any number of prestigious learned societies, and received any number of prestigious awards and decorations for his brilliant contributions to the advancement of “science.” It would seem that, just as no good deed goes unpunished, no bad deed goes unrewarded.

Why the Blank Slate? Let Max Eastman Explain

In my opinion, science, broadly construed, is the best “way of knowing” we have. However, it is not infallible, is never “settled,” cannot “say” anything, and can be perverted and corrupted for any number of reasons. The Blank Slate affair was probably the worst instance of the latter in history. It involved the complete disruption of the behavioral sciences for a period of more than half a century in order to prop up the absurd lie that there is no such thing as human nature. It’s grip on the behavioral sciences hasn’t been completely broken to this day. It’s stunning when you think about it. Whole branches of the sciences were derailed to support a claim that must seem ludicrous to any reasonably intelligent child. Why? How could such a thing have happened? At least part of the answer was supplied by Max Eastman in an article that appeared in the June 1941 issue of The Reader’s Digest. It was entitled, Socialism Doesn’t Jibe with Human Nature.

Who was Max Eastman? Well, he was quite a notable socialist himself in his younger days. He edited a radical magazine called The Masses from 1913 until it was suppressed in 1918 for its antiwar content. In 1922 he traveled to the Soviet Union, and stayed to witness the reality of Communism for nearly two years, becoming friends with a number of Bolshevik worthies, including Trotsky. Evidently he saw some things that weren’t quite as ideal as he had imagined. He became increasingly critical of the Stalin regime, and eventually of socialism itself. In 1941 he became a roving editor for the anti-Communist Reader’s Digest, and the above article appeared shortly thereafter.

In it, Eastman reviewed the history of socialism from it’s modest beginnings in Robert Owen’s utopian village of New Harmony through a host of similar abortive experiments to the teachings of Karl Marx, and finally to the realization of Marx’s dream in the greatest experiment of them all; the Bolshevik state in Russia. He noted that all the earlier experiments had failed miserably but, in his words, “The results were not better than Robert Owen’s but a million times worse.” The outcome of Lenin’s great experiment was,

Officialdom gone mad, officialdom erected into a new and merciless exploiting class which literally wages war on its own people; the “slavery, horrors, savagery, absurdities and infamies of capitalist exploitation” so far outdone that men look back to them as to a picnic on a holiday; bureaucrats everywhere, and behind the bureaucrats the GPU; death for those who dare protest; death for theft – even of a piece of candy; and this sadistic penalty extended by a special law to children twelve years old! People who still insist that this is a New Harmony are for the most part dolts or mental cowards. To honest men with courage to face facts it is clear that Lenin’s experiment, like Robert Owen’s, failed.

It would seem the world produced a great many dolts and mental cowards in the years leading up to 1941. In the 30’s Communism was all the rage among intellectuals, not only in the United States but worldwide. As Malcolm Muggeridge put it in his book, The Thirties, at the beginning of the decade it was rare to find a university professor who was a Marxist, but at the end of the decade it was rare to find one who wasn’t. If you won’t take Muggeridge’s word for it, just look at the articles in U.S. intellectual journals such as The Nation, The New Republic, and the American Mercury during, say, the year 1934. Many of them may be found online. These were all very influential magazines in the 30’s, and at times during the decade they all took the line that capitalism was dead, and it was now merely a question of finding a suitable flavor of socialism to replace it. If you prefer reality portrayed in fiction, read the guileless accounts of the pervasiveness of Communism among the intellectual elites of the 1930’s in the superb novels of Mary McCarthy, herself a leftist radical.

Eastman was too intelligent to swallow the “common sense” socialist remedies of the news stand journals. He had witnessed the reality of Communism firsthand, and had followed its descent into the hellish bloodbath of the Stalinist purges and mass murder by torture and starvation in the Gulag system. He knew that socialism had failed everywhere else it had been tried as well. He also knew the reason why. Allow me to quote him at length:

Why did the monumental efforts of these three great men (Owen, Marx and Lenin, ed.) and tens of millions of their followers, consecrated to the cause of human happiness – why did they so miserably fail? They failed because they had no science of human nature, and no place in their science for the common sense knowledge of it.

In October 1917, after the news came that Kerensky’s government had fallen, Lenin, who had been in hiding, appeared at a meeting of the Workers and Soldiers’ Soviet of Petrograd. He mounted the rostrum and, when the long wild happy shouts of greeting had died down, remarked: “We will now proceed to the construction of a socialist society.” He said this as simply as though he were proposing to put up a new cowbarn. But in all his life he had never asked himself the equally simple question: “How is this newfangled contraption going to fit in with the instinctive tendencies of the animals it was made for?”

Lenin actually knew less about the science of man, after a hundred years, than Robert Owen did. Owen had described human nature, fairly well for an amateur, as “a compound of animal propensities, intellectual faculties and moral qualities.” He had written into the preamble of the constitution of New Harmony that “man’s character… is the result of his formation, his location, and of the circumstances within which he exists.”

It seems incredible, but Karl Marx, with all his talk about making socialism “scientific,” took a step back from this elementary notion. He dropped out the factor of man’s hereditary nature altogether. He dropped out man altogether, so far as he might present an obstacle to social change. “The individual,” he said, “has no real existence outside the milieu in which he lives.” By which he meant: Change the milieu, change the social relations, and man will change as much as you like. That is all Marx ever said on the primary question. And Lenin said nothing.

That is why they failed. They were amateurs – and worse than amateurs, mystics – in the subject most essential to their success.

To begin with, man is the most plastic and adaptable of animals. He truly can be changed by his environment, and even by himself, to a unique degree, and that makes extreme ideas of progress reasonable. On the other hand, he inherits a set of emotional impulses or instincts which, although they can be trained in various ways in the individual, cannot be eradicated from the race. And no matter how much they may be repressed or redirected by training, they reappear in the original form – as sure as a hedgehop puts out spines – in every baby that is born.

Amazing, considering these words were written in 1941. Eastman had a naïve faith that science would remedy the situation, and that, as our knowledge of human behavior advanced, mankind would see the truth. In fact, by 1941, those who didn’t want to hear the inconvenient truth that the various versions of paradise on earth they were busily concocting for the rest of us were foredoomed to failure already had the behavioral sciences well in hand. They made sure that “science said” what they wanted it to say. The result was the Blank Slate, a scientific debacle that brought humanity’s efforts to gain self-understanding to a screeching halt for more than half a century, and one that continues to haunt us even now. Their agenda was simple – if human nature stood in the way of heaven on earth, abolish human nature! And that’s precisely what they did. It wasn’t the first time that ideological myths have trumped the truth, and it certainly won’t be the last, but the Blank Slate may well go down in history as the deadliest myth of all.

I note in passing that the Blank Slate was the child of the “progressive Left,” the same people who today preen themselves on their great respect for “science.” In fact, all the flat earthers, space alien conspiracy nuts, and anti-Darwin religious fanatics combined have never pulled off anything as damaging to the advance of scientific knowledge as the Blank Slate debacle. It’s worth keeping in mind the next time someone tries to regale you with fairy tales about what “science says.”

How a “Study” Repaired History and the Evolutionary Psychologists Lived Happily Ever After

It’s a bit of a stretch to claim that those who have asserted the existence and importance of human nature have never experienced ideological bias. If that claim is true, then the Blank Slate debacle could never have happened. However, we know that it happened, based not only on the testimony of those who saw it for the ideologically motivated debasement of science that it was, such as Steven Pinker and Carl Degler, but of the ideological zealots responsible for it themselves, such as Hamilton Cravens, who portrayed it as The Triumph of Evolution. The idea that the Blank Slaters were “unbiased” is absurd on the face of it, and can be immediately debunked by simply counting the number of times they accused their opponents of being “racists,” “fascists,” etc., in books such as Richard Lewontin’s Not in Our Genes, and Ashley Montagu’s Man and Aggression. More recently, the discipline of evolutionary psychology has experienced many similar attacks, as detailed, for example, by Robert Kurzban in an article entitled, Alas poor evolutionary psychology.

The reasons for this bias has never been a mystery, either to the Blank Slaters and their latter day leftist descendants, or to evolutionary psychologists and other proponents of the importance of human nature. Leftist ideology requires not only that human beings be equal before the law, but that the menagerie of human identity groups they have become obsessed with over the years actually be equal, in intelligence, creativity, degree of “civilization,” and every other conceivable measure of human achievement. On top of that, they must be “malleable,” and “plastic,” and therefore perfectly adaptable to whatever revolutionary rearrangement in society happened to be in fashion. The existence and importance of human nature has always been perceived as a threat to all these romantic mirages, as indeed it is. Hence the obvious and seemingly indisputable bias.

Enter Jeffrey Winking of the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M, who assures us that it’s all a big mistake, and there’s really no bias at all! Not only that, but he “proves” it with a “study” in a paper entitled, Exploring the Great Schism in the Social Sciences, that recently appeared in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. We must assume that, in spite of his background in anthropology, Winking has never heard of a man named Napoleon Chagnon, or run across an article entitled Darkness’s Descent on the American Anthropological Association, by Alice Degler.

Winking begins his article by noting that “The nature-nurture debate is one that biologists often dismiss as a false dichotomy,” but adds, “However, such dismissiveness belies the long-standing debate that is unmistakable throughout the biological and social sciences concerning the role of biological influences in the development of psychological and behavioral traits in humans.” I agree entirely. One can’t simply hand-wave away the Blank Slate affair and a century of bitter ideological debate by turning up one’s nose and asserting the term isn’t helpful from a purely scientific point of view.

We also find that Winking isn’t completely oblivious to examples of bias on the “nature” side of the debate. He cites the Harvard study group which “evaluated the merits of sociobiology, and which included intellectual giants like Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin.” I am content to let history judge whether Gould and Lewontin were really “intellectual giants.” Regardless, if Winking actually read these “evaluations,” he cannot have failed to notice that they contained vicious ad hominem attacks on E. O. Wilson and others that it is extremely difficult to construe as anything but biased. Winking goes on to note similar instances of bias by other authors in various disciplines, such as,

Many researchers use [evolutionary approaches to the study of international relations] to justify the status quo in the guise of science.

The totality [of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology] is a myth of origin that is compelling precisely because it resonates strongly with Euro American presuppositions about the nature of the world.

…in the social sciences (with the exception of primatology and psychology) sociobiology appeals most to right-wing social scientists.

These are certainly compelling examples of bias. Now, however, Winking attempts to demonstrate that those who point out the bias, and correctly interpret the reasons for it, are just as biased themselves. As he puts it,

Conversely, those who favor biological approaches have argued that those on the other side are rendered incapable of objective assessment by their ideological promotion of equality. They are alleged to erroneously reject evidence of biological influences because such evidence suggests that social outcomes are partially explained by biology, and this might inhibit the realization of equality. Their critiques of biological approaches are therefore often blithely dismissed as examples of the moralistic/naturalistic fallacy. This line of reason is exemplified in the quote by biologist Jerry Coyne

If you can read the [major Evolutionary Psychology review paper] and still dismiss the entire field as worthless, or as a mere attempt to justify scientists’ social prejudices, then I’d suggest your opinions are based more on ideology than judicious scientific inquiry.

I can’t imagine what Winking finds “blithe” about that statement! Is it really “blithe” to so much as suggest that people who dismiss entire fields of science as worthless may be ideologically motivated? I note in passing that Coyne must have thought long and hard about that statement, because his Ph.D. advisor was none other than Richard Lewontin, whom he still honors and admires! Add to that the fact that Coyne is about as far as you can imagine from “right wing,” as anyone can see by simply visiting his Why Evolution is True website, and the notion that he is being “blithe” here is ludicrous. Winking’s other examples of “blithness” are similarly dubious, including,

For critics, the heart of the intellectual problem remains an ideological adherence to the increasingly implausible view that human behavior is strictly determined by socialization… Should [social]hierarchies result strictly from culture, then the possibilities for an egalitarian future were seen to be as open and boundless as our ever-malleable brains might imagine.

Like the Church, a number of contemporary thinkers have also grounded their moral and political views in scientific assumptions about… human nature, specifically that there isn’t one.

Unlike the “comparable” statements by the Blank Slaters, these statements neither accuse those who deny the existence of human nature of being Nazis, nor is evidence lacking to back them up. On the contrary, one could cite a mountain of evidence to back them up supplied by the Blank Slaters themselves. Winking soon supplies us with the reason for this strained attempt to establish “moral equivalence” between “nature” and “nurture.” It appears in his “hypothesis,” as follows:

It is entirely possible that confirmation bias plays no role in driving disagreement and that the overarching debate in academia is driven by sincere disagreements concerning the inferential value of the research designs informing the debate.

Wait a minute! Don’t roll your eyes like that! Winking has a “study” to back up this hypothesis. Let me explain it to you. He invented some “mock results” of studies which purported to establish, for example, the increased prevalence of an allele associated with “appetitive aggression” in populations with African ancestry. Subtle, no? Then he used Mechanical Turk and social media to come up with a sample of 365 people with Masters degrees or Ph.D.’s for a survey on what they thought of the “inferential power” of the fake data. Another sample of 71 were scraped together for another survey on “research design.” In the larger sample, 307 described themselves as either only “somewhat” on the “nature” side, or “somewhat” on the “nurture” side. Only 57 claimed they leaned strongly one way or the other. The triumphant results of the study included, for example, that,

Participants perceptions of inferential value did not vary by the degree to which results supported a particular ideology, suggesting that ideological confirmation bias is not affecting participant perceptions of inferential value.

Seriously? Even the author admits that the statistical power of his “study” is low because of the small sample sizes. However statistical power only applies where the samples are truly random, meaning, in this case, where the participants are either unequivocably on the “nature” or “nurture” side. That is hardly the case. Mechanical Turk samples, for example are biased towards a younger and more liberal demographic. Most of the participants were on the fence between nature and nurture. In other words, there’s no telling what their true opinions were even if they were honest about them. Even the most extreme Blank Slaters admitted that nature plays a significant role in such bodily functions as urinating, defecating, and breathing, and so could have easily described themselves as “somewhat bioist.” Perhaps most importantly, any high school student could have easily seen what this “study” was about. There is no doubt whatsoever that holders of Masters and Doctors degrees in related disciplines had no trouble a) inferring what the study was about, and b) had an interest in making sure that the results demonstrated that they were “unbiased.” In other words, were not exactly talking “double blind” here.

I think the author was well aware that most readers would have no trouble detecting the blatant shortcomings of his “study.” Apparently to ward off ridicule he wrote,

Regardless of one’s position, it is important to remind scholars that if they believe a group of intelligent and informed academics could be so unknowingly blinded by ideology that they wholeheartedly subscribe to an unquestionably erroneous interpretation of an entire body of research, then they must acknowledge they themselves are equally as capable of being so misguided.

Kind of reminds you of the curse over King Tut’s tomb, doesn’t it? “May those who question my study be damned to dwell among the misguided forever!” Sorry, my dear Winking, but “a group of intelligent and informed academics” not only could, but were “so unknowingly blinded by ideology that they wholeheartedly subscribed to an unquestionably erroneous interpretation of an entire body of research.” It was called the Blank Slate, and it derailed the behavioral sciences for more than half a century. That’s what Pinker’s book was about. That’s what Degler’s book was about, and yes, that’s even what Cravens’ book was about. They all did an excellent job of documenting the debacle. I suggest you read them.

Or not. You could decide to believe your study instead. I have to admit, it would have its advantages. History would be “fixed,” the lions would lie down with the lambs, and the evolutionary psychologists would live happily ever after.