Jacob C.
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The American Prospect vol. 10 no. 45, July 1, 1999 - August 1, 1999.
Darwin's Truth, Jefferson's Vision Sociobiology and the Politics of Human Nature by Melvin Konner
As the new field of sociobiology has emerged during the past quarter century, it has met with firm and unrelenting opposition from prominent liberal critics. Sociobiology—also known as evolutionary psychology or neo-Darwinian theory—holds that many patterns of human behavior have a basis in evolution. Because this approach often suggests biological explanations of gender roles, it affronts many feminists. It has also drawn opposition from a group of biologists on the left who have raised general scientific and philosophical objections and have had great influence in shaping liberal opinion. The scientific critics have included highly respected figures in biology: Ruth Hubbard, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Jonathan Beckwith, among others. None in this group had done direct research on human behavior when sociobiology first emerged in the 1970s. Nonetheless, they immediately perceived a grave threat to liberal values, and their opposition has persisted ever since.
However respected the source, the criticism from this group has had little effect on the direction of scientific research: sociobiology is now firmly established as an accepted branch of normal science. As a result, liberal opinion about sociobiology has increasingly diverged from scientific opinion. If liberals are to understand why this has happened, they need to consider the possibility that Gould, Lewontin, and other prominent scientific critics were wrong in their attack on sociobiology in the first place.
Liberal uneasiness about sociobiology is understandable. A bad odor hangs about any social application of Darwinian ideas. Right-wing intellectuals in the past have abused Darwin's legacy in efforts to justify colonialism, imperialism, racism, and even mass murder. But the old ideological associations of scientific ideas are sometimes a poor guide to their present incarnations. To be sure, some conservative intellectuals infer from sociobiology that liberal reforms are doomed by human nature. But sociobiology today is not nineteenth-century social Darwinism reborn. As I intend to show, there is no conflict between liberal political philosophy and sociobiology. Indeed, quite the contrary is true. A deep understanding of the foundations of liberalism and the fundamental processes of Darwinian reasoning will readily show that the opposition to sociobiology has been based on a superficial view of both. The across-the-board attack on sociobiology was ill-conceived to begin with, and it is time to put it to rest.
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Contrary to predictions made by opponents in the 1970s and 1980s, sociobiology was not a nefarious plot to give scientific credence to a right-wing policy agenda. It was not nearly that important. And contrary to early predictions of its greatest enthusiasts, sociobiology has not pushed aside the rest of the behavioral and social sciences, nor has it folded them all neatly into its wide theoretical embrace. What has happened instead is something neither side wanted to believe, but that was expected by open-minded people with no direct stake in the controversy: sociobiology has become a small but significant part of the spectrum of behavioral and social science.
Like all good theories, it is sometimes unsuccessful in particular situations. Even in the nonhuman world, nepotism is imperfect and inexplicable acts of altruism occur.
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The theory's failures have been local; it has proven uninformative in many instances, and specific hypotheses arising from it have often failed empirical tests. As an overarching viewpoint, though, it successfully organizes much of the behavior and social organization of animals—including, to some extent, us.
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Needless to say, the theory sometimes seems eerily able to handle any facts on the ground, a tendency Lewontin and Gould have aptly labeled "Panglossian adaptationism," after Voltaire's character who found everything for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Neo-Darwinian theorists would like nothing better, however, than to find ways to predict which species will turn out like lions and which like baboons, rather than offering post hoc explanations. In fact, they are working like beavers on this and similar problems, which is what theories are supposed to make scientists do. That is called heuristic value. This theory has heuristic value in abundance.
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With a completed Das Kapital in hand, Karl Marx wrote to Charles Darwin, requesting permission to dedicate it to the older, world-famous biologist. Darwin's demurral showed that he was a bourgeois, conservative sort of scientific revolutionary who had troubles enough of his own; but it also showed that there is evolution and then there is evolution. Marx's evolution was that of successive waves of socioeconomic adaptation, each predictably replacing the last through a process of revolutionary transformation.
Marx, of course, was a kind of group selectionist; classes were relentlessly pitted in dialectical conflict. This has proved wrong, partly because of defection (opportunity?) and partly because of the enlightened self-interest of ruling classes, choosing conciliation over chaos. The utopian part of Marx—his version of the Hegelian end of history—was even less compatible with real evolutionary theory, since like all utopian visions it was perfectly cooperative and free of selfishness. In art and poetry the lion may lie down with the lamb, but in evolution the lamb gets eaten. Likewise, within a species, bullies and victims do not rest easily side by side.
For some critics, those last remarks alone make me an apologist for exploitation. This criticism naively confuses "ought" with "is."...
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A 1789 monograph from the laboratory of Madison et al. (the one that begins "We the people . . .") described what might be viewed as an epochal social science discovery. It presented the plan for an intricate, elegant device, a sociological invention for keeping human nature in check, while allowing the conflict that seethes in the human breast to leak out through various safety valves. In fact, you could say that they harnessed conflict itself to make the machine run. For unlike most machines, this device was to be built out of people; therefore, its designers had to have some notion of what these human building units were.
Despite agreeing with Paine about the tendency to order, Jefferson—an affiliate of the lab, but absent in Paris when the monograph appeared—had a dark view. "In questions of power," he would write in 1798, "let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief, by the chains of the Constitution." Paine similarly saw the purpose of constitutions as "to restrain and regulate the wild impulse of power." It was these men's great gift to be able to take a Hobbesian view of human life without applying a Hobbesian solution.
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I support liberal economic programs because I want to live in a decent community. My definition of "decent" doesn't depend on one or another theory of evolution. But in addition, because I do see human nature as an obstacle to decency, I support programs that buffer us against the loss of it. Newt Gingrich and Milton Friedman must have a far more sanguine view of human nature than I do, or they would surely not be heartless enough to want to give it the free rein of an unalloyed market economy.
In part, it is because I take a dim view of human nature as an evolutionary product that I reject their view. Virtually everyone in the world has decided that economies don't work without more or less free markets at their center. What is up for further discussion is only how much we will care about those who lose out in open competition—including the sick, the old, and the very young. Human nature was not designed by evolution to take care of the needs of these people automatically. Therefore only programs and supports deliberately designed by a collective, humane, political will—a will that also restrains the worst excesses of markets—can, after wide debate, create a decent community and set some limit on selfishness.