http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,739941,00.html
The deluded gene
Sociobiology is a one-dimensional tyranny that fails to consider our complexities as human beings
Hywel Williams Wednesday June 19, 2002
Do you forage alone? Or do you optimise hunter-gathering capacity when doing the weekly shop? A mate is useful when dealing with other hunter-gatherers bearing down on you with their trolleys. The sight of those battering rams along the aisles seems to show that there's a lot of cave person inside us. Perhaps you feel triumphant at seeing so "basic" a universal law in action, or do you feel queasy? Still, can't be helped. This is the way humans are.
Back home, as you relax in your upholstered nest, you may evolve future outcomes for your genes. You are, let us say, a successful breeder. Now you ponder on how to maximise that achievement. You like your kinship group - so why not help out with the relatives' shopping? After all, they share your genes, and you want to ensure that what's bred in the tribal bone will carry on breeding.
Upstairs your brood are screaming. In life on earth there's nothing more selfish than the clinging gene. Sadly, strategic reproduction with your mate is suspended for the duration. But that knock on the door means deliverance is at hand from a non-breeder. It's your sibling, prepared to help with the litter. In the gap between birth and death comes the struggle for life. And a gene can get extra fit for that fight by helping relatives. Farewell then to altruism, heroism and martyrdom, but a big hello to "inclusive fitness".
Sociobiology is now one generation old, having been born as a subject with its own peculiar speech patterns in the 1970s. It is a reductivist game because it sees social behaviour as the outcome of other "deeper" forces within human nature. But it is itself a child of its age, having evolved at a time when western societies faced crises of authority. Aggression is the sociobiologist's special subject, along with the means to be adopted in separating its successful expression from its self-destructive power. Behind this lie the fears of a decade, the strikes of British trades unions and the triggers of Italian terrorists.
The sight of Desmond (Naked Ape) Morris on 70s television lent an added dread to the decade. Morris operated at the lower - and laddish - end of the sociobiological ascent. He popularised the view that all human beings were hunters, still aching for a spot of pillaging. His shallow speculations were subsumed in the new science. And when the 80s arrived, the era of competitive individualism coincided con veniently with the new genetic authoritarianism.
In the sociobiological terrain we only act cooperatively when forced to achieve by manipulation what we can't get on our own. But although the science operates under the shadow of the selfish gene, it is congenitally incapable of understanding the individual. Its one-dimensional tyranny is void of anything that makes individuals interesting, whether it be the frenzies of love, the passions of religion, or the creations of art.
The new sociobiology re-packaged old urges. The Austrian Konrad Lorenz had been talking to the animals for decades before publishing On Aggression in 1963. He belonged to that ethnological group to whom Princess Anne and the late John Aspinall also belong: those who find animals more interesting than humans. For Lorenz, aggression was the key to existence and had to be expressed somehow. He thought sport was canalised aggression. But Nazi eugenics he found similarly appealing in the 1940s.
Sociobiologists knew that the nastier and the sillier ends of the science had to be avoided. And so they developed the language of "propensity". But it's always a vapid generalism to say that human beings are "basically" aggressive. It's like saying that, fundamentally, mothers are maternal and fathers are paternal. In seeking to explain everything the socio-biologist ends up explaining nothing.
The roots of war are particular causes. If Pakistanis and Indians are aggressive, how does that help us to understand their conflict? In India, adult male langur monkeys bite the offspring of others within the same group to death, and the mothers then mate with the killers. Perhaps this happens when new males enter the group. Perhaps competitive males do it to ensure that the females, deprived of their infants, ovulate faster. This is interesting but useless information if you want to understand human wars. Few women - except in Greek tragedy - end up married to their children's killer. But, generally, there is nothing in the comparison between animal and human aggression which explains our wars.
The sociobiologist is out to establish a general truth. But wars are individual. Sometimes conflict comes from failure, wilful or otherwise, to understand what the other party is saying. Wars reflect national identity, something beyond mere kinship. They are bred by imagination, revenge, hurt pride, misinterpretation and misunderstanding.
But in the sociobiological world, humans behave instinctively but also as ideal reasoners; they become utilitarians calculating outcomes and consequences. This is a fantasy science, as well as a neo-conservative delusion. Looking in their one-eyed way at how it seems to them, the sociobiologists tell us that this is also how it's meant to be. It is a deception offered by those lacking in imagination - and who need to get out more.
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