“Here's another perversity of human nature. Many conservatives resist the theory of evolution even though it confirms many of conservatism's deepest truths,” said David Brooks the other day in the New York Times ($here$ ). Yesterday’s post (here) looked at why it would be surprising if a new scientific understanding really confirmed anybody’s traditional “deepest truths.” It is the nature of scientific understanding to be transforming, not reassuring. Science, like capitalism, and evolution itself, is always overthrowing what is, in favor of what has survived the most recent test.
So what new understanding of humanity is emerging from our growing understanding of speech origins?
On this blog I use my crystal ball only to look for what happened, not what is going to happen. Since we do not yet know what the full understanding of speech origins will be, I am in no better position than anybody else to say what the final implications of that understanding will be. Yet I am already pretty confident that neither the political conservatives nor the modern-day liberals are going to make easy peace with what we learn.
Why?
Because it already seems clear that what evolved in this case was not language, not speech, but speaking communities.
That idea is so radical that it is going to take some time to digest. It does not exactly challenge the notion of the selfish gene. Competition between individuals persists, but communities can carry many individuals who would not survive in the war of all against all that characterizes so many other species. An early example of that community support is in the rise of a childhood during the time of Homo habilis. Apparently it was two million years ago that Homo infants started to be weaned before they were able to feed themselves. In all-v-all societies we would expect natural selection to eventually evolve a species whose first permanent teeth come in much earlier, so that dependence on the kindness of others would be reduced. Instead, the species appears to have evolved a sharper sense of fairness and social obligation. But nobody has to be told that we haven’t gotten rid of egotism.
In the insect world there are many species that compete one on one and there are a smaller number of social species in which societies compete against other societies. That kind of either/or condition is not found among humans. We are still egotists, but we are communitarian too. It’s as contradictory as a photon being a particle of matter and a wave of energy at the same time, but it is still a fact.
Traditional ideas ignore or condemn half of the mix. Brooks comes out of the libertarian school which says there must be winners and losers and that any rules promoting communal rights put undesirable limitation on the freedom of the rightful winners. It is a very old line of thought. Political individualists preached the survival of the fittest well before Darwin came along. Meanwhile, totalitarians of various stripes denounce the egotistical imperative as treasonble. They take the bee hive as their ideal.
Brooks used his column to dismiss Rousseau and his romantic followers down through today’s psychobabbling therapists and gurus who emphasize “feelings over reason.” Rousseau’s vision, as summarized by Brooks, was a non-theological version of The Fall. We began in Eden alright, but “everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Brooks would replace this view with the Hobbesian one that in a war of all against all, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. As Brooks reports,
Humanity did not come before status contests. Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. People in hunter-gatherer societies were deadly warriors, not sexually liberated pacifists.
We fell before we began. It doesn’t look like Brooks is a conservative who is likely to be trusted much by religious conservatives. But if it was communities with speech and communal morals that evolved, we can flip the tradition of the Fall on its head. Before the appearance of Homo, loving behavior, sacrificing self for the good of one’s neighbor, and a morality based on the idea that the neighbor is one’s equal was a losing proposition in the Darwinian struggle to pass on one’s genes. Now it is an ideal that is lived, to some extent, in almost every life. Even those hunter-gatherer societies that horrify Brooks are notable for their egalitarian structures. Their lives are poor and, often, shorter than ours, but they are neither nasty nor brutish. Well... no more nasty and brutish than my life here in New York City.
It is difficult to generalize about human nature because, although Brooks says it is “universal,” individual lives reflect so many varied tastes and are found in such diverse contexts. That mountain of idiosyncracies is another peculiarity of humans, as reflected in our evolutionary story. We became general-purpose groups, skilled at seizing whatever niche we found and, by using knowledge distributed throughout the group, making it a community. Most animals that are forced to adapt to a new niche evolve specializations for that niche. We have gone the other way, evolving a language faculty that enables us to be part of whatever speaking community we are born into, and perhaps a moral faculty that enables us to participate fairly and justly into whatever community becomes our own.
We are used to favoring either the group or the individual, so I am not sure where thinking even-handedly about these two pillars will lead. Perhaps it will not lead anywhere, for there was one part of Brooks’s piece that was dead on. One hundred and fifty years after The Origin of Species there are still many people who refuse to accept it. If an idea with natural selection's time-tested, explanatory power can still be rejected by supposedly serious people, there seems no reason to expect that even less tested ideas are going to make either egotists or communitarians rethink.
I would just point out that while no serious scientist "rejects" natural selection, many (including mysefl) think it has been given too much importance in theories of evolution.
You mention its "explanatory power," but that is actually the problem. Natural selection is too powerful. It can be used to explain anything (including "P is true" and "P is not true") and therefore it explains nothing.
It is always a relief to read Darwin and find that he realized this as well, making the clear distinction between the actual means of variation (gemmules and other inventions nonsense to us now, but we can't fault him for that) and the forces that act on that variation (natural selection, physical constraints, etc). Natural selection doesn't explain variation, it just explains why some variants survive and others don't - and in rather uninteresting ways, to my mind. The interesting stuff is all about how variation arises - and that can only be investigated by real science studying genetics, biochemistry, development, etc.
Its an important distinction even serious scientists often miss and the public discussion by non-scientists almost always misunderstands.
--------------------------
BLOGGER: One of the advantages we have over Darwin is a pretty good understanding of how heredity works. He had none and was even guessing when he insisted that traits were individually selected. Our genetic knowledge lets us answer many questions about the process of evolution that could only confound the Darwin-Wallace group. Yet, to this day evolution is best understood as changes in the distribution of traits through populations over time; these changes are accounted for, overwhelmingly but not exclusively, by natural selection. At the same time, just as it is not enough to say 'gravity,' when explaining the orbit of a rocket ship, you have to say more than 'natural selection' when explaining evolution. You have to get down to the details and find what were the pressures and counterpressures.
Posted by: TLTB | February 27, 2007 at 04:02 PM
No, they are not accounted for at all by natural selection since natural selection is responsible only for their survival, not their generation. This is not how evolution is 'best understood.' What the study of genetics and evo-devo has taught us over the past 20 years or so is that the adaptionist assumption that evolution proceeds in small, barely discrete steps is a warped picture of how variation likely proceeds. Very small changes in the genetic code or developmental process can lead to cascading effects that can change an organism's form and ability dramatically. The old model of the step-by-small-step gradual speciation can no longer be taken for granted. Yet most, if not all, stories of natural selection (in particular with regards to language) orbit around the assumption that this is the only way evolution proceeds.
Chomsky has pointed out that when one looks at the structure of language, it is difficult to image it developing piece-meal in a step-by-step fashion, suggesting it may have developed as an 'overnight' adaptation. This has drawn down attacks on Chomsky as an "anti-Darwinist," though of course he is nothing of the kind. Clearly language was selected for, or it wouldn't be around today. The question is how we got it in the first place, and natural selection cannot help us there.
If we posit language as an overnight adaptation from what chimps have to what we have, natural selection is easy: clearly there are great advantages to being able to communicate like we do. If we say that first we had gestures and then the larynx lowered, and then the cochlea changed, and then we got syntax, etc., the stories get more complicated, but again natural selection tells us why the species that survived did survive.
What actually happened - the overnight story or the piecemeal story - is an empirical question that cannot be answered by philosophers, but can be answered by scientists investigating the communication systems, minds, and brains of humans and animals. The key is not to get bogged down in this position or that one, as if they can only be argued with and not (dis)proven. They can be (dis)proven by doing normal science.
Posted by: TLTB | February 28, 2007 at 01:58 PM