A Biological Revolution

Stalin as a young man was a much anthologized poet, pretty well settling the question of whether sociopaths can be articulate.

Could we have evolved speech without evolving morality, or morality without evolving speech?

I want to shout, of course we could have. Speech and morality are both peculiar to our species, but that’s a coincidence. We have all seen many a glib sociopath. Stalin was even a pretty good poet in his younger days (see: Simon Montefiore Young Stalin), although the force of his conscience was always limited. But I’ve come across an essay (for publication next year) by a distinguished philosopher of biology, Francisco Ayala, titled, “What the Biological Sciences Can and Cannot Contribute to Ethics” (available here) that has forced me to rethink.

Morality has come up a few times before on this blog. Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser’s book Moral Minds convinced me that the central fact of speech—two people paying joint attention to something—is the result of a revolution in social relationships (see: Ape Communities). Hauser noted that apes are intelligent enough to pursue their own self-interest, but are unconcerned with community interests:

Across several studies of chimpanzees, results show that individuals successfully use information about what another individual knows and intends to guide competitive interactions, while failing to use the same information to guide cooperative interactions. (p. 340)

The conclusion seems clear enough. It is not that apes are too dumb to have any morals. Something else is lacking. In other points, the same point holds for speech. Apes are smart enough to use words, but they do not.

What’s missing from ape thinking is a willingness to take other individuals seriously, to grant them a kind of rough equality that permits an exchange of words. You cannot converse if you cannot listen, and you cannot sustain a conversation if participants cannot be somewhat fair and respectful to one another. These same traits, of course, are morality’s minimal requirements.

Two lists of psychological traits that enable moral and verbal learning show what I mean.

• Hauser listed a series of distinctive behavioral traits of human communities that promote morality: patience, reciprocity, punishment, imitation, and conformity bias. Several of these traits are obviously important to speech, a fact that jumps out when you look at
• Judy Kegl’s list of instincts necessary for the creation of a language. Kegl studied the creation of sign language by deaf children in Nicaragua and said it depended on rhythm/prosody, hunger for language, imitation and peer pressure. (See: 4 Instincts Lead the Way.)

Imitation and conformity bias/peer pressure are on both lists and are unknown to apes. The funny thing is that neither of them has a very good reputation these days. Monkey see, monkey do goes the sneer, yet any visitor to the zoo can seek people imitating monkeys but not vice versa. And kids these days are assigned classes in overcoming peer pressure. Paradoxically, however, despite universal imitation and susceptibility to peer pressure, human communities produce a wider variety of individuals than do ape societies. A reason does not seem hard to discover. Groups based on cooperation benefit when members bring different assets to the table, but a when individuals compete for the same assets they become more and more like one ideal competitor.

By now, some may be wondering where that essay I mentioned about biology and ethics fits into this meditation. It was more a trigger than an inspiration. If I were teaching undergraduates and got Ayala’s effort as a term paper, I’d give it a B with a recommendation for deeper research. I was shocked to find that the author is a graybeard (older than me) with a distinguished career behind him. Its simple thesis is that human rationality has given us a proclivity for judging actions as either right or wrong, but that the norms by which we make these judgments are entirely cultural and have nothing biological (or genetic) about them. Morality is a spandrel, the inevitable consequence of our “exalted rationality.”

The same idea once dominated thinking about the biology of speech: our (biologically based) exalted rationality mades us able to speak, but culture determined the nature of the language. The effort to teach sign-language to apes, however, proved that apes have the brains for some words, there must be some other reason why they don’t use any language at all.

Rationality, even of the “exalted” variety, is not enough to justify either morality or speech. You have to be able to trust others. If you cannot, you would be a fool (unexaltedly irrational) to tell them what you think or give them an even break. (A recent Psychology Today blog post by Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs, available here, reported that our demand for fairness can get in the way of economic rationality so that apes sometimes seem more rational than humans.)

“A man lacking shame can go far in life, especially one who feels no need for friends,” says one of the many narrators in Peter Mattheissen’s novel Shadow Country [p. 743]. Since it works so well for apes, and can work for people too, it is striking that most people can feel shame, guilt, injustice, and a need for friends. Of course, without those things cooperation and all its benefits are impossible too. Without cooperation there is no speaking either nor any morality.

It seems that somewhere between our ape ancestry and us there was a revolution that made cooperation—and therefore speech and morality—possible. It wasn’t the sort of revolution we know from history, which requires speech and a sense of grievance from the outset. Those things were the outcome rather than the input of this revolution. If culture was the outcome, the revolution itself must have been biological, or at least begun that way.

Thus the timeline seems to have been

• Ape competitiveness.
• Biological revolution.
• Human cooperation with speech and a moral sense as its main pillars.

So I’ve changed my mind about the opening question. We could not have evolved speech without evolving morality, or morality without speech. Speech and morality are characteristics of a community rather than an individual, so it does not follow that everyone who speaks well is moral deeply. Yet perhaps it is not a coincidence that the United States became confused about the morality of torture during the tenure of its least articulate president.

Comments

[Rick Thomas]

Your timeline suggests a discontinuity - the biological revolution. But there's a simple argument for a continuum of mutually causal processes. 1) Primate social intelligence increases, effectively expanding the ability to judge the implications of action. 2) Biological processes like sexual selection and the Baldwin effect select for the more intelligent, the more morally capable, the more able to articulate. 3) Pre-humans invent language and moral systems and coevolve with those contexts.

Is it too simple to argue that humans invented language and morals because language and morals are judged good?
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BLOGGER: It probably is too simple. To give a too simple response, I will just note that even today, with long histories of language and morals behind us, it is very difficult to get people to agree to do something because it is good. Conflicts of interest and mistrust complicate all social efforts.

[Rick Thomas]

We must distinguish evolutionary processes from historical processes.

Evolution has left a biological capacity for language and a biological capacity for morals. The processes that created them includes individual and collective choice. Evolution judges them good, by defintion. And so did the primary agents of evolution, the proto-humans.

Evolution doesn't care about historical choices. A "sociopath" is often a person of substandard capacity (Bush) or one who, while capable, acts otherwise (Stalin).

It can't be any other way. "Conflicts of interest and mistrust" are, still, among the most salient drivers of the human evolutionary process.
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BLOGGER: I'm not sure what the dispute is about — or even if there is a dispute, so I'm stepping aside.

[Rick Thomas]

I'll frame it as a dispute if you like. You say "If culture was the outcome, the revolution itself must have been biological, or at least begun that way." That is correct, it began that way. But in every interesting way, culture and biology are peers. You seem content to posit a "revolution" rather than to pursue the implications of coevolution.
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BLOGGER: Ah, I see. So we are disputing over tastes. On this blog I pay a lot of attention to biological origins.

[Rick Thomas]

(What's with the evasive responses??)

I have reread several of your articles that discuss coevolution. Nowhere do you address hypothesis that I mentioned in an attempt to contribute to the discussion - that the animals themselves are the significant agent of change.

Deacon has this blindness as well. He says (SS p329) "For genetic assimilation to take place, this [hypothetical] persistent aspect of language must also impose consistent invariant demands on neural processes...." The answer is plain: it is not an aspect of language but the persistent choice of the language users that present the "invariant demands" on their own neurons.

You will find that this line of thinking will clarify many issues that you leave as mysteries.
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BLOGGER: Well, the reason I've been evading a discussion of the proposition "that the animals themselves are the significant agent of change," is that I did not realize you had proposed it. I'm not sure of your argument from that little snippet, but normally getting from that idea to biological evolution runs us through Lamarckian processes, and hence is discredited from the outset. Baldwinean (pseudo-Lamarckian) processes may be at work, but I have yet to find a case where appealing to them seems necessary (and when I started this blog I expected to say a lot about them).

[Andreas Plischke]

Although Ayala (2009) is not correct and up-to-date in all details of evolutionary biology of human morality (see here for a vivid catch-up http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html), I think he is pointing out an important aspect that is often being neglected when discussing biological roots of cultural mechanisms: biological (i.e. genetic, or material) evolution and cultural (i.e. memetic, or informational) evolution are two separate systems, that are nevertheless interacting and coevolving. The capacity for morality (and language) is part of the former, the contents (the actual moral judgement of an action, or the particular language that one speaks) are part of the latter system. Cultural evolution is much more flexible than material evolution, but still - as culture is a behavioural trait of biological organisms - there are constraints imposed by natural selection. This does not mean that every particular cultural behaviour has an obvious and straightforward biological advantage for its performer. Darwinian fitness is per definitionem environment-dependent, and the fitness effects of a cultural behaviour depends on the cultural environment (e.g. while brown skin is considered attractive nowadys in Western cultures, it was for centuries a signal of lower social class, identifying fieldworkers, so white skin was the beauty standard).
In the same way that it is impossible to make future predictions about genetic evolution -as it involves random processes- it is impossible to make predictions about cultural evolution, let alone to derive one from the other in a circular argument. Making suggestions for the norms of ethics on the basis of evolutionary biology is a logical overdetermination.

[term paper writing]

The good thing about your information is that it is explicit enough for students to grasp. Thanks for your efforts in spreading academic knowledge.