2048. An Ecological Socialist's Reflection on Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology

By Kamran Nayeri, October 16, 2015

I. My intent and focus

There are dozens of reviews of Edward O. Wilson’s recent two books, The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) [hereon TSCE], and The Meaning of Human Existence (2014) [hereon TMHE], some by distinguished biologists.  The intent and focus of this review is different. As a life-long activist for radical social change and an ecological socialist, I wish to see what can be learned from Wilson’s work to advance these political projects.  I am fascinated by and sympathetic with Wilson’s intellectual quest for biological underpinnings of the human condition. Are we not biological beings? Do we not wonder about Paul Gauguin’s famous questions given as the title to his most famous painting: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” (D’où Venons Nous/Que Sommes Nous/Où Allons Nous, 1897) which frame’s Wilson’s two books?  Like Stephen Hawking who in  The Grand Design (2010) argues that longstanding philosophical questions about the nature of reality can now best be answered by advances in physics, Wilson asserts that evolutionary biology is key to a definitive answer to Gauguin’s questions.  But Wilson’s sociobiology has raised controversy. In the perennial debate over the role of “nature” and “nurture, Wilson offers an expansive view that claims that in the final analysis evolution through natural selection determines who we are and at the same time attempts to weave together sciences with the humanities and social sciences to give rise to a New Enlightenment.  

In Part II of the review, I will outline Wilson’s most basic arguments in these books.  In Part III, I will outline two lines of criticism of Wilson’s work: one from supporters of kin selection and another from dialectical biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin.  In part IV, I will offer my own critical reflections.

II. Sociobiology

Wilson’s argument in these two books further develop and refines his theory of sociobiology (Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 1975), which he defines in On Human Nature (1978) as “[t]he extension of population biology and evolutionary theory to social organization.”  By social organization Wilson means the way in which eusocial species live: cooperative brood care (including brood care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups.  Wilson books are largely given to the study of the emergence of eusociality and why it is so limited (only about two dozen species, only human among the Great Apes, that are eusocial).  

The dominant view of human nature during the past century has been the “blank slate” theory which is based on John Locke’s Tabula rasa that denies inborn mental content for humans arguing that all human traits are culturally acquired.  But if humans are in fact animals and other animals demonstrate at least some behavior that are inborn then perhaps human nature also includes inborn traits.

Thus, the notion of co-evolutionary biological, environmental and cultural determination of social behavior and organization is an attractive approach.  In fact, Wilson’s readers are treated with an exquisite discussion of long chain evolutionary transformations that have led to modern humans.  The question is how much of this co-evolutionary development of nature and culture continues with the emergence of the Homo genus.  This part of Wilson’s narrative is subject to criticism as we will see in Part 2. 

Since Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1999), Wilson has argued that once the biological underpinnings for human condition are discovered it is possible to work for integration of sciences with the humanities and social sciences. In the books under review Wilson continues this line of inquiry.  TSCE has a discussion of how culture and language evolved and diverged. He discussed origins of morality and honor and creative arts. In TMHE  he continues with his earlier discussion of instinct, religion, and free will.  In the interest of brevity, I can only state that he is more persuasive in some and unconvincing in some others (I will return to these issues in Parts 2 and 3).

In comparison to other two questions posed by Gaugin, Wilson spends much less space on the question of where we are going. He ends both books with a short chapter on his idea of New Enlightenment which at the risk of oversimplification can be characterized as an ecologically aware modernism.  

On human nature

For Wilson, human nature is defined by “the inherited regularities of mental development common to our species.” (TSCE, p. 193)  

Wilson argues that these “regularities” are enforced by epigenetic rules that are themselves products of “interaction of genetic and cultural evolution” in Homo genus that emerged some 2.8 million years ago. 

“… [T]he ‘epigenetic rules’ which evolved by the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution that occurred over a long period in deep prehistory.  These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we automatically open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make.” (ibid.)

Moreover, Wilson writes: 

“The behaviors created by epigenetic rules are not hardwired like reflexes. It is the epigenetic rules instead that are hardwired, and hence compose the true core of human nature.  These behaviors are learned, but the process is what psychologists call ‘prepared.’ In prepared learning, we are innately predisposed to learn and thereby reinforce one option over another.” (TSCE, p. 194, my emphasis) 

Once established, epigenetic rules contribute to further gene-culture co-evolution.  Wilson cites lactose tolerance as the textbook example of what ecologists call “niche construction” that occurred in recent millennia. Another, more ancient such gene-culture co-evolution Wilson discusses is incest avoidance that occurs across human cultures and in other species as well.  

Wilson observes that human behavior is conflicted by selfish and selfless traits. To account for it, he utilizes Darwin’s own multilevel individual and groups selections.  (Mirsky, 2008)  Individual selection is non-controversial but cannot account for social (altruist) behavior.  Evolutionary biologists have largely accepted kin selection model first proposed in 1955 by J. B. S. Haldane but more fully laid out by William D. Hamilton in 1964.  It proposes that “kin recognize one another and form altruistic groups because relatives share the same genes and can still place those genes in the next generation, even if they fail to do so by having offsprings of their own.”  (TSCE, p. 165)  Wilson himself was a leading advocate of kin selection and gave it a predominant position in his writings in the 1970s, including in Sociobiology.  In books under review, Wilson gives an account of how he began to suspect the incorrectness of Hamilton’s theory (see, for example, chapter 18 in TSCE).  

In 1994, David Sloan Wilson (no relation to E. O. Wilson) and Elliott Sober argued for multi-level selection, including group selection, on the grounds that groups, like individuals, could compete. In “The Evolution of Eusociality,” (Nature, August 26, 2010), Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson used sophisticated mathematical methodology that showed that limitations of the kin selection model based on the concept of inclusive fitness and argued  

“… [t]hat standard natural selection theory in the context of precise models of population structure represents a simpler and superior approach, allows the evaluation of multiple competing hypotheses, and provides an exact framework for interpreting empirical observations.” (ibid.)

Group selection holds that “hereditary altruists form groups so cooperative and well organized as to outcompete non-altruist groups.” (TSCE, p. 165) 

In TSCE and TMHE, Wilson describes how eusociality evolved in insects and in humans and he explains some consequences of it. 

III. Criticism 

Criticism by proponents of kin selection

Not being a biologist, I defer to biologists to provide criticism of Wilson’s arguments.  I outline two strands of criticism here.  First, there are evolutionary biologists who continue to subscribe to the kin selection model and see Wilson’s rejection of it in favor of group selection an unjustified assault on their long-held view of how natural selection operates.  Thus, Jerry  A. Coyne, a University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, writes about TSCE in “Genes First” as  being “devoid of merit except for tidbits about biology and anthropology.”  Richard Dawkins whose The Selfish Gene (1976) popularized kin selection selling over one million copies wrote a review of TSCE entitled “The Descent of Edward Wilson” (Prospect, June 2012).  Dawkins based his criticism on the rejection of Wilson’s use of group selection model by some 140 evolutionary biologists. He lists some of them in his review.

“They include Alan Grafen, David Queller, Jerry Coyne, Richard Michod, Eric Charnov, Nick Barton, Alex Kacelnik, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Geoffrey Parker, Steven Pinker, Paul Sherman, Tim Clutton-Brock, Paul Harvey, Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Stephen Emlen, Malte Andersson, Stuart West, Richard Wrangham, Bernard Crespi, Robert Trivers and many others. These may not all be household names but let me assure you they know what they are talking about in the relevant fields.”

However, as Wilson responded to such critics, the article in the highly respected scientific journal Nature was peer-reviewed by some of the best experts in the field and to date there has not been any refutation of it published anywhere. 

Levins’ criticism of sociobiology

The second line of criticism I will discuss is leveled by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin who have long practiced and advocated a dialectical approach to biology. (Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 1985; most relevant to this discussion are chapters “1. Evolution as Theory and Ideology,” “13. What Is Human Nature?” and “Conclusion: Dialectics.”)  In “Is Human Behavior Controlled by Genes?” (2012) Levins reviews TSCE.  He gives Wilson credit for fighting against biological reductionism but criticizes him for reducing social and behavioral sciences to biology.  

He agrees with Wilson that “[o]ur lives are restrained by two laws of biology: all of life’s entities and processes are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry; and all of life’s entities and processes have arisen through evolution and natural selection.” (TSCE, p. 287)  But he criticizes Wilson for ignoring interactions among levels of analysis.  In particular, he argues Wilson does not consider how the social level alters the biological. “Or biology is a socialized biology,” Levins writes.

To illustrate, Levins notes that a few animals, such as bears, are omnivores like humans. But that label’s utility is limited to such things as comparing digestive systems across species that are omnivores.  However, when humans “produce food, turning inedibles to edibles, the transitory into stored food. This has had such a profound effect on our lives that it is also legitimate to refer to us as something new, "productivore.” Thus, Levins argues humans have developed various modes of production, that these have varied across time and each has its specific internal dynamics and relation with the rest of nature.  

“Division of society into classes changes how natural selection works, who is exposed to what diseases, who eats and who doesn’t eat….It is no longer possible to prescribe the direction of natural selection for the whole species.”

As for Wilson’s discussion of human nature, Levins argues that beyond its general capacities there is widespread disagreement about which behaviors or attitudes are expressions of brain structure.  “The amygdala is a locus of emotion, but does it tell us to be angry or rejoice? It is an ancient part of our brains, but has it not evolved in response to what the rest of the brain is doing?”

“Every part of an organism is the environment for the rest of the organism, setting the context for natural selection.  In contrast to this fluid viewpoint, phrases such as ‘hardwired’ have become part of the pop vocabulary, applied promiscuously to all sorts of behaviors.

“In a deeper sense, asking if something is heritable is a nonsense question. Heritability is always a comparison: how much of the difference between humans and chimps is heritable? What about the differences between ourselves and Neanderthals? Between nomads and farmers?” 

Levins seems sympathetic to Wilson’s quest for understanding the emergence of eusocial species, including humans, and why they are so few of them.   He calls Wilson “at his best” in his discussion of “the origins of social behavior 220 million years ago for termites, 150 million years for ants, 70-80 million years for humble bees and honey bees.” But he argues that as Wilson 

“gets closer to humanity the reductionist biases that informed Sociobiology reassert themselves. Once again Wilson argues that brain architecture determines what people do socially – that war, aggression, morality, honor and hierarchy are part of ‘human nature.’”

Levins welcomes Wilson’s break with kin selection.  However, he takes exception with Wilson’s embrace of group selection that in combination individual selection to explain social behavior.  Quoting Wilson that “[w]e are an evolutionary chimera living on intelligence steered by the demands of animal instinct. This is the reason we are mindlessly dismantling the biosphere and with it, our own prospects for permanent existence” (TSCE, p. 13) Levins writes:

“For Wilson, as for many environmentalists, the driver of ecological destruction is some generic ‘we,’ who are all in the same boat. But since the emergence of classes after the adoption of agriculture some 8-10,000 years ago it is no longer appropriate to talk of a collective ‘we.’”

He concludes: 

“In a book that attempts such a wide-ranging panorama of human evolution, there are bound to be errors. But the errors in The Social Conquest of Earth form a pattern: they reduce social issues to biology, and they insist on our evolutionary continuity with other animals while ignoring the radical discontinuity that made us productivores and divided us into classes.”

Lewontin’s criticism of sociobiology

Lewontin has written about and lectured on dialectical biology for a long time and like Levins has been critical of sociobiology.  I particularly enjoyed reading his “Sociobiology as an Adaptationist Program” (1979) in which he also takes on Wilson’s Sociobiology (1976).   First, he dissects sociobiological theory into three elements: description, heritability, and adaptive story.  He then criticizes each element.  Description faces the daunting task of which behaviors are the correct set to consider. These problems include arbitrary agglomeration, reification, conflation and confusion of levels of analysis.  Heritability is problematic due to genetic variation in a given species.  The problem of adaptive story is in individual and kin selections (Wilson was a proponent of kin selection in the 1970s are discussed above).  Lewontin offers an outline of an alternative approach to sociobiology.  He concludes by stating the sociobiological theory can make lasting contribution to our understanding of evolution if it abandons the “naive adaptationist program that now characterizes human sociobiology and become very much more explicit about the epistemological and methodological difficulties it faces.”  

“To do so will require that sociobiologists abandon their claim to universal explanation of all human social phenomena and accept a much more modest goal of providing well-founded explanation, say, caste formation in social insects…By being less grandiose in its project, sociobiology may become more fruitful in its outcome.” (ibid., p. 14). 

Thirty-six years later, last March 2015 in an interview with David Sloan Wilson (no relations to E. O. Wilson). (“The Spandrels of San Marco Revisited: An Interview with Richard C. Lewontin,” March 29, 2015)  Lewontin criticism of Wilson’s recent work is less severe. He still criticizes Wilson for attributing traits to human nature without sufficient reason.  But his main problem is with Wilson search for determinants of human nature.

“My main complaint is not the list of specific manifestations but the underlying claim that there exists a human nature, which then the claimant must give examples of, and so each claimant gives examples that are convenient for his or her pet theory. I think the worst thing we can do in science is to create concepts where what is included or not included within the concept is not delimited to begin with. It allows us to claim anything. That’s my problem with Sociobiology. It’s too loose.”

IV. My reflection

Three critical differences

In his The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1972), the British analytical philosopher Bertrand Russell concludes about human knowledge that “the only difference between science and philosophy is, that science is what you more or less know and philosophy is what you do not know.” (ibid., p. 124)  A key difference between Wilson and others who argue for a sociobiological theory and their dialectical biology critics such as Levins and Lewontin is in their respective estimation of current biological knowledge that can serve as the basis for understanding human behavior.   Wilson believes there is sufficient knowledge to propose an outline of a sociobiological theory. Levins and Lewontin argue that we just don’t know enough. 

A second important difference is in the underlying epistemological and methodological views of human nature.  Wilson clearly believes that aside from individual variations there is a significant set of characteristics that define us as humans and that these are explainable through evolution by natural selection.  However, as Levins and Lewontin point out that in sociobiological theory “the individual is ontologically prior to the social organization, it is genetically determined human nature that gives shape to society.” (Levins and Lewontin, 1985, p. 254).  It so happens that conservative ideologues use a similar approach to society by arguing that class society and class rule are justified by some innate human nature.  Neoclassical economists, for example, argue for the notion of Homo economicus is consistent with human nature which justifies the capitalist society.    

Thus, Levins and Lewontin criticize the very notion of human nature.  

“The trouble with the question of human nature is that it is the wrong question.  Partly the question reflects the analysis we bring to understanding human political and social life, and partly it carries a vestige of Platonic idealism.  The evident fact about human life is the incredible diversity in individual life histories and in social organization across space and time. The attempt to understand this diversity by looking for some underlying ideal uniformity, called ‘human nature,’ of which the manifest variation is only a shadow, is reminiscent of pre-Darwinian idealism of biological thought.” (ibid.) 

However, this view tends to narrow the scope of the discussion of human nature to class societies that are only some 5,000 years old.  This narrow time span does not really lend itself to a discussion of evolution by natural selection and whether and how a human nature emerged.  In contrast, Wilson looks at the much longer span of time, deep into our prehistory, at least the past 2.8 million years, to the emergence of the Homo genus.  

Further, Levins and Lewontin endorse Frederick Engels’ focus on “[t]he very strong feedback between what people did and how they changed” in “The Role Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man” (1876).  (Levins and Lewontin, 1985, p. 253).   In his review of TSCE Levins actually, argues that humans are uniquely “productivore.” Could we say that is human nature?  But then again, the earliest possible “productivores” emerged when Homo erectus controlled fire some 400,000 years ago.  But we know that our ancestors continued to mostly subside as foragers, by various combinations of gathering, collecting, scavenging, fishing and hunting until the emergence of first farmers some 10,000 years ago.  Then again, even if being “productivore” is a uniquely human trait it coincides with the human history that Marx and Engels describe in their historical materialist outline as centered on modes of production.  

Thus, Levins' and Lewontin’s discussion of human nature argues that even the most basic traits of humanity such as eating and sex are affected by the mode of production and it's attending social organization that gives differential access according to class position. Their discussion of human nature dissolves into the search for an appropriate political program for radical social change (ibid. pp. 264-65). 

A third key difference is an emphasis on continuity or discontinuity with the Great Apes and other species in the Homo genus. As already noted, Levins and Lewontin emphasize our discontinuity with other animals by stressing our “productivore” character. While Wilson does praise humans as a special eusocial species that emerged with a large brain enabling us to reflect on the rest of the universe and on ourselves and generate civilization itself, he sees these as the product of a long evolutionary chain of cause and effect underscoring our continuity with the rest of the animal kingdom. Thus, while for Wilson the prehistory of humans looms large for Levins and Lewontin our history is essential.

Let me use Gauguin’s three questions to evaluate Wilson discussion in light of dialectical biology criticism.  Where do we come from? Levins praises Wilson for his delineation of evolution up to the rise of eusocial insects: termites, ants and humble bee and the honey bee.  However, Levins argues that Wilson’s account becomes problematic the closer it gets to the rise of the human species as his reductionist biases reassert themselves and he ends up arguing that social issues such as war, aggression, morality, honor, and hierarchy are part of “human nature.”

While I agree with Levins’ concerns, I find Wilson’s argument in his recent books quoted above to be more nuanced about how biology plays a role in who we are. Wilson argues that epigenetic rules predispose species, as in “prepared learning” in psychology, to favor certain choices over others.  This view is not mechanical biological determinism or biological deterministic that argues our behavior is determined by genes.  While Wilson says epigenetic rules are “hardwired” he also argues they are codetermined by genes, environment, and culture interaction. Given that even in On Human Nature (1978) Wilson suggested that culture determines 90% of our behavior, genes only 10%, it seems inaccurate to state that his most recent writings are biological determinist.  Still, it is true that Wilson lacks an explicit socioeconomic and cultural theory to understand human history. This leaves him vulnerable to biological determinist biases (see, for example, John Horgan’s “New Study of Foragers Undermines Claim That War Has Deep Evolutionary Roots,” 2015).  Similar biases are at the core of the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: why Violence Has Declined (2011) and Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from the Traditional Societies (2012)  (For critical reviews see, Peter Gray’s review of Pinker’s book, Stephen Cory’s review of both books, and Richard Lee’s “Hunter-Gatherers on the Best-Seller List: Steven Pinker and the “Bellicose School’s” Treatment of Forager Violence,” 2014)

The claim that there is no human nature runs against thousands of year of longing to understand what it is that make us human from the Indian and Chinese philosophy in the first millennium BCE to the present day (for a collection of such texts see Kupperman, 2012).  To look at the problem from a different angle, if animate life arose out of inanimate nature then we admit inorganic matter can give rise to organic matter and life itself without any intervention of biology or culture. As the first living organisms emerged, their interaction with their environment made for the unfolding of the evolutionary process that eventually led to the rise of the eusocial insects. Here interaction of genes and environment seem to have been the main drivers. With the rise of the Homo genus, the development of culture begins to interact with genetic and environmental factors.  Clearly, the further culture developed the more influential it has become. So, Levins and Lewontin are correct to emphasize social factors in human evolution since the rise of civilization.   However, this does not negate Wilson’s overall goal to search for how the interaction of epigenetic, environmental and cultural factors could explain our evolution. Wilson's key shortcoming lies in his lack of consideration of sociocultural theories that explain in his own estimation the large majority of effects.  

It is true that in the final analysis, Wilson’s current model of human behavior gives primacy to biology.  “The more we learn about our physical existence, the more apparent it becomes that even the most complex forms of human behavior are ultimately biological.” (Wilson, TSCE, p. 288) But Marx’s and Engels' theory and methodology that inform Levins' and Lewontin’s own dialectical biology similarly assigns primacy to the “economic base” in understanding human history: “The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure, the real basis on which rises a legal and political superstructure. . .” (Marx, Contribution to Critique of Political Economy, Preface, 1859)   In fact, Marx has been criticized for economic determinism. However, some proponents of historical materialism have proposed a more dialectical relationship between the “base” and “superstructure” to avoid an economic deterministic error in understanding human history.  Cannot Wilson’s attempt to answer Gauguin’s questions get help from a more dialectical approach for the period from the emergence of the Homo genus up to the emergence of Homo sapiens and complete it with an adequate theory of history which he clearly lacks?  

While I think I sympathize with Lewontin's criticism that Wilson goes too far out on a limb trying to synthesize biology with the humanities and social sciences through sociobiology, and that by doing so he ventures outside the realm of biological inquiry, Marx and Marxists can be similarly accused of venturing too far out from a critique of political economy to explain some of the same social behavior that is certainly in part due to our biology. As some of the key problems of our times are clearly specific to the present capitalist mode of production, others such as religion and war, date back to prehistory but are now re-articulated in a capitalist world economy.  

Where are we going?

How about Gauguin’s final question? Where are we going? For Wilson, the answer is in evolution by multilevel selection (group and individual selection combining altruistic and selfish behavior).  “We, all of us, live our lives in conflict and contention.” (ibid.) These conflicting social behavior and feelings are the domain of the humanities and social science.  The confusion of our conflicted feeling and behavior is compounded by our need to find answers to existential questions that first were posed for our ancestors probably some 100,000 or 75,000 years ago when they acquired a full recognition of their personal mortality.  This led to mythical stories about our existence and in time to organized religions.  Thus, for Wilson overcoming religious and non-scientific view of the world in favor of a scientific one, of rational mind over irrational mind is the road to human fulfillment. He calls this the New Enlightenment which is an extension of his humanism: 

“[H]umanity is far and away life’s greatest achievement. We are the mind of the biosphere, the solar system, and—who can say?—perhaps the galaxy….We will soon create simple organisms in the laboratory. We have learned the history of the universe and look almost to its edge.” (ibid. p. 288)    

Human fulfillment will arrive with the triumph of scientific rational though and homogenizing and universalizing trends in history to cumulate in a New Enlightenment.  Thus, Wilson is an ecologically sensitive modernist. 

Levins perceptively notes that the division of society into social classes “changes how natural selection works….It is no longer possible to prescribe the direction of natural selection for the whole species.”  Thus, he illuminates an aspect of human civilization that is lacking in Marx’s and Engels’ historical materialism.  Thus, Levins and Lewontin utilize historical materialism to demonstrate how social stratification caused by modes of production, in particular by capitalism, differentially affect the operation of natural selection.  Given this, we must ask how Levins and Lewontin might respond to the question of where we are going.  In the concluding part of the chapter on the human nature in The Dialectical Biologist, they write that as materialists we do not search for universal or superior goals within ourselves. Instead, our starting point “is the real struggles of peoples for a better life….The core of our vision of the new is the negation of our deeply felt suffering in the exiting order.” (Levins and Lewontin, 1985, p. 264)  However, their vision of the future is fluid. 

“There is no final state. …[A]lthough as revolutionaries we struggle for those arrangements that make different emancipating goals compatible, we cannot foresee with any real accuracy the problems that will arise or the new aspirations that people will have who grow up in a new society.” (ibid. p. 265)

Just as Marx’s theory of the proletariat and the socialist revolution were formulated as the historical response to the unfolding of the “laws of motion” of the capitalist society of their time, in today’s world we must recognize ecological socialism as the response to the combined social and ecological crisis of the world capitalist economy.  

Evolution and Ecological socialism

In his Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (1990), philosopher James Rachels argues that “moral rules are species-neutral: the same rules that govern our treatment of humans should also govern our treatment of non-humans.” (p. 208). 

There is a certain tension between Wilson the naturalist and Wilson the humanist. It is the tension between ascribing both to evolution by natural selection and anthropocentrism. Although Wilson's approach to evolution is anti-teleological, he takes great pain to walk his reader through many evolutionary coincidences that let to eusociality and to humans, he still characterizes humans as special, in fact as the pinnacle, of the evolutionary process because of our large brain and complex and rational mind.  But these are purely anthropocentric values.  Wilson details how many other species excel well beyond humans in their senses and abilities.  Would it be correct to hold them to be the pinnacle of the evolutionary process for their amazing powers? At the same time, Homo sapiens could be justifiably described as the invasive species par excellence as Wilson is keenly aware of the planetary crisis caused by our species.  How does he explain the root cause of this crisis?   Lacking a social theory, he might fall back on the conflicted view of human nature. And although there is nothing in his theorizing that justifies overcoming selfishness with altruism he lands on the side of optimism for a New Enlightenment.

However, there are in fact social explanations for the combined social and ecological crisis of our time.   Take, for example, climate change.  Scientists agree that it is caused by “man-made” greenhouse gasses mostly from burning fossil fuels.  Exxon corporation has known about this since the 1970s but has chosen to wage a disinformation campaign to cast doubt on the scientific consensus about its cause delaying policy response (see, Naomi Oreskes’s  “Exxon’s Climate Concealment,” October 9, 2015).  In this, it has been joined by other fossil fuel companies and forces that oppose government regulation of “free enterprise.” It is well known among economists that in the global capitalist economy individual countries have no incentive to limit emissions that bring them economic benefits as long as they do not have to share its costs.  It is a typical free-rider problem.  Thus, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that industrial capitalist world economy is the cause of climate change and what holds humanity back from addressing it.  Similar explanations exist for all other ecological problems of our time. In fact, the Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Curtzen and ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer have argued that we live in a new geological epoch in which one species, Homo sapiens, has come to shape the Earth’s geology in ways that undermine life-sustaining environment and ecology, setting off planetary crises.  They called it the Anthropocene and suggest it might have begun with the introduction of the steam engine (although they have left open the possibility that it began much earlier). Thus, no reasonable person, much less an eminent scientist who deeply cares for life on earth, can argue we can deal with the root cause of the planetary crisis without transcending a particular socioeconomic system humans have built—world capitalism. 

Marx and Engels view of history is of class societies driven by internally generated struggles. They explained that with the advent of the Agricultural Revolution the possibility of economic surplus arose and with it the basis for social stratification and emergence of social classes defined by a given mode of production. 

A neglected but crucial aspect of this world-historic transition is the cultural revolution from the ecocentric world views of hunter-gathers to anthropocentric world views of early farmers.  It is still an open question whether the anthropocentric view emerged before the transition to farming or during or after the transition was initiated. However, we know that anthropocentrism was consolidated and became the common ideological pillar of all class societies since.  Anthropocentrism marked our alienation from nature because hunter-gatherer bands held cosmologies that viewed them as organically connected with all life and inanimate objects in nature. With the rise of civilization alienation from nature deepened and the need to dominate and control nature increased.  The resulting class societies emerged precisely because the early agriculturalists eventually succeeded in developing a surplus economy by exploiting domesticated flora and fauna, the early systematic cases of artificial selection. The economic surplus made it possible to extend alienation from nature to social alienation through social stratification and multifaceted oppression and exploitation of some humans by others.  As Barker (2006, pp. 38-39) observes, domestication of flora and fauna led to “domestication of the [farmers] mind.” While it is true, as Levins writes, that with the rise of class societies natural selection began to affect humanity differentially across social groups, it is even more crucial and true that artificial selection intervened ever more deeply in the lives untold non-human species. The case for domesticated flora and fauna has been well-known and in fact set Darwin on his path to the discovery of evolution by natural selection (for an especially gross recent example, see the Silver Fox Experiment in the Soviet Union).  However, wildlife has also been subject to heavy evolutionary pressure from human civilization. Throughout history, civilizations have either dominated and controlled other species or sought to annihilate them.  Anyone who has gardened or knows of gardening also knows how selectively we propagate domesticated species and how violently we eradicate those we do not like.  In the great majority of cases wildlife species simply cannot keep pace with the radical, expansive and fast pace of change humans have brought to their habitat causing them to dwindle in numbers and range or/and disappear. The Sixth Extinction is the most tragic consequence of artificial selection and other activities of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist society.  Thus, in “Economics, Socialism, and Ecology: A Critical Outlines, Part 2” (Nayeri, 2013) I have argued that the advent of the Agricultural Revolution should be viewed as the onset of the Anthropocene and to address the root cause of the current combined crisis of society and nature we must transcend the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization.  Ecological socialism in this sense can provide us with the mode of productions that can eliminate class conflict and re-establish our conscious connection with the rest of nature. If we succeed we can be confident that we are genuinely capable of making our own history and improve our own human nature. 

References:

Barker, Graeme.  The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory.  2006.

Corry, Stephen. “Savaging Primitives: Why Jared Diamond’s ‘The World Until Yesterday’ Is Completely Wrong.” The Daily Beast, January 30, 2013. 

———————-.  “Why Steven Pinker, Like Jared Diamond, Is Wrong,” truthout.com, June 11, 2013. 

Coyne, Jerry A.  “Genes First: Review of E. O. Wilson’s ‘The Social Conquest of Earth.”  Why Evolution Is True. December 12, 2014. 

Dawkins, Richard.  The Selfish Gene. 1976.  

—————————    “The Descent of Edward Wilson,” Prospect, June 2012. 

Diamond, Jared. The Wold Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from the Traditional Societies. 2012

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2036. The Spandrels Of San Marco Revisited: An Interview With Richard C. Lewontin

By David Sloan Wilson, The Evolution Institute, March 29, 2015

Richard Lewontin

One of the most widely cited and discussed articles in evolutionary biology is “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme”, which was written by Harvard biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1979. Their critique of their own field of evolutionary biology spilled out of the Ivory Tower onto the pages of general intellectual forums such as the New York Review of Books.

Gould died in 2002 but his coauthor is still active. Richard C. Lewontin is a population geneticist by training and pioneered the method of gel electrophoresis among many other accomplishments. His academic books include The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (1974), which I eagerly read as a graduate student. His biological books for the general public include The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (2002) and Human Diversity (part of the Scientific American Library Series; 1982). In his role as social critic and theorist, his books include Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health (with Richard Levins; 2007), It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (2001), Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1993), and Not in Our Genes: Biology Ideology, and Human Nature (with Leon J. Kamin and Steven Rose; 1984). Finally, Lewontin has served as a mentor for many PhD and postdoctoral students, in philosophy in addition to biology, including my longstanding philosophical collaborator Elliott Sober.

I talked by phone with Lewontin on March 2 2015. In his mid-eighties, he is still scientifically active and could recall his collaboration with Gould in detail. Our conversation is highly relevant to the “Just so story” critique that is frequently leveled against Evolutionary Psychology.

DSW: I’m so happy to be talking with you and thanks for making the time.

RL: I don’t know if anything I can say to you at this stage has any usefulness.

DSW: I think that is overly humble on your part.

RL: You can’t be overly humble.

DSW: That’s true. Humility is a religious virtue but it is also a secular virtue and a scientific virtue. I couldn’t agree more. I am interested among other things in social history. To get started, you are one of the preeminent evolutionary biologists of our time—many achievements. In 1979 you felt the need to write this article with Stephen Jay Gould that became a classic.

RL: Sorry—which article is that?

DSW (laughs): The Spandrels of San Marco.

RL: I thought it was but I didn’t remember the exact date.

DSW: I wonder if you could tell me—what were the circumstances that moved you and Steve Gould to write this article?

RL: Sure, I can give it to you in detail. I was invited by, I think it was the Royal Society, to come and give a lecture. For one reason or another that I can’t remember, I couldn’t go. So I asked if it would be alright if I asked Steve Gould if he would go in my place–Steve and I were teaching evolution together—and they said sure. So Steve went and he gave a talk from the standpoint of what interested him at the time, which was the notion that some traits arise simply as a structural byproduct of selection on other traits, and he chose to call them spandrels. I did make a contribution to the written version of that article, but most of it was Steve’s.

DSW: Ok!

RL: Now I should warn you about my prejudices. Steve and I taught evolution together for years and in a sense we struggled in class constantly because Steve, in my view, was preoccupied with the desire to be considered a very original and great evolutionary theorist. So he would exaggerate and even caricature certain features, which are true but not the way you want to present them. For example, punctuated equilibrium, one of his favorites. He would go to the blackboard and show a trait rising gradually and then becoming completely flat for a while with no change at all, and then rising quickly and then completely flat, etc. which is a kind of caricature of the fact that there is variability in the evolution of traits, sometimes faster and sometimes slower, but which he made into punctuated equilibrium literally. Then I would have to get up in class and say “Don’t take this caricature too seriously. It really looks like this…” and I would make some more gradual variable rates. Steve and I had that kind of struggle constantly. He would fasten on a particular interesting aspect of the evolutionary process and then make it into a kind of rigid, almost vacuous rule, because—now I have to say that this is my view—I have no demonstration of it—that Steve was really preoccupied by becoming a famous evolutionist.

DSW: So he was trying to grab center stage at every opportunity.

RL: Yeah, I think so.

DSW: Is the Spandrels paper like that?

RL: Well, I made a lesser contribution than he did. Most of the Spandrels paper was written by Steve. There is a section in there, which one can easily pick out, where I discuss the various factors and forces of evolution…

DSW: Yes, I can see that division.

RL: That paper never would have been written by us as a joint paper if I hadn’t asked Steve to go to the Royal Society and give a talk in my place.

DSW: Fascinating! To what extent was this paper motivated, either for you or Steve, by Sociobiology?

RL: Well, I don’t know to what extent it was motivated. Sociobiology was certainly contextually relevant. I think we would have written exactly the same paper if Sociobiology had never come into existence. Looking back, that’s hard to say, but I think the idea was to avoid selective caricatures, the making up of selective stories just because you felt you had to. That is, as you are aware, a very common phenomenon in writing about and teaching evolution. For example, why is blood red? The fact that hemoglobin happens to have that absorption spectrum in the visible is not sufficient for some people, who have to show that it’s a good thing that blood is red because it scares off predators who come and scratch you and stuff like that. So we had a lot of that sort of thing to deal with—what we called “Just so stories”.

DSW: So forget about Sociobiology—basically, you saw naïve adaptationism being a problem in general in the field of evolutionary biology?

RL: Exactly. It was really not Sociobiology itself, but a tendency to try to find, in every instance, some selective advantage for things. We were teaching the students—and Steve was not as keen on that as I was—that there are a whole variety of forces that give rise to observed traits and they are not all directly selected for.

DSW: This interests me very much. I’m interested to know that was the primary motivation for the article, not Sociobiology.

RL: Yeah.

DSW: What’s the right way to do it? When I talk about the adaptationist program, I say that an adaptationist hypothesis is often the best way to start because it doesn’t require much information to know what an organism should be like to be well adapted to its environment. So it’s a good starting point, although certainly not the end point. Then the inquiry can go in a direction where you decide—as with the color of blood, by the way, an example that I use myself—that this is probably not an adaptation. You can arrive at the truth of the matter. But thinking in adaptationist terms is part of the process. So what’s the way to do it right and what’s the role of adaptationist thinking in an appropriate procedure?

RL: Well (laughs), you’re asking me what the right way to do it is. I think the right way is to start with the sentence: “We do not have any hard evidence of the forces leading to the following evolutionary change.” There has to be a prelude to the discussion of evolutionary change to make it clear that although the theory of natural selection is very important and happens lots, there are other forces, or other mechanisms, that lead to change and we are not obliged by being Darwinians and being evolutionists to invent adaptive explanations for all changes. I think that’s where you have to start. Then, as either a philosopher or biologist, ask in a particular case what is the direct evidence, besides the desire that we want to find something, that a particular story is true or not true. Most of the time we’re going to have to say that this happened in the Eocene or the Paleocene and we haven’t the foggiest notion of why it happened. I think the admission of necessary ignorance of historically remote things is the first rule of intellectual honesty in evolution.

DSW: Good. Thank you for saying that so clearly. At the same time, sometimes the past can be inferred with amazing certainty. All the historical sciences are like that, right?

RL: Right. And so, I think that the right general strategy for explanation, writing, and teaching is to begin with some really clear cut cases where we have in our very hands the evidence for a particular causal pathway–a greater reproduction and survivorship of one form versus another–and then move from that to living cases where we’re not quite so sure because we can’t actually count the number of offspring of each type, and so on, to somewhat hazier cases, and then go back to extinct organisms and evolutionary past and say, we could make up a good story, but we don’t know how to show that it’s really true.

DSW: Right. There is the humility again that began our conversation. Although I have to say that it was the lack of humility, in part, that caused the Spandrels article to become so widely read. Steve Gould the showman put that on center stage and it became a three ring circus for a long time, as you know. The adaptation wars and all that. I don’t know whether that is good or bad.

RL: All we can say is that sometimes the stories are right and sometimes they’re wrong. One way to deal with this is to take a case where we can in fact—because it’s present and we have the organisms, and we really test what’s going on. Take such a case and put it aside and don’t even mention the result of our determined discovery about it, and make up three stories, all of which sound perfectly biologically realistic and reasonable, and then give the right answer and say now, aside from the necessary observations and experiments—forget the real answer, why should we choose one of these versus another?

DSW: Uh Huh. Interesting.

RL: What we have to decide is whether we’re going to put behind us certain motivations, one of which is the general motivation to struggle against religious anti-evolutionary views, and at the other extreme to be as individuals successful as evolutionary biologists by giving an explanation of something interesting even when we don’t have the observations. I was raised not as an evolutionist but as a population geneticist.

DSW: Right.

RL: That’s a big difference.

DSW: Why is that a big difference? Let’s clarify that for me. I tend to see it as a small difference. What’s the difference between being a population geneticist and an evolutionist?

RL: A population geneticist by theoretical training has certain parameters of population change. That’s become broadened by the realization that there are between population changes and so on, but within a population we’re talking about changes in gene frequency and we have a catalog of the causes: selection, inbreeding, chance, mutation, and so on. Our job as population geneticists is to do the necessary observations of the various things that give us estimates of the strength of those different forces. Now, historically one of the most interesting—now I want to talk a little about the sociology of our science—Theodosius Dobzhansky, my professor and then greatest living evolutionary biologist…

DSW: Mr. “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution…”

RL: Yeah, right. He was a very bad field observer. Theodosius Dobzhansky never, in his entire life, nor any of his students, me included—I would go out in the field with him, actually–ever saw a Drosophila pseudoobscura in its natural habitat.

DSW (laughs): Yeah, OK!

RL: We didn’t know where they laid their eggs. We couldn’t have counted the number of eggs of different genotypes. How did we study Drosophila in the wild? We went out into the desert, into Death Valley, we moved into a little oasis, we went first to the grocery store, and bought rotten bananas. We mushed up the bananas with yeast till they fermented a bit, we dumped that into the paper containers, put it out in the field and the flies came to us.

DSW: Right! No naturalistic context whatsoever.

RL: None…at…all. And to this day we do not know anything about the actual habitat of Drosophila pseudoobscura, although by the way, interestingly enough, in more recent years, Tim Prout actually succeeded in trapping pseudoobscura in orange groves, so we don’t even know how much they hang out with cultivated fruit.

DSW: Right.

RL: Now let me go one step further because we cannot understand the development of evolutionary biology if we don’t understand questions of the sociology of academic life. If I wanted to study evolutionary forces acting on some genetic polymorphism in Drosophila, I would go and look for some species of Drosophila where I could actually look at, perturb, and work with the actual breeding sites and egg laying sites and pick up larvae in nature and so on. And in fact there is such a group of Drosophila. They the cactophilic ones. There is a group [of scientists] from Texas and other places that studies the cactophilic Drosophila in an ecologically sensible way of going to the rot pockets and perturbing them, getting larvae out of them and so on. That group never acquired the prestige associated with the Dobzhansky school because—I don’t know why. They were doing what one has to do. That’s why, for example, I try to convince students who are entering evolutionary biology not to study animals at all but to study plants. Plants stay in one place. You can manipulate them. You can move them. Plants are much better than animals for studying things in nature. Yet, plant evolutionary biology is not, for sociological reasons that I don’t understand—I could make up stories—has never had the prestige that animal work has had when it comes to population genetics.

DSW: Right. I think that [there was an] all consuming interest in physical mechanisms as opposed to a more fully rounded approach. I place a lot of emphasis on the classic paper by Niko Tinbergen, “The Methods and Aims of Ethology”, in which he says that you have to ask four questions: Function, History, Mechanism, Development. Are you familiar with that paper?

RL: No, I’m not. Send me a reference to it.

DSW: It’s such a succinct summary of what a fully rounded approach needs to be. Dick, I’d like to spend a little bit of time on Sociobiology and also Evolutionary Psychology, because even though that didn’t motivate the Spandrels paper, it still motivated you to be a critic and Steve too. I wonder if you could bring us back to that point and what you saw as problematic about Sociobiology and then Evolutionary Psychology.

RL: This is what I have been talking about for the last five minutes. This is a branch of academic life that consists entirely, as far as I can see, of making up what would seem to be plausible stories. I would say that’s not what we are in business to do. I don’t know what else to say. Look, when I look at Sociobiology, the book or some of the other books he [E.O. Wilson] has written, it drives me mad. For example, if you read—I’ll take an extremely nasty example because it’s so clear—it is written that aggression is a part of human nature. It says that in the book. It lists features of human nature and aggression is one of them. So then I have said to Ed and others of his school, what do you do about people who have spent almost their entire lives in jail because they refuse to be conscripted into the army? What do you think the answer is? That is their form of aggression.

DSW: Well, OK, that’s facile.

RL: I don’t know what you can do about it. If everything can be said to be a form of aggression, even the refusal to be physically aggressive, what kind of science is that?

DSW: Would it be more acceptable to say that aggression is part of the repertoire of human behavior? That leaves it open to be part of the repertoire that we don’t always use.

RL: Before I will allow you to make even that statement, I will insist that you write down how I know whether any particular phenotypic manifestation is or is not included in your definition of aggression.

DSW: That’s fair.

RL: I don’t know what those people would say. But if you are willing to make a clear enough—and most important, and this is perhaps the fundamental contradiction, potentially there has to exist a group of cases of non-aggression. Because if everything by definition can be shown to be aggression then it ceases to be a useful concept in our scientific discussions.

DSW: The problem of explaining everything, and therefore nothing, recurs again and again. What were some of the political implications of Sociobiology that worried you? Misuses of biology, or misuses of evolutionary reasoning–back then and are they still with us today?

RL: My main complaint is not the list of specific manifestations but the underlying claim that there exists a human nature, which then the claimant must give examples of, and so each claimant gives examples that are convenient for his or her pet theory. I think the worst thing we can do in science is to create concepts where what is included or not included within the concept is not delimited to begin with. It allows us to claim anything. That’s my problem with Sociobiology. It’s too loose.

DSW: That brings us to the topic of cultural evolution, which is something that I study a lot and I think that you have thought of a lot. One of the exciting things that I think has taken place is the idea that the study of evolution became too gene-centric over the course of the 20th century. Evolution requires heredity, not genes, and there are other mechanisms of heredity. Culture really is an evolutionary process. That is in part why we are so open-ended, why there’s not a human nature in terms of a fixed human nature because we’re so adaptable. I wonder how much you have thought about cultural evolution in that way and if you have any comment to make upon what studying culture as a genuine evolutionary process with its own inheritance mechanism, including symbolic thought—the evolution of meaning systems—what that does to change the picture of evolution.

RL: I think that the evolution of this thing that’s in our cranium, however it happened, has changed all the rules for the history of the species, for its biology, for everything about it. I mean, rational thought and the kind of communication we have with human language, as opposed to the stereotypical communication of other animals, has really made a fantastic change in the conditions of life and the rates of reproduction of individual types and so on. I would say human evolution is in that sense unique because of the possibility of: a) the details of communication; b) the notion of historical memory; well, everything about human thought. I really do think that if we want to understand evolution, the first species we should keep out of our consideration is Homo sapiens. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is for me.

DSW: Well, but that’s genetic evolution. What if the principles of cultural evolution, although different in some respects–because another inheritance mechanism needs to be functionally an inheritance mechanism but need not resemble other inheritance mechanisms in detail–what if the basic way of going about genetic evolutionary reasoning also could be employed for cultural evolutionary reasoning? Wouldn’t that put evolution back in the game for the study of human cultural evolution?

RL: Well, let me ask you a question. Why do you use cultural evolution instead of cultural history? Why evolution instead of history? Can you avoid—let me put it another way—can you generally avoid the false similarities, the made up structures that we are criticizing, if we continue to use the word evolution when what we really mean is historical change?

DSW: I’ll actually take you on, on that issue. I’m not sure how much time we’ll have during this conversation. What the mechanisms of human cultural evolution do is adapt human populations to their environments, often with a fine degree of sophistication. When you just say cultural history you’re being agnostic about adaptation. Cultures adapt to their environments. [Without a history of adaptation] they could no more survive and reproduce in their environments than a genetically evolved species. Just to say history leaves out adaptation, don’t you think?

RL: But the problem, here, is that it’s a form of adaptation that hasn’t been studied enough in animals and plants, which is that each change in the species changes what we call the environment, so there is a co-evolution of organism and environment. Historical change in our species has been increasingly the consequence of the organism itself. We’re inventing it all. As the brain grew into what we now have, it became the chief mechanism by which organisms constructed their environment. Look, let me interject here. I think it is extremely important to go to a fundamental issue, which is organisms create their own environments. All organisms make their niches. The whole notion of ecological niche is a very bad notion. There are no niches without organisms. This notion that there is a hole in the world that the organism evolves to fill. The organism by its evolution changes the conditions of its life and changes what surrounds it. Organisms are always creating their own hole in the world, their own niche.

DSW: You pioneered the concept of niche construction, which has become a hot topic.

RL: I think that one mustn’t see niche construction as a special issue. There are niches and then there is reconstruction of the niches. My claim is a very strong one and I could be wrong: there is no niche without an organism.

DSW: I’ll accept that provisionally, but there is such a thing as a purely physical environment…

RL: A physical world, oh yeah, but let me tell you one of my favorite seminars that I ever heard. I can’t trace it any more, unfortunately. A guy came to Chicago and gave a talk in which he showed motion picture photographs of all kinds of organisms, plants and animals, using what are called Schlieren optics, which are sensitive to differences in optical density. What he showed was every organism of which he took moving pictures—both plants and animals—have around them a layer of warm moist air–even trees have it—which is being produced by the organisms themselves. So every organism, at least every terrestrial organism (I don’t know about aquatic ones) is by its metabolism producing a layer of warm moist air with certain gases in it that are its immediate environment.

DSW: I think that’s probably even more so for aquatic organisms. You make your point very nicely. Each organism is manufacturing its own local environment.

RL: Exactly. That’s the wind chill factor. That’s why it gets colder when the wind blows.

DSW: Right. But that makes it a complicated evolutionary story. It’s still an evolutionary story, and when you just say history you’re leaving all that out. History seems to me too broad. Sure everything is history but we’d like to say something more specific. If there is a process of adaptation going on, even if it’s one of rapid niche construction and coevolution, that’s still a more specific set of ideas than just plain history, which really does encompass everything and therefore nothing. Don’t we want to use some of those more specific ideas about adaptation and coevolution and niche construction? That’s more than just history!

RL: Oh no, I’m with you! If I could convince people to use that notion of niche, not as a fixed thing, but as something that is manufactured by the organism, I would be very very happy. But when I talk to biologists about it, they’re always surprised.

DSW: It is still a new idea, in part of course because it’s a complex idea. Complexity is complex, it’s hard to study. We’re always trying to keep things simple, even when we should be embracing complexity in some sense.

DSW: What a pleasure, Dick! Thank you so much for this conversation. Have a great day.

RL: You too.