The Genealogy of Morals

I can't now remember how I came across Morality as a Biological Phenomenon: the Presuppositions of Sociobiological Research, edited by Gunther S. Stent and published by the University of California Press in 1980, but I'm glad I did. Stent's introductory essay, which I want to write about later, is especially interesting, and I'm still working my way through the book.

"The Biology of Morals from a Psychological Perspective," by P. H. Wolff, seems at odds with the general approach of the collection. Wolff, a developmental neuropsychologist in Boston, puts his foot in it on the very first page.

Like other natural scientists, biologists are guided by an ethical code of procedure, but they usually take for granted the values implicit in the scientific method. The scientific study of human morals, however, makes values themselves the subject matter for investigation, and therefore requires an explicit definition of morality and of the criteria by which various behavior patterns can be categorized as moral. The ultimate criterion applied by biologists to evaluate the relevance of social behavior is survival of the genotype. Natural selection operates on social behaviors that promote reproductive advantage, whereas the individuals whose moral behavior has evolved are not, or need not be, aware of the reasons for the selective fitness of their behavioral genotype.

By contrast, moral philosophers, and at least some psychological theories of morality, consider as moral only those forms of human behavior for which intention, deliberate choice among equally determined actions, and awareness of the social consequences of alternative actions can be assumed. Social behavior that is so rigidly determined by biological mechanisms as to be involuntary is considered to have no more moral content than the human sucking reflex or the gaping response of the herring gull. Yet, from a rigorous biological perspective, both reflex behaviors would have moral relevance. The biological and psychological approaches to human morals may therefore diverge so greatly as to be irreconcilable.

By positing survival of the genotype as a necessary and sufficient sufficient criterion of moral behavior, the biological approach either trivializes the central problems of human morality, or dismisses them as irrelevant epiphenomena. ... We are inclined to absolve transgressions of responsibility when medical diagnosis identifies the physiological causes of antisocial behavior, but we insist on moral responsibility when no such causes can be demonstrated. Thus, we arrive at a classification of human morals under which only social behavior is considered to have moral content for which no causal mechanisms can be demonstrated. Should progress in biological research eventually all varieties of pro- and antisocial behavior in terms of metabolic processes, the belief in moral autonomy and freedom of choice would itself be shown to have genetic determinants, and the traditional views of human morality would evaporate as historical curiosities [83-85].

It's true that the ultimate criterion in evolutionary theory is survival of the genotype, but I can't see any reason to call it moral. Scientists are of course free to grab any term they like, redefine it to suit their research program, and use it happily. Physicists who refer to the "color" or "beauty" of subatomic particles are in little danger of confusing non-physicists or themselves with the possibility that beauty in a quark is the same as beauty in a person, let alone that quark beauty is True Beauty, and that traditional views of human beauty are curiosities suitable for museums and the scrap heap of history.

When biologists and wannabes borrow terms like "moral" or "selfish" for their own use, though, trouble usually ensues. Not only the ignorant masses but the scientists themselves have trouble distinguishing between the different meanings, and it doesn't help when scientists claim that their definition is the real deal, and the "traditional view" just a superstitious vanity. So you get someone like Richard Dawkins insisting that the "selfish gene" isn't selfish in the same way people are, that in any case having selfish genes doesn't make individuals selfish, though he also says that we are born selfish, but are able to "transcend" our genes in some mysterious way.

While "the sucking reflex" that enables a newborn to get nourishment from its mother's breast is valuable for its own survival and so for the survival of Homo sapiens as a species, it really doesn't make any sense to call it "moral", even biologically moral. I suspect that behind such redefinition there lurks a Platonic conception of "species" as some sort of transcendental entity more real than individuals, whose survival isn't just a metaphor but a higher truth. I also suspect that the biologists who do this believe that they really are using "moral" correctly according to its platonically true meaning, and that any other use is not just unscientific but wrong, and superstitious nonsense to boot.

To put it bluntly, where the biological and psychological approaches to human morality clash, the biological approach should lose. Wolff should have included the philosophical approach among the alternatives, though, because moral philosophy is the field of study that actually addresses the meaning of human morality on its own terms (however badly it often does its job).

The really bad thing about positing biological morality as genotype survival is that biologists are perennially tempted to apply biological morality to social morality. If survival of the genotype is true morality, then anyone who chooses not to have offspring is immoral for not doing their part -- except for biologically inferior individuals however they are defined, who should not reproduce at all. Homosexuals, the celibate, all are biologically immoral if they don't reproduce; the sick, the lame, the halt are biologically immoral if they do. It also means that biological morality, far from applying to social behavior -- that is, between individuals of the same species -- is really about the relation between the individual and the Genotype. We've been there before.

Also, it doesn't take Darwinian theory or modern medicine to claim that some individuals, because of their physiological condition, are not responsible for their acts. What we suppose to be the true cause of that condition has changed over the centuries, but it's not a modern development to make allowance for people who aren't in their right mind. What is somewhat new is the scientific notion that biology determines behavior totally, and that no behavior whether pro- or anti-social is the result of "metabolic processes," so that choice is an illusion.

I'm not sure to what extent Wolff actually believes all this. After surveying "social learning theory" for a few pages, he advocates "a more flexible approach to sociobiology," and concludes that

The capacity to reflect on and choose among alternative outcomes is inherent to mature human intelligence. ... Biological evolution does not specify what forms of social action regulate moral conduct, but it defines the boundaries of ethical behavior compatible with species survival. Biology does not specify the choices made, but it prepares the structural conditions without which there can be neither intention or deliberate choice [91-92].

It seems, then, that Wolff considers intention and deliberate choice to be realities, rather than the illusions many sociobiologists and other scientists suppose them to be. His conclusion is basically a platitude, though, which requires neither biology nor psychology to state. Like too many scientists, he seems to think that a person with scientific training doesn't need to be informed philosophically about issues like morality, even though science is nowhere near encroaching on them. That was true in the 1970s when Wolff wrote his paper, and it's still true now.

The Genealogy of Morals

I can't now remember how I came across Morality as a Biological Phenomenon: the Presuppositions of Sociobiological Research, edited by Gunther S. Stent and published by the University of California Press in 1980, but I'm glad I did. Stent's introductory essay, which I want to write about later, is especially interesting, and I'm still working my way through the book.

"The Biology of Morals from a Psychological Perspective," by P. H. Wolff, seems at odds with the general approach of the collection. Wolff, a developmental neuropsychologist in Boston, puts his foot in it on the very first page.

Like other natural scientists, biologists are guided by an ethical code of procedure, but they usually take for granted the values implicit in the scientific method. The scientific study of human morals, however, makes values themselves the subject matter for investigation, and therefore requires an explicit definition of morality and of the criteria by which various behavior patterns can be categorized as moral. The ultimate criterion applied by biologists to evaluate the relevance of social behavior is survival of the genotype. Natural selection operates on social behaviors that promote reproductive advantage, whereas the individuals whose moral behavior has evolved are not, or need not be, aware of the reasons for the selective fitness of their behavioral genotype.

By contrast, moral philosophers, and at least some psychological theories of morality, consider as moral only those forms of human behavior for which intention, deliberate choice among equally determined actions, and awareness of the social consequences of alternative actions can be assumed. Social behavior that is so rigidly determined by biological mechanisms as to be involuntary is considered to have no more moral content than the human sucking reflex or the gaping response of the herring gull. Yet, from a rigorous biological perspective, both reflex behaviors would have moral relevance. The biological and psychological approaches to human morals may therefore diverge so greatly as to be irreconcilable.

By positing survival of the genotype as a necessary and sufficient sufficient criterion of moral behavior, the biological approach either trivializes the central problems of human morality, or dismisses them as irrelevant epiphenomena. ... We are inclined to absolve transgressions of responsibility when medical diagnosis identifies the physiological causes of antisocial behavior, but we insist on moral responsibility when no such causes can be demonstrated. Thus, we arrive at a classification of human morals under which only social behavior is considered to have moral content for which no causal mechanisms can be demonstrated. Should progress in biological research eventually all varieties of pro- and antisocial behavior in terms of metabolic processes, the belief in moral autonomy and freedom of choice would itself be shown to have genetic determinants, and the traditional views of human morality would evaporate as historical curiosities [83-85].

It's true that the ultimate criterion in evolutionary theory is survival of the genotype, but I can't see any reason to call it moral. Scientists are of course free to grab any term they like, redefine it to suit their research program, and use it happily. Physicists who refer to the "color" or "beauty" of subatomic particles are in little danger of confusing non-physicists or themselves with the possibility that beauty in a quark is the same as beauty in a person, let alone that quark beauty is True Beauty, and that traditional views of human beauty are curiosities suitable for museums and the scrap heap of history.

When biologists and wannabes borrow terms like "moral" or "selfish" for their own use, though, trouble usually ensues. Not only the ignorant masses but the scientists themselves have trouble distinguishing between the different meanings, and it doesn't help when scientists claim that their definition is the real deal, and the "traditional view" just a superstitious vanity. So you get someone like Richard Dawkins insisting that the "selfish gene" isn't selfish in the same way people are, that in any case having selfish genes doesn't make individuals selfish, though he also says that we are born selfish, but are able to "transcend" our genes in some mysterious way.

While "the sucking reflex" that enables a newborn to get nourishment from its mother's breast is valuable for its own survival and so for the survival of Homo sapiens as a species, it really doesn't make any sense to call it "moral", even biologically moral. I suspect that behind such redefinition there lurks a Platonic conception of "species" as some sort of transcendental entity more real than individuals, whose survival isn't just a metaphor but a higher truth. I also suspect that the biologists who do this believe that they really are using "moral" correctly according to its platonically true meaning, and that any other use is not just unscientific but wrong, and superstitious nonsense to boot.

To put it bluntly, where the biological and psychological approaches to human morality clash, the biological approach should lose. Wolff should have included the philosophical approach among the alternatives, though, because moral philosophy is the field of study that actually addresses the meaning of human morality on its own terms (however badly it often does its job).

The really bad thing about positing biological morality as genotype survival is that biologists are perennially tempted to apply biological morality to social morality. If survival of the genotype is true morality, then anyone who chooses not to have offspring is immoral for not doing their part -- except for biologically inferior individuals however they are defined, who should not reproduce at all. Homosexuals, the celibate, all are biologically immoral if they don't reproduce; the sick, the lame, the halt are biologically immoral if they do. It also means that biological morality, far from applying to social behavior -- that is, between individuals of the same species -- is really about the relation between the individual and the Genotype. We've been there before.

Also, it doesn't take Darwinian theory or modern medicine to claim that some individuals, because of their physiological condition, are not responsible for their acts. What we suppose to be the true cause of that condition has changed over the centuries, but it's not a modern development to make allowance for people who aren't in their right mind. What is somewhat new is the scientific notion that biology determines behavior totally, and that no behavior whether pro- or anti-social is the result of "metabolic processes," so that choice is an illusion.

I'm not sure to what extent Wolff actually believes all this. After surveying "social learning theory" for a few pages, he advocates "a more flexible approach to sociobiology," and concludes that

The capacity to reflect on and choose among alternative outcomes is inherent to mature human intelligence. ... Biological evolution does not specify what forms of social action regulate moral conduct, but it defines the boundaries of ethical behavior compatible with species survival. Biology does not specify the choices made, but it prepares the structural conditions without which there can be neither intention or deliberate choice [91-92].

It seems, then, that Wolff considers intention and deliberate choice to be realities, rather than the illusions many sociobiologists and other scientists suppose them to be. His conclusion is basically a platitude, though, which requires neither biology nor psychology to state. Like too many scientists, he seems to think that a person with scientific training doesn't need to be informed philosophically about issues like morality, even though science is nowhere near encroaching on them. That was true in the 1970s when Wolff wrote his paper, and it's still true now.

I Like A Girl With Spirit!

There’s a story I’ve been hearing for some time now, from Golda Meir’s days in the Israeli cabinet, before she became Prime Minister. I haven’t had much luck tracking it down, but I have found this direct quotation (unfortunately unsourced):

Once in the Cabinet we had to deal with the fact that there had been an outbreak of assaults on women at night. One minister (a member of an extreme religious party) suggested a curfew. Women should stay at home after dark. I said: "but it's the men attacking the women. If there's to be a curfew, let the men stay at home, not the women."

Of course the proposed curfew was not enacted; contrary to what most people who tell this story seem to think, I wonder if it had a chance to begin with, since Meir singles out the minister who suggested it as “a member of an extreme religious party” (this was the 1950s, when the ultraorthodox were not the force they are today in Israeli politics). But everyone loves Meir’s comeback, because despite her general anti-feminism, she put her finger on the key issue: why should women, but not men, have to adjust their behavior?

Remember that one result of such a curfew would be that any woman who was raped after curfew would be legally assumed to be “asking for it,” thus letting off the rapist. (I’m not just speculating; such blaming the victim has been traditional in American practice, unquestioned until feminists fought it.) This would also be a consequence of Thornhill and Palmer’s suggestion, in A Natural History of Rape, that girls be taught not to dress provocatively, which is not just stupid and malevolent, it’s regressive. (The same is true, by the way, for their suggestion of mandatory rape-prevention classes for boys, teaching them that they are biologically prone to sexual assault. You don’t have to be a professional psychologist to know that such teaching would encourage rape, not discourage it. But Thornhill and Palmer are scientists, so they must know what they’re talking about.)

Martha McCaughey, in The Caveman Mystique, page 94, quotes two more guys who

remind readers that they do not mean to imply that women should begin to forgive sexual harassers:

It is simply our hope that the more we understand about the evolution of human psychology, the closer we will be to developing appropriate and effective solutions for such unfortunate and deplorable side effects of human nature and behavior as sexual harassment.

Their solution involves changing

the structure of the organizational environment which would reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances, and allow women more freedom to change jobs or change their working environment, as they feel is necessary.

Allowing harassers more “freedom” to get fired is not mentioned as a solution, nor is equal pay, although earlier the authors state that women’s economic position relative to men’s makes this male strategy surface (the way lots of gardening makes calluses come out). …

Notice the pious beginning, followed by the assumption that “the organizational environment” should be rearranged around men’s immutable “evolved” obnoxiousness, and that women should be freer to “change jobs” or, in some unspecified way, “their working environment.” (Certainly not in any way that would inconvenience the men.) It’s never clear in such discussions how we – that is, evolutionary psychologists -- know that women are so malleable, so flexible, compared to men’s “evolved” rigidity, which will go all limp if it’s not given free rein. I suspect that malleability is simply assumed, on the male-supremacist postulate that women exist to give service to men; not merely sexual and domestic service, but emotional service as well. (There are echoes of behaviorism in McCaughey’s targets: they want to structure the work environment so as to “reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances,” which is right out of Skinner.)

Richard Dawkins exploded (he tends to explode a lot) in a 1997 interview quoted by McCaughey (122f):

[T]he opponents of sociobiology are too stupid to understand the distinction between what one says about the way the world is, scientifically, and the way it ought to be politically. They look at what we say about natural selection, as a scientific theory for what is, and they assume that anybody who says that so and so is the case, must therefore be advocating that it ought to be the case in human politics. They cannot see that it is possible to separate one’s scientific beliefs about what is the case in nature from one’s political beliefs about what ought to be in human society.

It is, however, Dawkins who is clearly too stupid to understand the difference he harps on. In his bestseller The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976, p 126) he wrote:

Since we humans do not want to return to the old selfish ways where we let the children of too-large families starve to death, we have abolished the family as a unit of economic self-sufficiency, and substituted the state. But the privilege of guaranteed support for children should not be abused. … Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.

I found this bit of old-fashioned scientific racism (the Pope is ordering the stinking Irish to breed like rabbits so he can take over England!) quoted in Not in Our Genes (Pantheon, 1984) by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In its original context it’s even worse, deranged in fact: to start with, Dawkins believes that there is a gene “for having too many children”, which makes no sense. Evolutionary theory is based on the assumption that all animals have “too many children”: “All species overproduce offspring, not all of which can survive to reproduce in their turn. Thus, there is inevitable competition among the individuals of each species for the means to survive and reproduce, and any inherited advantage in this competition will be naturally selected” (Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, quoted in McCaughey, p. 27). Further, “the family” is not the “unit of economic self-sufficiency”, communities are, and “the old selfish ways” are a figment of Dawkin’s imagination: societies have always made provision for people who need help, and adults limited the the size of their families long before modern contraception. Infanticide, especially, is very old, both as a means of culling and as a means of redistributing children to parents who can and want to support them. (Exposed children didn’t always die, as exemplified by the fictional but realistic case of Oedipus.) I’ve often observed that people who like to think of themselves as hard-headed realists tend to be soft-headed fantasists, and Dawkins fits the mold.

“Men must stop prostrating themselves to science,” McCaughey says (136), but “hiding behind” might express it better. It seems to be typical for evolutionary psychologists to begin their sermons by deploring the amorality of “nature.” (They also tend to personify “nature” and “evolution,” but that’s a topic for another day.) They think that doing so proves they don’t justify rape or male promiscuity, and they get very self-righteous when their magic shield doesn’t work. Considering that they have no real evidence that all men are genetically predisposed to abuse women, they shouldn’t be so surprised when feminists (and not only feminists) suspect that they aren’t as disinterested as they’d like to think. When your conclusions aren’t supported by your evidence, it is only reasonable to suspect that you have a personal investment in your conclusions. As Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote over thirty years ago in her brilliant (though, I admit, uneven) book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976, 215ff):

I have seen on the faces of some men who are on the whole quite likable a certain smile that I confess I find deeply unattractive: a helpless smile of self-congratulation when some female disadvantage is referred to. And I have heard in their voices a tone that (in the context of what women put up with) is equally unattractive: a tone of self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement when some male disadvantage becomes obvious. This sense of being put upon that many men feel in the fact of evidence that the adult balance of power is not at every point by a safe margin in their favor seems based on the implicit axiom that to make life minimally bearable, to keep their very chins above water, to offset some outrageous burden that they carry, they must at least feel that they are clearly luckier and mightier than women are.

I detect just that kind of smirk in David Barash’s complaint, “If Nature is sexist don’t blame her sons,” quoted by Hilary Rose in Alas Poor Darwin (Harmony Books, 2000, 139). Notice first the personification of “nature”; Nature is not a person and cannot be sexist. But “her sons” can be, and often are; hiding behind Mother’s skirts won’t help them.

I Like A Girl With Spirit!

There’s a story I’ve been hearing for some time now, from Golda Meir’s days in the Israeli cabinet, before she became Prime Minister. I haven’t had much luck tracking it down, but I have found this direct quotation (unfortunately unsourced):

Once in the Cabinet we had to deal with the fact that there had been an outbreak of assaults on women at night. One minister (a member of an extreme religious party) suggested a curfew. Women should stay at home after dark. I said: "but it's the men attacking the women. If there's to be a curfew, let the men stay at home, not the women."

Of course the proposed curfew was not enacted; contrary to what most people who tell this story seem to think, I wonder if it had a chance to begin with, since Meir singles out the minister who suggested it as “a member of an extreme religious party” (this was the 1950s, when the ultraorthodox were not the force they are today in Israeli politics). But everyone loves Meir’s comeback, because despite her general anti-feminism, she put her finger on the key issue: why should women, but not men, have to adjust their behavior?

Remember that one result of such a curfew would be that any woman who was raped after curfew would be legally assumed to be “asking for it,” thus letting off the rapist. (I’m not just speculating; such blaming the victim has been traditional in American practice, unquestioned until feminists fought it.) This would also be a consequence of Thornhill and Palmer’s suggestion, in A Natural History of Rape, that girls be taught not to dress provocatively, which is not just stupid and malevolent, it’s regressive. (The same is true, by the way, for their suggestion of mandatory rape-prevention classes for boys, teaching them that they are biologically prone to sexual assault. You don’t have to be a professional psychologist to know that such teaching would encourage rape, not discourage it. But Thornhill and Palmer are scientists, so they must know what they’re talking about.)

Martha McCaughey, in The Caveman Mystique, page 94, quotes two more guys who

remind readers that they do not mean to imply that women should begin to forgive sexual harassers:

It is simply our hope that the more we understand about the evolution of human psychology, the closer we will be to developing appropriate and effective solutions for such unfortunate and deplorable side effects of human nature and behavior as sexual harassment.

Their solution involves changing

the structure of the organizational environment which would reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances, and allow women more freedom to change jobs or change their working environment, as they feel is necessary.

Allowing harassers more “freedom” to get fired is not mentioned as a solution, nor is equal pay, although earlier the authors state that women’s economic position relative to men’s makes this male strategy surface (the way lots of gardening makes calluses come out). …

Notice the pious beginning, followed by the assumption that “the organizational environment” should be rearranged around men’s immutable “evolved” obnoxiousness, and that women should be freer to “change jobs” or, in some unspecified way, “their working environment.” (Certainly not in any way that would inconvenience the men.) It’s never clear in such discussions how we – that is, evolutionary psychologists -- know that women are so malleable, so flexible, compared to men’s “evolved” rigidity, which will go all limp if it’s not given free rein. I suspect that malleability is simply assumed, on the male-supremacist postulate that women exist to give service to men; not merely sexual and domestic service, but emotional service as well. (There are echoes of behaviorism in McCaughey’s targets: they want to structure the work environment so as to “reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances,” which is right out of Skinner.)

Richard Dawkins exploded (he tends to explode a lot) in a 1997 interview quoted by McCaughey (122f):

[T]he opponents of sociobiology are too stupid to understand the distinction between what one says about the way the world is, scientifically, and the way it ought to be politically. They look at what we say about natural selection, as a scientific theory for what is, and they assume that anybody who says that so and so is the case, must therefore be advocating that it ought to be the case in human politics. They cannot see that it is possible to separate one’s scientific beliefs about what is the case in nature from one’s political beliefs about what ought to be in human society.

It is, however, Dawkins who is clearly too stupid to understand the difference he harps on. In his bestseller The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976, p 126) he wrote:

Since we humans do not want to return to the old selfish ways where we let the children of too-large families starve to death, we have abolished the family as a unit of economic self-sufficiency, and substituted the state. But the privilege of guaranteed support for children should not be abused. … Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.

I found this bit of old-fashioned scientific racism (the Pope is ordering the stinking Irish to breed like rabbits so he can take over England!) quoted in Not in Our Genes (Pantheon, 1984) by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In its original context it’s even worse, deranged in fact: to start with, Dawkins believes that there is a gene “for having too many children”, which makes no sense. Evolutionary theory is based on the assumption that all animals have “too many children”: “All species overproduce offspring, not all of which can survive to reproduce in their turn. Thus, there is inevitable competition among the individuals of each species for the means to survive and reproduce, and any inherited advantage in this competition will be naturally selected” (Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, quoted in McCaughey, p. 27). Further, “the family” is not the “unit of economic self-sufficiency”, communities are, and “the old selfish ways” are a figment of Dawkin’s imagination: societies have always made provision for people who need help, and adults limited the the size of their families long before modern contraception. Infanticide, especially, is very old, both as a means of culling and as a means of redistributing children to parents who can and want to support them. (Exposed children didn’t always die, as exemplified by the fictional but realistic case of Oedipus.) I’ve often observed that people who like to think of themselves as hard-headed realists tend to be soft-headed fantasists, and Dawkins fits the mold.

“Men must stop prostrating themselves to science,” McCaughey says (136), but “hiding behind” might express it better. It seems to be typical for evolutionary psychologists to begin their sermons by deploring the amorality of “nature.” (They also tend to personify “nature” and “evolution,” but that’s a topic for another day.) They think that doing so proves they don’t justify rape or male promiscuity, and they get very self-righteous when their magic shield doesn’t work. Considering that they have no real evidence that all men are genetically predisposed to abuse women, they shouldn’t be so surprised when feminists (and not only feminists) suspect that they aren’t as disinterested as they’d like to think. When your conclusions aren’t supported by your evidence, it is only reasonable to suspect that you have a personal investment in your conclusions. As Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote over thirty years ago in her brilliant (though, I admit, uneven) book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976, 215ff):

I have seen on the faces of some men who are on the whole quite likable a certain smile that I confess I find deeply unattractive: a helpless smile of self-congratulation when some female disadvantage is referred to. And I have heard in their voices a tone that (in the context of what women put up with) is equally unattractive: a tone of self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement when some male disadvantage becomes obvious. This sense of being put upon that many men feel in the fact of evidence that the adult balance of power is not at every point by a safe margin in their favor seems based on the implicit axiom that to make life minimally bearable, to keep their very chins above water, to offset some outrageous burden that they carry, they must at least feel that they are clearly luckier and mightier than women are.

I detect just that kind of smirk in David Barash’s complaint, “If Nature is sexist don’t blame her sons,” quoted by Hilary Rose in Alas Poor Darwin (Harmony Books, 2000, 139). Notice first the personification of “nature”; Nature is not a person and cannot be sexist. But “her sons” can be, and often are; hiding behind Mother’s skirts won’t help them.

Won't Get Fooled Again

I just finished reading Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture debate in the twentieth century, by Aaron Gillette, published last year by Palgrave Macmillan. Gillette, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Downtown, has another book awaiting publication, on “the development of a ‘Latin’ variety of eugenics in the early 20th century. Latin eugenics was ultimately used as a tool by Fascist Italy in an attempt to dominate the scientific life of Latin America and other Latin countries.” Ooookay.

The best I can say for Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture debate in the twentieth century is that it’s frustrating. Like many scholars, Gillette gives good research: he’s dug into the archives of twentieth-century biology and eugenics, and has unearthed some interesting material, especially on eugenics in Fascist Italy. (Historians usually focus on the US, Britain, and Germany for this topic.) I’m no expert, but I’ve read a fair amount in this area, and I’m not sure how much light he really casts on the usual US/UK suspects; Daniel Kevles’s In the name of eugenics, for example, a careful and thoughtful study of the same era, isn’t even mentioned in his bibliography. What seems to be Gillette’s main argument, that 19^th and early 20^th century biologists did important work in what would now be called “evolutionary psychology”, doesn’t feel like news to me.

But research is only half of the work of scholarship, and like many scholars, Gillette stumbles when he interprets his data. This produces some bloopers from the beginning of the book, which largely set its tone. He begins by telling how,

On February 15, 1978, Edward O. Wilson sat on the stage of an auditorium, waiting to address an audience. Suddenly, a young woman leapt onto the stage, grasped a pitcher of ice water, and poured it onto Wilson’s head. Others ran onto the stage and waved anti-Wilson placards, chanting, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”

Several weeks before, two of Wilson’s colleagues, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, wrote an attack against him in the New York Review of Books. They claimed that Wilson was an ally of eugenicists, and his theory was a dangerous pseudoscience associated with “the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”

It’s not clear who is being quoted here. Gillette gives no citation for Lewontin and Gould’s “attack”; an endnote cites John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (Oxford, 2003), p. 3, and Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (Viking, 2002), p. 109. But he seems to be quoting from a letter published in the New York Review of Books on 13 November 1975 – three years earlier than the date he assigns to it – “prepared by a group of university faculty and scientists, high school teachers, doctors, and students who work in the Boston area” and signed by Gould and Lewontin along with many others. Sloppy, Aaron, sloppy.

I can’t see where the letter calls Wilson “an ally of eugenicists.” It does say at the outset that not Wilson’s but earlier biological-determinist theories “provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.” I suspect that Gillette drew on partial quotations from this letter in Alcorn and Pinker without reading the whole text, which took me about five minutes to find on the web.

More damaging to Gillette’s account, the bulk of the letter criticizes the substance of Wilson’s theory, a critique that would be extended and developed in years to come. It also undermines Gillette’s main thesis, that the non-eugenic work of early 20^th-century biologists had been suppressed for ideological reasons and forgotten: the writers of the letter note the existence of that work, and comment that “Each time these ideas have resurfaced the claim has been made that they were based on new scientific information. Yet each time, even though strong scientific arguments have been presented to show the absurdity of these theories, they have not died.” The amnesia was actually to be found among the sociobiologists, and later evolutionary psychologists, who thought, or claimed for PR reasons, that they were offering new insights into human nature. (Among those PR reasons would have been the wish to dissociate themselves from the discreditable racism of their predecessors.)

Gillette undermines his own case by using the term “evolutionary psychology” anachronistically for all biological-determinist science from Darwin’s day to the present; the idea is presumably to stress the continuity of Wilson and Pinker with Robert Yerkes, Madison Grant, Julian Huxley, and other eugenicists – but that continuity is exactly what, for PR reasons, contemporary evolutionary psychologists want to deny. (I’m reminded of the way that Intelligent Design’s proponents hope that label will distance them from “Scientific Creationism”, also for PR reasons.)

Another important point from the letter (my italics, by the way):

We are not denying that there are genetic components to human behavior. But we suspect that human biological universals are to be discovered more in the generalities of eating, excreting and sleeping than in such specific and highly variable habits as warfare, sexual exploitation of women and the use of money as a medium of exchange.

This is important because one standard riposte to criticism of biological determinism is the claim that the critic believes that human beings are a “blank slate,” or as Gillette puts it, “that human behavior is almost entirely molded by environment and culture, rather than instinct or heredity” (171 note 4). Attempting to settle the question by labeling, Gillette lumps together all critics of biological determinism under the rubric of “behavioral environmentalism.” This is disingenuous, to put it gently, since among those critics are people like Noam Chomsky, who believes that language is innate and is famous for his attacks on B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism; geneticists like Richard Lewontin and Ruth Hubbard, and other biologists. Those interested might look at Alas, Poor Darwin, edited by Steven Rose and Hilary Rose (Harmony Books, 2000) which covers most of the issues Gillette believes to be settled.

The other standard move is to associate criticism of biological determinism with “the Left.” (For example, the Publishers Weekly review of Alcock’s The Triumph of Sociobiology identifies the field’s critics as “many feminist and socialist thinkers” who embrace “the competing blank-slate ‘culture is all’ theory.) If true, this only implies that leftists have better sense than rightists. But its purpose is to avoid addressing the substantive criticisms of the critics by attacking their ideology – exactly what Gillette, Pinker, and so many others accuse the critics of doing. One suspects projection.

Gillette also relies on overwrought rhetoric to present his eugenicists and sociobiologists as pitiful victims (or “casualties”) of behaviorist ideologues. Early on he tells of a hapless fellow named Craig Stanford, who,

while attending a seminar on primate societies, made the mistake of claiming that chimpanzee communities had cultures. The infuriated cultural anthropologists attending the seminar “fairly leaped across the seminar table” to verbally garrotte Stanford.

“Verbally garrotte”? Gillette continues through the book with terms like “the battle”, “the melee”, the “conflagration”; well, at least he didn’t use “Holocaust.” But only the biological determinists are haloed with such terminology. When he discusses Franz Boas, the influential anthropologist who opposed and criticized biological determinism in the first half of the 20^th century, Gillette clucks disapprovingly over Boas’s adversary, the eugenicist Madison Grant:

Grant would tell anyone willing to listen how much he loathed Boas[, who] “naturally does not take stock in any anthropology which relegates him and his race to the inferior position that they have occupied throughout recorded history."

Sound familiar? See the pattern? When Boas publicly criticized government censorship during World War I,

Boas’s enemies were delighted. They maneuvered the American Anthropology Association into censoring [sic] him, in 1919, for his “anti-American statements.”

But Gillette never uses his rhetoric of violence to describe the attacks on Boas, nor does he see it as ideological suppression of dissent that, though “Boas’s troops may have been gaining control over the American Anthropology Association, the hereditarians gained control over that most critical resource of modern science: money.”

More serious, Gillette minimizes the connection of American eugenics with Nazi “race science,” which is difficult to do since as he admits, the major American eugenicists endorsed Hitler’s eugenic programs. For example, he quotes Paul Popenoe, who wrote:

Not even Hitler proposes to sterilize anyone on the ground of racial origin. My impression is that the Germans are much more anxious to weed out the undesirable elements among the non-Aryan groups. The law that has been adopted is not a half-baked and hasty improvisation of the Hitler regime, but is the product of many years of consideration by the best specialists in Germany. I must say that my impression is, from a careful following of the situation in the German scientific press, rather favorable.

Gillette comments:

Hitler’s policies and the lukewarm support he received from some American eugenicists doomed eugenics in the United States.

To which I can only say: Jesus H. Christ – you call that “lukewarm”?

Gillette mentions just once, in passing, the American sterilization laws that influenced and inspired the Nazi programs, and which continued to be implemented through the 1970s: the Italian eugenicist “Corrado Gini also rejected the practice of American sterilization in a response to Davenport’s presidential address” at the Third International Congress of Eugenics in 1932, but Gillette never draws the connecting lines. That has to be deliberate, and it doesn’t speak well for him. (And really, why did John Alcock choose a title like The Triumph of Sociobiology? It calls up such unfortunate associations.)

Nor does his claim that

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have absolutely no interest in creating ideological movements or becoming involved in politics. With a few notable exceptions, they even eschew making policy recommendations to improve society. Such is the beneficial result of the reaction against eugenics and racism.

Well, maybe this is true if you overlook the ballyhooed tract The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, which said and did exactly what Gillette claims isn’t being done or said, and which got a lot of favorable media attention even before its publication in 1994. (It also got a lot of fierce criticism, from the usual “feminist and socialist thinkers.”) But maybe it’s one of Gillette’s “few notable exceptions.” The Bell Curve was another example of the pattern described by Wilson’s critics in 1975, where the same old claims are recycled periodically as new and exciting science.

Gillette’s repeated claims that evolutionary psychology today has nothing to do with eugenics don’t convince me. The eugenicists he exhumes would surely have rejected his thesis, and reasonably so. They insisted that the behavior determined by biology included things like criminality, poverty, and other kinds of deviance, and that such defects should be extirpated from society by eugenic measures, including sterilization of the carriers, whether voluntary or involuntary. Today’s biological determinists prudently refrain from making such recommendations, at least most of the time; they may, like Herrnstein and Murray, just shake their heads in sorrow and ask rhetorically, “What Is To Be Done?” This division of labor shouldn’t fool anyone who doesn’t want to be fooled. Evidently Aaron Gillette does want to be fooled.

Won't Get Fooled Again

I just finished reading Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture debate in the twentieth century, by Aaron Gillette, published last year by Palgrave Macmillan. Gillette, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Downtown, has another book awaiting publication, on “the development of a ‘Latin’ variety of eugenics in the early 20th century. Latin eugenics was ultimately used as a tool by Fascist Italy in an attempt to dominate the scientific life of Latin America and other Latin countries.” Ooookay.

The best I can say for Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture debate in the twentieth century is that it’s frustrating. Like many scholars, Gillette gives good research: he’s dug into the archives of twentieth-century biology and eugenics, and has unearthed some interesting material, especially on eugenics in Fascist Italy. (Historians usually focus on the US, Britain, and Germany for this topic.) I’m no expert, but I’ve read a fair amount in this area, and I’m not sure how much light he really casts on the usual US/UK suspects; Daniel Kevles’s In the name of eugenics, for example, a careful and thoughtful study of the same era, isn’t even mentioned in his bibliography. What seems to be Gillette’s main argument, that 19^th and early 20^th century biologists did important work in what would now be called “evolutionary psychology”, doesn’t feel like news to me.

But research is only half of the work of scholarship, and like many scholars, Gillette stumbles when he interprets his data. This produces some bloopers from the beginning of the book, which largely set its tone. He begins by telling how,

On February 15, 1978, Edward O. Wilson sat on the stage of an auditorium, waiting to address an audience. Suddenly, a young woman leapt onto the stage, grasped a pitcher of ice water, and poured it onto Wilson’s head. Others ran onto the stage and waved anti-Wilson placards, chanting, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”

Several weeks before, two of Wilson’s colleagues, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, wrote an attack against him in the New York Review of Books. They claimed that Wilson was an ally of eugenicists, and his theory was a dangerous pseudoscience associated with “the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”

It’s not clear who is being quoted here. Gillette gives no citation for Lewontin and Gould’s “attack”; an endnote cites John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (Oxford, 2003), p. 3, and Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (Viking, 2002), p. 109. But he seems to be quoting from a letter published in the New York Review of Books on 13 November 1975 – three years earlier than the date he assigns to it – “prepared by a group of university faculty and scientists, high school teachers, doctors, and students who work in the Boston area” and signed by Gould and Lewontin along with many others. Sloppy, Aaron, sloppy.

I can’t see where the letter calls Wilson “an ally of eugenicists.” It does say at the outset that not Wilson’s but earlier biological-determinist theories “provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.” I suspect that Gillette drew on partial quotations from this letter in Alcorn and Pinker without reading the whole text, which took me about five minutes to find on the web.

More damaging to Gillette’s account, the bulk of the letter criticizes the substance of Wilson’s theory, a critique that would be extended and developed in years to come. It also undermines Gillette’s main thesis, that the non-eugenic work of early 20^th-century biologists had been suppressed for ideological reasons and forgotten: the writers of the letter note the existence of that work, and comment that “Each time these ideas have resurfaced the claim has been made that they were based on new scientific information. Yet each time, even though strong scientific arguments have been presented to show the absurdity of these theories, they have not died.” The amnesia was actually to be found among the sociobiologists, and later evolutionary psychologists, who thought, or claimed for PR reasons, that they were offering new insights into human nature. (Among those PR reasons would have been the wish to dissociate themselves from the discreditable racism of their predecessors.)

Gillette undermines his own case by using the term “evolutionary psychology” anachronistically for all biological-determinist science from Darwin’s day to the present; the idea is presumably to stress the continuity of Wilson and Pinker with Robert Yerkes, Madison Grant, Julian Huxley, and other eugenicists – but that continuity is exactly what, for PR reasons, contemporary evolutionary psychologists want to deny. (I’m reminded of the way that Intelligent Design’s proponents hope that label will distance them from “Scientific Creationism”, also for PR reasons.)

Another important point from the letter (my italics, by the way):

We are not denying that there are genetic components to human behavior. But we suspect that human biological universals are to be discovered more in the generalities of eating, excreting and sleeping than in such specific and highly variable habits as warfare, sexual exploitation of women and the use of money as a medium of exchange.

This is important because one standard riposte to criticism of biological determinism is the claim that the critic believes that human beings are a “blank slate,” or as Gillette puts it, “that human behavior is almost entirely molded by environment and culture, rather than instinct or heredity” (171 note 4). Attempting to settle the question by labeling, Gillette lumps together all critics of biological determinism under the rubric of “behavioral environmentalism.” This is disingenuous, to put it gently, since among those critics are people like Noam Chomsky, who believes that language is innate and is famous for his attacks on B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism; geneticists like Richard Lewontin and Ruth Hubbard, and other biologists. Those interested might look at Alas, Poor Darwin, edited by Steven Rose and Hilary Rose (Harmony Books, 2000) which covers most of the issues Gillette believes to be settled.

The other standard move is to associate criticism of biological determinism with “the Left.” (For example, the Publishers Weekly review of Alcock’s The Triumph of Sociobiology identifies the field’s critics as “many feminist and socialist thinkers” who embrace “the competing blank-slate ‘culture is all’ theory.) If true, this only implies that leftists have better sense than rightists. But its purpose is to avoid addressing the substantive criticisms of the critics by attacking their ideology – exactly what Gillette, Pinker, and so many others accuse the critics of doing. One suspects projection.

Gillette also relies on overwrought rhetoric to present his eugenicists and sociobiologists as pitiful victims (or “casualties”) of behaviorist ideologues. Early on he tells of a hapless fellow named Craig Stanford, who,

while attending a seminar on primate societies, made the mistake of claiming that chimpanzee communities had cultures. The infuriated cultural anthropologists attending the seminar “fairly leaped across the seminar table” to verbally garrotte Stanford.

“Verbally garrotte”? Gillette continues through the book with terms like “the battle”, “the melee”, the “conflagration”; well, at least he didn’t use “Holocaust.” But only the biological determinists are haloed with such terminology. When he discusses Franz Boas, the influential anthropologist who opposed and criticized biological determinism in the first half of the 20^th century, Gillette clucks disapprovingly over Boas’s adversary, the eugenicist Madison Grant:

Grant would tell anyone willing to listen how much he loathed Boas[, who] “naturally does not take stock in any anthropology which relegates him and his race to the inferior position that they have occupied throughout recorded history."

Sound familiar? See the pattern? When Boas publicly criticized government censorship during World War I,

Boas’s enemies were delighted. They maneuvered the American Anthropology Association into censoring [sic] him, in 1919, for his “anti-American statements.”

But Gillette never uses his rhetoric of violence to describe the attacks on Boas, nor does he see it as ideological suppression of dissent that, though “Boas’s troops may have been gaining control over the American Anthropology Association, the hereditarians gained control over that most critical resource of modern science: money.”

More serious, Gillette minimizes the connection of American eugenics with Nazi “race science,” which is difficult to do since as he admits, the major American eugenicists endorsed Hitler’s eugenic programs. For example, he quotes Paul Popenoe, who wrote:

Not even Hitler proposes to sterilize anyone on the ground of racial origin. My impression is that the Germans are much more anxious to weed out the undesirable elements among the non-Aryan groups. The law that has been adopted is not a half-baked and hasty improvisation of the Hitler regime, but is the product of many years of consideration by the best specialists in Germany. I must say that my impression is, from a careful following of the situation in the German scientific press, rather favorable.

Gillette comments:

Hitler’s policies and the lukewarm support he received from some American eugenicists doomed eugenics in the United States.

To which I can only say: Jesus H. Christ – you call that “lukewarm”?

Gillette mentions just once, in passing, the American sterilization laws that influenced and inspired the Nazi programs, and which continued to be implemented through the 1970s: the Italian eugenicist “Corrado Gini also rejected the practice of American sterilization in a response to Davenport’s presidential address” at the Third International Congress of Eugenics in 1932, but Gillette never draws the connecting lines. That has to be deliberate, and it doesn’t speak well for him. (And really, why did John Alcock choose a title like The Triumph of Sociobiology? It calls up such unfortunate associations.)

Nor does his claim that

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have absolutely no interest in creating ideological movements or becoming involved in politics. With a few notable exceptions, they even eschew making policy recommendations to improve society. Such is the beneficial result of the reaction against eugenics and racism.

Well, maybe this is true if you overlook the ballyhooed tract The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, which said and did exactly what Gillette claims isn’t being done or said, and which got a lot of favorable media attention even before its publication in 1994. (It also got a lot of fierce criticism, from the usual “feminist and socialist thinkers.”) But maybe it’s one of Gillette’s “few notable exceptions.” The Bell Curve was another example of the pattern described by Wilson’s critics in 1975, where the same old claims are recycled periodically as new and exciting science.

Gillette’s repeated claims that evolutionary psychology today has nothing to do with eugenics don’t convince me. The eugenicists he exhumes would surely have rejected his thesis, and reasonably so. They insisted that the behavior determined by biology included things like criminality, poverty, and other kinds of deviance, and that such defects should be extirpated from society by eugenic measures, including sterilization of the carriers, whether voluntary or involuntary. Today’s biological determinists prudently refrain from making such recommendations, at least most of the time; they may, like Herrnstein and Murray, just shake their heads in sorrow and ask rhetorically, “What Is To Be Done?” This division of labor shouldn’t fool anyone who doesn’t want to be fooled. Evidently Aaron Gillette does want to be fooled.