Louis Proyect vs. Steven Pinker

Louis Proyect is the master of ad hominem argument. In a post pretentiously titled Pecksniff and the Harper’s Open Letter, he'd refuse to sign the Harper's Open Letter because he wouldn't want to join the disreputable crowd of hypocritical, prominent signatories. He never claims to oppose the letter's actual content, which champions free speech, open inquiry, and some minimal respect for persons who disagree. These are bourgeois values which I believe Mr. Proyect holds in low esteem--he is, after all, a totalitarian Marxist.

Certainly respect for persons who disagree is low on Mr. Proyect's list. This is what he says about Mark Lilla.

Mark Lilla—Another Columbia professor. His claim to fame is writing a book urging the Democrats to dump “identity politics”. Katherine Franke, a Columbia law professor compared Lilla to David Duke and charged him with “underwriting the whitening of American nationalism, and the re-centering of white lives as the lives that matter most in the U.S.” Maybe he signed the letter because she “canceled” him.

So apparently any skepticism about "identity politics" is the same as David Duke, who, we may extrapolate further, is just one short step away from H*tl*r. And that's the problem--anybody who disagrees with Mr. Proyect is ultimately associated with the H-man. This is supposed to pass for discourse.

He saves his worst bile for Steven Pinker.

Steven Pinker—Pinker is arguably the worst person who signed the letter. My interest in him was focused on his reactionary sociobiological theories that I described as a mixture of Hobbes and Pangloss. I also recommend a new Jacobin article titled “It’s Official — Steven Pinker Is Full of Shit”. I guess Jacobin was guilty of cancel culture.

I've read both Mr Proyect's post (entitled Steven Pinker = Hobbes + Pangloss, posted in 2011, which in turn links to a post from 2009) and the Jacobin piece. It appears that Mr. Proyect has never actually read any of Pinker's books, so on this I have an edge. I read The Blank Slate shortly after it was published in 2003. I have never read The Better Angels of our Nature--the book that really gets Mr. Proyect's goat.

Sociobiology (aka evolutionary psychology) asserts two premises--the veracity of which are to be proven empirically.

1) That human evolution occurs much more rapidly than was believed in the 20th century.
2) That genetic evolution happens not just in response to changes in the natural environment, but also to changes in the social environment. This leads to the concept of gene-culture co-evolution. (For more about this, see Joseph Henrich.)

The first premise is now demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt. Detectable evolution can happen in historical time--certainly within a few thousand years, and likely within one thousand years. Indeed, it can happen almost immediately, as when a small band of people separates from a much larger group, and by crossing a mountain range loses genetic contact with their ancestors. They will be genetically distinct almost from the git-go--even if they represented a random sample before they crossed the mountain range.

Analysis of the human genome (first sequenced in 2003) has become cheap and ubiquitous. Coupled with massive data processing power, it is now possible for commercial companies (e.g., 23&me) to distinguish ethnic groups by genomic analysis alone.

The second premise is harder to definitively establish, but it can be said with confidence that genes correlate with personality traits, which collectively contribute to culture. Correlation obviously does not prove causation, and because genetic influences are extremely complicated and subtle, proving causation will be difficult to impossible except in a few cases (e.g., lactose tolerance). But correlation certainly suggests causation, and in many cases it probably results from causation.

In the 2009 post Mr. Proyect attributes the following statements to Pinker.

• Males have a stronger tolerance for physical risk and a stronger drive for anonymous sex. 

• Women have stronger emotions and are better at reading emotions on the faces of others. 

• Pinker states “A variety of sexual motives, including taste in men, vary with the menstrual cycle.” 

• He also states that “in a sample of mathematically talented students, boys outnumbered girls by 13 to one” but that women maintain more eye-contact, and smile and laugh more often. 

• Humans are hard-wired to think in stereotypes and to prefer kin. 

• Some people, most of them men, are born with criminal tendencies. 

• Turning to the big questions of social transformation that have vexed Great Thinkers for the millennium, we learn from Pinker that “Biological facts are beginning to box in plausible political philosophies.” Communism may work for insects, but humans are programmed for economic exchange and “reciprocal altruism.” (Is that the reason I used to climb across the ceilings and consume a pound of sugar at a time when I was in the Trotskyist movement, I wonder?)

Apart from the last bullet, there is abundant empirical evidence--genetic, neurological, anatomical, behavioral, and anthropological--to support all these claims. The best, recent source for this is Charles Murray's 2019 book entitled Human Diversity (my review here). The author compiles huge datasets (sample sizes in the millions) to support the assertions listed above (and much more besides).

I know, I know. I genuinely wish that somebody else besides Mr. Murray had written the book, and failing that I wish he'd written it under a pseudonym. But it is really important here to separate the subject from the author. Mr. Murray has written a textbook instead of a monograph. He has not done the research himself, but has put together the data from the scientific literature compiled by other people. One common criticism of Mr. Murray's book is that he's published no peer reviewed papers. I don't know if that's true, but it's irrelevant--textbook authors are not typically researchers themselves.

The other common criticism is that he's "cherry-picked" the data. This is both cheap and irrefutable. Any author--even a textbook author--has to pick and choose what to include and what to leave out. So of course the contents are "cherry-picked" in that trivial sense. The implication, however, is that he's hiding some crucial bit of data that disproves his thesis--presumably because he's dishonest, racist, and his name is Charles Murray. I find this incredible. While the book can certainly be criticized, it won't be easily dismissed because of some magic, missing data point.

The Blank Slate, published in 2003, did not have access to the voluminous data at Murray's fingertips. It is necessarily more speculative, and has been criticized for telling just so stories. But Murray's subsequent data have largely confirmed Pinker's hypotheses.

In the 2009 post Mr. Proyect writes about Pinker:

For all of Pinker’s animosity to radicalism and Marxism in particular, there is very little evidence that he understands how historical materialism deals with the question of human nature. While it is beyond the scope of this article to trace its development through the years, suffice it to say that Marxism views the nature-nurture relationship dialectically.

It does not really challenge the existence of biologically determined traits, but simply places the whole question of equality, justice and freedom in a materialist context. In other words, revolutionary socialism strives to create the conditions in which all human beings can reach their full potential. Within the context of such a challenge, Pinker’s “Blank Slate,” with its discussions about the difference between the appearance of male and female brains (according to Pinker, they are “nearly as distinct as their bodies”) seems little more than “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” geared to readers of the New York Review of Books.

It turns out that the pop-culture Mars/Venus stories are not that far off the mark. Most people understand that men and women are different in the ways one expects. (Only woke people on college campuses have forgotten how to do that.) But Murray's data is much more rigorous: first, it's actual data with sample sizes in the millions rather than mere anecdotes; second, it can quantify the differences, and also the similarities between men and women; and finally, it can at very least correlate those differences with differences with genomic and neurological data. In some cases it can establish causation.

Opponents of sociobiology will not get very far by firing shots at Charles Murray. First, he's just the messenger, and second, his book is very thorough. What they need to do instead is write a competing textbook. If Marxist dialectics are indeed the key to the nature-nurture debate, then by all means write the textbook that makes that case. But it must take the data seriously--you can't just philosophize in the abstract about "equality, justice and freedom," along with empty words like "dialectically," and expect to get away with it.

Materialism, if it means anything at all, certainly means arguing from empirical data.

One last point: nobody is arguing for genetic determinism. The environment plays a large role--both for individual outcomes, and certainly for cultural outcomes. I hope there's even room for old curmudgeons like me who still believe free will has at least a small remit.

But what is now undeniably true is that genes play a significant role in explaining variation between individuals, and also between ethnic groups. While genetic determinism is wrong, it is equally impossible to ignore genetics when thinking about human health, psychology, and culture.

Mr. Murray makes that point. He argues that, within the next ten years, academic papers in the social sciences will all include genetic data as a matter of course, and will be unpublishable otherwise. This is already true in biology, medicine, and psychology, and will spread to sociology and economics--even in the face of political correctness.

So the window of opportunity for our Marxist friends to write their textbook is closing fast. Mr. Proyect needs to get busy.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Righteous Mind
• Book Review: A Troublesome Inheritance
• Marxism and EvoPsych

Book Review: Human Diversity

The full title of Charles Murray's recent book is Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race and Class. It's a dense, tightly-reasoned, data-packed, expertly-written tome that will change the world. Or rather, the subject it discusses will change the world.

The major purpose of the book is to bring the educated layman up to date on the science of human genetics. Thanks to spectacular advances since 1980, and especially since the complete mapping of the genome in 2005, it is now possible to shed some serious light on the old nature vs. nurture question. While these results have until now stayed mostly within the specialist, scientific community, it is Mr. Murray's view that before the end of this decade, the consequences of this new knowledge will impact every aspect of our lives.

A short, oversimplified summary of the story goes like this: Back in the old days (before 1980) it was supposed that most human traits were the result of a gene or two, or perhaps maybe half a dozen. In this context we are using the word gene to refer to a bit of DNA that actually codes for a protein. In those days people supposed there were 100,000 or more genes.

This had numerous consequences. First, there was fear of genetically modified babies. If we could just change a specific gene, then we could make children much more intelligent. This possibility was never remotely realistic.

Then people assumed that evolution happened very slowly. Most mutations in actual genes are deleterious--resulting in birth defects or death. Only a very few are beneficial, and even those will need about 2000 generations (40,000 years) to spread from one individual to the entire human population.

Even then, it was understood that the bulk of our DNA was not part of a gene, i.e., didn't code for anything. Folks didn't know what that excess DNA did--it was often called junk DNA. Today we know different. It appears there are only about 20,000 actual genes in the entire genome. By far most DNA is in the non-coding portion. It appears that non-coding DNA regulates gene expression in some complex way.

While mutations in the genes are still usually deleterious, mutations in the non-coding parts of the genome tend to not have much effect. Therefore mutations accumulate there. Many of them spread across the human species: certain mutations that occur in more than 1% of individuals are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced snips). Wikipedia claims that more than 335 million SNPs have been found in our species, while any given individual will have between four and six million SNPs.

While an individual SNP has little effect, cumulatively the SNPs make a big difference. For example, it is now known that millions of SNPs help determine how tall you will be. With enough data and a big enough computer, one can isolate those SNPs that correlate with height.

So today we understand there isn't a "gene" for height, nor for personality/behavioral traits like intelligence, empathy, honesty, conscientiousness, etc. Yet we know that all these traits are significantly heritable--that is depend on our DNA. But instead of counting genes by the handful, we count SNPs by the thousands. Thus almost all traits (both physical and behavioral) are polygenic, in some cases nearly omnigenic (involving contributions from nearly all your DNA).

It's the SNPs that drive human evolution, and sufficiently fast that evolution can (and does) happen in historical time.

It is possible to count SNPs that enhance a certain trait, such as height or tendency toward schizophrenia. This leads to the polygenic score for that particular trait. Since your SNPs are fixed at birth, one can readily calculate your odds of being schizophrenic later in life. (It will never be 100%--environmental effects alter the odds significantly).

Likewise, there is a polygenic score for IQ. It cannot predict your IQ as an adult--for which the environment contributes about 40% of the variance--but it definitely narrows the field. If your child is born with a high polygenic score for IQ, then it might be worth saving money to send her to Harvard.

There are polygenic scores for things like criminality. The optimist will say that by judicious interventions we can prevent that outcome from occurring. The pessimist will fear that we'll be punishing people in advance of any crime--simply on the basis of their polygenic scores. I think they're both probably right--it is a brave new world coming on.

A second theme in Murray's book is an argument against the socialization theory. This theory--standard groupthink at American colleges--maintains that all differences between genders, races, and classes are merely social constructs, and have no underlying basis in biology. I'll mention that prior to 1980 this was a plausible idea, but since then, and especially since the rise of modern genomics, it becomes completely untenable.

Mr. Murray discusses at length the differences between men and women, who differ by an entire chromosome. There are genetic, physiological and psychometric differences between the sexes, compared to which "socialization" pales into insignificance. That said, it is not a simple switch--there is a continuum between male and female in nearly all traits. Few men have exclusively "male" traits, while few women are exclusively "female."

Murray uses facial features as an example. Consider the kinds of metrics facial recognition software might use: relative length of nose, relative distance between the ears, etc. Suppose there are twenty such metrics. It may be that women have slightly shorter noses (relatively) than men. But the effect is not very large--many women have noses longer than the average man, but most women don't.

So it is with all the other metrics. Women congregate slightly on one side of the spectrum, while men predominate mostly on the other, with a large overlap in the middle. Very few men are "masculine" on all twenty measures, and neither are many women "feminine" on all measures.

And yet it is easy to distinguish male faces from female faces. Even though each effect is small, the accumulated effects are big enough to see the difference. Only in a few cases is it truly ambiguous--I think of Rachel Maddow, for example. Two corollaries: facial recognition software can distinguish between male and female faces most of the time; it takes a skilled artist to draw an obviously female face, since most of the differences are so subtle.

Similarly, racial and ethnic differences show up in polygenic scores. That's how sites like 23&Me work their magic. Those very same polygenic scores imply ethnic differences in disease susceptibilities, physical attributes, and personality traits. Race is not just "skin deep" as the pre-1980 school would have it.

Class differences also depend on polygenic scores.

I'll close with some comments on how I think Murray's book will be received, especially by my former colleagues at Local State College.

First, most of the people who fancy themselves as experts on Race, Class and Gender are committed to the social construct theory and won't change their minds. But science progresses one retirement at a time, and these folks--tenured baby boomers--are not that long for the academic world. I don't think they're being replaced.

Second, those same self-proclaimed experts are typically in English and education departments. They know nothing about statistics. (Yes, I know--education faculty should know some stats, but I don't think they generally do.) One doesn't need a lot of statistics to read Murray's book, but a college-level introduction to the discipline strikes me as a prerequisite. (Sociologists have no excuse here.)

Finally, "Charles Murray" is a dirty word in those quarters. He should have written the book under a pseudonym. As the book has just come out, I can't blame them yet for not having read it, but they won't have read it five years from now, either.

So yes, while it will pass the academy by, I predict there will be a revolution in our understanding of human behavior. I'm not sure it will all be good. Lots of people (e.g., inhabitants of red states) will be classed as vaguely subhuman because of their average polygenic scores, as will many other groups of people.

There are some things this book should never change, concepts of morality, justice, and human worth among them. No polygenic score is an excuse to deny anybody their human rights. As Mr. Murray recently opined, religion becomes more important. Absent some kind of revival, the temptation to equate polygenic scores with human worth becomes irresistible.

You should definitely read Charles Murray's book. But whether you do or not, for better or worse it will definitely change your life.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: By The People
• Book Review: The Righteous Mind
• Book Review: A Troublesome Inheritance

Book Review: Hillbilly Elegy

Author J.D. Vance's older half-sister, Lindsay, has a successful life: stable marriage, three children, a house in the suburbs.

Hardly the stuff memoirs are made of. Mr. Vance has been more adventurous: after a stint in the Marine Corps he got a law degree from Yale University, though again that's not material for a best-seller.

Yet best-seller is precisely what Mr. Vance's autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, has become. The tale is not in the outcome but rather how they got there. Mr. Vance (and his sister) endured the Childhood from Hell. Their mother was a drug-addict, and J.D.'s father--one of a long succession of men who passed through his life as one of Mom's boyfriends or husbands--was an alcoholic.

So normally this book wouldn't interest me. Count me hardhearted, but tales of troubled children are not generally on my reading list. Tearjerker memoirs don't rank high, either. But Mr. Vance's book is not that, or at least not just that. It is a serious effort to understand the hillbilly culture in which he grew up. That I found fascinating, besides which it is beautifully written.

Mr. Vance credits his grandparents--Mamaw and Papaw--for his success. They were born in Jackson, Breathitt County, Kentucky, even today known as one of the poorest counties in America. As young adults Mamaw and Papaw traveled north along the "hillbilly highway" to look for work in the industrial Midwest, settling in Middletown, Ohio, where Mr. Vance was born. He has fond childhood memories of trips back to Jackson to visit his great-grandmother, Mamaw Blanton, along with other relatives.

It's a matriarchal world. The men come and go, and the women get pregnant as teenagers. Mamaw (a heavy smoker) lived only into her mid-seventies, but survived long enough to supervise a whole passel of great-grandchildren.

"Hillbilly" (the word used freely by Mr. Vance) is a slightly pejorative synonym for Scots-Irish. If you believe Scott Alexander, that term is also misleading, as there's no Irish blood involved at all. Instead hillbillies descend from the Scottish Borders, that lowland part of Scotland that was fought over for a thousand years ending in the 18th Century. Every summer one army or another would pass through, doing, I suppose, what armies of that era did: looting, raping and pillaging.

So no wonder the Borders people were clannish, deeply suspicious of outsiders, exceedingly sensitive to insult, and prone to violence. In North America they initially settled as far from authority as they possibly could, in the mountain fastnesses of Pennsylvania, Western Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. In the 19th and 20th Centuries economic deprivation forced them to wander--to Arkansas, Oklahoma and California, and then to the industrial Midwest along the trail that Mamaw and Papaw followed.

From a demographic viewpoint they are a successful people. And no surprise since they possess positive character traits as well: loyalty, courage, self-reliance.

Now if you believe authors like Nicholas Wade and Gregory Clark, then the concept of gene/culture co-evolution comes as no surprise. That states that cultures select for certain genes, and/or genes favor particular cultural attributes. Either way, over time (and a thousand years is certainly long enough) cultural attributes become inscribed in the genome. Thus hillbillies are, in some sense, born that way, at least as predisposition.

Mr. Vance, born a hillbilly, definitely shows the personality traits of his tribe. He is fiercely loyal to his family (insulting his mother is the surest route to a fistfight), served as a combat Marine in Iraq, and (justly) takes great pride in his ability to pull himself up by his bootstraps. Reading between the lines, I infer he has a tendency toward alcoholism (he drinks throughout the book).

But in one very important way--not mentioned explicitly in the book--he is very different from most Scots-Irish. He is very smart.

He is smarter than I am. Despite my upper middle class upbringing, I could never have aspired to attend Yale Law School. Even if I survived the IQ cutoff, I simply don't have the ability to work 16 hour days. In this he differs, not just from most hillbillies, but even from most people.

So Mr. Vance did inherit something from his grandparents: a high IQ. It's pretty obvious from the book that Mamaw and Papaw, however uneducated, certainly were not dumb. Even Mom, helpless though she was, had some serious smarts about her. While his grandparents clearly rescued him from absolute disaster, his stunning success in life is less due to what they did, but more on what he inherited from them.

There are simple tests given to toddlers that measure an ability to defer gratification. The archetype is known as the marshmallow test. A child is offered one marshmallow now (placed on a plate in front of him while the tester leaves the room), but if he can wait 15 minutes then he will get two. There is a strong correlation between passing the marshmallow test and future success in life, e.g., SAT scores, time spent in jail, future earnings, etc. The marshmallow test also correlates with IQ.

So Mr. Vance clearly would've passed the marshmallow test, even as a child. But many in his family wouldn't have. His Mom would've failed. Maybe even Mamaw would've failed. The stereotype for hillbillies is precisely that they're impulsive and undisciplined. Which implies that on average they're not very smart (I don't know if that's true).

Mr. Vance and his family are obviously a huge exception.

Toward the end of the book Mr. Vance stops talking about "hillbillies," and begins to identify more with the "working class." These groups overlap, but they are far from being the same thing. "Hillbilly" refers to an ethnic group, while "working class" is an economic entity not defined by genes. "Working class" does not denote a cluster of personality traits.

Hillbillies, successful in many contexts, are dysfunctional in the modern, urban, service economy. Mr. Vance is right to be skeptical about various government programs to help them. But I don't think he's skeptical enough. For if you take the above arguments seriously, there is no way a bespoke pre-school program or some special third grade curriculum is going to magically give ornery hillbillies a personality transplant. A thousand years of gene/culture co-evolution can't be undone that easily.

The poor will always be with us

Further Reading:

• Politics & Evolution
• Book Review: Trotsky
• Book Review: Grover Cleveland

Politics & Evolution

In which I claim that Dr. Ben Carson and Mr. Louis Proyect hold similar beliefs.

My Trotskyist friends claim to accept the theory of evolution while also denying it. In this they are typical of the Left. And also of the Right.

Louis Proyect is a good example. I reviewed his extensive criticism of Napoleon Chagnon in a post entitled Marxism & Evopsych, which includes a critique of the Marxist view on evolution. I won't repeat that here except to say that contrary to their claim, Marxists deny the theory of evolution, at least as it applies to human beings.

Since writing that review I have read and reviewed two books on the subject: one by Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind), and the other by Nicholas Wade (A Troublesome Inheritance). These render my Marxism & Evopsych remarks somewhat incomplete, and I confess probably lend some credence to Mr. Proyect's complaints against modern Darwinism.

The latter book is particularly troublesome, as the name implies. It argues that ethnic differences are indeed more than skin deep, and also include variations in personality. In particular, the circle of trust appears to be under significant genetic control. People who have lived in urban areas for many generations, for example, will tend to be more trusting of strangers than folks who've spent the last millennium out in the bush. 

Other people (not Mr. Wade) argue that things like IQ is significantly heritable, and that ethnic groups differ in average IQ, often by a significant margin. Indeed, a recent book by Garett Jones (The Hive Mind) argues that the wealth of nations depends crucially on the average IQ of its population. (He speculates that it may depend more strongly on the IQ of the top 5%, though that's unproven.)

Such ideas have a long and disreputable heritage, as Mr. Proyect will be quick to point out. This chart is easily found by searching for "iq by nation". 

It's been reposted by such worthies as Stormfront (I won't honor them with a link) and FreeRepublic. Nevertheless, the data in this chart seem mostly reproducible and correct, as Mr. Jones discusses in detail. (The causes of the phenomenon are a matter of considerable controversy.)

So actually I don't blame Mr. Proyect for denying evolution's application to human beings. It paints a grim picture of our species. Our prognosis is not good. Mr. Proyect aspires to a better world, and in doing so he is forced to deny science.

Another politico who sides with Mr. Proyect is the presidential candidate, Dr. Ben Carson. Dr. Carson is a retired neurosurgeon, serving as the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins for nearly 30 years. As such he must know something about evolution, and it is unlikely that he rejects it altogether. Even though he says "I don't believe in evolution... I simply don't have enough faith to believe that something as complex as our ability to rationalize, think, and plan, and have a moral sense of what's right and wrong, just appeared." [All Carson quotes from Wikipedia.]

Further,

In October 2015, Carson stated that he does accept the idea of natural selection, but there is only evidence for microevolution (changes in allele frequencies that occur over time within a species), which he believes was the result of "a wise creator who gave his creatures the ability to adapt to their environment so that he wouldn't have to start over every 50 years", whereas "there's never been one species that's turned into another species, that can be proved." 

But then, with respect to using fetal tissue for research, he said "to not use the tissue that is in a tissue bank, regardless of where it comes from, would be foolish. Why would anybody not do that?"

So like Mr. Proyect, Dr. Carson is inconsistent on evolution. When it comes to his professional life he has at least implicitly accepted it. But in his religious and political world he adamantly rejects it. In this he is like most people--they reject evolution on Sunday when they go to church, but rely on it on Monday when they visit the doctor. Surely this ability to compartmentalize is an evolved, human trait.

It's very difficult to be consistent on evolution. Maybe some devoutly religious people qualify--like those Christian Scientists who reject any and all medical care, or perhaps some of the faculty at Bob Jones University. But such folks are few and far between.

Then there are people who raise evolution to the status of religion: I'd put Stormfront or FreeRepublic in that category. They consider the above IQ chart to be divinely inspired. Leave aside, for the moment, that they don't know what they're talking about.

Also consistent on evolution is Boko Haram. I don't mean in an intellectual sense--I doubt the Bokos know anything about science. But in the way they live their lives they obey evolution's core principles:

1. The ultimate measure of evolutionary success can be measured by the fertility rate of one's children and grandchildren.
2. Evolution cares not a whit for the happiness of the individual organism.

So consider the 250+ schoolgirls from Chibok kidnapped by Boko, and then sold off as wives and concubines.

1. The lifetime fertility of these girls is likely to be very high--at least for those who survive. Four or five children apiece, subsequently yielding 20+ grandchildren is a reasonable guess. Further, the reproductive success of the kidnappers is virtually assured--how many of the girls are already pregnant?
2. Yet prospects for happiness for the girls is dire. Or, as an evolutionist might put it, who cares.

Compare the Bokos' fertility with that of aging ex-Trotskyists. I don't believe Mr. Proyect has any offspring (or at least none mentioned on his blog). I have two, but not yet any grandchildren. How many unrelated ex-Trotskyists would you have to put in a room before they could cumulatively match the reproductive success of one Boko platoon leader?

There is no doubt, at least compared to Trotskyists, that the Bokos have a better understanding of evolution.

And yet any member of civilized society--among whom I'd count myself and both Dr. Carson and Mr. Proyect--will object. While we might state it differently, our creed maintains We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Of course evolution denies all of this: the Truths are not only not self-evident, they're not even true. We weren't endowed by any creator, and we don't have any unalienable rights. And for Happiness? Just ask the organisms from Chibok about that!

So I sympathize with Misters Proyect & Carson. Their selective denial of evolution is a mark of civilization, not scientific ignorance (though in the case of Mr. Proyect it is that, too). Despite my own passionate defense of the science of evolution, I have no use for those who raise it to moral principle. Accordingly I would never vote for any ultra-rationalist candidate--not Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett or Christopher Hitchens. Nor would I vote for Barack Obama.

Still, I think Dr. Carson gets the better of any debate. He has three children, and one presumes also some grandchildren. Religious people are more able to successfully reproduce, despite denying evolution, than us more secular sorts. This is civilized religion's great advantage: it potentially answers the question of our age: how can we successfully reproduce in an environment that contains birth control and still remain civilized?

I would never vote for Dr. Carson for biology teacher of the year. For other reasons I probably won't vote for him as president. But on the issue of evolution he's probably closest to getting it right.

Evolution is a science. That's all it is. It tells you something about the human species, but it cannot be the moral lodestar or a religious foundation. As Katherine Hepburn famously said, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

Further Reading:

• Dorothy Day
• Subway Values
• Book Review: Lord of the World

Beware the Amazons!

I have not read Adrienne Mayor's new book, entitled The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Women Warriors Across the Ancient World. It would never have crossed my radar screen but for an article in Socialist Action.

From the preview at amazon.com it looks to be charmingly written and beautifully researched. Appropriately, it's doing well in the sales rankings and has been widely reviewed elsewhere. I have read two "bourgeois" reviews from The Independent and the Wall Street Journal. There's nothing wrong with the book. It's just that I have lots of other stuff to read first that's more important to me.

Ms. Mayor's opus concerns female warriors from Scythia. That land was in Central Asia, and the warriors (both men and women, as the WSJ points out) were members of nomadic tribes who depended on finding new pastureland and/or booty for survival. Occasionally they attacked Greek communities (unsuccessfully, I gather), inspiring a voluminous and enduring series of myths about Amazon warriors. They caught the Greek imagination.

Ms. Mayor writes

After Heracles, Amazons were the single most popular subjects in Greek vase paintings. Amazons appeared in city murals and monumental civic sculptures in Athens and other Greek cities; tombs and places linked to Amazons were revered in the Greek and Anatolian landscape.

Ms. Mayor's effort is to separate fact from fiction--what was true about the Amazons, and what was myth. It's a book about art, culture, fashion, archaeology, and sex. I think it will be a bestseller.

So why am I writing about a book that I have no plan to read? It's because of the odd, idiosyncratic review provided by Socialist Action's resident feminist, Christine Marie, entitled A challenge to the myth of male dominance. Ms. Marie reads much more into the book than I think is there.

The title of Ms. Marie's review gives the game away. She reduces a complex, romantic tale to a cardboard cutout. Mayor's book is little more than an anecdote to justify some Marxist theory.

Her first claim is that the very existence of female warriors is in doubt. Of course that's not true--we have Amazons even today--the US military is almost completely gender-integrated. Ms. Marie thinks that we males are sent into paroxysms of psychological despair by the mere thought of female warriors. Then how does she explain the idolization of said Amazons in today's video games?

Second, she suggests that the acknowledgement of women soldiers has been the secret knowledge of Marxist anthropologists.

Collections of works by Marxist feminist anthropologists such as Eleanor Burke Leacock are kept in the public eye thanks only to small radical publishing houses. And so, when academic publishers commit to printing a new book that challenges the mainstream on these questions, it should be celebrated.

This ultimately reduces to a conspiracy theory--that well-known academics (almost all of whom are Leftists, and the majority are women) are somehow keeping important knowledge under wraps. How could this happen? And why?

Then comes the bizarre argument that because women died in battle, therefore there is a threat to male dominance. The logic escapes me. I do not see the connection between the title of Ms. Marie's piece and the substance of Ms. Mayor's book. Over 700,000 British soldiers died in World War I, many of them in futile attempts to move the front lines by a few hundred yards. Is that an argument for male dominance? And yet Ms. Marie will have us believe that the discovery of graves of a few hundred female battle victims implies that women were equals way back when.

And then there is the category error. She is taking a tale from history and turning it into a fact of anthropology. Ms. Mayor's book looks to be a rousing good tale, analogous perhaps to the myriad Civil War stories. These are at best anecdotes. And true enough--collect enough anecdotes and eventually you get data. But Ms. Marie has one anecdote and from there she argues for Marxist anthropology. The premise does not justify the conclusion.

Any effort to do anthropology has to take into account evolutionary psychology. From what I've read, there is nothing in Ms. Mayor's book that contradicts evoPsych. Nor as a work of history would one expect it to. But anthropology looks at a much bigger canvas over a much longer timeframe. Marx knew nothing about genes or genetics, nor did he have any ability to track their propagation through human populations. We have that toolkit today, at least in rudimentary form.

I don't expect Ms. Marie to change her mind. A person's political opinions are likely innate, or at least not changeable after age 30 or so. It all depends on what categories you put things in, and what values you consider important. To use Arnold Kling's language, Ms. Marie puts everything in terms of an Oppression/Liberation axis. Women are oppressed, and the political goal is to free them.

I prefer (in this context) the Civilization/Barbarism axis, i.e., that rules of civilized behavior are a crucial ingredient of our modern world. Civilization requires some limits on freedom. Men, for example, are not allowed to form street gangs with the purpose of going out to rape women, Genghis Khan style. Women, on the other hand, need to provide domestic life that keeps families and communities intact. When these institutions break down, we'll all be much worse off.

So Ms. Marie is from Mars and I'm from Venus, or whatever. I relinquish any effort to alter her world view. But I will suggest that she could become better at making her own case if she knew more. And that, of course, applies to me as well. So I'll make a deal with her. If she reads one book that I recommend, then I shall return the favor. The goal is not to change minds (impossible), but rather just to inform.

My recommendation for Ms. Marie is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. I don't agree with everything in that book. It's also somewhat dated. Nevertheless, I think it makes the strongest case against Marxist anthropology as historically understood. Now a reformulation of Marxism is possible, but that will require some understanding of evolutionary psychology.

I await Ms. Marie's instructions for what book I am to read. I promise to review it here.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Righteous Mind
• Book Review: A Troublesome Inheritance
• Stitched-Up Snit

Book Review: The Righteous Mind

Like many people before him (e.g., John Lennon and Steve Jobs), author Jonathan Haidt traveled to India seeking enlightenment. There he learned that he was morally challenged, a discovery that led in part to this book The Righteous Mind. Among the first indications of this occurred when his academic hosts in India advised that he should stop saying "thank you" to his servants as they did their jobs. In contrast to his experimental subjects in Orissa state, he discovered he was WEIRD.

Not only is Mr. Haidt WEIRD, but so am I, and likely as a reader of this blog so are you. The acronym stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, terms that describe almost all college graduates in the Western world. But they don't describe the rest of the human race (including many American subcultures); the pun is totally intended.

Mr. Haidt postulates that our moral reasoning is done with a set of biological tools. These are analogous to taste buds, of which there are five: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory. The myriad combinations of these result in the cuisines of the world. You can think of them as the alphabet.

Analogously, human beings are possessed of six moral processors (call them moral-buds, if you will) that are part of our innate, human biology. The six moral axes are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/anarchy, purity/impurity, and liberty/oppression. Culture determines how these are mixed together in making specific, moral choices.

What's weird about WEIRD people is that we only use three of these moral-buds, mostly ignoring the rest. It's as if we devised a cuisine that only used the sweet and salty taste buds--we'd be culinarily challenged compared to the rest of the globe. Accordingly, says Mr. Haidt, we fail to understand how much of the world thinks about moral issues. The three WEIRD axes are care, fairness, and liberty.

Mr. Haidt's Orissa hosts, for example, employed the authority/anarchy module in their advice to stop thanking the servants. Contrary to Western opinion, authority is not necessarily oppressive, but rather serves the interests of social order. It involves reciprocal relationships and obligations, for which no thank you is required. We WEIRD people might recognize this in a beloved teacher. We grant him great authority, trusting him to consider our benefit, and it would not occur to us to say "thank you for teaching us arithmetic today."

Likewise, WEIRD people often fail to understand the moral power of dietary laws, or rules regarding sexual intercourse. The rules of kosher or halal seem silly and arbitrary to us--mere social conventions. Yet to most people on the planet those sorts of rules carry as much moral weight as thou shalt not steal. They preserve purity.

The subtitle of Mr. Haidt's book, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, describes why conservatives are likely to be more successful than liberals or libertarians. Conservatives are less WEIRD than the others--they appeal (at least somewhat) to the other three axes. For conservatives, for example, gay marriage is not primarily an issue of fairness, but rather one of purity. Gay sex is disgusting because it is impure, and therefore immoral. That makes little sense to us WEIRD people, but since humans come with a built-in purity moral-bud, it will strike a chord with most of the world's people.

I guess I'm a pretty WEIRD person. The raw conservative moral arguments don't make too much more sense to me today than they did when I was a Trotskyist. Still, thanks to my long-standing interest in religion, and now thanks to Mr. Haidt's book, I do believe I understand better than I did.

Mr. Haidt describes human nature in terms of aphorisms, one of which is human beings are like an elephant with a rider, and the rider serves the elephant. Our biological, subconscious impulses are the elephant, by far the strongest part of our make-up. The tiny rider represents our conscious selves. Perhaps one can compare it to Freud's id and ego. But unlike in Freud's scenario, where the ego is constantly fighting the id, Mr. Haidt tells us that the elephant and the rider are on the same side, with the elephant in charge.

First impressions matter. The elephant leans one way or another when confronted with new people or situations, either for or against. This is technically known as affect, which lasts for about eight seconds. The rider, meanwhile, serves as the elephant's lawyer or public relations agent, devising post-hoc rationalizations for why the choice was made. The rider's job is to preserve our reputation. Mr. Haidt claims that the elephant almost never listens to its own rider, though it will more often take advice from other people's riders.

This all rings true to me. Short term behavior is made instantaneously, and often regretted later. "I didn't mean to say that," is the oft-heard excuse when the rider can't come up with anything better. I think Mr. Haidt accurately describes behavioral psychology.

But it's not a description of moral psychology. Moral decisions are always conscious, made by free will if put in theological terms. The law certainly recognizes it that way--accidents, or actions done while insane are not considered criminal. Spur of the moment crimes--crimes of passion committed by the elephant--are treated more leniently than the premeditated sort committed by the rider.

Mr. Haidt never discusses free will, and probably for good reason. It is not amenable to scientific investigation. Nevertheless, it likely exists. Unless one is some kind of super-Calvinist (i.e., you believe that every event is predetermined since the Big Bang), then there must be some freedom in the universe. Given that, then both logic and common sense suggest that some of that freedom lies within the human brain.

Without free will it is impossible to discuss morality, at least as theologically understood. Unfree decisions are not moral decisions. Decisions made by affect have no moral content. Mr. Haidt's book, however interesting and however correct, is not really about moral psychology.

For all that, I found Mr. Haidt's book totally convincing. It certainly delimits the constraints on our moral behavior, better defining the scope of free will. It is a tour de force of evolutionary psychology (evopsych), using clever experiments and evolutionary reasoning to derive counter-intuitive conclusions. If you don't like evopsych, then you will hate this book. My Trotskyist friends, for example, believe in the miraculous exemption theory, i.e., that human being are somehow exempt from the laws of evolution as they apply to all other life on earth.

But my former comrades do have some cause for doubt, for evopsych has been something of a moving target. Mr. Haidt's book is a nice summary of the evolution of evopsych.

In the beginning was Edward Wilson's groundbreaking work on the sociobiology (his term for evopsych), emerging from his study of ants. The theory was generalized and popularized by Richard Dawkins' excellent classic, The Selfish Gene, which was my introduction to the discipline. That book identified evolution of the individual gene as the key player.

The second iteration is due to improved experimental technology. For many years it was assumed that we had stone age brains, evolved in an Era of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA). The impression was that during historical time human biology was more or less fixed. However, as Mr. Haidt details and as I described in my review of Nicholas Wade's book, it has become apparent that evolution moves much faster than that. Mr. Haidt introduces the concept of gene/culture coevolution.

Finally, Mr. Haidt asserts the heretical concept of group evolution, something that Mr. Dawkins thought he had vanquished once and for all. Mr. Haidt states that religion offers benefits to the entire group. The classic example is that devout Jewish observance builds substantial social capital, sufficient to allow diamond traders to make million dollar deals based on a handshake. Mr. Haidt convincingly refutes the Dennett - Dawkins thesis that religion is some kind of parasitic growth on human society.

Overall, I really enjoyed Jonathan Haidt's book, and highly recommend it.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Lord of the World
• David Berlinski & Evolution
• Marxism & EvoPsych

Book Review: A Troublesome Inheritance

This book about race and the human genome (by former NYTimes reporter Nicholas Wade) will neither shock nor surprise the reader already schooled in evolutionary psychology. I, for example, have read much of the antecedent literature, and little of the data was totally new to me (though I still learned a lot). The book is well-written and well-documented. The author is careful not to overstate his case, even while speculating beyond the hard facts.

The principle thesis of the book is that race (and more broadly, ethnicity) is more than skin deep. The book demonstrates--conclusively in my view--that there are genes that influence behavior, and that these are unevenly distributed among racial groups. One example that he describes in detail is the MAO-A promoter sequence, a variable piece of DNA that regulates aggressive behavior.

The book is very careful not to make too much of this. It's not as though there are "Caucasian genes" and "Asian genes." We are all one species, and the races have been separated for at most 50,000 years. At most the races constitute sub-species--such as dog breeds--but Mr. Wade won't even go that far. Instead, the phenomena is much more subtle, and not necessarily observable at the level of an individual.

Genes mutate through natural processes such as cosmic radiation, transcription errors, and whatnot. Most of these mutations are harmless, most of the rest are harmful or even fatal, but a few of them confer some benefit on the individual and his/her offspring. These latter will be propagated throughout the population.

When mutations are very beneficial, they sweep the entire population until 100% of all individuals possess those genes--we say they have reached fixation. Most genes that we have inherited from our mammalian ancestors, along with many human genes, have reached fixation and are common to all human beings. Those genes are what make us human.

But some genes are not so obviously beneficial--they confer benefits only under some circumstances. For example, the gene for sickle cell anemia is beneficial to those who live in malarial climates, but counterproductive everyplace else. It is thus most commonly found among West Africans. These genes do not sweep the entire population, but instead coexist with other variants of the same gene. These coexisting gene mutations are known as alleles.

So it would be easy to claim that White people have one set of alleles, while Asians another set. But that is also an oversimplification. Consider two alleles of a given gene--label them A and B. In Caucasians, allele A might be found in 75% of the population, while in Asians it may only be found in 40% of the population. Thus it's not that each race has a separate set of alleles, but the frequency of alleles varies between the races. By looking at the allele ratio for multiple genes (typically in the dozens) it is possible to determine the race of the individual to within 90% accuracy (i.e., an answer that corresponds to how the person assigns his own race).

So there is no question that race is inscribed in our genes. The second claim is that there are genes for behavior. This seems obviously true--certainly animal behavior is regulated by genes, and it would be strange if that weren't also true for humans in some degree. The elucidation of the function of the MAO-A promoters (among other genes) demonstrates this conclusively.

There are certain complex behaviors that determine social interactions. For example, how big is the circle of trust? A small circle consisting only of kin will predominate in tribal societies. A much bigger circle is necessary for urban individuals who participate in a global economy. However, there is not a gene for "trust." Instead, trust is regulated by a large number of genes, and can be modified by slight changes the frequencies of various alleles. These frequencies probably do not change by much--most people are fairly trusting--and we have neither identified any of the relevant genes, nor successfully measured the frequencies of the alleles. Still, it is a very reasonable hypothesis that evolution can modulate social interactions to optimize the individual's chances in their current environment. Jews, for example, have long lived in urban environments that put a premium on trust--that's why they're successful bankers. Australian aborigines, on the other hand, lived as tribal hunter-gatherers for 46,000 years, up until the arrival of Europeans in the 17th Century--their ability to function as global citizens will be much more limited.

The third thesis is that evolution happens fast. My Trotskyist friends, for example, have long argued that evolution takes "millions of years," and that within the timeframe of human history our biology was static. But with the advent of modern genomics, we know that evolution operates on much faster timescales. It is now possible to measure human evolution to within the last 3,000 years, and that limit is simply an experimental restriction. With better data (that we shall soon accumulate), there is every reason to think that measurable evolution can occur within a few centuries. This is especially true if the environmental driver is very strong, e.g., birth control.

So the claim of Mr. Wade's book is that people evolve to optimize their success in their environment. If that environment is cultural, then cultural traits will soon be inscribed in the genome. China, for example has existed as a unified nation under autocratic rule since 221 BC. That they will suddenly turn into a Western-style democracy just because a few McDonald's restaurants have opened up is surely a silly thesis. Behavioral traits such as conformity, obedience, thrift, hard work, and a large trust circle are likely not merely cultural phenomena anymore--they are part of the genetic heritage. Mr. Wade's book predicts that someday soon we will be able to prove that through an analysis of the human genome. I think he's right.

By demographic measures, the Han Chinese are the most successful people on earth. They are clearly optimized for their environment.

I'll add three comments of my own. First, people like my Trotskyist friends who claim that evolution stopped the minute human beings came along can no longer justify that belief on facts. Theirs is no longer a scientific opinion. Our ability to analyze the genome directly completely discredits that point of view.

Second, the public policy implications of this data are pretty small. It implies that efforts to change people's personality, either through education or economic motivation, will probably fail. Personality is substantially heritable, and the part that isn't heritable is not easily addressed institutionally. Schools can educate students, but they can't build character or instill good citizenship. Those traits depend on culture and genes, neither of which are amenable to schooling. Head Start failed, not because it was bad educational practice, but because it wanted to give its students a personality transplant. That goal was impossible.

Finally, moral claims are unchanged. To put it in religious terms, God Loves You. It doesn't matter what your alleles are--we are all created in the image of God. Or, in more secular language: We hold these truths to be self-evident...

Further Reading:

• Sisters & Slackers
• Book Review: Lord Of The World
• David Berlinski & Evolution

Book Review: Lord Of The World

Apparently the Pope has read and frequently refers to Robert Hughes Benson's novel Lord Of The World. Or so says George Weigel in two articles about President Obama's visit to the Vatican, here and here. Mr. Weigel claims (perhaps facetiously) that it is not great literature. I am no judge of literature--I only know if I enjoy reading the book. I did enjoy reading this one.

The book, written in 1907, is a novel about the distant future a century hence, i.e., about 2007. On one level it can be read as science fiction--a prediction about what the modern world will be like. Father Benson (for he was a priest) was not especially interested in technology and that certainly is not his focus. Still, it figures into the plot.

A primary mode of transport is the volor, which modern readers will recognize as an airplane. A volor ascended to 500 feet and could occasionally top 150 miles per hour. Inside, however, they were outfitted like railway carriages, with compartments and a dining car, staffed by a conductor and piloted by a "steersman." They were unheated--passengers packed coats and blankets for the relatively arduous journey over the Alps. There are no automobiles, computers or telephones, though radio telegraphs exist at the margin. It's the world of Sherlock Holmes with airplanes.

Fr. Benson anticipates George Orwell's 1984. His world is divided among three empires: Asia (everything east of the Urals), Europe (west of the Urals, and including Africa), and the Americas. The threat is war between Asia and Europe, which if it happened would be unimaginably destructive. Both sides possess the new "Benninschein explosives," which "...if tales were true, entire towns could be destroyed with a single shell." War had not happened in Europe in living memory, and needs to be avoided at all costs.

Salvation comes in the form of the Antichrist (Mr. Weigel's term, not used in the novel), who by dint of charisma and intelligence unites Europe and Asia under his presidency. This is met with near universal acclaim, and even Catholics acknowledge that the new leader had accomplished good things. Like Hitler, he made the trains run on time.

The struggle is between the supernatural and the natural, humanist world. In the latter humanity is raised to divine status. Religious holidays are replaced by four secular ones: Maternity, Life, Sustenance, and Paternity. The fearless leader has the status of a Nietzschean hero, and is worshiped accordingly.

In opposition is the small remnant of the Catholic Church, the last group of rebellious Christians who have managed to resist both material temptation and violent persecution. Protestant denominations have long since yielded. Catholics believe in the supernatural, and that God will intervene in history and redeem his people. The value of that faith is the matter of this novel.

I don't know about the supernatural, but I agree with Fr. Benson, George Weigel, and (apparently) the Pope that humanism makes for a very poor religion. Where it has been tried--from the French Revolution to Stalin to Hitler to Kim Jong-un--it has failed miserably. For humanism denies the one great empirical fact underlying all religion: all normal people perceive themselves as sinners, unworthy of the moral demands placed upon them. The boundary between Good and Evil runs through the middle of every human heart.

Who knows why people feel that way. I'm sure evolutionary psychologists will have something to say about it. But apart from psychopaths and small children it appears to be a human universal. Humans are simply not divine. Humanism as a religion elides or denies this great fact, and assumes that people can raise themselves up by their own bootstraps to escape from sin. They can't. It simply is not part of our nature.

So religions are both more demanding and more tolerant. Religions believe God's law is absolute, and violation is a sin. At the same time they understand that no real person can obey God's law, and that's where forgiveness comes in. In the religious world view, you can be a sinner and still be a child of God. Sometimes the "sinners," (e.g., gays) find religious forgiveness (e.g., Phil Robertson) to be intolerably arrogant and patronizing. But all religions have as a goal to separate the sin from the sinner--to condemn the sin while forgiving the sinner.

Humanism can't do that. Humanism aspires to create a socialist Man, or a master Race, or (in the case of Fr. Benson's book) a humane Society. Sin must be ruthlessly punished and the sinners killed. Stalin murdered Kulaks and counter-revolutionaries. Hitler murdered Jews and Gypsies. Kim Jong-un murders just about anybody. At least at the beginning all of this murder is for a worthy cause: to expunge sin from the world. But sin is unexpungeable, and soon enough murder just becomes murder, no matter what the intention was.

Humanism is incapable of tolerance.

So I don't know precisely what sin is. In particular, I'm less convinced than Phil Robertson that homosexuality is a sin. It's more likely to be a handicap, if not just an alternative lifestyle. I don't know if using contraception is a sin, though it does seem to me to be horribly counterproductive. Why would you want to purposely impair your own fertility? People who use contraception will not determine the future. Abortion is undoubtedly a sin, but it still has to be legal, as are many other sins.

But this much is certain: no truly religious person will advocate the murder of any of those sinners, if sinners they be. Humanists can make no such distinction--why even today some environmentalists are advocating criminal charges against those who disagree with them on global warming.

So I enjoyed Fr. Benson's book. It's a rousing good tale. I skimmed through some of the longer religious passages about the adoration of the Sacred Host, etc. I understand Catholic thought better than I did before, but I am no closer to believing in the supernatural. I admire and envy their faith, but unfortunately I can't really share it. But of this I am convinced--the Catholic Church represents on balance a positive good in the world. I wish Godspeed and all the best to Pope Francis and his army of believers.

Further Reading:

• David Berlinski & Evolution
• Duck Soup
• George Gilder, Evolution & Science

David Berlinski & Evolution

I'm a great fan of Peter Robinson's interview videos under the title Uncommon Knowledge. It is a conservative version of Charlie Rose--at least as good, and better in the sense that Mr. Robinson actually lets his guests talk. While I don't always agree with his guests, I always learn something.

Yesterday I watched an interview with David Berlinski. I went into this fully aware that Mr. Berlinski is a crusader against Darwinism, so that was no surprise. I hoped to learn something new. Even I concede that there might be reasons to oppose Darwinism. It's just that I haven't heard them very clearly formulated yet.

No doubt Mr. Berlinski is a charming interviewee. Unfortunately, much of his argument is just pure nonsense. This is sad because I would love to agree with him on some important issues. I hate to recycle this tired old stuff again, but here goes.

First, like many Darwin skeptics, he's got this thing about the Cambrian explosion. This event, which happened about 550 million years ago, is when multicellular life first appeared (evolved) on earth. Mr. Berlinski argues that all these life forms couldn't have formed in such a short period of time, and further, there is no fossil record showing the continuity between the Precambrian time and post-explosion.

The counter argument is pretty obvious: single-celled organisms don't yield much of a fossil record, so we don't know much about them. And the appearance of multicellular organisms opens up a whole new ecological space. Since evolution can work in parallel, a million species can evolve as fast as one. Since a new species can evolve in a million years or less, it is surely understandable that no fossil record exists. Mr. Berlinski's argument is just silly.

His second argument is even worse. He accuses Darwinism of a tautology: survival of the fittest. We know that the fittest have survived because they're around today, and therefore they must have been the fittest. And true enough: if "survival of the fittest" were the sole content of Darwinism then he'd have a point. But unlike his contention, "fittest" has a very definite meaning. Any critter that can out-reproduce its neighbors is more fit. Fertility rates can be measured, which gives "survival of the fittest" empirical content.

And then he's off on the species kick: you can't evolve new species. This statement is just factually false--Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene provides numerous examples. Also, most biomass on the planet is single-celled organisms that reproduce asexually and don't form species. Yet surely Mr. Berlinski acknowledges these organisms evolve. By what principle is evolution turned off when sex appears?

It is actually very easy to disprove the theory of evolution. All Mr. Berlinski needs to do is to produce one reproducible example of an organism that has a significantly different genetic code from everything else. That would blow evolution out of the water. No need to mess around with the inevitably ambiguous evidence from the Precambrian muck. That we all have the same genetic code is powerful evidence that we are all descended from the same organism. But Mr. Berlinski evinces no knowledge of modern genetics.

And that's what bothers me most. I accuse most religious objectors to evolution of being know-nothing critics. They simply haven't read anything. My Trotskyist friends fall into the same category. I am shocked that somebody who claims to be an intellectual and writes books on evolution should be so phenomenally ignorant.

And then he's full of ad hominem attacks. In Mr. Berlinski's world, we scientists are evil bastards who are just in it for the grant money. In his view, if the federal research budget could be cut to zero (and I agree with him that should happen), then both global warming and evolution would disappear. Of course he's wrong. I work with global warming fanatics every day, and I can tell you they are definitely not in it for the money. Theirs is a missionary, "save-the-planet" zeal.

Unlike global warming, evolution is not a political opinion. Evolution makes no predictions, nor does it impose any public policy. Indeed, evolution is the theoretical framework underlying all of modern biology. It is to biology what the periodic table is to chemistry. It is an incredibly useful organizing principle.

There is an odd symmetry here. The climate change crew accuse their critics of being science deniers. That is, not only do we "deny" global warming catastrophism, but also evolution, and then even the fact that cigarettes cause cancer! We're such knuckle-dragging idiots. Mr. Berlinski holds precisely the same opinion in reverse, and likely for the same reason. He maintains that anybody who agrees with evolution also agrees with global warming catastrophism. But neither the climate crew nor Mr. Berlinski are arguing science anymore. They are simply asserting their own world views irrespective of any evidence.

The truth is that "global warming" is vastly exaggerated, and the theory of evolution is mostly true. Those are just facts. No need to hypothesize some grand conspiracy theory.

So that brings us to where I agree with Mr. Berlinski. Evolution is not a philosophy. It is only science.

Evolution won't tell you what the purpose or meaning of life is. Nor will it tell you what is moral or immoral. Evolution is mute on the question of the existence of God. For that matter, evolution is totally compatible with Mr. Berlinski's intelligent design theory (crackpot science, but perfectly acceptable as a philosophical point of view).

I, for one, center my religion on Thomas Jefferson's words We hold these truths... There is absolutely nothing in evolution that either requires or prohibits those truths. I simply assert them as self-evident, i.e., as a moral imperative. That is my religious faith.

Further Reading:

• Dusty's Ducks
• George Gilder, Evolution & Science
• The End Of Science

Dusty's Ducks

A fellow named Dusty has posted a video on the Duck Dynasty kerfuffle (h/t Louis Proyect). Mr. Proyect offers it without comment, but he labels it under humor, among other categories. That does seem apt.

A more vituperative, angry response to a TV show is hard to imagine. That said, there are a couple of points where Dusty and I agree.

1) This is not a free speech issue. A&E certainly has the right to schedule its programming as it wishes.

2) It's not actually a reality show. The Robertsons are actors playing a cartoon version of themselves. Like actors the world over, they get into costume before appearing on camera. Dusty calls that "fake," but it's no more fake than any other TV show.

Beyond this, ironies abound.

The duck gang has expressed irritation with A&E for bleeping the soundtrack, as if there were profanity. They deny that they ever use profanity, and I'm inclined to believe them. Devoutly religious people don't use swear words.

Contrast that with Dusty, whose vocabulary consists mostly of profanity. A&E would have to bleep his entire speech! His favorite word is douchebag--that's the term he uses to describe Phil Robertson, all his kin, and Christians in general. This is an odd term: it's related to douche, which refers to "the cleansing product for vaginas." It's hard to know who's being insulted here: Christians because they're like dirty vaginas, or women because they're like Christians.

So Dusty claims that "nothing brings out the Christian love like hating us gay people." That's the felony, but for good measure he adds two misdemeanors: Christians (in the person of Phil Robertson) are ignorant and bigoted. Now I agree with him--Phil Robertson is ignorant. He's poorly educated and not widely traveled. And he's probably bigoted as well.

But he's not hateful. Phil does not threaten violence against gays, or even their civil rights. He just thinks that gays are tempted by their unique version of sin. As I said in my last post, "[i]f a gay man were to encounter a Robertson, the worst that could happen is he'd get an earful about the need for repentance and the saving power of Jesus Christ. And then he'd be invited over for dinner..."

Dusty is the man who is hateful, as the language, anger, and vitriol he directs against the Robertsons demonstrates.

A second irony is that Dusty sports a Darwin fish tee-shirt. I assume he refers to Phil's creationist views. As I said, Phil is not an educated man. He is an entertainer, and not an intellectual or political leader. In this he is similar to any number of other Hollywood airheads, like George Clooney or Prince Charles. You can't take them too seriously.

The irony arises because Dusty ignores the consequences of his own professed belief. As readers of this blog know, there aren't many people who can out-Darwin me, so let me school Dusty.

We live in an environment where birth control is cheap and widely available. It appears that people who use birth control have fewer children and grandchildren than people who don't use birth control. Thus any combination of genes and memes that inhibit using birth control will be favored. On the other hand, more permissive gene/meme combos will be less fecund.

My observation is that devoutly religious people tend not to use birth control. This includes not only fundamentalists Christians, but Mormons, devout Muslims, Amish, orthodox Jews, etc. The Robertson family is a case in point: Phil, at age 67, has thirteen grandchildren, and his parents have around 50 great-grandchildren. (Reproducing the species requires an average of four grandchildren.)

Compare this with a secular crowd. Take elderly Trotskyists for example, and even include some elderly ex-Trotskyists, such as Mr. Proyect or me. Put a random sample of such folks in a room until they, collectively, accumulate thirteen grandchildren (to rival Phil). How many Trotskyists would it take? I'll hazard more than thirteen. The median Trotskyist likely doesn't have any grandchildren, much less thirteen.

Phil Robertson's religion is crackpot--Dusty and I agree--but it is very successful in the Darwinian sense, measured by how many grandchildren you've got. I anticipate getting a few, but from what I know, Dusty's prognosis is not good. I think that's why he's so mad. If present trends continue, religious people will win the demographic culture war.

Duck Dynasty is not popular because of Phil's views about gays or creationism. That might be important to Phil, but its not what makes the show tick. It appeals to middle-aged women because it represents an aspirational ideal for them. Women want 1) a stable marriage with a faithful husband, who 2) is wealthy and has 3) earned his money in a He-Man profession. And while he engages many man-child hijinks, when in the presence of the ladies he 4) behaves like a gentleman.

And on the fourth point, Phil Robertson and I agree. No gentleman would ever call anybody a douchebag.

Further Reading:

• George Gilder, Evolution & Science
• The Dream 50 Years On
• Marxism & EvoPsych

George Gilder, Evolution, & Science

This post started life as a review of George Gilder's recent book, Knowledge and Power. But the book is unreviewable, at least in a short post. Don't get me wrong--it's a fabulous read. Mr. Gilder is a superb writer, very literate, extraordinarily entertaining, and there is a surprise on almost every page (that last being a compliment Mr. Gilder will especially appreciate). However, it is nothing if not complicated, and the author promiscuously crosses and re-crosses that fine line between visionary and crackpot. Parsing it all apart is a task beyond me.

When one goes through a dramatic change in world view--as I did in my transition from Trotskyist to Republican--certain books become very influential. First for me was Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. Second place is a longer list, including two by Mr. Gilder--Wealth and Poverty and Men and Marriage. The former was the first serious book about economics I ever read, and it inspired a life-long interest. Even today, were Mr. Gilder to read this blog, I doubt there is much about economics where he would disagree. I also read Microcosm, a book that I thought was silly.

I subsequently learned that Mr. Gilder is co-founder of the Discovery Institute, an organization I associated with know-nothing religious objections to evolution. (These days I argue against the know-nothing Marxist objections, which are actually nearly the same thing.) So I approached the current tome with trepidation.

It's mostly about economics, and indeed he makes the strongest case for capitalism I have ever read. He borrows from Claude Shannon's information theory, and the analogy to economics is enlightening and convincing. But beyond economics, he proposes information theory as a theory of everything (my term), employing it, at one point, even to dispute the second law of thermodynamics. The subplot of the book is a philosophy of science, and a sub-subplot of that concerns Darwinism. Specifically, he takes issue with Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Dennett extends Darwinism to memes and elevates that to a theory of everything. He calls natural selection "the universal solvent," i.e., everything (literally) is just a series of selected, random permutations.

Astonishingly, I agree with Mr. Gilder in this dispute, despite being an avid a fan of Darwinism. I do not think Darwinism is a theory of everything. As a unifying concept in biology it is absolutely compelling. Insofar as human beings are biological critters, evolution rules. Both religious and Marxist objections that evolution somehow stopped the instant humans came along is completely wrong. Evolutionary psychology is indisputably a valid approach to understanding human instinct and much of human behavior.

But Mr. Gilder correctly notes that evolution cannot account for new technology. While our sexual, culinary, social, and child-rearing urges likely have biological roots, there is no way that the invention of a jet aircraft or an iPad can be predicted by evolutionary psychology. Simple-minded reductionism will not do--some other factor comes into play.

Mr. Gilder falls into the trap of saying that science only describes the material world, and that the extra-scientific world of ideas must also be considered. (This oddly echos Marxist complaints about idealism. It also revisits the similar debate around the turn of the last century between Ludwig Boltzmann and Ernst Mach.) In this he disagrees with authors like Stephen Pinker and Steven Landsburg, who come down strongly on the "materialist" side, contending that people don't have free will. Mr. Landsburg even makes the silly argument that (since mental processing is obviously done in parallel) because we begin muscle movements milliseconds before we're aware of them, therefore free will is a myth. (I can plan things months in advance, but never mind.)

I personally reject the material-ideal distinction. My working definition of science is this: Science is the study of reproducible phenomena. Reproducible means that all normal human beings perceive the phenomena in ways that they describe similarly. Normal people will see a red book and a red table and verify between themselves that they are the same color. Normal in this case does not include folks who are colorblind (or just plain blind). Nor does it include cats, which even if they were intelligent enough to communicate with us, have a completely different visual physiology and don't see things the same way. Reproducibility is common at the level of human perception (which is why arguments that science is merely a cultural artifact fall flat with me).

All normal human beings have a sense of free will, normal in this case excluding small children and schizophrenics. The phenomenon is as reproducible as the color red. Therefore when people like Pinker and Landsburg say we have no free will, they are just flat-out wrong. Of course we do.

Though that's not the end of the story. Color perception, for example, depends as much or more on eye and brain physiology than it does on the science of optics (Google the word metamer for more information). One could very reasonably argue that our color sense is just an illusion--the colors aren't really there. That's the kind of argument that Messrs. Pinker and Landsburg make for free will. But it's ultimately solipsistic--since all perception depends on physiological states, then one can't believe any of it. Everything is an illusion.

So it's true that free will, like color perception, requires explanation and elaboration. It clearly has something to do with brain physiology. But that doesn't make it less real. It may be that free will is an epiphenomenon of evolution, or perhaps an emergent phenomenon, or something else altogether. But it is very unlikely that it can be satisfactorily described by evolutionary psychology. There is some other constituent--call it a soul if you want--to the human being that exists beyond Darwinism.

Many, possibly including Mr. Gilder, argue that the soul exists independently of the brain, perhaps even out-living the brain. There is no reproducible evidence for this--millennia of seances, ancestor worship, praying to the saints, ghost stories, etc., have yielded no consensus among normal people. The scientific conclusion, therefore, is that the soul and brain are inextricably linked. I, for one, have no trouble with the fundamental assumption of neuroscience--that for every mental state there corresponds a physical state. But the direction of the causal arrow is not determined. Of course changing the physical state--seeing a big truck while standing in the middle of the road--will alter my mental state. But free will implies that the causal arrow goes the other way as well, and it most assuredly does.

Mr. Pinker argues against the ghost in the machine, i.e., against the existence of scientifically unsupported, irreproducible causes of mental states. In this he is certainly correct. But he counterposes a rigid, Newtonian determinism, for which there is also no scientific evidence. There is a huge gap between those two poles. There is no ghost in the machine, but free will is also not a straightforward product of physics or evolution. There is, instead, a third way. Looking for emergent phenomena might be a place to start.

In my dreams I imagine that some comrade some day will read this blog and say "Aha! Marxism is wrong. I'm going to be a Republican." If it ever does happen, it won't be because of evolutionary psychology.

Further Reading:

• The End Of War?
• The End Of Science
• Marxism & EvoPsych

The End Of War?

Socialist Viewpoint reprints an article by science writer John Horgan entitled War has no deep evolutionary roots. The article looks to be an addendum to Mr. Horgan's recent book The End Of War (which I have not yet read). I say addendum because the article describes results from recent research that support the book's thesis.

In brief (read the article for details), ethnographers studied 21 hunter-gatherer societies and tabulated incidences of violence. They documented 141 "lethal aggression events"--the timeframe for which is not stated. Of these, only six societies experienced anything that might be considered "war," i.e., two or more victims killed by two or more perpetrators. The remainder resulted from individual personal disputes, including, e.g., domestic violence. Of the warlike cases, most came from a single tribe--the Tiwi of Australia.

From this, the study's authors and Mr. Horgan conclude that war is not an evolved trait since a large majority of the tribes didn't fight any. The obvious rejoinder is that the tribes were not observed over a long enough period of time. If, for example, one had ethnographed Japan from 1946 to the present, one would think they were a bunch a pacifists. Most Americans have never been in a war, and indeed, probably a majority have never been involved in violence since grade school. This list includes me. So from this research one can only conclude that war is rare, not that it isn't an evolved behavior.

My view of these issues derives from evolutionary psychology, so it's probably worth a moment to review what kind of information EvoPsych gives us. The discipline tries to determine the extent of human instinct. It does this by studying a wide variety of cultures and finding traits they all have in common. Presumably those represent instinctive behaviors. And then the ways in which societies differ are likely cultural artifacts.

So the clothes people wear, which side of the road we drive on, or how we poke fingers at our iPads--those are all cultural traits. On the other hand, behaviors that are crucial to the survival and propagation of our genes are likely to be instinctive--at least substantially so. And two aspects of human activity stand out: food and sex. These should depend heavily on instinct.

Food is certainly complicated, given the seemingly wide variation in cuisines. Much of this is influenced by climate--Japanese like sushi, while seal hunting is not a popular sport in Kansas. Still, all human beings have the same nutritional needs--we all require the 21 amino acids, vitamins and minerals, sugar and fatty acids. Thus cuisines are not really as different as they seem. Nobody survives on dirt, or grass, or tree bark, or insect exoskeletons. What tastes good is, in substantial measure, instinctive and biological.

I think sexual behaviors are less variable than food. When I lived in Uganda, despite the vast cultural differences I had absolutely no difficulty telling the boys from the girls. The rhyme beginning sugar and spice and everything nice applies as much to girls in Uganda as to those Kansas. Prepubescent school children were all dressed alike, with close-cropped hair--so I couldn't tell the genders apart. But come puberty that all changed, and dramatically so. Nature makes a special effort to fine-tune our sexual preferences--those are mostly instinctive.

So Mr. Horgan gives the game away with the off-hand remark: "96 percent of the killers were male. No surprise there." That kind of lopsided gender distribution, from cultures around the globe, strongly suggests that violence has something to do with sex. Being violent helps men successfully reproduce. While the degree of violence varies from culture to culture--or perhaps more accurately, varies within a culture from time to time--violence exists in all cultures. Even Mr. Horgan isn't surprised.

Mr. Horgan further remarks that "But some readers may be surprised that only two out of 148 killings stemmed from a fight over “resources,” such as a hunting ground, water hole or fruit tree." Most of the killings were in revenge for a previous attack. This is consistent with violence as a sexual behavior. Access to sex (for men) is all about status, and violence is a way of enforcing and enhancing one's status.

Mr. Horgan argues that "The war meme also transforms societies, militarizes them, in ways that make war more likely. The Tiwi seem to be a society that has embraced war as a way of life. So is the United States of America." I think this characterization is flat-out wrong. As already mentioned, in my 62 years I have no first-hand experience with war. The last war on our continent was in 1865. So it is surely not true that the US has embraced war as a way of life.

If war is about sex and status, and given that the USA is at the top of the status heap, it is no surprise that lots of other peoples are taking potshots at us. Al-Qaeda's struggle is all about sex and status--they even use 72 black-eyed virgins in their imagery. It's not that we're war-mongers. It's just that we're currently the most successful society on the planet.

Violence is often good for individuals and groups of individuals, but it is usually bad for society as a whole. Thus most nations go to great lengths to prevent actual war. Instead they shadowbox to show off their capabilities, and then usually resolve conflicts short of war. This is like mountain goats bumping heads--rarely does the contest lead to actual injury. Instead the weaker animal simply concedes. This is why war is rare, even among hunter-gatherer tribes.

War becomes more likely when power relationships are in great flux, or when societies cannot accurately convey their true abilities. It is probably not true to class the Tiwi as a war-like tribe. More likely is that the power relationships between them and their neighbors is changing, and until a new modus vivendi is reached it comes to blows.

So I think war and violence have evolutionary roots, and I think the evidence in support of that thesis is pretty overwhelming. Mr. Horgan's recent evidence doesn't dissuade. But there is nothing instinctive about drones, nuclear warheads, or chemical weapons. These are cultural artifacts, which can conceivably be regulated, albeit with enormous difficulty.

Why does a Trotskyist newspaper like Socialist Viewpoint reprint Mr. Horgan's column? Trotskyists, like all Marxists, don't really believe in evolution. They believe human evolution stopped with the development of culture. Thus they claim that if we just change the culture we can perfect human nature. Their goal is to make a Socialist Man, i.e., a person who works according to his ability, and takes according to his needs.

I think that goal is neither attractive nor possible.

Further Reading:

• The 7th Century Solution
• The Status of Marxists
• Marxism & EvoPsych