Homo Deceptus
At the risk of sounding
grandiose, I hereby declare myself to be involved in a bitter feud with no less
a personage than Stephen Jay Gould. It all started in 1990, when I reviewed his
book Wonderful
Life for the New
Republic . I argued,
basically, that Gould is a fraud. He has convinced the public that he is not
merely a great writer, but a great theorist of evolution. Yet, among top-flight
evolutionary biologists, Gould is considered a pest--not just a lightweight,
but an actively muddled man who has warped the public's understanding of
Darwinism.
Gould,
alas, paid me no mind. No testy letter to the New
Republic ,
nothing. I heard through the grapevine that he was riled. But, savvy alpha male
that he is, he refrained from getting into a gutter brawl with a scrawny,
marginal primate such as myself. Then, last month, my big moment finally
arrived. Gould's long-repressed contempt burst forth from the reptilian core of
his brain and leapt over the fire walls in his frontal lobes. In an essay in
Natural
History magazine, while dismissing evolutionary
psychology as "pop science," he called my book The
Moral
Animal "the most noted and most absurd example."
It is, of course, beneath my dignity to respond to this
personally motivated attack (except to note that if you think Stephen Jay Gould
actually deigned to read my puny book, you must be getting him mixed up with
someone whose time is less precious). Instead, I will use the occasion of
Gould's essay to make a major contribution to Western thought. And actually,
come to think of it, making this contribution will entail responding to Gould's
personally motivated attack. We'll start with Gould and get to Western thought
later.
Gould's
Natural
History essay, in keeping with his long tradition of
taking courageous political stands, argues against genocide. Its final lines
are: "It need not be. We can do otherwise." You may ask, "Where's the news
value in noting that people can refrain from committing genocide?" Well, Gould
spent the previous half-dozen paragraphs cultivating the impression that some
people think genocide is hard-wired into our genes.
Who are these people? Good question. Gould
doesn't name names. Instead, just when you're starting to wonder who exactly is
making this ridiculous claim, he changes the subject to an allegedly analogous
example of biological determinism: currently popular Darwinian ideas about male
and female psychology. Here he can name names--or, at least, one name. That's
where I come in.
Gould
begins by distorting a basic evolutionary psychology argument: that because men
can reproduce more often and more easily than women, natural selection (which
favors traits conducive to genetic proliferation) has made the minds of men and
women different. Gould puts the posited difference this way: Women, in theory,
"should act in such a way as to encourage male investment after impregnation
(protection, feeding, economic wealth, and subsequent child care), whereas men
would rather wander right off in search of other mates in a never-ending quest
for maximal genetic spread." The "wander right off" part is wrong. Evolutionary
psychologists classify our species as having "high male parental investment."
Men are naturally inclined to fall in love with women, stay with them through
pregnancy, and fall in love with the endearing little vehicles of genetic
transmission that roll out of the womb.
To be sure, men may be tempted to philander on the side,
even to fall in love with a second woman; they are more inclined than women to
both infidelity and polygamy. (Women do have a penchant for cheating or
straying, but under a narrower range of circumstances.) Moreover, men find it
easier to have sex without emotional attachment, so they do sometimes
want to "wander right off" after sex. Still, the fact that evolutionary
psychologists don't view desertion as standard male procedure vaporizes what
Gould considers one of his killer arguments: "Any man who has fiercely loved
his little child--including most fathers, I trust--knows that no siren song
from distinctive[ly male] genes or hormones can overcome this drive for
nurturing behavior shared with the child's mother." If Gould knew the first
thing about evolutionary psychology (if he had, say, read my book), he'd know
that this "drive for nurturing behavior" isn't some news flash to evolutionary
psychologists. It is central to their view of the tensions within male sexual
psychology.
More
noteworthy than Gould's warping of evolutionary psychology is that he actually
embraces some of its premises. On sex differences: "I don't ... think that the
basic argument is wrong. Such differences in behavioral strategy do make
Darwinian sense." Hmm. Gould has denounced evolutionary psychology for years
without (to my knowledge) making such concessions. Now, as it gains support
within both biology and psychology, he seems to be staging a strategic retreat.
But, of course, he can't be seen retreating. He must, in the end, still manage
to depict evolutionary psychologists as simpletons. What to do? Create
confusion.
Gould informs us that the sexual strategies of
men and women are mere "capacities, not requirements or even determining
propensities." Now, first of all, a truly determining propensity
is a requirement. So Gould, without conspicuously positing a simplistic
dichotomy, has posited a simplistic dichotomy: Every behavior--infidelity,
genocide, whatever--is either a mere "capacity" or an "inevitability."
Evolutionary psychologists, Gould suggests, tend to take the "inevitability"
view, while a more discerning interpretation of biology (his) takes the
"capacity" view.
Let's not dwell on the sheer
dishonesty of insinuating that I, or any serious writers on evolutionary
psychology, believe infidelity or genocide or anything else is rendered
inevitable genetically. (Well, OK, let's dwell briefly. There.) The key point
is this: Isn't the range of alternatives to inevitability too broad to cram
under the single heading of "capacity"? Do I just have the "capacity" to eat
doughnuts and hamburgers and broccoli? No. Unfortunately, it's more complicated
than that. I almost always feel a very strong attraction to doughnuts. To
hamburgers I feel a fairly strong attraction under most circumstances. For
broccoli I can muster mild enthusiasm if I'm feeling hungry or guilty. All
these attractions can be bridled, but the amount and nature of the necessary
effort differs by food type and by circumstance.
I concede that my inner
turmoil over doughnuts is not of great moment. But let's get back to things
like infidelity, men's desertion of their families, or even genocide. If we can
learn something about how the underlying emotions wax and wane, about the
circumstances under which bad things are likely to happen, wouldn't that be
useful information? Amazingly, Gould suggests not. After saying "we learn
nothing" from current Darwinian theorizing about any "darkness" in human
nature, he continues, "At the very most, biology might help us to delimit the
environmental circumstances that tend to elicit one behavior rather than the
other."
At the
very most? Delimiting those circumstances is the central aspiration of
20 th -century psychology! So, even if Freud and Skinner had wholly
succeeded in explaining how upbringing and social experience shape us, it all
would have been a waste of time? Too bad they didn't have a luminary like Gould
to explain that to them. I've heard many criticisms of evolutionary psychology,
but this is the first time I've heard anyone dismiss it by saying that all it
can do is find the Holy Grail of behavioral science.
Obviously, evolutionary psychology hasn't yet come close to
finding the Holy Grail. But, it has provoked ideas about the role of
environment that, if confirmed by further study, can inform moral discourse and
public policy. For example, I've argued from ev-psych premises that extreme
inequality of income, all other things being equal, tends to raise the divorce
rate. This claim may turn out to be wrong, but, contrary to Gould's basic
indictment of evolutionary psychology, it is neither obvious nor, if true,
useless.
I grant
Gould that evolutionary psychology hasn't taught us much about genocide that we
didn't already know. So far, its main contribution is to illuminate not epic
enmity, but the everyday, subtle kind. For example: I just referred to Gould's
"dishonesty" in misrepresenting my views, but maybe the dishonesty isn't
conscious. Once I wrote that 1990 review, I became a threat to Gould's social
status, an enemy. According to evolutionary psychology, it then became hard for
him to objectively appraise anything I've written (though I suppose actually
reading it would have been a start). Tactically caricaturing my beliefs became
an essentially unconscious process.
Similarly, now that Gould has attacked me, I
have trouble being objective about him. My radar readily picks up, even
magnifies, his distortions and confusions, but is less sensitive to my own
missteps. (The editors of Slate will contact Gould and invite him to have an
online debate with me, during which the truth can emerge from dueling
egocentric biases. I predict Gould will ignore the invitation, reverting to a
risk-averse alpha-male strategy.) Anyway, the point is just that we are all, by
nature, deeply and unconsciously self-serving in our judgments of others. Gould
and I are convinced of each other's confusion, and the Hutus and Tutsis, long
before the slaughter began, were convinced of each other's treachery.
One big problem with Gould's
simplistic capacity/necessity dichotomy is the way it obscures this commonality
between us and the Hutus. Gould (in another sign of strategic retreat) concedes
that people have a biologically based "capacity" to view enemies as "beyond
fellowship and ripe for slaughter." But that makes it sound as if most of us
are entirely civil human beings, while occasionally--in some remote part of the
world--a "genocide" switch gets flicked, and slaughter happens. Those Serbs and
Hutus may act like animals, but we Americans have kept our "capacity" for evil
turned off.
Many Germans, presumably,
had a similarly high opinion of themselves in the early 1930s, and no doubt
such blithe self-regard lubricates descent. OK, OK--I won't get carried away.
I'm not saying Americans are on a slippery slope toward genocide, and that only
evolutionary psychology can save the day. My point is just that (here comes my
contribution to Western thought) evolutionary psychology needn't, as Gould
fears, be used to excuse evildoers as victims of biology. It can actually serve
humanity by making it harder for any of us to casually assume our own goodness.
It says we all warrant skeptical self-scrutiny, and it warns us that this
scrutiny, being unnatural, is very hard. But it also suggests that the effort
is needed. If you sit around waiting for some switch to get flicked, you'll
have waited too long.
