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            The Absurdity of Family Love

            Don't get me wrong. Kids are
great. I have some, and I adore them. Every Christmas I become a slave to my
camcorder. Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow, and so on. But now that the
radiance of the yuletide season is fading, it's time to confront a sobering
scientific truth: The more you think about the biology of parental love, the
more absurd it seems. The same goes for love of kin generally--brothers,
sisters, nephews, etc.

            Readers
familiar with my obsessions may fear that this column is just another attempt
to spoil everyone's fun, to replace the beautiful mystery of life with ugly
Darwinian clarity. Actually, what I hope to dispel isn't pre-Darwinian mystery,
but a kind of post-Darwinian mysticism, a confused exaltation of genetic
affinity. You see the confusion when biological parents invoke "blood ties" to
reclaim a child from adoptive parents. You see it when opponents of
cross-ethnic adoption argue--as in a New York Times op-ed piece a few
months ago--that we must respect "the strength of the biological and cultural
ties that Indian tribes can offer their own children." In a sense, you see it
every year around Christmas, when people pay lip service to the idea of
universal brotherhood but believe in their hearts that it's ridiculous, that
truly loving people to whom you aren't related violates some law of nature.

            Thanks to the biologist William Hamilton, it is now clear
why people feel brotherly love in the literal sense--and sisterly love,
maternal love, and paternal love. It's all due to the operation of "kin
selection" during evolution. A greatly oversimplified textbook example: Two
million years ago, two hominids, Loveless Bob and Loving Bob, stand on two
different riverbanks, in identical situations. Each is watching his full
sibling Bill drown. Loving Bob has a gene inclining him to love his brother and
thus jump in the raging river, even though his risk of dying is 10 percent.
Loveless Bob has no such gene, and thus stands on the bank wondering whether
his brother's corpse will attract any large, edible fish. Which Bob's genes
will survive the Darwinian reaper--genes for love or for cold indifference?

            Love triumphs. True, there's
a one-in-10 chance that the love gene will sink along with Loving Bob. But
consider the upside. There's a one-in-two chance that Bob's full sibling Bill
has the same gene and, thus, that a successful rescue mission will pluck an
otherwise doomed copy of the gene from the dustbin of history. Do the math, and
you'll see that, over time, Loving Bobs send more genes to posterity than
Loveless Bobs. As love genes spread at the expense of indifference genes,
Loveless Bobs slowly become extinct. Die, selfish scum! Genes for sibling love
come to permeate our species--as, in fact, they now do. So do genes for
maternal love and paternal love. All brought to you by kin selection.

            As modern
Darwinism gets popularized, the basic idea of kin selection is approaching the
status of conventional wisdom. So are some attendant misconceptions.

            
Misconception No. 1: Genes are smart .
People often assume that kin-selected altruism is foolproof; that a gene can
magically sense copies of itself in other organisms--or, at least, can somehow
ascertain with perfect accuracy which organisms are close relatives of its own
host organism and thus may carry copies of itself. In truth, genes aren't
omniscient, or even sentient. If kin-selected genes are going to induce love of
kin, they'll have to determine who qualifies as kin in some pedestrian and
probably fallible way.

            For
example: Back when Loving Bob was 6 years old, if his mother was nursing some
infant named Bill and sleeping by its side every night, there's a very good
chance that Bill was Bob's sibling. So a gene disposing Bob to love children
whom he sees his mother nurturing could spread through the population until
everyone obeys the same rule. But this rule would misfire now and then, when a
mother is for some reason nurturing a non-offspring. It's just that the
misfiring wouldn't happen often enough to greatly dilute the genetic math
favoring the gene's proliferation.

            Little is known about which rules for identifying
kin--"kin-recognition mechanisms"--do operate in our species. But clearly, they
are fallible. Even mothers, who you'd think would have a damn good idea of who
their offspring are, can in principle be fooled. When hospital staffers for
some reason handed hours-old Kimberly Mays to a mother who was not hers, the
mother's kin-recognition mechanisms--a k a bonding processes--kicked in. This
woman wound up loving Kimberly like a daughter (though the mother died two
years later, so that Kimberly was reared mostly by a stepmother). Meanwhile,
Kimberly's genetic mother, having missed years of bonding, can never love
Kimberly quite like her own child, even though Kimberly is her own
child. Because genetic relationship per se doesn't matter.

            This
irrelevance of genes is why surrogate motherhood is so messy. Even when, thanks
to in vitro fertilization, the birth mother is unrelated to the fetus she
carries, she will, upon giving birth, fall in love with the child. During
evolution, after all, having a baby come out of your womb was reasonably strong
evidence of kinship. The power of the hormones that govern this bonding is
familiar to anyone who has watched a woman clutch her just-born child and turn
into a love-drunk cuddle-bunny. (When my wife went through this magic moment, I
briefly considered snatching the baby and replacing it with an 8-by-10 glossy
of myself.) This hormonal power was also observed by researchers studying
oxytocin, a hormone that's present in human and other mammalian mothers at
birth. The researchers put it in a syringe and used it to shatter all previous
records for cuddling among laboratory rats. By the way, the synthetic version
of oxytocin, Pitocin, is what doctors use to induce labor.

            
Misconception No. 2: People are smart--or,
at least, they are smart Darwinian robots . Darwinian theory does posit that
homo sapiens were "designed" to get their genes into the next generation, but
not that they were designed to do so consciously and rationally. As surrogate
mothers have proved, knowing that you've given no genes to an infant needn't
stop the bonding process. Thus, "kin- recognition mechanism" is a doubly
misleading term--first because, as we've seen, the mechanism doesn't positively
identify kin, but just identifies factors correlated with kinship; and second
because people aren't really aware of doing the identifying. We don't
think, "There's strong evidence that she's my daughter, so I adore her." More
like, "God but my daughter's adorable."

            It is
good news for adoptive parents that neither genetic relationship nor conscious
awareness of genetic relationship is a prerequisite for love. Still, it is bad
news that maternal bonding begins with hormones at birth. It is also bad news
that breast-feeding, which adoptive mothers usually can't do, releases the
bonding hormone oxytocin. Then again, there is no reason in principle that
adoptive parents couldn't take Pitocin once a day for synthetic bonding
sessions. (Oxytocin seems to be part of the bonding formula in men, too.)
Besides, some genetic mothers aren't conscious at birth, and many don't
breast-feed, yet they all nonetheless wind up loving their kids. As the many
successful adoptive parents know, lots of the magic moments that add up to
durabonding have nothing to do with birthing or breast-feeding. (Tiny tots,
with their eyes all aglow ... )

            Anyway, the main point is that when genetic parents give up
a child for adoption and have second thoughts weeks, months, or even years
later, their appeals to blood ties should count for zilch. Their love of their
child, and their child's love of them, depends not on genetic math but on a
long and complex chain of bonding, much of which they have already voluntarily
missed out on.

            Similarly,
the idea that Native American babies, or black babies, or whatever, have some
mystical genetic affinity with their "own" kind is silly. Obviously,
cross-ethnic adoption is dicey. It draws sidelong glances and playground
taunts, and it may give the adopted child an identity crisis. But it won't do
this because of some ancestral memory in the genes. As attitudes change,
cross-ethnic adoption will get easier; and as cross-ethnic adoption gets more
common, attitudes will change. (There are other pop-genetics arguments against
cross-ethnic adoption, and against adoption in general. One is that genes
influence personality so powerfully that mixing unrelated siblings is like
mixing oil and water. This idea is .)

            
Misconception No. 3: Our genes, though
perhaps not real smart, aren't downright stupid . Here we come, at last, to
the true absurdity of familial love. As we've seen, the genes that sponsor it
flourished by encouraging an "altruism" that was, in fact, self-serving at the
genetic level (the inexorable triumph of Loving Bob's genes). As we've also
seen, these genes can be "fooled" into encouraging altruism toward non-kin,
altruism that presumably is not self-serving at the genetic level.
Still, you might argue, in defense of your genes, they usually direct
familial love toward genuine kin, and thus usually succeed in being efficiently
selfish. Wrong! When genes confine altruism to kin, and deny it to needy
non-kin, they are in fact failing spectacularly to be efficiently selfish.
Because nowadays, copies of these genes do reside in non-kin--in your
next-door neighbor and, for that matter, your worst enemy. After all, the
Darwinian logic behind love of kin was so relentless that these genes permeated
our entire species! Loveless Bob is extinct, remember?

            You can
be forgiven for doubting my logic. People like me, in writing about kin
selection, often talk about full siblings sharing "half their genes," implying
that nonrelatives share none. But in truth, you share virtually all your genes
with any randomly selected homo sapien on any continent. What people like me
really mean is that full siblings share half of any genes that are newly
minted--genes that have recently arisen and on which natural selection is just
starting to pass judgment. Genes that natural selection fully endorsed long
ago--the basic genes for hunger, for lust, for familial love--are in everyone.
So genes that originally flourished by bestowing love with discerning
selfishness--by discriminating against people not containing copies of
themselves--now, having spread through the species, discriminate against people
who do contain copies! You may doubt that natural selection, a process
that supposedly maximizes genetic selfishness, could fail so abjectly to do so.
But it's true. .

            So this past holiday season, as you rushed to buy presents
for your kids or your siblings or your nieces or nephews, impelled by
"selfishly" altruistic genes, you were operating under flawed Darwinian logic.
These "selfish" genes could do just as much for themselves by encouraging you
to instead spend your money on the beggar outside the department store. In
fact, they could do more, since the beggar is closer to perishing than your
relatives are. (Also, the beggar might buy something useful such as food, as
opposed to a hair-eating Cabbage Patch doll.) But our genes are too stupid to
so deftly serve their own welfare.

            Not that I attach much weight
to what is and isn't "good" from the standpoint of genetic self-interest. As
virtually all ethical philosophers who have pondered the matter agree, it
doesn't make sense to model our moral values on the logic of nature anyway; to
infer ought from is --to commit the "naturalistic fallacy"--only
leads to moral confusion. For example, you might, after observing the natural
behavior of praying mantises, be tempted to conclude that it is morally good
for females to eat males after sex--and this, I submit, would be a repugnant
and wrongheaded doctrine! (Though slightly less repugnant than the idea of
eating males before the sex.)

            Most people implicitly
recognize the naturalistic fallacy in some contexts. They sense that there's
something visceral about, say, malice; yet they'll tell you (when not in its
thrall) that they disapprove of it. It's obvious, they believe, that the
natural strength of hatred is not a good thing. They're right. What is equally
right, but a bit less obvious, is that the "natural" limits of love aren't
necessarily good either. And, on close inspection, these limits turn out not to
be all that rigorously "natural" anyway.