by Barry Goldman
Owen Jones and Rob Kurzban have new books out. Jones is the director of the Weaver Program in Law, Brain Sciences, and Behavior at Vanderbilt. He previously led the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. Kurzban is a former psychology professor at Penn and the author of Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind. Both men are deeply knowledgeable thinkers and graceful writers. Both books are extensively researched and thoroughly annotated. I enjoyed them, and I recommend them without hesitation. So, what’s the problem?
I can’t resist telling a story from my youth that kept occurring to me as I read. Many years ago, my mother had a friend whose son was a dope fiend (her term). At her wit’s end, the distraught woman managed to get an audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Mendel Schneerson. She explained the situation and pleaded for his advice. He said, “Keep a kosher home.”
Of course he did.
I suspect we can agree with D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson that, “Everything is the way it is because it got that way.” And we can agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” We might even agree with Daniel Dennett that evolution by natural selection is “the single best idea anyone has ever had.”
Still, there is something about books by evolutionary thinkers that is reminiscent of books by Marxists. Where Marxists have historical materialism and class struggle, evolutionists have reproductive advantage. It explains everything.
Jones’s book, Force of Nature: Understanding Evolution’s Deepest Logic – and Putting It to Use, explains natural selection and shows how understanding it can illuminate problems in medicine, agriculture, artificial intelligence, economic decision making, and law.
In the chapter on law, he writes:
Consider, for instance, the interplay between natural selection and the evolved emotional underpinnings of what we call jealousy, which in humans and other species help to focus attention on acute risks of losing a mate. (What we have labeled emotions—such as jealousy, fear, sadness, lust, and the like— are, biologically speaking, evolved shortcuts to historically adaptive behavior, which tend to quickly and often powerfully bypass slower and more analytic regions of the brain.)
Kurzban’s book is All the Feels: The Evolved Function of Every Human Emotion and Sensation. In Kurzban’s view:
Our felt experiences exist because they measure something useful and motivate appropriate behavior. Importantly, I’m using the words “useful” and “appropriate” in the evolutionary sense: How did these experiences contribute to survival and reproduction?
Let’s start with sex. There are a lot of questions we could ask about sex. One of them – perhaps not the first one most of us would think of, but a central question for evolutionary thinkers – is: Why is sex fun? The answer goes like this. Suppose we had a population of animals for whom sex was fun and another population of the same animal for whom it was not. The animals for whom sex was fun would do it more. Consequently, they would have more babies. And if the trait was heritable, those babies would also think sex was fun, they would do it more, and they would have more babies. Since the whole idea is that the team that has more babies is the winner, the sex is fun team wins.
It ain’t rocket surgery, as the kids used to say. It’s more like the Brazil nut effect. Why are the Brazil nuts on top when you open a can of mixed nuts? It’s not because they want to go to the top or because God designed them to go to the top or because Nature has a master plan with everything in its place. It is because gravity makes things fall down, and small things can fall through small openings that bigger things can’t. You can call it granular convection and act like it’s a marvelous scientific discovery if you want. Or you can just look at the crumbs at the bottom of your cereal box.
Here’s a graphic: https://vimeo.com/265919301?fl=pl&fe=cm
Perhaps the sex example was too easy. Let’s try a hard one, Why is fun fun? In other words, what is it about enjoying fun that confers a reproductive advantage?
Here the explanation gets labored. Fun is fun because it is safe practice. Or, if it is not safe practice, then it signals fitness. Or, um, it’s complicated. But for sure fun is fun because it is “fitness-good.” In an evolved species traits do not evolve unless they confer a reproductive advantage. Jones says, “Species tend not to evolve capabilities that never come in handy.” That’s just bedrock true. Except when it’s not. Later in the book he says:
Consider, for instance, the classic example of an evolved physical feature that is unlikely to be an adaptation: the whiteness of bones. The whiteness is almost certainly a mere byproduct of limited available materials and therefore an incidental consequence of using calcium to build bones, rather than of whiteness providing a reproductive advantage over, say, magenta bones.
The need to provide a “fitness-good” explanation for each evolved feeling produces some odd reasoning. Here is a sentence from Kurzban’s chapter on sadness along with the accompanying citation:
When parents suffer the death of a child, the sadness they feel is always great, but it is greater when the lost child was closer to the age of reproduction, reflecting the loss of someone closer to achieving reproductive success.
Crawford, C., Salter, B. E., & Jang, K. L. (1989). Human grief: Is its intensity related to the reproductive value of the deceased? Ethology and Sociobiology, 10, 297–307.
Reading this I couldn’t stop thinking of the line from Annie Hall where Woody Allen says to Christopher Walken, “I have to go now, Duane, because I’m due back on the planet Earth.
In the chapter on Awe, Kurzban writes:
Proposals about the function of awe generally have to do with things like “meaning,” “connectedness,” and “purpose.” A recent book, Awe, by Dacher Keltner, arguably one of the most prominent researchers working on this question, suggests that awe “shifts our minds from a more reductionistic mode of seeing things in terms of separateness and independence to a view of phenomena as interrelating and dependent.” An odd feature of this idea is that it doesn’t indicate what the emotion is for, from an evolutionary perspective. It’s certainly a powerful feeling. What’s the function? Keltner’s suggestion, which might be true, is typical of the sorts of proposals one sees in social psychology, but ideas to do with “meaning,” “connectedness,” and “purpose” don’t make a lot of sense from the perspective of evolutionary psychology.
Precisely.
There is a famous video of Richard Feynman talking about the beauty of a flower. He says the beauty the rest of us experience is also available to him and that scientific knowledge only adds to the excitement, mystery and awe. Maybe.
As I said, I enjoyed these books. I learned quite a bit about psychology experiments, pop culture, swallow-tailed kites, Greek mythology, and about Jones and Kurzban. I learned about Hamilton’s Rule and the “conditions under which altruistic behaviors can evolve through natural selection:
an altruistic act is beneficial to the altruist’s inclusive fitness if the benefit to the recipient (B) multiplied by their genetic relatedness (r) exceeds the cost to the altruist (C). In simpler terms, altruism evolves when the benefits to relatives outweigh the costs to the altruist.
I did not find that scientific knowledge added to my excitement, mystery, and awe. But perhaps that is just because I am not of this church.
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