The Age of Empathy, and Selfish Genes

I had suggested that this be the core book for our October meeting, while encouraging people to read other books on altruism/cooperation as well.

I have started to read The Age of Empathy, and am not finding it that enlightening.

For one, he rails against Social Darwinism quite a bit--wasn't Social Darwinsim discredited in the early 1900's? Definition from Wikipedia:

Social Darwinism is a pejorative term used for various late nineteenth century ideologies which, while often contradictory, exploited ideas of survival of the fittest. More from the Wikipedia article

Sadly, "survival of the fittest" is what some lay people (and some scholars in the social sciences) still think of when they think of Darwin. I read today that Darwin did use the term, but that Herbert Spencer came up with it before Darwin published On the Origin of the Species. It is an unfortunate phrase, as it makes people think that Darwin is saying that life is all about competing, and that only the physically strongest and most aggressive survive. "Fit" refers to fit to survive and leave offspring in the environment the organism finds itself--it could be brute strength that is called for, but it could mean so many other things, such as having a nose that can filter cold air if you find yourself living in Ice Age Europe.

As we read in Genome, humans who tended to live in monogamous pairs were more fit at some point in our history: Men hunted; high-quality protein was necessary for our larger brains; women gave birth to premature infants because of head size; men helped care for the infants and provided meat; women did not need to go out and hunt, so could stay with the young child while digging roots and tubers, which were a more reliable source of steady calories when no meat was killed. The pairs who lived that way tended to leave more offspring at that point in human history. So, "fit" in this case means cooperating in a monogamous pair.

One thing I didn't know was that Enron's "CEO, Jeff Skilling ... was a great fan of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and deliberately tried to mimic nature by instigating cutthroat competition within his company." (p. 39) This seems to be a misunderstanding of what I think Dawkins was saying (it's been a long time since I read the book). Genes are selfish--in that a gene's ultimate purpose is to get itself reproduced--but that doesn't always mean that the organism they find themselves in is necessarily selfish. (Well, I believe that organisms are ultimately selfish; that's what our discussion of altruism in evolution is all about.) But even though the ultimate aim is for the organism to reproduce itself, the proximal aim could be to do so by showing generosity to the rest of one's group in the hope that they will reciprocate with more altruism. So the selfish gene theory doesn't rule out altruism and cooperation. Apparently de Waal and Dawkins have had disagreements about the meaning of the "selfish gene." (p. 40)

I keep waiting to get to an examination of primate cooperation, but so far (p. 43), the book rambles with anecdotes. And de Waal seems more interested in making political statements than sticking to biology. He starts out in the first paragraph of the preface with politics:

Greed is out, empathy is in.

The global financial crisis of 2008, together with the election of a new American president, has produced a seismic shift in society. Many have felt as if they were waking up from a bad dream about a big casino where the people's money had been gambled away, enriching a happy few without the slightest worry about the rest of us. This nightmare was set in motion a quarter of a century earlier by Reagan-Thatcher trickle-down economics and the soothing reassurance that markets are wonderful at self-regulation. No one believes that anymore.

Can't I just read about primate behavior?

I will finish this book--it is a quick read, since it doesn't go into much depth. Then I'm going to read one of the others on the list to discuss at the October meeting (see sidebar).

Here's a review that had some criticisms of The Age of Empathy that I agree with. For example,

This is a wonderful book to dip into, but a frustrating one to read from start to finish, since it is hard to discern a clear organizing principle for the chapters. After reading a few pages, one tends to run out of momentum, because themes seem to repeat.

Meeting on July 17

Lots of discussion:

1. Whether humans are "evolving" to a new level of altruism at the societal level--Ken Wilber wrote a book suggesting we're on a "brink" of something new. This also goes along with what we've probably mentioned at each meeting ... the idea (first from Julie's professor) that life is evolving towards greater cooperation. However, there is probably a distinction between biological evolution, and the cultural evolution that happens now that evolution gave us these brains to contemplate stuff like this. Similar to the distinction between genes and memes. Note: I was just now watching Robert Sapolsky's Great Courses lecture series on Biology and Human Behavior, and he pointed out that many of us were taught evolution by that old TV program Wild Kingdom, where the wildebeest, say, would "sacrifice himself" for the good of the species by letting the crocodiles eat him while the other wildebeest swam to safety. Sapolsky said that what the TV neglected to show us was that the wildebeest (or whatever other animal was featured) was probably the oldest one and got pushed into the water rather than sacrificing himself. Sapolsky says "evolution is not about evolving behaviors that optimize the survival of your species."

2. The origins of agriculture as a step towards a more difficult, if more secure life. As we have increases in technology such as agriculture, we are able to avoid or survive some of the smaller catastrophes (frequent famine), but the trade-off is that when we do have a catastrophe, it's bigger (we can't just pick up and move like the hunter-gatherers can, for example). (Idea from Brian Fagan, The Long Summer, and the concept of "trading up on the scale of vulnerability.")

3. If we have evidence that, say, sociopaths have innately different brains than the average, or that Einstein had particularily large and unusually shaped parietal lobules, what does that mean for us in terms of who we are (and how much pride or shame we can take in being that person)?

How much discretion did the “you” making the choices actually have if the outcome could have been predicted in advance, at least probablilistically, based on events that took place in your mother’s fallopian tubes decades ago?

(We had discussed this when we read The Blank Slate, too--the above quote is from page 51 of that book.)

TED video of neuroscientist Jim Fallon talking about psychopathic brains

E.O. Wilson's talk last night

Nancy W. and I went to hear E.O. Wilson speak about his new novel, Anthill, last night.

I jotted down some of the many interesting things he had to say, several of which related to things we've talked about in our group.

• "Kin selection" is no longer a tenable theory. This relates to altruism, which we discussed at the last meeting. (I think. I meant to, anyway.) Altruism is a problem for evolutionary biologists, because why would we do things--like share resources--that increase someone else's fitness at the expense of our own? I looked up kin selection theory on Wikipedia: " ...(A) gene that prompts behaviour which enhances the fitness of relatives but lowers that of the individual displaying the behavior, may nonetheless increase in frequency, because relatives often carry the same gene; this is the fundamental principle behind the theory of kin selection... Evolutionary psychologists have attempted to explain prosocial behavior through kin selection by stating that “behaviors that help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection.” " But, now current evolutionary biologists like Wilson are saying that evolution doesn't work this way. Instead, he says that individual selfishness drives altruism (which is the same thing Pinker is saying).

• I think Wilson said altruism has developed only about 20 times in the history of life.

• Competition between groups of humans is what drives the evolution of what we tend to think of as the highest human qualities, the most "noble" qualities. I think he's saying that a lot of things such as love and altruism and honor are actually things that help your tribe defeat the neighboring tribe. For millenia we tended to behave in these positive ways about our in-group. Pinker (see that website that Karen sent) sees that with modernity we have been able to extend who we see as being in "our" group, and that because of this, and contrary to what it looks like, there is less violence as time goes on.

• Along the same lines--I think--one of the most remarkable things that Pinker explained in The Blank Slate was "...without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all." (p 268) So it's competition over resources, and strife, basically, that has driven us to be the conscious beings we are.

• Humans are tribal in nature. Religion is a manifestation of tribalism. A group's creation story is the story of how they came about and why they are the chosen group of the Creator. (I have often thought that one of Jesus' missions was to try to "extend the tribe"--i.e. think of more and more people as "us"--hence the stuff about loving all your brothers and sisters and helping people like Samaritans (an outgroup from the Jewish point of view). (I think Christians who raise Christianity as some sort of superior belief system are missing one of Jesus' main points, personally.) I think Karen Armstrong saw a similar widening of the circle and extending social justice in the religious movements around 800 B.C. by the way.

• The human condition: we have

Paleolithic emotions
Medieval institutions
but Godlike technology