From: tmb@access.digex.net (Tim Beardsley)
Newsgroups: alt.books.reviews
Subject: Review: The Moral Animal
Date: Mon, 03 Apr 1995 09:01:17 -0500


>From Selfishness to Compassion

Review: "The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright (Pantheon Books, New York, 1994) 

"Know thyself" is the famous advice of the oracle at Delphi; but as the
disorienting philosophical impact of natural selection has spread, we have
not much felt like knowing ourselves, being fearful of what we might
discover. Despite some skirmishes on the fringes, there has been no
serious challenge to modern evolutionary theory, and books such as Richard
Dawkins's The Selfish Gene have impressed into the public mind life's
unthinking dance to the music of DNA. Dawkins and others of a
sociobiological cast of mind have taken care to point out that if their
doctrine seems to justify callous exploitation, it should not: humans,
alone in the animal kingdom, can choose to fight the horrors of nature's
way rather than perpetuate them. Nonetheless, the Darwinian revolution has
often seemed a depressing one. The ancient and powerful legacy of the
genes seemed to leave little room for our nobler sentiments. 
     Robert Wright is fully aware of how far genes' malign influence
extends into our lives and our innermost thoughts: he accepts that people
are "basically selfish". Dismissing the notion that Darwinian insights
have little relevance to modern society, he pursues natural selection's
often unpalatable effect on our minds to its logical conclusion. "I think
we are more in danger of underestimating the enemy than overestimating
it," Wright explains. Yet his analysis steers well clear of the
intellectually and morally bankrupt notions of "social Darwinism" and its
converse, behaviorism. And it is in a curious way inspiring, because by
highlighting Homo sapiens's most wicked inclinations it shows how some of
them might be tamed. 
     Wright first follows DNA's trail of blood and tears to the battle of
the sexes. His provocative survey of findings from "evolutionary
psychology" on sex and marriage would itself be enough for a remarkable
book.  Wright picks up where Robert Trivers, the inventor of an important
concept known as parental investment, left off.  Trivers drew attention to
the fact that the cost of a single act of procreation, in terms of
diminished expectations for future reproduction, is in most animals much
smaller for males than it is for females. That difference seems to explain
why it usually males who compete for females, and not vice versa. Wright
uses this idea to conduct an audit of public and private sexual morality. 
He visits   Victorian England (where Charles and Emma Darwin are the prize
exhibits) as well as the contemporary U.S., stopping on the way to look at
Margaret Mead's mistaken conclusions about coming of age in Samoa. 
     Today's enlightened times don't seem so enlightened through the lens
of evolutionary psychology. In the U.S., at least, men still often see
women as Madonnas or whores, and serial polygyny is the order of the day.
"We have to ask not whether monogamy can be be saved, but whether it can
be restored. And we might be enthusiastically joined in this inquiry not
only by discontented wifeless men, but by a large number of discontented
former wives--especially the ones who had the bad fortune to marry someone
less wealthy than Johnny Carson." 
     Wright does not shrink from moralizing. A moral code is "an informal
compromise among competing spheres of genetic self-interest". His thinking
leads in some unexpected directions. There is "a virtual genetic
conspiracy to depict sexually loose women as evil", since parents of
pretty girls as well as happily married women perceive an atmosphere of
promiscuity as inimical to their interests, while men shun women who are
too readily available as marriage partners. Yet "If you believe, as most
people seem to, that it is immoral to cause others pain by implicitly or
explicitly misleading them, you might be more inclined to condemn the
sexual looseness of men than of women." 
     Sex is OK but it's not like the real thing, somebody once said, and
>from the agonies of relations between the sexes Wright turns to the even
bigger private agonies of a troubled conscience. Friends and family have
different claims on us: brotherly love, although far from unconditional,
is the more genuine of the two, being firmly butressed by kin selection. 
That principle, formalized by William Hamilton in the 1960s, posits that
natural selection should favor genes that predispose their owners to be
more self-sacrificing toward relatives than toward others, because
relatives are more likely to carry similar genes. People certainly seem to
behave roughly in accordance with the predictions of the theory, and it
accounts well for some paradoxes of animal behavior.
     A different kind of social cement, that of reciprocal altruism, can
be simply summed up as "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours".
Reciprocal altruism appears  to oblige us to be helpful, or at least fair,
to our fellows as well as our kin. But this obligation is actually a
lesser one: it is merely to give the appearance of having helped. And so
we tirelessly strive to present ourselves as epitomes of decency, and our
consciences make sure we stick to the story--at least enough to preserve
our image. "Is there a single culture in which neglecting a friend is a
guiltless and widely approved behavior?" Wright demands. 
     Seeking social status--a proxy for control over physical resources
and sexual opportunity--is one of the games people play almost everywhere.
Not everyone consciously indulges in social climbing, but a thirst for
approval appears early in life. We like to leave a good impression, so
much so that "we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better".
That startling idea was first aired by Trivers and Richard Alexander in
the 1970s, but Wright grabs it and runs. "It goes without saying that the
fish got away through no fault of the fisherman's. The assignment of blame
and of credit, an area where objective truth is elusive, offers rich
terrain for self-inflation". 
      Enmity is reciprocal altruism's enforcer, and many of us today try
to express loathing (always deserved, naturally) verbally rather
physically. The best way to be convincing when saying bad things about
people is to believe the insults, Wright suggests. Darwin, whose diaries
provide fertile ground for explorations of a male primate's mental
processes, made a highly relevant observation: "[F]ew individuals...can
long reflect about a hated person, without feeling and exhibiting signs of
indignation or rage". When we argue, we are convinced of our exact
rightness--and then we make a concession to our opponent. This "flexible
firmness" may be an evolutionarily advantageous strategy, Wright
speculates: "The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large
part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others
that its owner is right--and thus a machine for convincing its owner of
the same thing".
     Where does all this leave the nobler sentiments? Not where you might
think.  Far from being a counsel of despair, Wright's book recognizes at
each turn the malleability of the mind. "Some drives and emotions--say,
lust and jealousy--may never be wholly erasable"--but on the other hand,
our "more egregious tendencies can be greatly, if arduously, subdued". We
may indeed all crave social status, but we can be persuaded to accept
different tokens of that status. Darwinism does not put insurmountable
obstacles in the way of improving society in a way most people would want.

     Which way would most people want? Not one to duck a challenge, Wright
produces a formula: that of John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, which seeks
the greatest happiness of the greatest number. It's unquestionably fair,
and only a few "die-hard nihilists" who deny that there's anything good
about happiness are likely to object.  This sounds like the way to
unprincipled hedonism, but it isn't.  The utilitarian advantages of
cooperation with our fellow human beings far outweigh the disavantages of
becoming known as a cheat and a turncoat, so it's very much in our
interest to join the morality club. But the very last place we should look
for guidance on morality is our instincts, fashioned as they are to delude
us with feelings of righteous indignation and lust for retribution, not to
mention plain lust.
     Pursuing morality with the more objective guide of the utilitarian
calculus leads to a surprising result: "You should, in short, go through
life considering the welfare of everyone else exactly as important as your
own welfare". To the religious, that might have a familiar ring, but
Wright is as skeptical about religion as he is about human nature. He is a
determinist: we are determined jointly by our genes and our environment,
and free will is an illusion.  This line of thinking leads quickly to an
engaging perspective on criminal justice: blame is an intellectually
vacuous (although practically necessary) concept. "...I do believe,"
Wright concludes, "that most people who clearly understand the new
Darwinian paradigm and earnestly ponder it will be led toward greater
compassion and concern for their fellow human beings." 
     This journey from selfishness to compassion makes "The Moral Animal"
more than just a well-written book about a fascinating, if immature,
science. It is an important defense against the charge by religious and
political zealots that Darwinism is somehow immoral. For that reason if
for no other, biologists would do well to be aware of it. Fundamentalism
is in the ascendant in the U.S. and around the world, and Darwin's ideas
have never been popular in such circles. Efforts to suppress the teaching
of evolution have gained strength in the past couple of years. The next
couple of years could see swingeing budget cuts imposed on biological
research by its ideological opponents. Now is no time to be complacent
about science's hallowed place in society.
      Scientists would be foolish to ignore The Moral Animal because it
was not written by one of their own clan. Wright, a senior editor at The
New Republic, understands evolution better than many biologists. It is a
sad reflection on society that in the months since The Moral Animal was
published most of the ink spilled over genes and human behavior has
focused on The Bell Curve, a mean-spirited and muddled work that is a
sorry excuse for science. (Anyone who wants to know more about that could
read my article in Scientific American, January 1995, pp. 14-17). The
Moral Animal is admittedly speculative in places; but the speculation is
intelligent and careful, which is more than can be said for The Bell
Curve. 
     Parts of Wright's book can be criticized as overplaying the precision
of the genetic machinery that pulls our strings. Wright's struggle to
account for homosexuality, for example, whereby a substantial minority of
the population forgoes any prospect of getting its genes into the next
generation, is less than entirely convincing. His preferred explanation
cites the impressive maleability of the mind; but maleability in that
degree is not easily reconciled with the sort of fine-grained examination
of behavior Wright offers in his dissection of the evolutionary logic
behind Darwin's decision to marry. The ideas in the first half of the book
are explored patiently, but in the final chapters the pace picks up to
that of a whirlwind that might leave any reader gasping for air. 
     The author's deductions about morality place him politically neither
on the left nor the right. There is a conservative flavor to some of his
ideas about sex, but Wright's views on social issues are distinctly
unconservative. The lack of an obvious political constituency may be part
of the reason why, despite favorable reviews, Wright's book has not
captured as much attention as it deserves. I think The Moral Animal sits
quite well with communitarianism, the would-be social movement founded by
Amitai Etzioni that stresses the need to balance rights with
responsibilities.   I have no idea whether either Etzioni or Wright would
be complimented by that suggestion. 
     Wright's book is not the first to set the ideas of evolutionary
psychology before a public audience, and it will not be the last. But the
breadth of its scope and the sharpness of its insights make it the most
impressive attempt yet to reconcile Darwinism with hopes for a more humane
world.--Tim Beardsley