January 11, 2004
I, ROBOT:
Discover Dialogue: Anthropologist Scott Atran: The Surprises of Suicide Terrorism: It's not a new phenomenon, and natural selection may play a role in producing it (Josie Glausiusz, October 2003, Discover Magazine)
How on earth does anyone sane work up the gumption to blow himself up, together with what is often hundreds of bystanders?A: Exactly the same way that you get soldiers on the front line of an army to sacrifice themselves for their buddies. What these cells do is very similar to what our military, or any modern military, does. They form small groups of intimately involved "brothers" who literally sacrifice themselves for one another, the way a mother would do for her child. They do it by manipulating universal heartfelt human sentiments that I think are probably innate and part of biological evolution. In fact, I think most culture is a manipulation of innate desires. It's the same way that our fast-food industry manipulates our desires for sugars and fats, or the way the pornography industry manipulates people to get all hot about pixels on a screen or on wood pulp.
Wood pulp?
A: Yeah, paper in a pornography journal. I mean, it has no adaptive value.
In the case of something like Al Qaeda, you've got these people in groups of three to eight people, for 18 months, isolated from their family, getting this intense and deep ego-stroking propaganda. You do that to anyone, and you'll get him to do what you want. There are all these studies that psychologists have done of torturers on all sides of the political divide. A very famous one is on ordinary Greeks who became torturers during the military junta of 1967 to 1974. They found they were perfectly ordinary--in fact, above-average intelligence. They'd get them to be torturers by indoctrinating them, by showing them how necessary they were for their societies, and getting these people to believe it.You seem to be suggesting that natural selection may be playing a role in generating the feelings that enable people to become suicide terrorists, but blowing yourself up is hardly a good strategy for propelling your genes into the next generation.
A: Natural selection gives us all sorts of dispositions and desires that were adaptive in ancestral environments. Now, our cultural milieu picks certain of these adaptations or their by-products and is able to trigger them to produce behaviors that have nothing to do with what they originally evolved for. Kin altruism (the theory that individuals are willing to sacrifice their lives to save closely related kin) evolved through natural selection. If you listen to most political and religious discourse in societies, it's always done for a brotherhood--brothers and sisters. So you create a fictive family. How else are you going to get people to die for one another when they're non-kin-related? You've got to trick them into believing they are kin-related somehow.
Ah, Darwinian determinism at its absurd best. Convince me that it's best for my genes that I die and I'll go off like a lamb to the slaughter. One question though: Was there really time to trick the NYC firemen, cops, and other rescuers into believing that the Trade Center was packed with their "kin"? And what of Abe Zelmanowitz? How did dying with Ed Beyea serve his gene pool?
MORE:
-Genesis of Suicide Terrorism (Scott Atran, March 7, 2003, Science)
(via Mike Daley)
Is Altruism an Illusion? (Roger Kimball, Aramvirumque)
It is a tautology that any interest we have is an interest of our own: whose else could it be? But the objects of our interest are as various as the world is wide. No doubt much of what we do we do from motives of self-interest. But we might also do things for the sake of flag and country; for the love of a good woman; for the love of God; to discover a new country; to benefit a friend; to harm an enemy; to make a fortune; to spend a fortune."It is not," Butler notes, "because we love ourselves that we find delight in such and such objects, but because we have particular affections towards them."
Indeed, it often happens that in pursuit of some object--through "fancy, inquisitiveness, love, or hatred, any vagrant inclination"--we harm our self-interest. Think of the scientist who ruins his health in single-minded pursuit of the truth about some problem, or a soldier who gives his life for
his country.The fundamental logical error, as the Australian philosopher David Stove has pointed out, is in inferring real-life consequences from a tautology. "If you set out from a tautological premise," Stove observes, "you cannot validly infer from it ANY conclusion which is not itself tautological." It
does not follow from the tautology that "No one can act intentionally except from an interest that he has" that "No one can act intentionally except from a motive that is self-interested." As Stove observes, this is the same sort of reasoning--perennially popular, but nonetheless atrocious--that gulls people into concluding from the proposition "Whatever will be will be" that "All human effort is ineffectual." The first is a tautology; the second is a silly falsehood. (It is, David Hume observed, as silly as inferring from the proposition "Every husband has a wife" that "Every man marries.")
-EXCERPT: from Darwinian Fairytales (David Stove)
The attempts to escape from Darwinism's dilemma all fall into one or ether of three types. These can be usefully labelled 'the Cave Man way out', 'the Hard Man', and 'the Soft Man'. All three types are hardy perennials, and have been with us, in one version or another, ever since Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859. What I call the Cave Man way out is this: you admit that human life is not now what it would be if Darwin's theory were true, but also insist that *it used to be* like that. In the olden days, (this story goes), human populations always did press relentlessly on their supply of food, and thereby brought about constant competition for survival among the too-numerous competitors, and hence natural selection of those organisms which were best fitted to succeed in the struggle for life. That is, human life was exactly as Darwin's book had said that all life is. But our species, (the story goes on), escaped long ago from the brutal regime of natural selection. We developed a thousand forms of attachment,
loyalty, cooperation and unforced subordination, every one of them quite incompatible with a constant and merciless competition to survive. We have now had for a very long time, at least locally, religions, moralities, laws or customs, respect for life and property, rules of inheritance, specialised social orders, distinctions of rank, and standing provisions for external defence, internal police, education and health. Even at our lowest ebb we still have ties of blood, and ties of marriage: two things which are quite as incompatible with a universal competition to survive as are, for example, a medical profession, a priesthood, or a state. This Cave Man story, however implausible, is at any rate not inconsistent with itself. But the combination of it with Darwin's theory of evolution *is* inconsistent. That theory is a universal generalisation about all terrestrial species at any time. Hence if the theory says something which is not true *now* of our species (or another), then it is not true of our species (or that other); and if it is not true of our species (or another), then it is not true finish. In short, the Cave Man way out of Darwinism's dilemma is in reality no way out at all: it is self-contradictory.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 11, 2004 8:34 AM
This guy dances around the real reason why men (and it is nearly always men) do these things.
Keegan (I think) talked about it in The Face of Combat (I think): it is all about looking good in front of your buddies. I can tell you from personal experience that drive is absolutely primal, and will, given the proper conditions, overcome everything else.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at January 11, 2004 9:07 AMIt is the "proper conditions" which demonstrate that it is unnatural. Only highly trained armies do such things.
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2004 9:14 AM"Natural selection gives us all sorts of dispositions and desires that were adaptive in ancestral environments. Now, our cultural milieu picks certain of these adaptations or their by-products and is able to trigger them to produce behaviors that have nothing to do with what they originally evolved for."
Am I right in thinking that, if you believe this, you can attribute anything any human does to natural selection without further inquiry or evidence?
Posted by: Peter B at January 11, 2004 9:47 AMPeter:
Of course. One of the main attractions of Darwinian determinism is that it excuses all evil, rendering it merely natural behavior. That's why folks like Stephen Jay Gould end up being heretics from the faith.
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2004 10:06 AM"Only highly trained armies do such things."
Have you ever been on a football team? Have you ever heard of fraternity initiations? How about gangs?
The proper conditions include any set of activities promoting male-bonding. Highly trained armies do those things, but so do badly trained ones, because the activities promoting male bonding aren't necessarily the same as combat skills,
Peter:
Not quite. You can attribute any set of activities any population of humans do to what our brains are capable of. Which is exactly like saying human nature is virtually invariant; however, its expression is environmentally dependant.
Which makes the assertion, among other things, very undeterministic.
Oh, one other thing, Darwinism has no more to say about right or wrong, moral or immoral, than does Thermodynamics.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at January 11, 2004 12:51 PMIn my fraternity we were never asked to die for one another, but our initiation wasn't terribly onerous.
Badly trained armies break and run.
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2004 1:10 PM"In my fraternity we were never asked to die for one another, but our initiation wasn't terribly onerous."
Your fraternity wasn't a street gang.
Such groups also lack discipline in comparison to well trained military force,but are still capable of semi-organized violence.
Combat is combat,whether it's a street fight or D-Day.
Posted by: M. at January 11, 2004 4:00 PMAre street gangs really notorious for their willingness to sacrifice? Or for killing?
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2004 4:12 PM"Are street gangs really notorious for their willingness to sacrifice? Or for killing?"
Please tell me you're just being contrarian,OJ.
Posted by: M. at January 11, 2004 4:17 PMBy badly trained, I mean training using outmoded tactics or weapons. By that standard, the Light Brigade was badly trained.
But they didn't break and run.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at January 11, 2004 4:46 PMJeff:
"Darwinism has no more to say about right or wrong, moral or immoral, than does Thermodynamics"
Isn't that a little like saying atheism has no more to say about the nature of G-d than germ theory? Of course, there are so many Darwinisms floating around here that I could well be wrong.
Posted by: Peter B at January 11, 2004 5:52 PMJeff:
Tactics and weapons aren't training. Training is training and no one has ever been better trained than the British soldiers were.
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2004 6:23 PMM:
No, the point seems asinine. When do gang members sacrifice the self?
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2004 6:24 PMThey do,OJ.They lie for each other,go to prison for each other and even on occasion take a bullet for each other.Gang members regard themselves as family for whom virtually any sacrifice is wothwhile.
If you regard that point as either asinine or inaccurate,I suggest you do a little basic research on the subject.
Will they go over the top in a human wave to attack the enemy trench?No,of course not.Gangs are as organized and violent as they need to be.
They are not a military unit,but a pre-modern band of warriors who see themselves in an heroic manner little different from the classical Greeks.
M:
I think you've seen West Side Story a couple times too many. A cracked-out 13 year old spraying his Glock out the window during a drive-by is hardly a vision of selfless physical courage fueled by subtle manipulation of Darwinian kin theory.
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2004 6:46 PMYou've taken the analogy further than I do.
And romanticized it further than I intended.
And West Side Story is not a documentary,FYI.
But how would you characterize the well-organized Crips and Bloods.
Or the Hell's Angels?
Not many cracked out 13 yr olds there.
Murdering thugs. No one rumbles anymore.
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2004 7:01 PMOJ:
Read "The Face of Combat." In any male-bonded group, no matter the activity, the members of the group will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid looking bad in front of their peers. Including gangs. Rigorous initiation rites are nearly universal to such groups.
Peter:
"Isn't that a little like saying atheism has no more to say about the nature of G-d than germ theory?"
No, it isn't. Darwinism provides an explanation about how a system with certain characteristics changes over time. It has precisely nothing to say about moral or immoral, good or evil. Therefore, asserting Darwinism excuses evil is a statement that makes absolutely no sense.
Unlike atheism, which says something about God.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at January 11, 2004 7:18 PMDoes it occur to you there's a difference between chugging a beer or getting a tatoo and ending your own life quite intentionally?
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2004 7:37 PMJeff:
Who said Darwinism excuses evil? How could it excuse something it doesn't recognize or provide for?
Is Darwinism compatible with objective morality? A simple yes or no will do.
Posted by: Peter B at January 11, 2004 8:00 PMPeter:
According to OJ, "One of the main attractions of Darwinian determinism is that it excuses all evil ..."
Darwinism is a theory whose truth value has nothing whatsoever to do with morality. At that level, one may as well ask whether capitalism is compatible with objective morality.
The hidden assumption in your question is that such a thing as objective morality exists. My view is that such a thing is impossible. So, on that level, the question is invalid, and neither yes nor no will do.
However, for those claiming objective morality exists, then Darwinism poses something of a problem. For objective morality to exist, there must be some goal to the universe and our existence. Any theory that calls that in to question is incompatible with claims to objective morality.
Darwinism is one such theory. There are others.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at January 11, 2004 9:26 PMOJ:
Yes, it does.
Men put themselves at deliberate risk of losing their lives all the time, often for seemingly trivial reasons, with the overarching goal of retaining admiration within their male-bonded peer group. And, particularly given sufficiently intense initiation rituals, it just doesn't matter much what the activity is.
Your assertion that only highly trained armies do such things is flat wrong.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at January 11, 2004 9:34 PMJeff:
Male-bonded is obviously quite different from the kinship bond though. It's anti-Darwinian if anything.
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2004 10:41 PMCapitalism, as per Adam Smith, actually requires that morality be in place in order to function. Interestingly, Darwin simply borrrowed early capitalist/free market thinking and combined it with aniumal breeding to come up with his Natural Selection. He failed to recognize that the two processes he was paralleling required massive human intervention.
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2004 10:44 PMJeff:
Then you can't really say Darwinism has no relation to morality. Is thermodynamics compatible with objective morality?
Posted by: Peter B at January 12, 2004 5:46 AMOJ:
No, it isn't anti-Darwinian. At the risk of being accused of a just-so story, I think the theory goes like this: Men, in a hunter-gatherer environment, had to hunt cooperatively, and the resulting kill was shared. Hunting could also be quite dangerous. Those that were seen to share more in the danger would also share more in the kill. So an activity that was dependent upon group cohesion also awarded risks taken for the group in a way that would enhance the surival of risk takers.
Note that women don't have any corollary to male-bonding. (It may be out of print, but read "Women's Place in Language" by Karla Labov.)
Capitalism does not require massive human intervention, only participation. For human activity in capitalism to be considered intervention, it must be coordinated and purposive. It isn't is it?
Peter:
No, but genetics, chemistry and biology might. And astrophysics. Heck, even History/Anthropology contradicts notions of objective morality.
You would consider shared paternity (women continually mating with various men to obscure who the real father is) to be wholly, objectively, wrong. Yet in some hunter-gatherer societies, that is the best way to ensure children's survival. Hmmm...maybe it isn't objectively wrong, after all.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at January 12, 2004 8:01 AMCapitalism can't exist where a structure of morality and laws does not precede it. Then it requires an unending series of intelligent decisions.
Posted by: oj at January 12, 2004 8:19 AMJeff:
I have a better idea. Let's lock up all the women and insist they breed continuously from puberty with all kinds of men. Then we'll kill them at menopause. That would surely out-do those hunting societies in guaranteeing the survival of children, so what could possibly be objectionable about it?
BTW, how are those hunting societies doing last time you checked?
Posted by: Peter B at January 12, 2004 8:30 AMHmmm. A great deal here about armies and gangs, but nothing about monasteries and convents.
These would seem to be even less understandable in darwinian terms than armies and gangs. But of course, Orrin refuses to understand darwinism. It is not a thing and it does not tell or force anyone to do anything.
It does punish those who make wrong choices, and while most members of armies eventually demobilize, come home and reproduce, in theory the inmates of convents never do.
I'd rather give my life for my country or my platoon than for nothing.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at January 12, 2004 11:28 AMNuns aren't exactly notorious for laying down their lives to protect the kinship group either.
Posted by: oj at January 12, 2004 12:22 PMPeter:
You misunderstand my point. What might seem to be an objectively moral position to many may well not be, because morality is often environmentally dependant.
It isn't a question of how those tribes are doing today, but rather, in that environment what is moral? After all, your way-back predecessors may well have made the same moral decision.
Everyone here agrees polygamy is wrong. Thought experiment: a disease that affects only males reduces the male population by 2/3 in the US before it is tamed. Do you think the take on polygamy might just change?
As for the rest, morality won't go where people won't go.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at January 12, 2004 12:31 PMThere's nothing wrong with polygamy in a moral sense, it's just illegal.
Posted by: oj at January 12, 2004 12:40 PMI see nothing whatsoever wrong with polygamy, and in fact, it would probably raise the overall quality of life for participants, as those people who aren't currently anyone's first choice get a chance to participate in marriage.
oj:
Your concept of gangs is as distorted as 'West Side Story', only in the opposite direction.
Posted by: THX 1138 at January 12, 2004 2:31 PMIt doesn't matter whether nuns lay down their lives. If they don't reproduce, they're losers.
They themselves are led to believe they are altruists, though with compensations.
Now, either that is correct or it isn't. Either way, it proves you can talk people into acting against their own interests, so darwinism has nothing to do with the decision how to act.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at January 12, 2004 5:39 PMHarry:
Exactly my point--Darwinism has nothing to do with behavior (or anything else for that matter).
Posted by: oj at January 12, 2004 5:56 PMYou are right, if by that you mean Darwinism is not a prescription for one behavior or another, or that it can possibly be used to predict individual acts.
Statistics will tell you something about what 1,000 people might do, but it can't tell you anything about an individual.
Darwinism is applied statistics.
And I must disagree with Harry. If women were, in general, amenable to being convinced becoming nuns was their lifes' goal, Darwinism would have its way.
We wouldn't be here, indicating gullibility is an inadequately fit trait.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at January 12, 2004 8:45 PM