Evolution, Games, and God

The Principle of Cooperation

Martin A. Nowak, Sarah Coakley, Martin A. Nowak, Sarah Coakley

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674075535
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Evolution
• Index: Biological Sciences

According to the reigning competition-driven model of evolution, selfish behaviors that maximize an organism's reproductive potential offer a fitness advantage over self-sacrificing behaviors—rendering unselfish behavior for the sake of others a mystery that requires extra explanation. Evolution, Games, and God addresses this conundrum by exploring how cooperation, working alongside mutation and natural selection, plays a critical role in populations from microbes to human societies. Inheriting a tendency to cooperate, argue the contributors to this book, may be as beneficial as the self-preserving instincts usually thought to be decisive in evolutionary dynamics.Assembling experts in mathematical biology, history of science, psychology, philosophy, and theology, Martin Nowak and Sarah Coakley take an interdisciplinary approach to the terms "cooperation" and "altruism." Using game theory, the authors elucidate mechanisms by which cooperation—a form of working together in which one individual benefits at the cost of another—arises through natural selection. They then examine altruism—cooperation which includes the sometimes conscious choice to act sacrificially for the collective good—as a key concept in scientific attempts to explain the origins of morality. Discoveries in cooperation go beyond the spread of genes in a population to include the spread of cultural transformations such as languages, ethics, and religious systems of meaning.The authors resist the presumption that theology and evolutionary theory are inevitably at odds. Rather, in rationally presenting a number of theological interpretations of the phenomena of cooperation and altruism, they find evolutionary explanation and theology to be strongly compatible.

I

Evolutionary Cooperation in Historical Perspective

1

“Ready to Aid One Another”

Darwin on Nature, God, and Cooperation

JOHN HEDLEY BROOKE

There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.

(Darwin [1879] 2004, 157–58)¹

In this well-known passage from Darwin’s Descent of Man lies an invitation to consider his understanding of cooperation and its place in his naturalistic theory of human evolution. How did it feature in his account of the moral sense and its development—a development that Darwin believed had been reinforced by religion? In this introductory chapter my aim is to explore some of the principal reasons why Darwin came to believe that a naturalistic account should be given of what he called our social instincts and their transmission. Central to his analysis was a concept of “sympathy” that allowed him to say that, in the early history of human tribes, a decisive role had been played by an instinctive need for the approbation of others and a strong desire to avoid their disapproval. In order to place Darwin’s contribution in perspective, it is, however, necessary to show that there was nothing essentially “natural” about his naturalism. This can best be done—despite its back-to-front appearance—by examining a few theological responses to Darwin’s science and by identifying the reasons why he had abandoned a theology of nature that might have motivated him more strongly to see in the creative aspects of evolution the detailed fulfillment of a providential plan.

References to the naturalness, or otherwise, of naturalism immediately raise definitional problems. A distinction is routinely drawn between the search for natural causes as a principle of method in scientific inquiry and naturalism in the much stronger sense of a view of all reality in which there is nothing other than nature, no supernatural being of any kind. As a methodological assumption, naturalism had long proved its fruitfulness, notably by Darwin’s mentor, Charles Lyell, in his reconstruction of Earth’s physical history in his Principles of Geology (1830–1833). Lyell had also expressed the view that the origin of species, while under the control of Providence, might itself prove explicable in terms of natural, or what were often called secondary, causes. Darwin’s application of naturalism in this sense to the evolutionary development of human attributes would prove highly controversial. It did not, however, necessitate a naturalistic worldview in the stronger sense of prescribing an ontology in which what could be known of “nature” defined all that is. Not all forms of naturalism have been as extreme as this, since there are both theistic and deistic variants in which a divine being is understood to be working through natural causes. In this connection, theological disputes have frequently revolved around the question of whether such a deity need be supposed to have done anything more than establish and possibly sustain the “laws of nature.” Darwin would be caught in such debates because his central concept, that of natural selection, was unashamedly naturalistic in that it accorded agency to “nature,” not to divine intervention, in the production of new species. What this meant for his contemporaries, however, was a largely cultural matter because the meaning of “nature” was not a given but itself shaped by different presuppositions—whether, for example, it was understood to be an autonomous system of matter in motion, a carefully designed work of art, or a theater of redemption. Because a “naturalistic” explanation did not have to be atheistic, but could also be associated with theism, deism, or agnosticism, it can be simplistic to describe any one of these associations as “natural”! The significance of these distinctions will become clearer as we investigate Darwin’s naturalism, which at the time he wrote his On the Origin of Species still involved a deity in the design of nature’s laws but not in the day-to-day running of the universe.

Let us begin at Harvard, where this present book was conceived, but in the Harvard of the mid-nineteenth century when the great Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz had just been appointed Professor of Geology and Zoology. Why was Agassiz given such a generous and resounding welcome? Part of the answer lies in the interpretation he gave to living forms. His Platonist philosophy of nature struck a chord with the religious ideals of many in the College (Nartonis 2005). Agassiz had no time for theories of evolution that involved material connections between species. Rather, in the fossil record he saw evidence of progressive creation as epoch succeeded epoch. Living things were the instantiation of ideas in the mind of the Creator. As he once put it: “There will be no scientific evidence of God’s working in nature until naturalists have shown that the whole creation is the expression of thought and not the product of physical agents” (Roberts 1988, 34).

Agassiz was not alone in that view. In England, Richard Owen also ascribed the common bone structures of the vertebrates to an archetypal idea in the mind of God. Owen had risen to fame through his expertise in anatomy and paleontology, and it was he who coined the word “dinosaur.” Owen was willing to see the emergence of new species as the result of natural causes but, at the same time, the whole process was the unfolding of a divine plan. The many different vertebrates looked to him to be instantiations of a common skeletal structure—an archetypal idea in the mind of the Creator. There was a sense in which “creation” was continuous (Owen 1849).

During Agassiz’s tenure at Harvard, Darwin published his On the Origin of Species (1859). Here was a quite different account of the unity of form. For Darwin it was the consequence of a historical process in which species were related by common descent. The clash was transparent. Whereas Agassiz (Roberts 1988, 34) affirmed that “the intervention of a Creator is displayed in the most striking manner, in every stage of the history of the world,” Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection required no such intervention. Agassiz communicated his verdict to Asa Gray, who had been Harvard’s Professor of Botany since 1842: Darwin’s work was “poor—very poor” (Roberts 1988, 35).

A few years later, a scientific meeting was held in Boston at which both Agassiz and the British physicist John Tyndall were present. Tyndall (1879, 182) left a poignant account of a scene that marks the passing of an age:

Rising from luncheon, we all halted as if by common consent, in front of a window, and continued there a discussion which had been started at table. The maple was in its autumn glory, and the exquisite beauty of the scene outside seemed, in my case, to interpenetrate without disturbance the intellectual action. Earnestly, almost sadly, Agassiz turned, and said to the gentlemen standing round, “I confess that I was not prepared to see [Darwin’s] theory received as it has been by the best intellects of our time. Its success is greater than I could have thought possible.”

To speak of the passing of an age captures something of the Darwinian impact, but it also misses a vital element. This is the remarkable diversity of the religious response. No interpretation of Darwin’s science, whether theistic or atheistic can be singled out as the only “natural” one. Asa Gray, to whom Agassiz confided his poor opinion of Darwin, took a very different view. Gray positively promoted the theory of natural selection, claiming that it had theological advantages (Gray 1963). It underlined the unity of the human races in a way that Agassiz’s science did not, and it even helped theologians with their most difficult problem: that of suffering. If competition in a struggle for existence was the motor of evolution, there was perhaps a sense in which the concomitant suffering was a precondition of the very possibility of our existence. Gray even proposed to Darwin that since the cause of the variations on which natural selection worked was, at the time, unknown, there was nothing to say they could not be under the control of Providence.

The Diversity of Reception

Agassiz and Gray represent two poles in the response to Darwin, who had, of course, wondered, and worried, how his theory might be received: “God knows what the public will think,” he mused to one correspondent (Darwin 1991, 375). To admit the mutability of species, he once remarked, had been like confessing a murder, so great was the possible stigma. He knew his book was likely to have a polarizing effect, as it often did in public settings. When the politician Benjamin Disraeli suggested that a choice had to be made between apes and angels for the template of human beings, he was depicted in the press as having sprouted large angelic wings (Desmond and Moore 1991, 460–61). The threat to human dignity that so worried Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, was often captured in cartoons. There were monkeys impatient to have their tails clipped in order to take their true place in society (Brooke 1991, 291). Bruising attacks from some clergymen made Darwin almost say that those who opposed his theory by snarling and baring their teeth merely confirmed their animal origins.

The responses of three women reveal additional problems and other layers of diversity. An elderly Mary Somerville observed with nostalgic regret that the beauty of a bird’s plumage and song could no longer be enjoyed as having been designed for our delight. It was their utility to the birds themselves that mattered now (Somerville 1873, 358). For a feminist leader, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Darwinism offered the bright prospect of emancipation. “The real difficulty in woman’s case,” she wrote, “is that the whole foundation of Christian religion rests on her temptation and man’s fall.” By accepting the Darwinian theory that “the race has been a gradual growth from the lower to a higher form of life, and the story of the fall is a myth, we can exonerate the snake, emancipate the woman, and reconstruct a more rational religion for the nineteenth century” (Larson 2005, 52). Late in life, and poignantly, Darwin’s wife Emma admitted that some aspects of his writing had been painful to her—particularly the view that “all morality has grown up by evolution” (Darwin 1958, 93). For so many Victorians, belief in the transcendental significance of moral values could be a way back to an otherwise fractured faith—a route seemingly blocked by a science that had no need of the transcendent. To this question of the moral sense we shall return because, although Darwin’s account was naturalistic, it was not relativistic. Nor did it devalue the virtue of cooperation.

There was an even greater variety of religious reaction (Brooke 2003). Geographical parameters played a key role in shaping receptivity to Darwinian ideas, making them seem less natural in some constituencies than others. As David Livingstone (2003, 117–23) has shown, Presbyterians in Princeton reacted very differently from those in Northern Ireland and differently again from those in Scotland. The reasons were often local and related to high-profile public events. In Belfast, the same John Tyndall who recorded the autumnal melancholy of Agassiz, delivered a provocative address in 1874 (1879, 137–203) that associated Darwin’s theory with a more forceful naturalism than Darwin’s own. Whereas Darwin himself was willing to use theological language when discussing the appearance of the first few living forms (Peckham 2006, 759), Tyndall brooked no compromise. His aggression toward theology in the context of educational priorities sparked an intensity of reaction that had no equivalent in Princeton. It meant that in Belfast Darwin’s theory would unequivocally be seen as a vehicle for materialism and atheism.

Many such contrasts could be drawn to indicate the importance of local parameters. On the question of race, for example, geographical location mattered: the reception of Darwin’s theory in New Zealand, where it was invoked to justify extermination of the Maori (Stenhouse 1999), was quite different from perceptions in the southern states of America (Stephens 2000). For complex social and political reasons the public spectacle of the “monkey trials” (famously that of the biology teacher John Scopes in Dayton Tennessee in 1925) has been largely confined to North America (Larson 1997). There has been no equivalent in England, where a future archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, was already speaking in favor of evolution and against a God of the gaps as early as 1860. Because of the prevalent form of naturalism according to which the deity worked through “natural laws” (Kohn 1989; Brooke 2008), the more agnostic forms, such as that to which Darwin eventually tended, require explanation—and all the more so when, as in Darwin’s trajectory, there was the loss of an original intention to become an Anglican clergyman.

In Britain, by the close of the nineteenth century, there were, however, Anglican clergy ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Why Cooperation Makes a Difference
• Part I: Evolutionary Cooperation in Historical Perspective
• Part II: Mathematics, Game Theory, and Evolutionary Biology: The Evolutionary Phenomenon of Cooperation
• Part III: Psychology, Neuroscience, and Intentionality in the Cultural Evolution of Cooperation
• Part IV: Philosophy of Biology and Philosophy of Mind: Adjudicating the Significance of Evolutionary Cooperation
• Part V: Cooperation, Ethics, and Metaethics
• Part VI: Cooperation, Metaphysics, and God
• List of Contributors
• Index