Beyond Biofatalism

Human Nature for an Evolving World

Gillian Barker

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231540391
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Evolución

Beyond Biofatalism is a lively and penetrating response to the idea that evolutionary psychology reveals human beings to be incapable of building a more inclusive, cooperative, and egalitarian society. Considering the pressures of climate change, unsustainable population growth, increasing income inequality, and religious extremism, this attitude promises to stifle the creative action we require before we even try to meet these threats.

Beyond Biofatalism provides the perspective we need to understand that better societies are not only possible but actively enabled by human nature. Gillian Barker appreciates the methods and findings of evolutionary psychologists, but she considers their work against a broader background to show human nature is surprisingly open to social change. Like other organisms, we possess an active plasticity that allows us to respond dramatically to certain kinds of environmental variation, and we engage in niche construction, modifying our environment to affect others and ourselves. Barker uses related research in social psychology, developmental biology, ecology, and economics to reinforce this view of evolved human nature, and philosophical exploration to reveal its broader implications. The result is an encouraging foundation on which to build better approaches to social, political, and other institutional changes that could enhance our well-being and chances for survival.

[ 1 ]

Human Nature and the Limits of Human Possibility

WHAT KINDS OF SOCIETY are possible for human beings? What changes to our current social arrangements are feasible, and how can they be achieved? These are old questions, but they have recently taken on a new urgency. It has become plain that substantial social change of some kind will inevitably occur over the next few human generations, driven by new conditions of population density, resource scarcity, and climate change—conditions that are themselves in turn strongly influenced by what humans do and how we interact with one another. We face imminent and consequential choices about which social changes to pursue and which to resist, and by what means. At the same time, optimism about social change has been fading. Many commentators have noted that the utopian political and social movements of the twentieth century failed to achieve their lofty goals—some led instead to terrible new forms of oppression—and that even in the most enlightened societies many social problems persist despite public policies designed to counter them. These thinkers sometimes go on to draw a broader conclusion: that the possibilities open to human societies are much more limited than would-be reformers had assumed. But this lesson is too vague to be useful. To respond effectively to coming challenges and present problems, we need to understand the possibilities open to us: the particular constraints that limit our options and the pathways by which particular changes might be achieved.

Some of the more forceful recent discussions of the scope of human possibilities have been informed by ideas from evolutionary psychology, taken in the broad sense: evolutionary studies of human cognition and social behavior, what some proponents call “the new science of human nature.” This label links evolutionary psychology to the long tradition that takes a conception of human nature as a crucial measure of what arrangements of human society could and should be pursued. A well-known version of this kind of reasoning is found in philosophical debates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about the “state of nature.” Is it (as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued) peaceful, communal, and egalitarian but capable of corruption by ill-advised innovation? Or is it (as Thomas Hobbes had asserted a century earlier) a state of war, all against all, that only an overarching central power can hold in check? Philosophers no longer appeal to the state of nature, but some evolutionary psychologists argue that evolved human nature sets limits on what is possible for human individuals and for human societies—limits that scientists can discover and specify.

Since close attention was first focused on the evolution of human social behavior in the 1970s, a series of prominent and influential thinkers have argued that evolutionary science has discovered fundamental behavioral dispositions written into the evolved genetic makeup of human beings that limit the social arrangements that are possible for us. These dispositions are not supposed to be absolute—they are subject to cultural and educational influence—but it is claimed that they nonetheless play a profound role in shaping human societies. They solidify certain dominant patterns in human social life such as sharply distinct gender roles, hierarchies of social power, and intergroup violence and intolerance, and they impose limits and costs on efforts to modify these features. These thinkers warn that the discoveries of evolutionary psychology warrant pessimism about efforts to accomplish major reductions in inequality, intergroup conflict, or gender role differences. In light of what evolutionary psychology reveals about human nature, they see such efforts as unlikely to succeed and as morally inadvisable.

The flawed understanding of social possibilities put forward by these thinkers in the name of evolutionary science is what I call “biofatalism”: a broad pessimism about the prospects for social change that, while not involving a commitment to genetic determinism, is nonetheless based on a particular set of presumptions about the biological underpinnings of human behavior. It stands in the way of an adequate discussion, both scientific and political, of the social changes that will preserve and enhance the quality of life under the stringent constraints of global warming and other environmental limitations. But such a discussion does require close attention to what we can learn about human psychology from evolutionary science, and it can benefit greatly from some of the genuine insights of evolutionary psychology. The broad aim of this book is to examine and challenge the misleading presumptions that lead to biofatalism and to begin an exploration of what can be learned from an evolutionary psychology freed from those presumptions.

The debate aroused by the claims that many feminist, egalitarian, and peace-oriented social objectives are untenable has been fierce, and some critics argue that evolutionary approaches to the question of human possibilities should be rejected across the board. This book takes a different and more positive approach. It aims to show that a broader consideration of evidence from evolutionary biology and related areas of biology and psychology, and from recent work within mainstream evolutionary psychology itself, supports a different picture of human nature, one that shows us to be more open to some important varieties of social change than the leading synthesizers of evolutionary psychology allege. This new perspective on what evolutionary psychology contributes is opened up by clearing away some conceptual obstructions—examining what the leading voices of evolutionary psychology have said about human possibilities, the reasoning behind their claims, and the tacit assumptions built into that reasoning. When we revise these assumptions in light of what biologists and psychologists have learned over the last few decades across many fields of research, we can see that the evolved strategies expressed in behavior are much more complex and open to a variety of influences than the leading syntheses admit, in part because of the multistranded sensitivity of evolution itself: both behavior and evolution are realized by means of complex organism–environment interaction. Key elements of this interaction include the active plasticity that allows organisms to respond to environmental variation and the many processes by which organisms modify their environments in ways that in turn affect both themselves and others (what some evolutionary theorists have dubbed “niche construction”). Related research from social psychology, developmental biology, and ecology reinforces this expanded view of evolved human nature and fills in its details in certain key areas.

The new conception of human nature and its role in human social life offered here supports the conclusion that some substantial and desirable social changes—including some kinds of change whose possibility has been cast in doubt by mainstream evolutionary psychology—are achievable; indeed, it suggests that we are a long way from having tested the true scope of human possibility. More practically, this approach has the potential for showing (sometimes, at least) which kinds of change and which methods of change are more or less likely to succeed. There is room for optimism about the prospects for social change, and about the possibility of developing powerful tools for instigating it. But optimists must accept that all changes are not equally possible or easy: evolved human nature does have implications for the possible outcomes and paths of change, and as we learn about what these are, we are likely to find that they raise some difficult moral questions.

The view sketched here also has implications for the conduct of inquiry—and broader public discussion—in areas where evolutionary science, social thought, and political decision making intersect. Claims about the implications of evolutionary psychology for social policy do not usually appear in evolutionary psychologists’ research papers but in works aimed at synthesizing a larger body of research and exploring its broader implications. Such works are often written for a nonspecialist audience, sometimes by leading empirical researchers but sometimes by thinkers who become prominent mainly on the basis of their conceptual and synthesizing work. The prominence of these books in discussions of the social lessons to be drawn from evolutionary science has been notable since the publication of Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene, and although some of this “pop” evolutionary psychology has rightly drawn stiff criticism (Kitcher 1985; Panksepp and Panksepp 2000; Dupré 2003; Buller 2005; Richardson 2007), there is also much to praise in the contribution that such works make to a wide public engagement with scientific ideas about human behavior and human society.

The discussion that follows focuses especially on works by E. O. Wilson (Wilson 1975, 1978), Robert Wright (Wright 1994a, 1994b), and Steven Pinker (Pinker 2002), all leading synthesizers of the research in mainstream evolutionary psychology. Their works are widely read, and the view of human possibilities that they present is fairly typical of mainstream evolutionary psychology. But other views can be found in the field itself and in related areas of study. In the latter part of the book, I turn to the work of David Buss, a leading researcher and the author of evolutionary psychology’s most widely used specialist textbook. Some of Buss’s recent work shows the potential for a fruitful engagement between mainstream evolutionary psychology and broader thinking about the evolution of human sociality and cognition (Buss 2001, 2009; Buss and Schmitt 2011). Such potential is also apparent in Pinker’s more recent work (Pinker 2011).

A different and valuable contribution comes from recent discussions about the relationship between feminism and evolutionary psychology (Eagly and Wood 2011). As the philosopher Carla Fehr has recently noted (Fehr 2012), feminist evolutionary psychology is a growing and important area of research; Fehr suggests that deeper engagement with this work by feminist science studies scholars could contribute to better thinking about human evolution and its implications. Some political scientists also see the promise of such engagement: Laurette Liesen (Liesen 2011) calls for feminists to “look beyond evolutionary psychology” to evolutionary biology, developmental biology, and behavioral ecology for insight into human reproductive strategies and their implications. The work of behavioral ecologist Patricia Gowaty on sexual strategies provides a particularly promising instance of evolutionary research informed by feminist insights (Gowaty 2003, 2008, 2011; Moore, Gowaty, and Moore 2003; Gowaty et al. 2007); some of the prospects that it opens up are sketched in the later chapters of this book.

My aim here is, in part, to advance the kind of engagement between social thought and various evolutionary perspectives that Fehr and Liesen recommend. Critics have frequently attacked or dismissed evolutionary psychologists’ claims about human nature but have relied too often on purely negative arguments focused on flaws in the evidence offered—a strategy that can lead at best to the negative verdict of “not proven.” Where evidence is faulty, of course, it is essential to point this out. But like Fehr, Liesen, Gowaty, and others, I think it is equally vital that feminists and other critics of mainstream evolutionary psychology engage in a positive exploration of what evolution might really have to teach us about human life, human possibilities, and the prospects for change. To bring the enlarged and revised evolutionary psychology envisaged here to full realization and fruitful use will require the establishment of a new kind of discussion, less ideological and more practical. The changes needed to make such a discussion work are explored toward the end of this book; happily, several of them are already under way.

As the next chapter shows, evolutionary psychologists have often written in a way that seems to suggest that we should trim our aspirations for social change to fit the limitations imposed by evolved human nature. This is only one of several areas where critics worry that evolutionary psychologists entangle facts and values by tacitly importing values into their descriptions of human nature and then use the results to support value judgments about how we should behave (Fairchild 1991; Travis 2003). Critics have accused evolutionary psychologists of condoning or justifying many less-than-admirable features of modern societies, including economic inequality, racism, religious bigotry, and rape. Evolutionary psychologists, in turn, have expressed outrage at these accusations, arguing that their aim is simply to get the facts straight so that whatever social choices we make are founded on an accurate picture of what people are like (Buss 1995; Leger, Kamil, and French 2001). Their critics, they say, are the ones guilty of confounding facts and values, rejecting empirical evidence when it conflicts with their ideology, and misinterpreting factual assertions about human nature as value-laden statements of approval or justification.

Evolutionary psychologists thus accuse their critics of assuming that we can reason from claims about facts to lessons about values, from descriptive premises about how things are to normative conclusions about how they ought to be or, indeed, to prescriptive conclusions about what we ought to do. David Hume famously pointed out in the eighteenth century that reasoning that makes this sort of move—deriving an “ought” from an “is,” as philosophers like to say—commits a fundamental error. One common way of making this mistake was later dubbed the “naturalistic fallacy.” This is the mistake of assuming that because something is natural or occurs in nature, it must be good. When evolutionary psychologists argue that some uncomfortable but common aspects of human societies, such as racism and gender inequality, are natural, critics say, this carries at least an implicit suggestion that these aspects are not so bad after all. Evolutionary psychologists point out, however, that they are alert to the pitfall of the naturalistic fallacy and at pains to avoid it. The facts about human nature, they insist, carry no implications about how things should be. When we identify some human characteristic as part of evolved human nature, this leaves open the question of whether we should celebrate it or strive to overcome it. Many other natural phenomena are harmful to human lives—pests and diseases, storms and wildfires—and scientists rightly seek an accurate understanding of these things to help discover how we can best protect ourselves from them. In just the same way, evolutionary psychologists say, we must face up to the uncomfortable facts of human nature to help us discover how to minimize the suffering they may bring about. And some lessons about the choices we should make do follow directly from the facts—if certain goals are impossible and the resources available are limited, we surely should direct our efforts toward other goals that are more feasible.

But the situation is more complicated than this simple response suggests. First, irrespective of the attitudes that evolutionary psychologists themselves take on such uses, their work is in fact widely cited to support prescriptive conclusions. Whether or not these conclusions should be laid at the door of evolutionary psychology, they—and the descriptive claims that are used to bolster them—warrant examination and response. Second, closer attention to the work of some leading evolutionary psychologists reveals that they themselves do not succeed in keeping judgments about facts and values clearly separate. It should be obvious that descriptive claims can yield substantial normative implications when combined with broad (perhaps tacit) assumptions about values; such reasoning is common in discussions of human nature and the limits of human possibility (Wilson, Dietrich, and Clark 2003). Moreover, certain kinds of beliefs about (merely descriptive) facts are themselves difficult to disentangle conceptually from prescriptive or normative views. Philosophers have noted that some concepts that we use in everyday factual descriptions are inherently value-laden—it might seem that there are facts about whether a particular action was cruel or courageous, for example, but these concepts seem to have a value component that cannot be eliminated, and this sort of entanglement is common in work seeking social lessons from human evolution. Such entanglement between descriptive and normative ideas can have serious consequences, allowing some thinkers to present normative positions as if they are descriptive or derive directly from descriptive facts and are authenticated by evolutionary science. And finally, the idea that many of the goals that would-be reformers have in view can be put aside as infeasible is an idea that can be supported only with the aid of substantial assumptions about values.

Much of my discussion here concerns the tacit value assumptions and value-entangled concepts in play in social applications of evolutionary psychology. There are larger philosophical issues here, though—how to think about values at all from a factual, scientific point of view, and how to think about the place of value judgments within science itself. I return to these questions and to some ramifications of the more practical problem of how to negotiate the interlacing of fact and value in the study of human nature toward the end of the book.

One of the core elements of what evolutionary psychologists see as evolved human nature—by far the most discussed—is sexual differentiation in behavior and cognition (Gowaty 1992; Wright 1994a, 1994b; Mulder 2004; Liesen 2007; Schmitt et al. 2008; Lippa 2009; Fine 2010; Eagly and Wood 2011; McCarthy and Arnold 2011).¹ The idea that female and male brains are evolved to be different (Buss and Schmitt 1993), in conjunction with an adaptive story that explains a long list of putative cognitive and behavioral differences in ways that fit comfortably with widespread gender stereotypes, has been picked up enthusiastically in a burgeoning popular literature. It is used (among many other things) to argue for gender-specific education (on the grounds that girls and boys have naturally different learning styles; Gilbert 2006; Halpern et al. 2011), for reevaluation of the notion of sexual harassment (on the grounds that women and men have naturally different attitudes toward sexual solicitation; Browne 2006), and for rethinking the aims of feminism (on the grounds that women and men have naturally different goals and priorities; Brizendine 2006). More broadly, this idea is used to defend the supposition that some societies are now approaching the natural limits of gender equality—that the gains that women in Western democracies have recently achieved in income, relief from unequal child care obligations, and success in traditionally male-dominated professional and intellectual arenas have gone about as far as nature will allow. This idea has also, of course, been sharply criticized by feminist scholars and others (Ah-King and Nylin 2010). Because this particular area of application is so important and well explored, it serves as a useful focus for this book’s investigation. The theoretical framework I develop here is quite general, however, and many of the particular lessons to be drawn from this instance apply equally to other aspects of evolutionary psychologists’ conception of evolved human nature.

This book draws together threads from many sources. The debts I owe to earlier thinkers from biology, psychology, philosophy, and economics will be obvious in what follows, as I trace many of these threads and show how they are interwoven. The way that I draw these elements together also has some important precursors. Philip Kitcher’s rich body of work at the intersection of evolutionary and ethical thought is one of these (Kitcher 1985, 1996, 2003, 2007, 2011); another is Patrick Bateson’s equally wide-ranging work on the interconnections between evolution, development, behavior, and the lived experience of humans and other organisms (Bateson 1983; Bateson and Martin 1999, 2013; Bateson and Gluckman 2011). Working from either side of the boundary between biology and philosophy, Kitcher (a philosopher) and Bateson (a biologist) show how much can be learned by exploring the interplay between questions about human biology and human values.

THE ZOOLOGIST G. G. SIMPSON famously remarked that all attempts to answer questions about human nature and the meaning of human life made before the publication of Darwin’s Origin are worthless. “We are better off,” he concluded, “if we ignore them completely” (Simpson 1969), and a similar attitude is apparent in the work of evolutionary psychologists and its many popularizers. The entanglement of descriptive hypotheses with value assumptions, I argue, suggests reasons to think harder about what evolutionary thinkers might learn from the long pre-Darwinian history of inquiry into these issues by philosophers, political theorists, and social scientists. This study focuses, nonetheless, on the discussion within evolutionary psychology and allied areas of biology; my main aim is to show ways in which the implications of evolutionary science for Simpson’s questions have changed since Darwin’s time and, indeed, since the time of Simpson himself.

Before considering how evolutionary psychologists think about the implications of evolved human nature for human societies, it will be helpful to get a sense of what their conception of human nature actually is. The ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• [ 1 ]: Human Nature and the Limits of Human Possibility
• [ 2 ]: The Cost of Change
• [ 3 ]: Thinking About Change and Stability in Living Systems
• [ 4 ]: Lessons from Development, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology
• [ 5 ]: Human Possibilities
• [ 6 ]: Valuing Change
• [ 7 ]: Choosing Environments
• [ 8 ]: What Is Feasible?
• [ 9 ]: Evolutionary Psychology and Human Possibilities
• Notes
• References
• Index