From: Terry Burnham
To: Robert WrightPosted Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2000, at 3:00 AM ET Dear Bob,
My friends have learned never to ask about my Marine experience. Although I spent a small fraction of my life wearing camouflage, that time occupies about 80 percent of my memories.
In 1943, the U.S. Marines attacked Japanese positions on Tarawa. Of the 5,000 Marines in the initial attack, 1,500 were killed or wounded. Many Marines had to wade more than half a mile through surf turned red with blood and filled with dead bodies.
In 1983, I entered boot camp to learn how Marines could act as they did at Tarawa and elsewhere. At 23, I was one of the oldest members of my platoon and the only college graduate. Jaded, I expected to avoid indoctrination as I dissected the tactics of my drill instructors. Yet on just the 22nd day of training, I cried in church over the deaths of a helicopter full of Marines flying near the Korean DMZ.
As we sang the Marine Corps hymn, I was stunned by the genuine sadness I felt for my fallen "brothers." How had three weeks of boot camp made me a Marine? Had I been a better student of psychology, I'd have known that human behavior is influenced by the situation to an unexpectedly large degree.
In his well-known study, for example, Stanley Milgram built a very specific environment where 65 percent of average people gave high-voltage shocks to a victim who cried and begged for the torture to stop. (Fortunately, the victim was just acting.) The summary of hundreds of related studies is that people are much more malleable than either they or others predict.
One of the most famous lines in sociobiology comes from The Selfish Gene, where Richard Dawkins writes, "Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots … they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines."
Critics use "lumbering robots" to suggest that modern Darwinists are genetic determinists. Nothing could be further from Dawkins' intention or from the truth. There is a genetic, universal human nature, but because the environment is so important, human behavior varies infinitely.
In Mean Genes, Jay Phelan and I joke about the dearth of self-help books titled "How to Build a Bigger Beer Gut, Ten Steps to Frivolous Spending, or Nurturing the Infidel Within." Our joke makes a serious point. If people simply seek pleasure and avoid pain, the outcome is unlikely to be pretty. Simply going with the flow often leads to obesity, bankruptcy, and unfulfilling relationships.
Genes build organisms to foster their goals and care nothing for happiness, justice, and peace. In the Australian social spider, for example, the power of genetic interests is clear. After giving birth to about a hundred hungry spiderlings, Mom's body literally liquefies into a pile of mushy flesh. The babies then completely consume the gooey mess and begin life with some real home cooking in their bellies. Genes are selfish, powerful, and pervasive. If they can build a dissolving, edible mom, what hope do we have?
Returning, as I often do, to my Marine memories, I recall a day in tank school at Fort Knox when a sergeant threw my entire bed out the third-floor window because a fold was the wrong size. As we went to sleep in the dark another night, my "friends" placed a bloody deer head on the tank fender that they knew I used as a pillow.
My most poignant memory, however, comes from collecting donations to buy Q-Tips to clean our rifles for a boot camp inspection. Money was tight as each recruit had only $90 for three months of shaving cream and other sundries. Accordingly, I was getting small donations of 10 cents or so until one recruit donated $5. I said that we didn't need so much. He replied, "Neither do I." An act of generosity that still tingles my spine.
When I think about the challenge you describe as "formulating a modern spiritual world view grounded in Darwinian self-understanding," I recall the generosity of my friend. His $5 was not a "random act of altruism," but rather was fostered by a very special environment.
Perhaps paradoxically, Marine culture is socialistic—all other things being equal, a Marine gets paid more if he or she is married and still more for each child. Socialism may not have worked in Russia, but socialism in combat units has proved to be effective.
Humans are not lumbering robots; we are acutely sensitive to the incentives. If, after writing The Moral Animal and Nonzero, your thoughts on how to build those incentives are hazy, mine are a formless mass. Although ignorant of the specifics, I remain optimistic for two reasons. First, humans are uniquely able to use rationality to build productive systems. Second, we have powerful instincts for cooperation and altruism that can be nurtured.
In closing, I've enjoyed this immensely—thanks to you and to Slate. I encourage readers to enter the Slate "Fray" and/or e-mail me from www.meangenes.org.
From: Terry Burnham
To: Robert WrightPosted Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2000, at 3:00 AM ET Can Darwin can help you lose weight, quit smoking, and get out of debt? Yes, says Terry Burnham, a professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of Mean Genes
, a guide to improving your life by acknowledging your hard-wired tendencies (click here to buy it.) This week he discusses the book with Robert Wright, the author of Slate's "Earthling" column, The Moral Animal, and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from The Fray Editor: In an earlier collection of replies to these articles--click here and scroll to the bottom of the page--we featured a post by Epicuria. He argued with our take on this, protesting that he was bothered by irrelevance to the topic, not by the specific views held by posters. Point taken. But his post still sounds good to us. (Look out for him in various threads in this Fray, including the excellent discussion started by Joseph Richard, below.) The question of whether religion was relevant to this topic also bothered Goofy: "Can't the Fray set up a board where those so inclined can argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while the remainder of try to have a serious discussion on science?" And there was a discussion starting here called "The Fray Gene".
Your Fray Editor asked for good arguments (to clarify, we wanted to show links to Fray postings, not, as some posters assumed, other sites) and some appeared…]
Â
These sociobiological /evolutionary psych ideas have been floating around for a couple decades. What was really innovative and intriguing was the self-help spin the authors placed on this topic. Musing to myself a few years ago I kind of invented this spin (one part of me told the other part, was as far as I got--no book from me). The topic I discussed with myself was the (anecdotally observed) tendency of many men and women to simultaneously pursue two mating strategies: what sociobiologists refer to as the longterm strategy (make a financial, emotional child-rearing commitments to one person) and the short-term strategy (casual affairs).
Even for our ancestors in evolutionary times, each short-term affair had relatively small reproductive pay-off, since the affair had a small probability of resulting in offspring, and any offspring born had a low probability of survival given that men had little info about the quality of forthcoming maternal care and women had only a small possibility of extracting
resources from the disappearing father or convincing another man to adopt fathering responsibilities. Still, given the low cost of a short-term encounter, the short-term strategies can end up increasing fitness (and some differences emerge for male and female strategists which evolutionary psychologists have discussed).
In the modern day, the short-term strategies are "fun" for the same reason that eating empty calories is fun. So: does "knowing" that we're only wolfing down a donut because sugar and fats were rare in the ancestral environment help us move to healthier eating strategies? Could "knowing" that casual sex is "just" a short-term, low-cost strategy that increased our ancestors' reproductive fitness actually help us in deciding to refrain? Would it help to "know" that even in ancestral time extra-pairbond affairs degraded the reproductive pay-off received from the longterm strategy?--because of jealousy from partner etc.
Just musing to myself I thought it could help, to know this stuff. Could take some of the mysterious allure out of the casual affair or the one-nighter with the incredibly charming stranger--and help you avoid deluding yourself that have a chance to see that charmer again or want to see that person again. Perhaps this is a case where scientific knowledge really does reduce the attraction of our instinctual responses--a sort of reduction of the beauty of the rainbow.
--Cathy Harris
(To reply, click here.)
To Cathy Harris:
I think you underestimate the importance of the affair in gene strategy. Sexual reproduction is no more that an effort to create genetic diversity. The female genes trade off half their survival to improve the chances of the survival of the remainder, in the process of sexual reproduction. The great mass of Earth's organisms reproduce by simply dividing, but their survival strategy involves the speed of the process.
If our ancestors lived in groups, as the apes do today, then paternal care comes through the group, as opposed to our modern concept of male participation in child rearing, while the one-on-one requirements were primarily provided by the female. The group does not need the alpha male for breeding purposes but to maintain group order. But since the alpha male tends to lead the group over a long period of the females' reproductive life, then the females would lose the advantage provided by the genetic diversity inherent in sexual reproduction, if they bred only with the alpha. Therefore there was an important genetic payoff for the female to seek partners other than the alpha male.
The fun part is to see how this plays out in modern humans. Incidentally, I have absolutely no formal training in this area, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
--Goofy in MD
(To reply, click here.)
Robert Wright, insightful as usual, states "our genes bias our perceptions and our 'rational' thought and even our moral intuitions in subtle and often pernicious ways." In fact I would take it a step further. Wright seems to be disagreeing with Burnham about the degrees of power our genes have in shaping our perceptions. I say they are omnipotent.
After all, what is consciousness but a byproduct of the human brain, which is a product of evolution. How can we think "rationally" if our every feelings and perceptions are constructed by evolution. Victor Johnston in his book Why We Feel--The Science of Human Emotions, points out that the pleasant sensation of "sweetness" is not a property of sugar molecules, but an illusion of the brain that emerged through natural selection because sugar is a great source of energy. All pleasant and unpleasant sensations evolved to advance the goals of our genes. (Rotten eggs smelling bad, tissue damage causing the illusion of pain, complex emotions such as love and sadness, etc.)
Even if we could "override" our genes, I'm not convinced that it is something that we should strive to do. After all, our emotions are what make life so beautiful. Yes, our emotions can at times cause us distress, humiliation, and despair but that's all part of the game. I'll take the bad over a finely-tuned emotionless machine any day.
--Joseph Richard
(To reply, click here.)
I often wonder what the impact of widespread use of anti-depressants might be both on human biological evolution and cultural evolution. Are we saving ourselves by preserving genes that were useful (in a survival sense) in the past but are now maladaptive? Will preserving what might be more sensitive, empathic tendencies soften the rough edges of modern society? Or on the contrary, will this allow the most ruthless tendencies to become even more dominant?
Does medicating those that can't cope as well with modern society, as other, perhaps more aggressive individuals, can, portend the onset of a truly inhumane society? Is it possible that by masking certain types of mental illness with medications we do a disservice to future human biological and cultural evolution? It seems that these sorts of questions are not being properly addressed presently.
--MODA
(To reply, click here.)
(10/30)
Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Please consider the first two posts below. Your Fray Editor would have more sympathy for these two if the supporters of their respective sides weren't so predictable and rigid. It would be nice to give some links to some smart enlightening exchanges on this fascinating and controversial subject, but sadly we can't find any. Everyone was too busy calling each other mental weasels. Steve Brannan at least was succinct here: "Three words against Darwin: no transitional form. God is real, and He will judge ignorance and disobedience." David Moore's post, below, was grim, but at least had a different perspective. Dr. Eugene tried to address the issues in the article in his interesting post on his research into adult diabetes. The rest of you can argue till you change someone's mind. As if.]
Isn't there some way to minimize the attacks of the Jesus freaks in The Fray? Whenever Darwin comes up in an article or title and the religious fanatics get wind of it, Katie bar the door. They're like some terrible virus that contaminates The Fray. There will be no way now to determine which posts are worth reading and which ones come from the crazies.
--Epicuria
(To reply, click here.)
Why don't you guys run an article about the advantages of being a Christian?
--Michael Easter
(To reply, click here.)
I agree that Darwinism can help you lose weight, quit smoking, and get out of debt. The full title of Darwin's Magnum Opus is Origin of the Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The Nazis reveal how barbarous his evolutionary philosophy can be; as 6 million Jews lost weight, never smoked again, or became encumbered with debt. The Australian aborigines suffered as well. Yes, one can live better through Darwinism; just make sure that you are a "favoured race."
--David Moore
(To reply, click here.)
As a doctor I see the most common misconception people have is that fundamentally the human body is a flawless machine, without any hidden traps, and if it were not for clearly defined diseases or other imposed flaws, everything would be OK if they just followed their gut (feelings).
But perhaps one of the most defining features of humanity, common to all human cultures, of all historic ages, and perhaps the very core of civilization itself, has been the ability of humans to delay gratification, and do it with intention. Every child is reared with some aspect of this principle, every rule, every effort to get them to "behave" exudes this guiding principle. The robust work ethics of modern society all shout out for this social stoicism. Religions in particular are laden with ascetic rules.
Concerning adult diabetes--I see appetite as a purely motivational instinct ...it is not well tuned to the precise needs of a human body, but rather set higher...because in a less convenient prehistoric environment, motivation was of paramount importance. So in the modern world, perhaps the best antidote to this mistuning is to advise people to always leave the dinner table hungry. Think of it as another positive reinforcement of importance of delayed gratification. Sure, culture is hard to change, but harder yet is it to change your genetic makeup.
The promising insight we have today is that the human machine can be understood, and it's instructions eventually read--and we can, as circumspect designers and engineers ourselves, figure out where the bumps in the road are, how high they are for a given individual, and either level them, or failing such technical expertise, learn to avoid them
--Dr. Eugene
(To reply, or to read a longer version of this post, click here.)
(10/26)
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Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from The Fray Editor: In an earlier collection of replies to these articles--click here and scroll to the bottom of the page--we featured a post by Epicuria. He argued with our take on this, protesting that he was bothered by irrelevance to the topic, not by the specific views held by posters. Point taken. But his post still sounds good to us. (Look out for him in various threads in this Fray, including the excellent discussion started by Joseph Richard, below.) The question of whether religion was relevant to this topic also bothered Goofy: "Can't the Fray set up a board where those so inclined can argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while the remainder of try to have a serious discussion on science?" And there was a discussion starting here called "The Fray Gene".
Your Fray Editor asked for good arguments (to clarify, we wanted to show links to Fray postings, not, as some posters assumed, other sites) and some appeared…]
Â
These sociobiological /evolutionary psych ideas have been floating around for a couple decades. What was really innovative and intriguing was the self-help spin the authors placed on this topic. Musing to myself a few years ago I kind of invented this spin (one part of me told the other part, was as far as I got--no book from me). The topic I discussed with myself was the (anecdotally observed) tendency of many men and women to simultaneously pursue two mating strategies: what sociobiologists refer to as the longterm strategy (make a financial, emotional child-rearing commitments to one person) and the short-term strategy (casual affairs).
Even for our ancestors in evolutionary times, each short-term affair had relatively small reproductive pay-off, since the affair had a small probability of resulting in offspring, and any offspring born had a low probability of survival given that men had little info about the quality of forthcoming maternal care and women had only a small possibility of extracting
resources from the disappearing father or convincing another man to adopt fathering responsibilities. Still, given the low cost of a short-term encounter, the short-term strategies can end up increasing fitness (and some differences emerge for male and female strategists which evolutionary psychologists have discussed).
In the modern day, the short-term strategies are "fun" for the same reason that eating empty calories is fun. So: does "knowing" that we're only wolfing down a donut because sugar and fats were rare in the ancestral environment help us move to healthier eating strategies? Could "knowing" that casual sex is "just" a short-term, low-cost strategy that increased our ancestors' reproductive fitness actually help us in deciding to refrain? Would it help to "know" that even in ancestral time extra-pairbond affairs degraded the reproductive pay-off received from the longterm strategy?--because of jealousy from partner etc.
Just musing to myself I thought it could help, to know this stuff. Could take some of the mysterious allure out of the casual affair or the one-nighter with the incredibly charming stranger--and help you avoid deluding yourself that have a chance to see that charmer again or want to see that person again. Perhaps this is a case where scientific knowledge really does reduce the attraction of our instinctual responses--a sort of reduction of the beauty of the rainbow.
--Cathy Harris
(To reply, click here.)
To Cathy Harris:
I think you underestimate the importance of the affair in gene strategy. Sexual reproduction is no more that an effort to create genetic diversity. The female genes trade off half their survival to improve the chances of the survival of the remainder, in the process of sexual reproduction. The great mass of Earth's organisms reproduce by simply dividing, but their survival strategy involves the speed of the process.
If our ancestors lived in groups, as the apes do today, then paternal care comes through the group, as opposed to our modern concept of male participation in child rearing, while the one-on-one requirements were primarily provided by the female. The group does not need the alpha male for breeding purposes but to maintain group order. But since the alpha male tends to lead the group over a long period of the females' reproductive life, then the females would lose the advantage provided by the genetic diversity inherent in sexual reproduction, if they bred only with the alpha. Therefore there was an important genetic payoff for the female to seek partners other than the alpha male.
The fun part is to see how this plays out in modern humans. Incidentally, I have absolutely no formal training in this area, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
--Goofy in MD
(To reply, click here.)
Robert Wright, insightful as usual, states "our genes bias our perceptions and our 'rational' thought and even our moral intuitions in subtle and often pernicious ways." In fact I would take it a step further. Wright seems to be disagreeing with Burnham about the degrees of power our genes have in shaping our perceptions. I say they are omnipotent.
After all, what is consciousness but a byproduct of the human brain, which is a product of evolution. How can we think "rationally" if our every feelings and perceptions are constructed by evolution. Victor Johnston in his book Why We Feel--The Science of Human Emotions, points out that the pleasant sensation of "sweetness" is not a property of sugar molecules, but an illusion of the brain that emerged through natural selection because sugar is a great source of energy. All pleasant and unpleasant sensations evolved to advance the goals of our genes. (Rotten eggs smelling bad, tissue damage causing the illusion of pain, complex emotions such as love and sadness, etc.)
Even if we could "override" our genes, I'm not convinced that it is something that we should strive to do. After all, our emotions are what make life so beautiful. Yes, our emotions can at times cause us distress, humiliation, and despair but that's all part of the game. I'll take the bad over a finely-tuned emotionless machine any day.
--Joseph Richard
(To reply, click here.)
I often wonder what the impact of widespread use of anti-depressants might be both on human biological evolution and cultural evolution. Are we saving ourselves by preserving genes that were useful (in a survival sense) in the past but are now maladaptive? Will preserving what might be more sensitive, empathic tendencies soften the rough edges of modern society? Or on the contrary, will this allow the most ruthless tendencies to become even more dominant?
Does medicating those that can't cope as well with modern society, as other, perhaps more aggressive individuals, can, portend the onset of a truly inhumane society? Is it possible that by masking certain types of mental illness with medications we do a disservice to future human biological and cultural evolution? It seems that these sorts of questions are not being properly addressed presently.
--MODA
(To reply, click here.)
(10/30)
Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Please consider the first two posts below. Your Fray Editor would have more sympathy for these two if the supporters of their respective sides weren't so predictable and rigid. It would be nice to give some links to some smart enlightening exchanges on this fascinating and controversial subject, but sadly we can't find any. Everyone was too busy calling each other mental weasels. Steve Brannan at least was succinct here: "Three words against Darwin: no transitional form. God is real, and He will judge ignorance and disobedience." David Moore's post, below, was grim, but at least had a different perspective. Dr. Eugene tried to address the issues in the article in his interesting post on his research into adult diabetes. The rest of you can argue till you change someone's mind. As if.]
Isn't there some way to minimize the attacks of the Jesus freaks in The Fray? Whenever Darwin comes up in an article or title and the religious fanatics get wind of it, Katie bar the door. They're like some terrible virus that contaminates The Fray. There will be no way now to determine which posts are worth reading and which ones come from the crazies.
--Epicuria
(To reply, click here.)
Why don't you guys run an article about the advantages of being a Christian?
--Michael Easter
(To reply, click here.)
I agree that Darwinism can help you lose weight, quit smoking, and get out of debt. The full title of Darwin's Magnum Opus is Origin of the Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The Nazis reveal how barbarous his evolutionary philosophy can be; as 6 million Jews lost weight, never smoked again, or became encumbered with debt. The Australian aborigines suffered as well. Yes, one can live better through Darwinism; just make sure that you are a "favoured race."
--David Moore
(To reply, click here.)
As a doctor I see the most common misconception people have is that fundamentally the human body is a flawless machine, without any hidden traps, and if it were not for clearly defined diseases or other imposed flaws, everything would be OK if they just followed their gut (feelings).
But perhaps one of the most defining features of humanity, common to all human cultures, of all historic ages, and perhaps the very core of civilization itself, has been the ability of humans to delay gratification, and do it with intention. Every child is reared with some aspect of this principle, every rule, every effort to get them to "behave" exudes this guiding principle. The robust work ethics of modern society all shout out for this social stoicism. Religions in particular are laden with ascetic rules.
Concerning adult diabetes--I see appetite as a purely motivational instinct ...it is not well tuned to the precise needs of a human body, but rather set higher...because in a less convenient prehistoric environment, motivation was of paramount importance. So in the modern world, perhaps the best antidote to this mistuning is to advise people to always leave the dinner table hungry. Think of it as another positive reinforcement of importance of delayed gratification. Sure, culture is hard to change, but harder yet is it to change your genetic makeup.
The promising insight we have today is that the human machine can be understood, and it's instructions eventually read--and we can, as circumspect designers and engineers ourselves, figure out where the bumps in the road are, how high they are for a given individual, and either level them, or failing such technical expertise, learn to avoid them
--Dr. Eugene
(To reply, or to read a longer version of this post, click here.)
(10/26)