A Biopolitical Analysis of the Election 2

Teams of three male dolphins will occasionally raid other pods of dolphins.  The object of the raid is to separate a female from the pod in order to mate with her.  As she is an unwilling participant, two of the team will wedge her between them while the third swims up underneath to mate.  If you are thinking that this sounds like rape, you are probably right; though there is some question about this. 

This is not unusual behavior among animals; however, what is unusual about the dolphin drama is that it often involve alliances between teams of individuals. 

Dolphins organized themselves into three different kinds of groups that could overlap. One group, usually in pairs or threes, was tasked with gathering fertile females during mating season.

In a "second-order alliance", the animals form "teams" of between four and 14 males which mount attacks on other groups to take their females, or to defend against attacks.

The third group maintained “friendly relations” with all dolphin groups and helped out various teams when additional forces were needed.

The team found the males made a series of alliances with the same sex. They only observed one group of females forming a temporary coalition against young males.

Reciprocity between individuals within a group or even individuals in different species, such as cleaner fish and predator fish, is common enough.  The third kind of dolphin group doing something rather different.  It is available for offensive and defensive alliances.  It hardly seems likely that such assistance would be offered unless there is some prospect of recompense.  I can’t think of any other example of this kind of behavior outside of human societies. 

This may be the thing that separates the most political animal from all the other political animals.  While chimpanzee groups may be governed by an alliance between an alpha and beta male, I have not heard that such groups divide into competing subgroups with more than one individual on each side.  This may have been true of human groups until very recently (meaning the last twelve thousand years).  Since that time, human political communities frequently divide into groups that compete for dominion over the larger group.  That is what we call politics in italics. 

How does this division occur?  The most obvious answer is that the divide occurs along family lines; however, most human societies consist of numerous families.  Isolated human individuals (free radicals?) and third and four rank families must decide which side to back.  How does this happen?

I have quoted this passage from an earlier post before. 

When these capuchin monkeys forage, how do they decide which way to go?  The answer is that individuals break off in different directions.  As the pathbreaker moves away from the group, she looks behind her to see who is following.  If no one follows, she will give up and rejoin the group.  If her entourage includes two or three, or four or more… .  The more of her troop that follow, the more likely she is to persist in her chosen direction.  Likewise, the more that follow, the more likely the rest of the troop will follow suit.  That is leadership in a basically democratic community.  Individuals compete for the position of archon, and so the group can act as a unit working for the advantage of all. 

I think it rather likely that this is not only how politics works but how the human mind works. 

My consciousness is, at best, a prime minister managing various constituencies.  My desire to lose weight addresses the ministry while my appetite screams from the gallery about chocolate eclairs.  Meanwhile my fellow Republicans seem about to nominate a chocolate éclair to run for president. 

Now that the chocolate éclair is the president elect, we may bring the analysis to bear.  Political alliances form on the basis of two decisions: which allies will form a winning coalition and which coalition will give us what we want.  In addition to getting a better share of the common resources, what we might want is revenge against those who have offended us.  That motive has been around at least since the common human-chimpanzee ancestor. 

Why did primate Trump win over primate Clinton?  The election was determined, as I have written before, by who showed up at the polls.  President Obama was reelected in 2012 with a smaller electorate than showed up for him in 2008.  I believe that is unprecedented in the post war period.  He won because Mitt Romney could not convince enough on his allies to come to the polls.  Secretary Clinton inherited Obama’s declining support and saw further decline.  Mr. Trump, meanwhile, held onto Romney’s coalition.  That decided the matter in the states where it counted. 

Individual human beings are extraordinarily complex the creatures.  The factions into which they sort themselves and others are vastly more complex.  Yet the latter are only the result of a lot of the former deciding which way to forage and who to back.  It was not a good thing for Secretary Clinton that a very large portion of the electorate knew that she, and most of the Washington establishment and pretty much all the journalist and pundits in the mainstream press thought were contemptuous of them.  It is not clear, however, that this increase Mr. Trump’s margin much.  What is clear is that a lot of the folks who followed President Obama down the path last time didn’t follow Ms. Clinton. 

Kinds of Political Minds

In his best book, Kinds of Minds, Daniel Dennett presents a marvelous account of the evolution of mind based on increasingly sophisticated mechanisms by which organisms can modify their responses to their environments.  Going from memory here, in the first stage a population of organisms diversifies, and the forms that respond best are the ones that flourish.  Each individual has only one trick.  In the second stage, single organisms acquire a diversity of responses and try each one to see if it works.  The organism can decide to approach or retreat, etc.  In the third stage, organisms acquire the capacity to make internal maps of the external environment, and more or less safely test each one prior to trying it out in the real world.  When last I tried X, it worked.  That is the first case of something that everyone might recognize as a mind. 

Finally, in the fourth stage, organisms find ways of uploading information into their environments to be used later, thus expanding the information that they can use beyond the storage capacity of their own brains.  A bird may decorate the area around its nest to make it easier to find.  Since others of its own kind can read the same information, this allows communication.  A dog may urinate on something to remind it that it has been here before and to inform other animals that this is its territory.  My daughter once remarked, as our dog was inspecting our fence post just after another dog had passed by, that he was reading his pee-mail. 

Aristotle’s division of animals into solitary, social, and political is relevant here.  Social animals merely congregate but political animals coordinate their behavior for a common purpose in which all share.  There are a lot of political animals.  When elephants arrange themselves in a circle, with the adults on the outside protecting the young in the center, that is political behavior. 

Here I present a section from a previous post on leadership.  The passage concerns a piece I read on capuchin monkeys. 

When these primates forage, how do they decide which way to go?  The answer is that individuals break off in different directions.  As the pathbreaker moves away from the group, she looks behind her to see who is following.  If no one follows, she will give up and rejoin the group.  If her entourage includes two or three, or four or more… .  The more of her troop that follow, the more likely she is to persist in her chosen direction.  Likewise, the more that follow, the more likely the rest of the troop will follow suit.  That is leadership in a basically democratic community.  Individuals compete for the position of archon, and so the group can act as a unit working for the advantage of all. 

Something the same can be seen in the waggle dance of honey bees, where returning hunters make their case for this or that patch of flowers.  It can be seen also in the function of an animal mind.  How does the rabbit in my back yard decide what to do when I step off my deck?  Different mental schema compete.  One says “freeze”.  Another says “run like hell”.  As long as I am moving at a tangent and my course is not too close, the animal is a statue.  I have seen a cat walk right by a frozen rabbit.  If I stop and move toward the rabbit, the “run” schema takes command. 

For social animals to become genuinely political, they upload information to the herd and download information from the same.  This makes for a collective mind.  Each time a capuchin moves off from the group in one direction or another, she is making a proposal.  The other monkeys then vote with their feet.  That is politics. 

The individual human mind is extraordinarily good at creating and manipulating internal models of the external world.  That is what its consciousness is doing almost all of the time.  When the young man stands up in the town meeting exquisitely depicted by Norman Rockwell, he is trying to lead the other members of his group in some direction.  Human beings are more political than the other political animals, as Aristotle says, because we can make a case for this direction or that one.  We go beyond merely liking or disliking this way or that.  We can recognize that we like one way, but that the better way for us lies in some other direction.  We can distinguish between what looks good and what is good, what is tempting and what is right. 

Aristotle understood that the more developed organisms are not simply different from the less developed ones, as red is different from blue.  Instead, the more developed organisms add new capacities to those that they share with the less developed, as purple is different from red.  Plants grow, flourish, and wither.  Animals do the same, but also move about and are aware of things distant.  When we add modern biology to that model, human beings are still primates but they are more than primates. 

This points to the thesis I am developing.  What is the human thing?  Is it the individual, as the early modern philosophers supposed?  Or is it the society, as the later historicists and socialists supposed?  The answer is yes.  Or to put it more accurately, the human thing is the dynamic relationship between the individual and the community of which he is a part.  One cannot reduce either to the other.  Were human beings to be entirely subsumed by their societies (as the Borg collective in Star Trek), they would no longer be, in any significant sense, human.  A human being who lives entirely alone is human only in so far as she continues to draw on the cultural and linguistic store that she acquired from others.  If Aristotle could not imagine the first, he could imagine the later.  

Lockean Monkeys

Locke was closer to the truth than Hobbes.  That is not a surprising sentiment coming from an American; even less so coming from an American patriot.  The United States is a Lockean regime.  It was founded on principles derived explicitly from Locke’s political thought and more or less explicitly on a rejection of Hobbes’ account of politics.  I would argue, however, that modern biopolitical research is backing up John more than Thomas. 

Both Hobbes and Locke began with the early modern assumption that human beings are by nature individual animals and that human society is largely an historical artifact.  All our instincts, in so far as we have any, are those of a creature as naturally asocial as a bear.  Human social life is as artificial as umbrella: it is something we cobbled together to meet our needs.  This is a mistake.  We were social long before we were genuinely human. 

Hobbes supposed that we were and remain perfectly amoral and selfish in our motivations.  What makes us dangerous to one another, when we come together in social groups, is precisely that selfishness combined with a distrust of one another.  Government is necessary to force us to suppress these selfish mutually hostile inclinations and cooperate with one another.

Locke recognized that we also possessed a sense of justice.  When someone transgresses on my rights I am offended.  I am offended even when I observe some transgressing against a third party in a case where my own interests are not involved.  It is this sense of righteous indignation that makes us most dangerous to one another.  We may pursue retribution beyond any selfish interest and, if the perceived offender believes he is the one who has been wronged, we become locked in a cycle of retribution.  That is what necessitates the formation of governments.  Only by turning over such disputes to an arbitrator can we resolve them without perpetual war. 

This question, whether pure selfishness is the motivation or whether there is a moral or proto-moral motivation has been playing out in primate studies.  I have been digesting a lot of research on capuchin monkeys.  Brown capuchins are “known to engage in rich cooperative behaviors… and more consistently exhibit other-regarding tendencies in donation tasks than chimpanzees.”  That is, in experiments where one individual must cooperate with another to reap a reward (food), capuchins seem more concerned with what the other partner is getting or not getting. 

In experiments modeled on the ultimate game, the capuchin subject must decide whether to pull a lever that will distribute food to herself and a conspecific partner.  When the distribution is unequal-the subject receives less food or a lower value food, the subject will often refuse the distribution.  At first glance, the subject appears to be acting out of sense of fairness.  If I can’t get what’s coming to me, then no one gets anything.  But is this right?

The subject may be motivated by inequity aversion, a distaste for unfair distributions.  Let us call that the Lockean motive.  However, a lot of research indicates that the real motive may be simple frustration.  The subject wants the greater share or the better reward and rejects the distribution because of a frustrated desire.  Let us call that the Hobbesian motive. 

Capuchin researchers have parted along the Lockean/Hobbesian divide.  Franz de Waal and his associates began the argument with a series of studies that pushed the Lockean interpretation.  In response, other researchers made the case for the Hobbesian-frustration interpretation.  I thought that the balance was tilting against the Lockean side until today. 

Kristin L. Leimgruber et. al., have a report in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior [37 (2016) 236-244] that tells for the Lockean view: “Capuchin monkeys punish those who have more.”  Here is the abstract:

Punishment of non-cooperators is important for the maintenance of large-scale cooperation in humans, but relatively little is known about the relationship between punishment and cooperation across phylogeny. The current study examined second-party punishment behavior in a nonhuman primate species known for its cooperative tendencies—the brown capuchin monkey (Cebus apella). We found that capuchins consistently punished a conspecific partner who gained possession of a food resource, regardless of whether the unequal distribution of this resource was intentional on the part of the partner. A non-social comparison confirmed that punishment behavior was not due to frustration, nor did punishment stem from increased emotional arousal. Instead, punishment behavior in capuchins appears to be decidedly social in nature, as monkeys only pursued punitive actions when such actions directly decreased the welfare of a recently endowed conspecific. This pattern of results is consistent with two features central to human cooperation: spite and inequity aversion, suggesting that the evolutionary origins of some human-like punitive tendencies may extend even deeper than previously thought.

These findings present a decidedly Lockean monkey.  It isn’t just that I, capuchin that I am, am not getting what I want.  It’s that the other hairy fellow is getting more, dammit.  

Capuchin monkeys are more distantly related to John Locke than chimpanzees.  Spite and inequity aversion are part of our emotional pallet that go beyond self-interest.  A purely selfish individual doesn’t care what others get; she only cares what she gets.  An animal who is genuinely offended when a distribution is unfair is a moral animal.

I think it is clear that human beings are Lockean animals.  If capuchin monkeys are as well, that suggests that morality is older than we are.  As the trajectory of evolution pushed into primate design space, it opened up the dimension of genuine moral consciousness. 

Plato, Aristotle, Darwin & Indirect Reciprocity

My strategy for pursuing political, moral, and biological questions consists of three basic steps in the following order.  The first is Platonic.  I look for the idea that is expressed in a wide range of phenomena across time and space.  The second is Aristotelian.  I look for the way in which the idea answers different questions in different contexts.  The third is Darwinian.  I look for how the idea might emerge in the evolutionary history of the organisms in which it is expressed. 

Consider the wing.  We recognize wings in a wide variety of animals.  In all cases, it is a biological appendage that allows the creature to gain altitude by beating the air.  In a fundamental sense, the wing of a bat, a bird, a pterodactyl and a dragonfly, are all the same thing.  Plato (or his Socrates) would be pleased.  The wings are very different, however, in their basic design.  One has to lift a heavy reptile; another, a creature as light as a feather.  Aristotle would point this out to his teacher.  The various wings are also examples of convergence.  This is a term in Darwinian explanations that indicates an independent evolution toward a common trait as opposed to homology, which indicates a trait shared because it is inherited from a common ancestor.  Bats and birds don’t have wings because they inherited them from a common ancestor, but because they worked out the same basic mechanics on their own. 

I have found this strategy to be fruitful when applied to my primary interest, morality and politics.  My work on autonomy (which I hope to be published soon) is an example that is illustrated in previous posts.  Here I apply it to reciprocity, one of the basic foundations of cooperation in animals (including human beings).  When some party X pays a cost on behalf of some other party Y because there is a reasonable expectation that the cost will be repaid with profit, that is reciprocity.  That this is a genuinely Platonic idea is indicated by the abstraction of the terms.  It can apply to two teams of dolphins cooperating with one another of different days and to a fellow tipping big at a local restaurant.  Obviously the mechanisms are different.  Less obviously but very likely, they both owe their operation to evolved dispositions. 

Reciprocity is a powerful engine for cooperation, but in its direct form (an exchange between two parties) it is limited to specific exchanges.  When we’re done we’re done.  Indirect reciprocity, by contrast, can knit together much larger communities of cooperators.  This is when an individual is influenced by observing third party cooperation.  In such a case, the cooperator benefits by building a reputation as a good partner.  The observer benefits by recognizing the altruist as a promising partner. 

Tonight I read two accounts of indirect reciprocity.  One was a study of cleaner fish and their clients (Bshary & Grutter, “Image scoring and cooperation in a cleaner fish mutualism”, Nature 22 June 2006).  Cleaner fish feed on ectoparasites in the mouths of much larger fish.  This is a classic example of reciprocity in a morally charged context.  If the cleaner fish eats ectoparasites, it will benefit its larger client.  However, it prefers mucus, if it has a choice.  Eating mucus does not benefit the client.  So the cleaner is tempted to cheat.  In some cases, the client fish is also tempted to cheat by eating the cleaner; however, in most cases the client fish do not prey on other fish.  So how are cleaner fish encouraged to be honest? 

The answer seems to be that client fish pay attention.  They recognize which cleaners are good cooperators and which are not.  They allow the one but not the other to service them.  The cleaners then have an interest in appearing to be good cooperators.  They are more likely to restrain their appetites and eat only the less preferred food (ectoparasites) when they are observed by other potential clients. 

I am pretty sure that there are no moral theorists among Laborides dimidaiatus.  Nor do these tiny denizens of the deep reflect on their behavior.  Their behavior is nonetheless logically moral. 

That this is an expression of a Platonic idea is indicated by the fact that it occurs in very different species.  James R. Anderson et. al., have found it in capuchin monkeys [Cognition 127 (2013) 140-146].  “

Here we show that capuchin monkeys discriminate between humans who reciprocate in a social exchange with others and those who do not. Monkeys more readily accepted food from reciprocators than non-reciprocators or partial reciprocators.

Hitomi Chijiiwa et al found much the same among domestic dogs [Animal Behavior 106 (2015) 123-127]. 

To put it mildly, cleaner fish and their clients, capuchin monkeys, and lapdogs occupy very diverse branches on the tree of life.  It seems likely this is a case of convergence rather than homology.  That makes the case for Plato stronger.  The same basic idea (indirect reciprocity) is expressed independently in a number of distinct cases.  Aristotle would remind us to pay attention to the differences.  Capuchin monkeys and beagles are psychologically social species.  They have, no doubt, a pallet of emotions that from which they paint out their behavior.  As for fish, probably not so much.  Darwinian theory helps us understand how this Platonic idea arises in each case.  

Plato and Aristotle were right, even when they disagreed with each other.  Both of them need Darwin to complete their accounts.  Aristotle understood that teeth make chewing possible is essential to explaining what teeth are.  Darwin explain how chewing explains teeth.  Plato understood that shark’s teeth and his teeth were the same thing.  Darwin explains why Plato was right.