Politically Correct Darwin

At least since the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, the American left has had an ambivalent reaction to Darwinian biology.  The left likes Darwinism in so far and because religious conservatives don’t like it.  When it is a question of the Bible vs. The Origin of the Species, the left thinks that anyone who questions Darwinism is a retrograde fool.  The left hates Darwinism when it is applied to human social and political behavior, for they think that any conception of human nature is a threat to the promise of social reform. 

These days the issues are rather more complicated than they were when Wilson was denounced in The New York Review of Books.  The ambivalence remains, however.  The New York Times recently published a defense of homosexuality from a biological point of view by David George Haskell.  Here is a taste:

The facts of biology plainly falsify the oft-repeated notion that homosexuality is unnatural. Every species has evolved its own sexual ecology, and so nature resists generalizations. Does humanity’s natural inheritance include homosexual bonds and behaviors? Certainly. This conclusion is reinforced by the growing evidence that our sexual orientation is influenced by both our genes and the environment that we experience in the womb.

This strikes me as plausible but very provisional.  We hardly have a good understanding of the natural causes underlying homosexual orientation.  It is far from clear whether homosexual behavior is in some way biologically functional, let alone whether gay marriage is a good idea.  Haskell’s piece doesn’t bother with the ambiguities. 

On the other hand, the Times doesn’t much like evolutionary psychology.  If the latter tells us anything, it is that male and female sexual behavior and instincts are robustly dimorphic.  What it tells us is wrong, according to journalist Dan Slater.  In “Darwin was wrong about Dating,” he explains that:

Lately a new cohort of scientists have been challenging the very existence of the gender differences in sexual behavior that Darwinians have spent the past 40 years trying to explain and justify on evolutionary grounds.

Wow.  Maybe all those gender differences that evolutionary psychology has painstakingly documented don’t really exist.  Slater offers us a small selection of studies that seem to deny gender differences.  Voilà! 

The only problem with this is that it flies in the face of the most obvious facts.  Consider pornography, for example.  Walk into an adult bookstore (purely for research purposes, of course) and ask yourself: to whom is all this stuff being marketed?  I predict (having done my own research) that virtually all of it is marketed to heterosexual or homosexual males.  Unless someone can show me that I am wrong (I am intrigued by the possibility), I submit this as a very robust fact. 

Consider also prostitution.  Allow me to suggest that virtually all prostitutes, both male and female, service males exclusively.  That men frequently pay for sex while woman almost never do strikes me as another robust fact.  There are solid Darwinian explanations for why these differences are so pronounced and so universal.  These explanations ground human behavior in the general biology of animals.  Across a very wide range of organisms, males produce more offspring when they obtain access to more mates.  Females do not. 

The New York Times likes Darwin when he is politically correct.  When he is not, they usher in someone to usher him off the stage.  It is a quixotic charge.  As long as science is allowed to progress, nature, as Anthony Hopkins says in The Wolfman, will out.  If the Church could not prevail against Darwin, neither will the church of The New York Times. 

The Evolution of Marriage

Larry Arnhart discusses the biological roots of marriage in a recent post.  I am sorry to report that I agree with Larry on the basic issues.  I am happy to report some skepticism regarding a secondary issue. 

Larry is responding to Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George, who argue that marriage should be restricted to a monogamous, heterosexual relationship.  He tells us that the authors make two points: one, that marriage is an institution rooted in human biology and two, that if homosexual marriage is legalized this will effectively destroy heterosexual marriage. 

Larry agrees with the first point but thinks that it is inconsistent with the second point.  If heterosexual marriage is indeed rooted in nature, then it should survive any changes in legal norms.  I am inclined to agree. 

Allow me to add some of my own reflections.  Marriage is rooted in a simple biological dimorphism: women know who their children are while men do not.  When an infant issues from her mother, the mother knows that the infant is hers.  The father must rely, let us say, on less direct evidence.  How confident can he be that he is the biological father?  This has Darwinian implications, in so far as his natural instincts move him to invest in his offspring. 

The problem is widely shared among animals and has had enormous consequences for their evolution.  Males of many species try to secure paternity by keeping other males away from their mates.  Some jealously guard their harems.  Canines have evolved a mechanism called a “copulatory lock”.  When the male enters the female, his organ expands and locks him in place.  He cannot engage until sometime after ejaculation, which makes it more likely that the female will be safely impregnated.  That is the tie that binds. 

Security for paternity encourages the male to invest his time and other resources in his offspring.  Of course there is a trade-off.  If the male is fooled, he will waste his resources on the offspring of some other male.  Likewise, he will be tempted to hedge his bets by siring offspring with other females, perhaps with false promises of support.  Such is the soap opera of mammalian biology.  If male parental investment is to be maintained against or supported by selection pressure, some means of securing paternity have to be available to the male. 

The human institution of marriage was built on these biological foundations.  Marriage offers the male some assurance of paternity in exchange for his promise of investment.  That contract is reinforced by the larger community, which recognizes his authority over his sons and daughters.  See Aristophanes Clouds.  It also puts a disproportionate weight on the fidelity of the wife. 

However, marriage is not a product of biology even if it rests on biological foundations.  It arises and is maintained because it is one of the conditions for human flourishing in social conditions.  The telos, or purpose of marriage, was not reproductive success in a Darwinian sense.  It was to promote societies that are more stable and satisfying, given our evolved inclinations.  Human institutions cannot for long act against natural selection; however, they exist to serve us and not our genes. 

Given that brief consideration of the biological foundations of marriage, what does it mean to extend the institution to include homosexual couples?  It means only that an institution that has been developed for one purpose has been employed for another.  This is a commonplace in both biological and cultural history.  In the ubiquitous beetles, a second set of wings evolved into a retractable coat of armor.  Clothing likely emerges as a remedy for discomfort in hostile climates; however, it comes to serve other purposes such as displaying wealth and status, inviting seduction, providing pockets, etc. 

While heterosexual marriage evolved to serve purposes connected with biological reproduction and familial stability, there is no reason to suppose that it cannot serve other purposes.  Some have argued that same sex marriage can promote monogamy among male homosexuals, which might well be a good thing.  Whether it can really do that remains to be seen.  I have my doubts.  

I am in favor of legal same sex marriage for a rather simple reason.  When two persons of the same sex form a stable relationship, analogous to heterosexual marriage, the two partners should enjoy the same privileges as a heterosexual couple who have chosen to marry.  When one goes to the hospital, the other should have the same medical access that I and my wife have.  This strikes me as the decent thing to do. 

I see no reason to suppose that this undermines the functions of heterosexual marriage any more than wearing cloths to make a fashion statement undermines the purpose of good winter gear in these Dakotas. 

That said, I am not at all certain that I agree with Larry Arnhart regarding the privatization of marriage.  Such a step would certainly render moot the political arguments over marriage, just as the privatization of religion dramatically reduced the tendencies toward armed conflicts between sects.  However, this step clearly weakened religion as a force in secularized societies.  As I noted above, marriage is an artificial institution and it can be stronger or weaker in its effects, depending on how it is managed. 

I think that marriage is one of the most important institutions in human history.  We want to encourage it and strengthen it, in so far as we can.  I suspect that privatizing it would weaken it by placing in the category of things that are not serious enough to have legal consequences.  Because I agree with Larry that marriage has deep foundations in human biology, I don’t expect that this would kill marriage.  I do think that it might weaken it further.  If I am right, that would be a step in the wrong direction. 

Philosophy, Science, & Scientism

Austin Hughes has an interesting piece in The New Atlantis: “The Folly of Scientism”.  I think I will have more to say about it later, but here I want to consider the difference between philosophy and science. 

Philosophy is the attempt to become wise, that is, to replace opinions about the most important things with knowledge about those things.  The most important things fall generally into two classes of questions or topics.  Human beings want to know what the nature of the world is and what their place is in that world.  This desire is not directly related to any practical concern.  We just want to know, or at least have something we can take for granted.  We also want to know how to live in this world. 

These two questions find their most famous expression in the two creation stories with which the book of genesis begins.  The first creation story lays out the order of creation.  The second explains why human existence is difficult and points to the solution for the difficulty in getting right with God. 

Most human beings rely on such received stories, supplemented by experience, to satisfy the craving for answers to these two questions.  The distinction between opinions and knowledge, however, drives the philosopher to attempt to answer them by a single method: relentless questioning.  The philosopher attempts to achieve wisdom by asking one question after another until, hopefully all questions have been answered.  That no philosopher has yet managed to achieve that goal explains why philosophy continues to this day. 

Unlike religion and mythology, philosophy is not ubiquitous.  It begins in specific place and time (Asia Minor in the sixth century BC).  All subsequent philosophy seems to depend on contact with the tradition that began there.  This is not to disparage other traditions of thought; it is simply to recognize the one that gave birth to modern science 

Socrates encountered philosophy as an ongoing practice.  His student Plato found it necessary to devote each dialogue to a distinct set of questions.  Aristotle further refines the distinctions by establishing distinct lines of inquiry for his various books.  Each book begins with certain questionable assumptions and proceeds on the basis of those assumptions.  For example, his Physics begins with the assumption that various natural things exist‑growing plants and moving spheres.  With that procedure‑putting aside more general questions to focus on more specific ones‑science is born. 

All science follows that general pattern.  One way to move toward a comprehensive knowledge of the Kosmos is to try to understand the various parts of the Kosmos.  Modern science follows suit but adds a new requirement for science that Aristotle did not.  It insists on articulating the questions in such a way that the mode of answering the question is implicit.  This is what is meant by the phrase “a testable hypothesis” and any genuinely scientific hypothesis hast to meet that criterion.  The power of that addition to the concept of science is evident to anyone who appreciates modern science. 

“Scientism” is a pejorative term for the claim that modern science can answer all questions and that it is the sole standard for the truth of any belief or proposition.  I am not at all certain that this term is useful.  If you think that more is being claimed on behalf of modern science that it warranted or that science has over stepped its proper bounds, it is enough to demand a testable hypothesis. 

Much of contemporary science looks a lot more like classical than like modern science.  For example, what explains the phenomenon of homosexuality?  David P. Barash comments on this biological mystery in The Chronicle.  Contemporary research programs offer only marginal findings.  All we can do is list the prospective explanations and consider the strengths and weaknesses of each.  That is pretty much how Aristotle proceeded.