animals, solitary, social, and political

This is the second post presenting the elements that will be included in my paper for the IPSA in Poznan, Poland.  See The Human Thing for the first. 

Perhaps the most famous quote from Aristotle is found in the Politics, 1253a following:

It is evident that the polis exists by nature and that man is by nature a political animal, for he who exists outside a polis because of his nature and not by luck is either worse or superior to man.  He is like the man denounced by Homer as “clanless, lawless, and hearthless.  Moreover such by nature desires war inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece on a game board.  It is clear, then, why man is more of a political animal than a bee or any other gregarious animal; for nature, as we say, does nothing in vain, and man alone of all the animals has the power of logos. 

What does it mean to say that the human being (anthropos) is a political animal?  To understand this, we must distinguish between three possible types of animals: solitary, social, and political.  As is usual with Aristotle, these are not mutually exclusive categories but instead represent stages of development.  A solitary animal is not, in any but the most primitive way, social; however, a social animal may remain, in certain significant senses, solitary.  Likewise, an animal can be social without being political, but not vice versa. 

For examples of solitary animals, we could consider a male polar bear.  He spends most of his life alone, hunting on the ice.  His social life will be limited to the time he spent with his mother and, if he is lucky, his mate.  We could also consider social amoebae, like the slime mold organisms.  In one stage of their existence they crawl around like individuals, without interacting much with their colleagues.  Some of my colleagues are like that. 

What does it mean to say that these amoebae are social?  When food runs low, they crawl atop one another and form a slug with lumbers around looking for a meal.  If that doesn’t work, they form a stalk and bulb structure.  This is designed so that a passing insect or something else (L.L. Bean hiker shorts) can burst the bulb and carry the spores to greener pastures.  This latter business requires that a lot of amoebae sacrifice themselves to make the stalk.  Only the lucky ducks in the bulb will have a future. 

Social animals are not animals that dwell together.  You can find lots of grizzly bears at the salmon spawn.  Social animals coordinate their behavior so that all of the contributors benefit.  In most cases this means that a solitary organisms or animal has a repertoire that includes both solitary and social behavior.  A wolf kicked out of his group will hunt on his own until or unless he finds a mate and founds a new pack. 

Aristotle recognized that there were many social animals, including bees.  He does not say that human beings are the only political animal; he only says that we are more political than all the other animals.  What exactly does it mean for an animal to be political?

An answer is provided elsewhere in the Politics, where Aristotle discusses the evolution of the family. 

The ruler of a household, as a husband and a father, rules both his wife and his children, who are free, but not in the same manner.  He rules his wife politically, but his children royally. 

However offensive this view may be today, it was remarkably liberal for its time.  He thought it barbaric for a man to treat his wife the same way as one would treat a slave or a beast of burden. 

That aside, what does it mean to treat the children royally but the wife politically?  The answer is that the father must explain his decisions to the mother and try to persuade her and thus gain her consent.  In this respect it reflects politics in so far as citizens rule and are ruled in turn.  Aristotle says that the relationship between the father and mother is like this, except that there is no change of office.  So the father must treat the mother as if she would one day rule over him, just as he must treat his fellow citizens while he is in power. 

By contrast, he gives his children commands and expects that they will obey them.  He may explain, but he doesn’t need to.  He knows more than they know about what is proper and safe.  Whatever happens in the future, he won’t be ruled by children. 

Politics is possible because all social organisms must obey rules that are morally logical.  A honey bee worker may be tempted to rear her own offspring; however, if she does, that would threaten the interests of the hive.  The worker is offered genetic success through the flourishing of the queen.  In that sense, the bees are political. 

Human beings are much more political because we possess logos.  Logos is the power to distinguish between what something looks like and what it is.  This includes the power to distinguish between what looks good but isn’t, and what looks bad but is really the best choice.  We anthropoi are political animals because we can attempt to persuade one another regarding the good and the just.  

Roger White on Origin of Life Explanations 2

Roger White distinguishes three types of phenomena, illustrated by “pebble patterns.” 

The Chancy Explanation: Pebbles scattered randomly on a sidewalk require no other explanation than chance. 

Unintentional Biasing: Pebbles arranged in order of diminishing size as they a near the shoreline. 

Intentional Biasing: Pebbles arranged in the shape of a fish (without legs). 

I altered the last one in a way that I hope will be amusing.  According to White, all but a few of those who write with expertise on the problem of the origin of life believe this phenomenon must fall into the second category.  Some natural forces must bias the Kosmos toward the emergence of life, just as the tides bias the pebbles toward a coherent pattern. 

The third explanation is ruled out as unscientific.  The first is ruled out because it is wildly implausible that the conditions upon which the emergence of self-replicators depends should have come about, in the time allotted, merely by chance.  Unintentional biasing must therefore be true by default. 

White argues that the reason that the origin of life is not at all like the unintentional biasing of pebbles by size on the beach. 

The numerous steps required for life to exist are quite unlike this. It is not a matter of the same event-type or property being instantiated many times without exception. The conditions required for the emergence of life have little at all in common.

Adding a bit to what White says, the emergence of life on earth seems to have been a single event (however long it took), not a repeated pattern. 

Why then are most scientists so reluctant to allow too much chance into their accounts of life’s emergence? I will offer a speculative diagnosis. The conviction that life couldn’t have arisen by chance is typically a gut reaction to the data, not a conclusion arrived at on the basis of a theory about when it is plausible to ascribe something to the work of chance.

What makes this event seem so implausible to so many is that it seems to suggest unmistakable evidence of design. 

Again adding to White, I would contrast the origin of life problem with the problem that Darwin addressed.  Why do so many different organisms exist, all of them more or less well adapted to their respective ecological niches?  That is a pattern that is persistent historically and geographically.  Natural selection then can be seen as the unintentional biasing mechanism analogous to the motion of water acting on the pebbles. 

Interestingly, unintentional biasing would be a much more likely explanation for the origin of self-replicators if Aristotle had been right about spontaneous generation.  If the emergence of living organisms from non-living matter under predictable conditions were a persistent feature of nature, as Aristotle, for understandable reasons, believed that it was, then unintentional biasing toward the emergence of life would be very likely indeed.  Of course, this is not the case. 

White makes a strong case that unintentional biasing in nature is not a well-grounded explanation for the origin of life.  That leaves chance and intentional (or intelligent) design.  I would suggest, however, that his dismissal of the gut reactions of so many scientists is premature.  To use one of his analogies, if a tornado picked up a pile of spare parts and assembled it into a working 747 airliner, no one would interpret this was the work of mere chance.  If even the simplest molecular self-replicators as well-designed as the airplane (which may be the case) and unintentional biasing is not a plausible interpretation of the former, then…

I am not making an argument for intelligent design here.  I am not particularly interested in it only because I don’t know what to do with it when thinking philosophically and scientifically about the phenomenon of life.  I do think that White’s argument could be turned almost as easily (perhaps just as easily) into an argument for intelligent design as for the origin of life by chance.  That fact may tell us something about the phenomenon.  If so, it would be unscientific to ignore it.  

Aristotle's Soul, Evolution, & Logos

In Chapter Four of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Thomas Nagel turns to the mystery of human reason.  Before I comment, I will consider Aristotle’s tripartite model of the soul, from On the Soul. 

For Aristotle, the soul is the actuality of an organic body that has the potential for life.  To understand this concept, consider the question “What is a church?”  Is it bricks, boards, plumbing, and pews?  No.  Empty of people, it is merely a structure with the potential of being a church.  Is it the people who show up on Sunday?  No.  If the same people occupy the same building but are engaged in gambling and whoring, then it is a casino and a brothel, rather than a church.  The church is these people collectively worshiping.  Likewise, the soul is this material organized into, well, organs, and doing the things that living things do.  What do they do?

The most basic activities that characterize a soul are absorbing nutrients and producing waste.  If it eats and goes potty, it’s alive.  An essential character of soul is a dimension of value.  A being with a soul can survive and flourish or wither and die.  It can succeed or fail, something in which no rock is involved. 

This basic level of soul has been dubbed nutritive soul.  Aristotle thought that all living things have this kind of soul, but plants had this alone.  In addition to nutritive soul, animals have the capacity to move about and perceive at a distance.  Animal soul opens up a second existential dimension: pain and pleasure.  Apart from flourishing and withering (though to be sure, connected with the same) animals can have good and bad lives. 

Finally there is a third type of soul possessed by human beings alone.  In addition to nutritive soul and animal soul, human beings have logos.  An animal cannot distinguish between what it perceives and what is true.  Accordingly, no animal can distinguish between what it wants and what is good for it.  Human beings can make these distinctions, and that makes all the difference. 

Aristotle’s scheme is astonishingly easy to map onto an evolutionary account of the emergence of complex organisms.  Evolution does not replace simple forms with more complex ones.  Instead, it lays increasingly complex levels of organization on top of earlier ones.  Plants communicate within their bodies by the movement of fluids.  Animals do the same, but over those mechanisms are laid a system of nerves coordinated by a brain.  Human beings are animals.  Our capacities are laid on top of the capacities enjoyed by other mammals. 

Are we more than animals?  An obvious challenge to Aristotle is to say that he privileges human beings.  Isn’t our logos just a more sophisticated device for running the gauntlet of reproductive success?  Maybe. 

Nagel seems to agree with Aristotle that our rational capacity puts us in an entirely new category and that our reliance on reason cannot easily be explained in evolutionary terms.  More on that later.