Of Microbes & Men

Conservative critics of the biosocial sciences general view the latter as reductionist.  They see it as a series of defeats.  The human mind is reduced to neurobiology, virtue and morality to raw self-interest, human beings to mere animals, animals to accidental products of blind evolutionary processes and those processes to molecular collisions.  I have long seen exactly the opposite in these same sciences.  I have argued in these pages that biology in general and evolutionary biology in particular are not and cannot be reductionist sciences.  The consequences of this insight are metaphysically robust. 

Leo Strauss wrote that

It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself as fully as what it is.

That is a clear and penetrating a rejection of reductionism.  I am in complete agreement and I think that evolutionary biology in general and the biosocial sciences in particular conform to Strauss’s principle.  The simplest understanding of the distinction between the high and the low goes like this: the high comprehends the low but is neither comprehended by nor exhausted by the low.  To take a simple example: consider the First Methodist Church in Aberdeen, South Dakota.  It is made of bricks, wood, plaster, pipes, wire, and glass, among other things.  While it includes all of these things, none of them is sufficient to explain why it came to be or why it has been sustained over the last century.  To understand that, you have to know something about the human turn toward the Divine, along with a lot of knowledge about human beings form societies, cooperate and pool resources, form networks, etc. 

I was led to these thoughts this week when reading a marvelous essay: “Evolution of cooperation and control of cheating in a social microbe,” by Joan E. Strassmann and David C. Queller (PNAS, vol. 108, suppl. 2).  Strassman and Queller believe that Dictylostelium discoideum, an occasionally social amoeba, is an excellent model for the evolution of cooperation and the transition in evolutionary history from single cells to multicellular organisms. 

D. discoideum amoebae live as singular cells, engulfing their bacterial prey when there is plenty of the latter.  When food runs out, they aggregate.  They form a slug which, after it has found a suitable perch, transforms into a stalk and bulb formation.  In the bulb are amoebae that have become spores, armored to a ride on the belly of some passing insect or other animal.  

All of this extraordinarily functional behavior depends upon mere molecules.  The amoebae secrete a molecule called “prestarvation factor”.  This is part of a quorum sensing mechanism.  It tells each amoeba how dense the population of its fellows is in the immediate neighborhood.  As long as there is enough food, the factor is suppressed.  When the population grows and the food runs out, it triggers the social stage (or the sexual stage, but I’ll leave that one for later).  Understanding how the molecules work in the mechanisms of the cells is work for a molecular biologist.  One cannot understand what the organism is doing without understanding that it is trying to do something.  The whole includes all the stages of the organism, from single cell to hopeful tower. 

The most interesting thing that Strassmann and Queller explain is that D. discoideum is a political animal (my phrase).  Its strategy requires a social contract, with benefits for cooperation and penalties for cheating.  The amoebae are not all genetically identical.  They are divided into diverse clones with distinct traits and distinct reproductive interests.  Any clone that exists is the offspring of previous amoebae that successfully navigated the process of sustenance, transportation and reproduction.  That defines its interest in the process. 

When a stalk and bulb is formed, all the amoebae that form the stalk will die.  Only those that end up in the spores will have a genetic future.  That doesn’t matter when the stalk and bulb are formed by a single clone.  However, the construction project frequently includes more than one clone.  The stalk and bulb are a chimera, an organism with more than one genetic identity.  In that case, there is an opportunity for cheating.  One clone might allow another to form the stalk without contributing to that work.  A clone that can get all of its team into spores would cheat a clone that did stalk work.  

That would mean, however, that the cheated clone would eventually disappear from the gene pool.  If that happens, there is no one left to cheat.  The system does not have to be egalitarian.  Some clones can do better than others, at least temporarily.  The system does have to demand contributions from every party and distribute benefits to every party if it is to be sustained. 

Strassmann and Queller do a fine job of laying out all the devices by which cheating is controlled and cooperation ensured in these social amoebae.  They frequently use the language of political theory: social contracts, “veils of ignorance”, etc.  These terms are partially metaphorical, but only partially.  There is a genuine social contract in force among these tiny citizens.  There are genuine conflicts of interest, concessions, sanctions, and a general interest. 

Instead of reducing the higher animals to the lowest ones, biology is busy elevating the lowest ones.  I know enough about Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to know who wins here.  Socrates spent most of his time in Plato’s dialogues arguing with Sophists.  The latter argued that justice was a mere human invention, contrary to nature, employed by the weak to hobble the strong.  Socrates argued to the contrary that justice was something real, intrinsic to the nature of things.  The strongest, he argued, had as much interest in justice as the weaker. 

Contemporary biology is proving Socrates right.  Principles of justice govern when slime mold clones congregate, honey bees operate their colonies, and the Continental Congress does the constitutional thing.  None of this deprives the lower organic and inorganic levels of the freedom to fully reveal themselves as what they are.  One cannot, however, understand any of this if one views the high solely in the light of the low. 

Are Darwinian Explanations Ugly?

At this blog I have argued persistently and I hope convincingly that Darwinian thought can be neither reductionist nor materialist.  The same is true, I suppose, for specifically biosocial thought.  One of the advantages of the latter, espec

ially when combined with classical philosophy, is that it not only confirms what I just submitted but helps explain the rhetorical force of the contrary claim.  Critics of biosocial explanations on both the left and the right deploy the reductionist and materialist interpretations of Darwinism in order to make the latter appear as ugly as possible.  It is this claim, that Darwinian social/political thought is ugly, that I intend to explore and refute here. 

Before we can decide whether Darwinism is ugly or why reductionism and materialism are ugly, we need to have an account of beauty and ugliness.  These concepts are frequently assumed to be entirely cultural in origin or socially constructed, which assumption turns out to be self-contradictory.  For example, if my people say that dark eyes are beautiful and your people say that blue eyes are beautiful, this would count as a distinction between our two cultures only if we have some common notion of beauty to disagree about.  To employ an analogy, we can whether it is right to feed a cold and starve a fever or vice verse only if we agree that the point is to relieve the one and the other. 

Disagreements about where beauty and ugliness are found, like disagreements over medical cures, take place in the context of universal agreements about what we are looking for.  As is usually the case, the Socratic philosophers laid out the basic logical structure of the business with both precision and depth.  In Plato’s Gorgias, the orator Polus concedes that getting away with murder is an ugly thing (or shameful in the context) but insists, nonetheless, that it is a very good thing.  Socrates points out that something that is ugly is so for one of two reasons.  Either it is unpleasant or it is harmful.  Since getting away with murder is not unpleasant, it therefore must be harmful. 

Socrates’ distinction seems to me to be both accurate and exhaustive.  According to his students Plato and Xenophon, Socrates was rather ugly in one sense but not the other.  He was painful to look at, but did you a lot of good if you hung around him long enough.  Other lovers, by contrast, can be very pleasing to eye but ruinous to the heart.  Perhaps a better example, and one beloved by evolutionary psychologists, is the black widow spider.  This creature can be intensely ugly, I can attest, if you find one crawling on your arm.  Yet it is not painful to look at.  On the contrary, it is a shiny jet black, with a beautiful red hour glass on its tear-shaped abdomen.  There is nothing ugly about any of that.  Its ugliness, when it does emerge, is a result of our inherited recognition.  We recognize it as venomous. 

This kind of ugliness holds for a wide range of creatures, from yellow jackets to rattlesnakes, which display warning colors.  These creatures are the opposite of unpleasant to look at if you can view them in safety.  In other contexts they are intensely ugly, so much so that human beings develop phobias about such things.  It is one of the remarkable observations of evolutionary psychology that we have phobias about spiders and snakes but not about automobiles or tobacco.  The reason is that the former killed our ancestors over very long periods of time whereas the latter kill us, but only very recently. 

Our capacity for distinguishing the beautiful from the ugly and the two senses of each from one another, depends on a set of evolved psychological mechanisms.  The same orange that is alarming on a snake is inviting on the skin of a piece of fruit, even the one held by the child in Van Gogh’s painting. 

Just as beautiful colors can be transformed into ugly warnings, they can also be employed as lures.  One kind of firefly uses its fire to attract males of another species looking for mates.  The unlucky suitors are devoured.  Likewise, human cooperators looking for honest partners can be fooled by conmen who have the knack of appearing honest.  Most human beings are bad liars.  We give ourselves away all too easily.  That makes us good cooperators.  Some human beings are very good liars.  Accordingly, most of us have built in bullshit detectors.  We instinctively look for signs of genuine virtue and deceit.  We esteem those who help without demanding a reward over those who always look for a payoff. 

I submit that the interpretation of Darwinian Theory (and especially Darwinian biosocial theory) as reductionist and materialist is rhetorically powerful because it arouses our fraud detection mechanisms.  If a woman nurtures her infant because such behavior was selected for over evolutionary history, that looks to a lot of us like an ulterior motive.  She doesn’t really love her baby; she really loves her selfish genes.  Reductionism and materialism arouse our suspicion all the apparently beautiful sentiments are mere pretenses.  My parents were only serving their genetic interests.  Darwinism is ugly because it paints all of us as devious con artists, painting ourselves in morally fraudulent colors. 

The interpretation of Darwinian moral/political thought as ugly gets the cart before the horse.  Conmen are effective because most of us are basically honest and that can only be because honesty was selected for.  Cooperation is beautiful because it is good.  It makes for a better life for all of us.  The fact that effective cooperative communities flourished whereas less effective cooperators did not underwrites the evolution of human language, morality, and indeed all higher culture.  Those who are good fathers, mothers, friends and citizens, out of genuine inclination made better cooperators than those who merely pretended to be so.  Indeed, the conmen could only come later, as parasites on the successful superorganism.  Before you can have free riders, you have to have something to free ride upon. 

What is ugly is either unpleasant to look at and/or harmful.  What is beautiful is either pleasant to look at and/or beneficial.  Darwinian Theory recognizes these distinctions.  It is therefore Socratic in its logical structure.  It is not ugly, unless it is wrong. 

Biology is Not a Materialistic Science

In the two essays by Evelyn Fox Keller and John Dupré that I commented on in my last post, both authors describe themselves as materialists.  Keller says that she is an “unambivalent materialist” and Dupré says

Like Keller, I am a materialist.  That is to say, I do not believe that there is any kind of stuff in the world other than the stuff described by physics and chemistry.  There are no immaterial minds, vital forces, or extra-temporal deities.

It is hard not to read these statements as other than prophylactic confessions. They are nervous that any distance from a reductionist position might be taken for a belief in magic. 

I would argue that neither of them are in fact materialists because any materialism worthy of that name is untenable.  I suggest that the promiscuous use of the term arouses unnecessary opposition to science and especially to Darwinian biology and worse, it is misleading.  Materialism means nothing if it does not mean an account of something that reduces that thing to the properties of its material constituents.  So what does it mean when two philosophers of biology feel obliged to profess materialism and then deny that such reductionism is possible? 

To understand what materialism might mean it is best to begin with a simple materialist explanation.  Consider an iron bar.  It has color, weight, solidity, and other properties such as magnetism and electrical conductivity.  The bar is made out of small bits of iron, which we may then see as its material.  The properties of the whole result from the addition of the properties of the uniform parts and thus the one is explained by and therefore reducible to the other. 

Now suppose that we heat the bar.  What explains the new properties of the object‑its capacity to warm, turn red, and liquefy?  One explanation is that by heating it we have added new material to the existing material‑particles of heat to particles of iron.  The new material we may call caloric or phlogiston.  As water softens soil and makes it flow, so caloric softens iron and, additionally, makes it red hot.  It’s not an implausible suggestion at first glance.  It explains why the hot iron will warm a surface that it rests on.  The caloric is leaking out into the surface, just as water leaks from a sponge into a table cloth.  The caloric theory of heat is what a genuinely materialist explanation looks like. 

By contrast, the molecular theory of heat denies that heat is something material.  It is instead the energy with which the molecules of a substance collide against each other.  Heating the iron bar does not, as such, introduce a new material into the object.  Instead, it changes the state of the same material.  That is a non-materialist explanation precisely because it does not require belief in “any other kind of stuff” than the stuff of iron. 

Genuinely materialist explanations must work like the caloric theory of heat.  Any property of something would have to be explained by reference to the properties of its material constituents alone and any change in properties would have to be explained by the addition or subtraction of material constituents.  A genuine materialism would have to restrict itself to materialist explanations.  It is not as if such a materialism has not be attempted.  Anaxagoras may have been one of the few genuine materialists in the history of philosophy.  Aristotle made short work of him. 

I return to Dupré.  When he says that “there are no immaterial minds, vital forces, or extra-temporal deities”, in addition to confessing atheism he is in fact rejecting materialist explanations for biological phenomena.  The reference to “vital forces” indicates the idea that there is some kind of stuff in living things that animates them.  That explanation of life was, at least originally, a thoroughly materialist doctrine.  According to the ancient atomists (Lucretius being a good example) the soul was a kind of substance present in living bodies.  When a living body was cut open (say, by a sword) the soul particles leaked out, causing death.  That is what a materialist biology would look like!

Much the same is true of “immaterial minds”.  The reference here, I presume, is to substance dualism.  While dualists attempted to explain consciousness by the supposition of an “immaterial substance”, they are, almost always, positing a division in the kinds of material.  Physical substance forms physical things while mental substance forms ideas, impressions, etc.  This is why conman spiritualists in the 19^th century had themselves photographed covered with cotton candy like “ectoplasm”. 

What is wrong with vitalism in biology and dualism in philosophy of mind is the same thing that wrong with the caloric theory of heat: they posit material substances that do not exist and propose materialistic explanations for phenomena which cannot be explained in material terms. 

To see that modern biology cannot be a materialistic science, one only has to compare it with Aristotle’s biology.  Aristotle believed in spontaneous generation.  Under certain conditions of heat, moisture, etc., material constituents spontaneously generate simple living organisms.  This happens, as Aristotle thought, frequently in swamps and perhaps dead bodies.  If that were true, then biology would be a much reductionist science that it is.  Aristotle was one of the most vociferous opponents of reductionism and, while he certainly incorporated materialist explanations in his biology, he was no materialist.  Yet he was more materialist than modern biologists.  The latter hold that all living organisms are the offspring of pre-existing organisms. 

Spontaneous generation must have happened at the very beginning of life on earth, but what was added to existing materials was not some new material but form‑a certain primitive structure and the process of self-generation and autonomous action.  Like the molecular theory of heat, any viable understanding of living organisms is non-materialistic.  Magical explanations are to be rejected precisely because they invent mythical materials and rely on inappropriately materialistic devices. 

As Aristotle recognized, materialist explanations are often appropriate in science.  Red paint is red because somebody added red powder to water.  Snowflakes take their amazing shapes because water molecules crystalize in certain patterns.  A baby comes to be because it comes to be out of something.  A materialistic biology is impossible because babies come to be something and come to be towards something and come to be because a process of ontogeny is pushing it out of its original state, to survey Aristotle’s four causes.  It is high time that philosophers and scientists stop calling themselves materialists when they are nothing of the sort.