Getting Over the Either Or

Several years ago in my Human Nature & Human Values course, a student indignantly objected to the whole idea I was presenting.  He told that he and several of his friends once jumped into a lake to save a poor fellow from drowning.  We didn’t do it, he insisted, because we were trying to survive or make babies!  We didn’t even think about what we were doing.  We did it because we cared about the poor bastard in the water. 

This turned out to be one of those great teachable moments.  I drew a chart on the board that started like this:

phenomenon	Dropping a hot object
Proximate cause	Pain
Function	Avoiding physical injury
Secondary Evolutionary Explanation	Personal Survival
Primary Evolutionary Explanation	Personal Reproductive Fitness

Dropping a hot object is something we do without thinking about it.  It is a reflexive reaction to pain.  Now suppose that someone said that physical injury had nothing to do with it.  I didn’t drop it because it might have injured me; I dropped it because it hurt.  That would surely be a mistake, not because the latter part is wrong but because both explanations are correct.  Yes, pain is a motive.  However, it is also obviously functional.  It encourages us to avoid things that might result in physical injury. 

One might then wonder how we came to be such creatures as are hurt by things that injure us.  The secondary evolutionary explanation explains how the functional device is maintained by its direct functional advantage, and the primary evolutionary explanation is the ultimate explanation of the action.  The same thing is true of my student’s wonderful story. 

phenomenon	Dropping a hot object	Saving a stranger from drowning
Proximate cause	Pain	Concern for another’s welfare
Function	Avoiding physical injury	Reciprocity
Secondary Evolutionary Explanation	Personal Survival	Forming cooperative networks for the sake of mutual survival
Ultimate Evolutionary Explanation	Reproductive Fitness	Reproductive Fitness

The concern for a stranger’s welfare was the genuine reason that my friend jumped into the water.  Like pain, this concern is obviously functional.  All of us are better off if each of us is prepared to jump to another’s aid.  It’s a case of both, not either or.  My secondary evolutional explanation here points to something like group selection, but I will ignore that for the moment.  Suffice it to say that the evolutionary explanations do not in any way contradict the common sense explanations that my student preferred. 

Yesterday, as I was laying out Lee Dugatkin’s four routes to cooperation, another student suggested that human beings, unlike animals, think about what they are doing.  Surely we cooperate because we can see that it makes sense, and not (or not solely) because of evolved instincts.  I emphatically agreed that deliberation is an important factor in human cooperation; however, I insisted, our deliberation is guided by social emotions.  We would reach different conclusions as a result of deliberation if we had a different set of emotions.  Here is another chart:

phenomenon	Ostracizing a cheater from the group
Proximate cause	Righteous Indignation
Function	Encouraging honest cooperation within the group
Secondary Evolutionary Explanation	Maintaining cooperative networks for the sake of mutual survival
Primary Evolutionary Explanation	Reproductive Fitness

When confronted with a cheater, a group of homo sapiens may think long and hard about what do.  If they decide to kick the dead weight out of the group that may be because they have calculated that he isn’t worth his weight.  Or they may simply be so mad that they don’t care about shrinking the group.  Either way, their indignation is a powerful motive and the human capacity for that emotion is clearly functional. 

The hardest part of teaching evolutionary social theory to undergraduates is getting them to see that common sense interpretations of social phenomena are not opposed to, let alone exclusive of, functional and evolutionary explanations. 

Explaining Proximate Causation & Ultimate Causation

Some years ago I attended a NHS summer institute on biology and politics.  Larry Arnhart was a fellow at that event.  Roger Masters and Ron Perlman hosted the event.  At one point Roger said that he had given up trying to explain the distinction between proximate and ultimate causation to his undergraduate students.  They just didn’t get it. 

I have found a very simple way to explain the distinction, which I share now for the edification of my readers.  It goes like this:

My summer school class begins at 7:30 am, a very uncivilized moment in the day.  I ask my bleary eyed students why I got up at 6 am.  No mystery there.  The alarm clock went off.  That, I point out, is the proximate cause of my waking and reluctantly swinging my feet off the mattress. 

Okay.  So what is the ultimate cause?  After they blink their eyes for a few moments I exclaim “beer isn’t free!”  The light shines in.