Darwinism and Human Affairs PDF
Preview Darwinism and Human Affairs
I I H I RICHARD U ALEXANDER PITMAN PuBusrnNG LIMITED London DARWINISM AND HUMAN AFFAIRS I Firstpublished in Great Britainin ig8o by Pitman Publishing limited, 39 Parker Street, London WCiB 5PB Copyright © 1979 by the University of Washington Press Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includingphotocopy, recording, or anyinformation storage orretrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Alexander, Richard D Darwinism and human affairs. (The Jessie and John Danz lectures) Bibliography: p. 1. Social evolution. 2. Evolution. 3. Natural selection. I. Title. II Series. HM1oO.A44 301‘.0424 75—65829 ISBN 0 273 08477 1 This book is dedicated to the great teachers in my life, especia Donald 1. Borror, Theodore H. Hubbell, Ernest M. R. Lamkey, Blanche McAvoy, Donald R. Meyer, Edward S. Thomas, John N. Wolfe, and, most of all, my parents, Archie Dale Alexander and Katharine Elizabeth Heath. The Jessie and John Danz Lectures In October 1961, Mr. John Danz, a Seattle pioneer, andhis wife, Jessie Danz, made a substantial gift to the University of Washtobe ington to establish a perpetual fund to provide income used to bring to the University of Washington each year “dis— tinguished scholars of national and international reputation who have concerned themselves with the impact of science and philosophy on man’s perception of arational universe.”The fund established by Mr. and Mrs Danz is now known as the Jessie and John Danz Fund, and the scholars brought to the University under its provisions are known as Jessie and John Danz Lecturers or Professors. Mr. Danz wisely left to the Board of Regents of the University of Washington the identification of the special fields in science, philosophy, and other disciplines in which lectureships may be established. His major concern and interest were that the fund would enable the University of Washington to bring to the campus some of the truly great scholars and thinkers of the world. Mr. Danz authorized the Regents to expend a portion of the income from the fund to purchase special collections of books, documents, and other scholarly materials needed to reinforce the effectiveness of the extraordinary lectureships and profes-. vii viii Darwinism and Human Affairs sorships. The terms of the gift also provided for the publication and dissemination, when this seems appropriate, of the lectures given by the Jessie and John Danz Lecturers. Through this book, therefore, another Jessie and John Danz Lecturer speaks to the pep1e arid scholars of the world, as he has spoken to his audiences at the University of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest community. It falls to a journalist reviewing the books of our day to treat the dreadful almost as though it were commonplace The books I review, week upon week, report the destruction of the land or the air; they detail the perversion ofjustice; they reveal national stupidities. None of them not one—hassaddened me and shamed me as this book has. Because the experience of reading it has made me realize for once and all thatwe really don’tknow who we are, or where we came from, or what we have done, or why. Geoffrey Wolff, Newsweek (from a review of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee) ix Preface My purpose, in the lectures from which this book was developed, was to review and extend our understanding of the relationship between the process of organic evolution and the structure, variations, and significance of human behavior. I wished to show that a thorough understanding of the evolutionary processes by which life has formed and diversified is a vital part of the everyday knowledge of ordinary human beings in a society such as ours that is to say, those who vote in a democracy, those who help guide soda!, cultural, and technological change, those who influence the lives of other human beings, and those who reflect upon their own existences and strive consciously to become the masters of their own fates. I emphasized what I see as the philosophical significance of evolution because it is defensible as the only theoretical base from which to undertake a truly comprehensive analysis of human activities and tendencies. I also sought to diminish the reasons for the existing hostilities and strife that derive, as I see it, from miscommunications and unnecessary disagreements between biological and social scientists, and between biologists and hu manists, in regard to evolution and its ideological and ethical meanings. Within the past two decades, refinements of evolutionary xi xii Preface theory have created a major revolution in biology and produced an entirely new view of human nature. I think it is worthwhile to state briefly what happened to cause this revolution, and to explain the reasons for its philoophica1 impact. The notion of genes as heritable factors or units that recombine during sexual reproduction and, together with the envithrough ronment, shape the organism’sbehavioral, physiological, and structural traits dates almost but not quite to Darwin, the work of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel. As a formal concept integrated into biology, this view of genes is only about as old as the twentieth century, although still a half century older than the knowledge that the genetic material is comprised of deoxyribonucleic acid molecules The evolution- ist’sview ofthe genes as recombining units is also a half century older than the efforts of molecular biologists to begin defining genes directly from knowledge of their physiological activities or effects. Not until the l9óos did social biologists realize how important it is for them to understand that what natural selection has apparen been maximizing is the survival by reproduction of the genes, as they have been defined by evolutionists, and that this includes effects on the copies of genes, even when those copies are located in other individuals In other words selection has . , not operated so as to promote directly either the long-term survival of individuals or the well-being and survival of populations or species at the expense of individuals. When such effects occur whether as a result of social interactions or for other reasons they are either incidental consequences of the evolutionary procesS or they arise out of such consequences. In one stroke this realization provided the means for solving numerous long-standing biological problems involving sexual ity, senescence, sex ratios, male-female interactions, parental care and nepotism Perhaps most importantly, it resolved the ancient philosophical paradox whether humans are really selfish individualists or group altruists, and provided, I believe I the first simple, general theory of human nature with a hi likelihood of widespread acceptance. The answer to the age-old Preface xlii riddle that even ordinary humans ask themselves appears to be that we are selfish individualists in the sense and to the extent that this maximizes the survival by reproduction of the genes in our own bodies, and we are group altruists in the sense and to the extent that this maximizes the survival by reproduction of the copies of our genes residing in the bodies of others—thaist, in the bodies of our genetic relatives, both descendant and nondescendant. At least this is what we have evidently evolved to be, in the usual environments of history, notwithstanding (i) the difficulties of determining what it means that our environments have surely been altered by culture and technology far too rapidly for our evolved phenotypes (or developmental potentials) to “trackt”hem adaptively and (2) our inability to know what the new knowledge about our nature and our history may enable us to become. Human behavior is exceedingly complex and diverse. It follows that if an appropriate and reasonable theory of human nature can be stated simply, it surely will be exceedingly difficult to apply. This is obviously true with the new theory from evolutionary biology. So long as human behavior and the capacity to generate, absorb, use, and maintain culture were seen as evolved to contribute to the well-being of the social group, population, or species as a whole, confficts of interest were relatively simple: by definition they should exist only as accifunction dents or mistakes below the level at which was being ascribed. The new theory, however, drives the problem of une derstan conflicts of interest right to th level of the gene. This means that, on evolutionary grounds, individual humans are expected to behave as though they have individualized sets of interests because they have individualized sets of genes. The degrees of difference in their interests and therefore their ten- dencies to cooperate and tobe altruistic toward one another cannow be quantified. We expect them to correlate, inthe usual environments of history, with degrees of genetic relatedness, or the general likelihood that any gene is shared between them. The major seeming exception is that means have developed for enforcing reciprocity, or payment in systems of exchange, causresiding
The list of books you might like
