Dark Nature

In a novel by Miguel de Unamuno, the protagonist Augusto Perez suddenly stops the action to confront the author. Which of the two is more “real,” he demands: himself the character, or Unamuno the author? He is arguing for his life, for the author Unamuno has decided to kill him off. Finally Perez delivers a decisive blow. Obviously he, the “fictitious being,” is more real, for he is a creation of human thought and genius, whereas the author is a product of blind animality.

Unamuno, a philosopher of Christian sensibility, was satirizing the state of art and science in modern times. With ever more brilliance and eloquence, the intellectuals of our day are arguing that they themselves are the product of blind animality. In doing so, they fail to see that devaluing the messenger casts doubt upon the message. Nowhere is this trend more obvious than in the new science of evolutionary psychology, which attempts to explain all human thought and behavior as the unguided result of natural selection.

As products of blind evolution, say these thinkers, we deceive ourselves by searching for any teleology other than that scripted in our DNA. We must look down, not up: to nature, not its Creator. The hubris of this new science is breathtaking. Predicts Robert Trivers of Harvard, “Sooner or later, political science, law, economics, psychology, psychiatry and anthropology will all be branches of sociobiology.” He might have added ethics to the list.

Writers on evolutionary psychology—Robert Wright, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, John Maynard Smith, Matt Ridley, Lyall Watson, Frans de Waal—are talented and entertaining, and fill their works with vivid descriptions of birds, bees, and chimpanzees. They explain courtship displays, infidelity, maternal instincts, gossip, and social organization in arresting ways. Newsmagazines like Time hire these writers to interpret gang behavior in the inner cities or sexual indiscretions in the capital city, and the results are so winsome that evolutionary psychologists have become the new cosmologists. They help us make sense of ourselves and our role in the universe. Even magazines for teenage girls now rely on them to explain why guys behave the way they do.1

Philosophers are just now beginning to scrutinize the assumptions of evolutionary psychology, and I suspect they will have a field day with its epistemology. In this essay, I am more concerned with its implications for what I have called “the crisis of unmorality.” As if in direct fulfillment of the apostle Paul’s predictions in Romans 1, scientists have relocated our primary source for morality and meaning in the beasts.

1. All human behavior is explained by a tautology, an all-encompassing principle impossible to prove or disprove.

Evolutionary psychology relies on one principle, that of the selfish gene, to decipher behavior. I do what I do, always, to advance the likelihood of my genetic material perpetuating itself. Even if an individual act does not benefit me personally, it does benefit the “gene pool” I am contributing to. Evolutionary theorists do not shrink from this sweeping assertion; indeed, they herald it as the most important single advance in their theory since Darwin.

“Always, without exception,” affirms Matt Ridley, “living things are designed to do things that enhance the chances of their genes or copies of their genes surviving and replicating.” George Williams notes that “a modern biologist seeing an animal doing something to benefit another assumes either that it is being manipulated by the other individual or that it is being subtly selfish.”

By their own admission, the new scientists propose a wholly deterministic understanding of the human species. Not only are we just another animal, we are, in Ridley’s words, a “disposable plaything and tool of a committee of self-interested genes.” Or, as Richard Dawkins puts it, “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.”

Randolph Nesse, another proponent, expresses more unease than astonishment:

The discovery that tendencies to altruism are shaped by benefits to genes is one of the most disturbing in the history of science. When I first grasped it, I slept badly for many nights, trying to find some alternative that did not so roughly challenge my sense of good and evil. Understanding this discovery can undermine commitment to morality—it seems silly to restrain oneself if moral behavior is just another strategy for advancing the interests of one’s genes. Some students, I am embarrassed to say, have left my courses with a na•ve notion of the selfish-gene theory that seemed to them to justify selfish behavior, despite my best efforts to explain the naturalistic fallacy.

Critics propose many anecdotal exceptions to the selfish-gene theory. What about gay people, or childless couples, who do not plan to perpetuate their genes—how to explain their behavior? Or consider the unselfish acts of Robertson McQuilkin and Mother Teresa, whom I mentioned in part 1 of this essay (see B&C, Jan./Feb. 1998, p. 14). McQuilkin’s children are grown and perpetuating genes of their own; Mother Teresa committed to a vow of chastity early in her life. On what basis can we account for their altruistic behavior? As if explaining algebra to a child, the evolutionary psychologists take up such thorny problems one by one and explicate them in terms of the selfish gene. Their energy is boundless, their ingenuity remarkable.

Like all monistic explanations of human behavior, evolutionary psychology has both the virtue and the defect of simplicity. If Robertson McQuilkin argues, as he does, that he stands by his Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife out of his love for her and because of his commitment to biblical standards of fidelity—why, of course he would argue that. He makes his living as a Christian writer and speaker, does he not? He is finding a way to propagate the ideas that have served him so well.

The same principle applies to me, too: I am doubtless writing this essay in response to my own selfish gene in order to propagate my Christian world-view. And if you find yourself disagreeing with me, you must be responding to a selfish gene that causes you to react against Christian orthodoxy. Both of us are led by deterministic urges that may not be evident to us or anyone else—except, perhaps, the evolutionary psychologists.

Robert Wright articulates the tautology: “We believe the things—about morality, personal worth, even objective truth—that lead to behaviors that get our genes into the next generation. … What is in our genes’ interests is what seems ‘right’—morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order.”

Carry the logic far enough, and it becomes evident why Professor Nesse slept poorly. Any notion of good and evil disappears. In essence, the evolutionary psychologists have devised a unified theory of human depravity that would make John Calvin blush. Hard-wired for selfishness, we have no potential for anything else.

2. Morality springs entirely from the most internal of sources: our genes.

John Maynard Smith, in a review of Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, asked,

But is there any way in which we can decide, with certainty, which actions are right? Dennett’s view, which I share, is that there is not, unless you hold that some book, for example the Bible, is the word of God, and that human beings are here to do God’s bidding. If a person is simply the product of his or her genetic makeup and environmental history, including all the ideas that he or she has assimilated, there is simply no source whence absolute morality could come. Of course, this does not exempt us from making moral judgments: it only means that we cannot be sure that we are right.

At one point or another, most evolutionary psychologists take their turn at accounting for the origin of morality. In his On Human Nature, for example, the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson proposed that over the course of thousands of generations, natural selection wired in certain tendencies that are “largely unconscious and irrational,” on the level of “gut feelings.” Morality must, of course, serve the monistic selfish-gene principle:

Human behavior—like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it—is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function.

All this talk about genetic makeup and hard-wired predispositions raises important questions about human freedom and moral responsibility. Western jurisprudence assumes the right to judge a person guilty of criminal behavior if he or she (1) can discern the difference between good and evil and (2) was mentally competent to make a free decision when committing the crime. Sirhan Sirhan was sent to prison and John Hinckley to a mental institution over just this legal distinction. Evolutionary psychology appears to call both principles into question by claiming that none of our actions are free, and that the difference between good and evil is a social construct.

In a widely publicized case a year before the famous Scopes trial, attorney Clarence Darrow took exactly this tack in defending Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two university students who had murdered a boy for the intellectual experience of it. Argued Darrow, “Is there any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life on it? … Your Honor, it is hardly fair to hang a nineteen-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.”

Since Darrow’s time, scientists have made great strides in unearthing the biological origins of our notions of morality. No longer must one study Nietzsche; nature itself provides the textbook.

Robert Wright, one of the best expositors of evolutionary psychology to the general public, points to lust as a clear example of the selfish-gene principle at work. Lust developed as nature’s way of “getting us to act as if we wanted lots of offspring and knew how to get them, whether or not we actually do.” Following this line of reasoning leads Wright tentatively to endorse polygamy. After all, the practice addresses the basic sexual imbalance between what men and women want. If a man grows restless after a woman gives him a few children, why shouldn’t he “fall in love” and begin another family line without divorcing his first wife?

Another evolutionary psychologist, Robin Dunbar, devoted an entire book (Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language) to the origin of gossip. Dunbar argues that gossip is the human version of primate grooming, the verbal equivalent of apes and monkeys stroking each other’s fur. One need only compare this view of lust and gossip to the New Testament’s to see the radical change introduced by evolutionary psychology. The New Testament imposes an external code of morality; evolution offers tantalizing clues of how such value-neutral behavior might have developed.

The sleuthing exercise can get dangerous when, as did Clarence Darrow, the theorist applies evolutionary principles to acts of violence. The authors of Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence advise us that we must resign ourselves to the fact that men “have been temperamentally shaped to use violence effectively, and that they will therefore find it hard to stop.” They reason that men must be innately violent because male chimpanzees, our nearest relatives, murder and rape their neighbors, and dominate and batter their mates.

Robert Wright cites with sympathy the Unabomber’s complaint that “society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved.” Yes, and if we are hard-wired to rebel against the modern technological world, who sets the limits on acceptable rebellion, on what is appropriate or inappropriate, if not good or evil?

Locked into a monistic explanation of behavior that excludes any category of “evil,” evolutionary psychologists reach far to explain heinous crimes. Lyall Watson takes on the case of Susan Smith, who rolled a Mazda containing her two infant sons, nicknamed “Precious” and “Sugarfoot,” into a lake. Infanticide is nothing new, says Watson, citing the statistic that in the U.S. alone, 1,300 children are killed each year by parents or close relatives. In a statement that could stand as a parody of the morally neutral stance of evolutionary psychology, Watson observes,

These examples are ones that cannot be described as contributing to social stability and ecological equilibrium, but neither can they, nor should they, be put beyond explanation as outbreaks of unimaginable evil. We have to be careful not to confuse the interests of parents and offspring, which often conflict where optimal fitness is concerned. Children nearly always want more than their parents can provide, and nice judgment is required to reconcile such disparity. In many situations, unconscious calculations are clearly being made, with every evidence of an evolutionary perspective coming into play.

A similar argument was advanced in the New York Times Magazine by Steven Pinker, the MIT linguist and author of How the Mind Works. “A mother who murders her baby commits an immoral act, but not necessarily a pathological one,” the subtitle of Pinker’s article explains. “Neonaticide may be a product of maternal wiring.”

In his book Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil, Lyall Watson even attempts to fit the atrocities of Rwanda and Auschwitz into a rational framework of genetic behavior. Logically he must, for he assumes that all human behavior results from the inbuilt predispositions bequeathed to us by natural selection.

Trapped in philosophical naturalism, evolutionary biologists cannot embrace any external code, such as the Tao described by C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man. The Tao represents objective truth, the first principle beyond which we cannot argue; it allows us to make judgments; we cannot judge it. Without such a standard, modern science must constantly teeter on the edge of self-contradiction. Edward O. Wilson’s memoirs, for example, wonderfully depict a scientist characterized by curiosity, fairness, and a commitment to truth. Yet if these very qualities came to him genetically, were in fact determined for him, what makes them superior to the qualities of laziness, dishonesty, and superstition against which he so valiantly struggled? Why choose one set of values over another, especially when you do not believe in free choice?

Some evolutionary biologists cheerfully acknowledge the problem. Concludes Robert Wright:

Thus the difficult question of whether the human animal can be a moral animal—the question that modern cynicism tends to greet with despair—may seem increasingly quaint. The question may be whether, after the new Darwinism takes root, the word moral can be anything but a joke.

3. Nature gives mixed messages about morality.

In the last pages of his book Good- Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, Frans de Waal says, “We seem to be reaching a point at which science can wrest morality from the hands of the philosophers.” He has just demonstrated that we can look to the primates for early examples of sympathy, empathy, and justice. Examples of “ethical” behavior abound in nature: whales and dolphins risking their lives to save injured companions, chimpanzees coming to the aid of the wounded, elephants refusing to abandon slain comrades.

Well, yes, but it all depends on where you point your field binoculars. Where do you learn about proper behavior between the sexes, for example? Each fall outside my Rocky Mountain home, a bull elk bugles together 60 to 100 cows, bullies them into a herd, and uses his magnificent rack of antlers to gore all male pretenders. Elk are more dramatic than most species in their male dominance, but nature offers very few examples of monogamy and none of egalitarianism. Should our females, like the praying mantises, devour the males who are mating with them? Should our neighborhoods resolve their disputes, as do the bonobo chimpanzees, by engaging in a quick orgy in which they all have sex with one another? Should human males mimic the scorpion-fly by lying in wait to take the nearest female by force?

Mark Ridley sees sexual jealousy as a Darwinian adaptation for humans that enabled our ancestors to outreproduce their more relaxed contemporaries. But he quickly adds that he can “imagine a society in which people are conditioned to enjoy the thought of their spouse’s being unfaithful.” In his discussion, the morality of sexual fidelity is a value-neutral adaptation to social circumstances.

Or, consider violence. Zoologists once thought murder a peculiarly human pastime, but no longer. Ground squirrels routinely eat their babies; mallard ducks gang-rape and drown other ducks; the larvae of parasitic wasps devour their paralyzed prey from the inside out; a species of African cichlid feeds on the eyes of other cichlids. Hyenas get the prize for ruthless cannibalism: within an hour, the stronger of twins will fight its baby sibling to the death.

Lyall Watson admits he finds it “disturbing” that hyena cubs seem genetically programmed to attack and kill their siblings on sight almost from birth. Researchers such as Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall likewise react in revulsion and dismay when primates they have grown to love are murdered by others of their species. On what grounds? The animals themselves seem undismayed; they are acting “naturally,” in response to genetic messages. What gives an evolutionist the right to step outside nature, endorse a moral concept of nonviolence, then apply it back to nature, of which we are all a part?

The alternative is not just jarring but appalling. Some evolutionary psychologists, showing more consistency, look to nature to explain, and even justify, the most egregious human behavior. Lyall Watson, for example, though mysteriously disturbed by fratricide among hyenas, admits that he could not easily condemn headhunting, because such a practice keeps certain tribes in ecological balance. In an extraordinary article in the New Yorker, Robert Wright drew parallels between inner-city gang behavior and that of primates in the wild. Urban violence may be a “natural” reaction to a particular social environment, he argued: ” … inner-city violence shouldn’t be labelled a ‘pathology.’ … Violence is eminently functional—something that people are designed to do.” In her recent book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, Barbara Ehrenreich wrestles with the moral dilemma of opposing war while accepting it as an expression of our innate neurobiology.

In response to their critics, evolutionary psychologists are quick to argue, “Don’t go from is to ought.” We examine nature to see what is, to learn why we behave the way we do. It does not necessarily follow that we ought to do what other species do.” Fair enough, but where do we go to get the ought? And another question: Where did this whole notion of ought come from, anyway?

4. A morality based in nature is vulnerable to large-scale abuse.

Stephan Chorover’s book From Genesis to Genocide traces the frightening misuse of biology in recent history. He shows how biological explanations have been used to justify slavery, imperialism, racism, sexism, and genocide. As Klaus Fischer’s Nazi Germany: A New History asserts, our century’s worst crime, the genocide orchestrated by Hitler, was made possible in part because of the eugenic consequences that German intellectuals drew from Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” philosophy.

The Western intellectual community now finds eugenics repulsive and roundly condemns racism based on Social Darwinism. Yet its allegiance to philosophical naturalism leaves it vulnerable to abuse, especially now that advances in gene research allow for genetic “improvement.”

Julian Huxley declared in 1963,

The population explosion is making us ask … What are people for? Whatever the answer … it is clear that the general quality of the world’s population is not very high, is beginning to deteriorate, and should and could be improved. It is deteriorating thanks to genetic defectives who would otherwise have died being kept alive, and thanks to the crop of new mutations due to fallout. In modern man, the direction of genetic evolution has started to change its sign, from positive to negative, from advance to retreat: we must manage to put it back on its age-old course of positive improvement.

Any time a leading thinker uses phrases like “general quality of the world’s population” and “genetic defectives,” the rest of us should invest in home security systems. An engineered society or engineered individual must conform to some standard of correctness or normalcy, and here is where evolutionary psychology and social engineering break down. Who decides the standard or norm? Julian Huxley or Martin Heidegger? Bill Clinton or Pol Pot? I am still trying to think of a large-scale attempt to improve human society that has not led to catastrophe.

Trust us, say the new behaviorists. We’re kinder and gentler. We have your best interests—the best interests of the whole species—at heart. Oh? And what historical examples can you point to in which behavioral conditioning was used for benevolent purposes? Must we repeat history? One may disagree with the tactics but understand the sentiments of the protestors who dumped a pitcher of ice water on the head of Edward O. Wilson as he received the National Medal of Science from President Carter in 1977. “Wilson, you’re all wet!” they chanted.

THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGISTS HAVE DEVISED A UNIFIED THEORY OF HUMAN DEPRAVITY THAT WOULD MAKE JOHN CALVIN BLUSH. HARD-WIRED FOR SELFISHNESS, WE HAVE NO POTENTIAL FOR ANYTHING ELSE.

James V. McConnell describes the ultimate goal of behaviorism: “I believe that the day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with drugs, hypnosis, and astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain absolute control over an individual’s behavior.” My fear, precisely.

We like to see ourselves as something more than animals. As animals plus. … The problem with this approach is that it looks at life from the top down. … As a naturalist, I tend to see things from the bottom up. —Lyall Watson

From a Christian perspective, the new science of evolutionary psychology founders on its anthropology, or basic understanding of the nature of humanity. The “trousered ape,” C. S. Lewis satirically called us in The Abolition of Man. Perhaps that should be updated to “untrousered ape.” Scientists are finding it increasingly difficult to claim any distinctiveness about being human. In his recent book, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould faults the view that places humanity at the top, as the pinnacle of evolutionary progress. We are instead, he says, “a cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted.”

Given the ascendant state of evolutionary psychology, the general public increasingly will be bombarded with this message about what it means to be human. You are a cosmic accident. You are no different from other animals. All morality is arbitrary. You must look down, not up, in order to understand yourself.

Animal-rights activists seize upon the new paradigm as an endorsement of their campaign against “speciesism.” Animals, being no different from people, should be treated accordingly. “There really is no rational reason for saying a human being has special rights,” says Ingrid Newkirk, cofounder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”

Evelyn Pluhar takes that logic further down the same road, arguing (in Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals) that in certain cases, an animal’s rights should take precedence over a human’s. For example, as one reviewer of the book suggested, “Compare a normal chimpanzee to a severely retarded human child unable to take care of itself or to speak or to reason. Given that neither qualifies as a rational moral being, capable of asserting its rights, why do we allow vivisection of the chimp but not of the child? Surely, if moral significance attaches only to full persons, then the child should be granted no more protection than the chimp, or the pig awaiting slaughter.”

It takes an honest scientist indeed to acknowledge that all discussion about rights is irrelevant. Rights are, by definition, granted. As zoologist Paul Shepard admits, “‘Rights’ implies some kind of cosmic rule prior to any contracts among users, legislation for protection, or decisions to liberate. It refers to something intrinsic or given by God or Nature. … Wild animals do not have rights; they have a natural history.”

At least Shepard is honest about the moral vacuum at the center of evolutionary psychology. Books in this field by evolutionary psychologists tend to contain glaring contradictions. They call on us to respect the rights of animals without giving us a rationale for those rights. They inform us we have no claim to superiority over other species—though as far as I know only humans will be reading their elegant arguments. After describing nature’s examples of gang rape, murder, and cannibalism, they urge us to rise above our genetic scripting. They call us to “higher” values of nonviolence and mutual respect even though there is no “higher” and “lower,” and apparently we have no freedom to act anyway.

Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the pioneers in evolutionary theory, observed: “The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-exertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows.” Others who follow Huxley, such as Robert Wright and George Williams, quote him approvingly. They too urge us to transcend the destiny of natural selection, to combat the cosmic process. Yet by binding us within that cosmic process, and by insisting that we have no other fate but natural selection, they deny our ability to act on such noble instincts.

I have met a few evolutionary psychologists, and they seem like cultured, well-mannered individuals who do not beat their children, cheat on their income tax, or murder their undesirable cousins. Yet the doctrine they promulgate, by undercutting any transcendent basis for morality, destroys our very ability to judge such behavior “bad” or “evil.” I do not worry about the morality of individual evolutionists, but I do worry about the morality of those who follow their doctrines to their logical ends. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise,” wrote C. S. Lewis. “We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Meanwhile, the leaders of the movement are cranking out books, writing cover stories for newsmagazines, and being feted at major universities. For the moment, at least, they hold the spotlight, and it illuminates a benign and knowing smile. At last we understand human behavior. At last we understand ourselves.

More than three centuries ago another scientist, Blaise Pascal, considered a premodern version of the loss of faith. This was his conclusion:

Now, what do we gain by hearing it said of a man that he has now thrown off the yoke, that he does not believe there is a God who watches our actions, that he considers himself the sole master of his conduct, and that he thinks he is accountable for it only to himself? Does he think that he has thus brought us to have henceforth complete confidence in him, and to look to him for consolation, advice, and help in every need of life? Do they profess to have delighted us by telling us that they hold our soul to be only a little wind and smoke, especially by telling us this in a haughty and self-satisfied tone of voice? Is this a thing to say gaily? Is it not, on the contrary, a thing to say sadly, as the saddest thing in the world?

Philip Yancey is the author of many books, including most recently What’s So Amazing About Grace? (Zondervan).

1. I should note that not all evolutionary theorists embrace this school of thought. Notably, Stephen Jay Gould offered a strong critique in successive issues of the New York Review of Books calling the evolutionary psychologists “Darwinian fundamentalists” and “hyper-Darwinian” for their dogged insistence that natural selection alone accounts for all evolutionary development and human behavior.