When I was in college in the early 1970s, anyone interested in reading, studying, and discussing philosophical ideas was likely to read John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, which was published in 1971. I approached Rawls at that time as an economics student and found his adaptation of that branch of economics known as welfare economics, which considers distributive impacts on societal economic welfare, to his views on distributive justice, of great interest. One did not have to agree with everything Rawls postulated or concluded, but the incorporation of aspects of 20th century economic analysis in a philosophical discussion of ethics and justice was illuminating. My particular interest in Rawls' approach was to tax policy, and how it informed a fair tax policy that simultaneously considered the societal benefits of economic growth. Despite Rawls' conclusion that a properly conceived theory of justice contemplates maximizing the welfare of those who are worst off economically (maximin), Rawls recognized that economic differences among individuals were a tolerable consequence of the need to develop incentives to do things that would maximize the welfare of the worst off (the difference principle).
Among the footnotes in A Theory of Justice were references to the work of a young Indian economist, Amartya Sen, who was just making a name for himself in the field of development economics and for his contributions to theory of "social choice." Social choice theory blends both welfare economics and voting theory. It is not surprising then that Rawls' and Sen's professional lives would intersect. Sen's The Idea of Justice is dedicated to the memory of John Rawls, but though The Idea of Justice is an appreciation of Rawls' oeuvre, it is not an endorsement of his Theory of Justice.
Rawls follows the social contract approach to political philosophy, building upon the work of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, which embraces a thought experiment in which the individuals in a society are imagined to agree unanimously on a set of principles that determines their processes and institutions for governing themselves. The imaginary social contract relies heavily on the assumption that individuals will cast aside their cultural, historical, economic, and personal biases in favor of impartiality --- and either agree to cede some of their individual interests in favor of the collective interest, or in Rawls' case, agree to maximize the economic welfare of those who are worst off --- subject to the difference principle. In Rawls' imagination, this agreement is made under the "veil of ignorance," which secures impartiality, perhaps even more impartiality than Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau contemplated. Also central to Rawls' contract is that the individuals who make this agreement will agree that liberty and political equality are values that are central to building just institutions and processes.
Impartiality, liberty, and equality figure in Sen's approach to justice as well, but Sen departs from Rawls' "transcendental" thought experiment and social contract approach which leads to the development of just institutions, and he focuses on how, through what he calls "public reasoning," we identify injustices and make incremental adjustments to more just outcomes in the relationships among people. The story told by Mark Currides in Contempt of Court, which was the subject of the previous December 16, 2010 post, is a type of example of the idea of justice that Sen is talking about. "The need for an accomplishment-based understanding of justice is linked with the argument that justice cannot be indifferent to the lives that people can actually live," Sen writes. "The importance of human lives, experiences, and realizations cannot be supplanted by information about institutions that exist and the rules that operate. Institutions and rules are, of course, very important in influencing what happens, and they are part and parcel of the actual world as well, but the realized actuality goes well beyond the organization picture, and includes the lives that people manage --- or do not manage --- to live." Sen explains that we can understand the differences between these two approaches in two different words for justice found in Sanskrit literature --- niti and nyaya --- the former focuses on organizational and behavioral correctness, while the latter is tied to the world that emerges, not just the organizations and rules that society happens to have. Rawls' "theory of justice" fits with niti, Sen's "idea of justice" is an example of nyaya.
Important to Sen's public reasoning approach to justice is the role of the "impartial spectator," a role-player first conceived by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. There are really two ideas here: self-scrutiny of our individual selves and self-scrutiny of our collective self. And for Sen, this scrutiny also contemplates that other voices --- even outsiders --- who are not part of the dominant culture, economic class, and political structure will be heard and listened to when there are opportunities to identify instances of injustice and take corrective action.
The public reasoning approach to justice leads to another departure from Rawls: it can be expected that it will not lead to unanimous consent for a single overarching principle or set of principles by which to identify injustice --- such as Rawls' "justice as fairness;" it is quite likely that the public reasoning approach will address injustice on many different grounds -- "a plurality of competing principles" such as utilitarianism, economic, political, racial, and religious egalitarianism, or radical libertarianism. And a society faced with competing principles that seeks to find the just solution to a given claim of injustice may only be able to achieve a partial resolution --- just as the United States Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Shipp, discussed in the December 16, 2010 post, represented only a partial resolution of racial injustice in 1906. The current public debate over universal health care access in the United States presents precisely this scenario. "We have good reasons for recognizing that the pursuit of justice is partly a matter of the gradual formation of behavior patterns -- there is no immediate jump from the acceptance of some principles of justice and a total redesign of every one's actual behavior in line with that political conception of justice. In general, the institutions have to be chose not only in line with the nature of the society in question, but also co-dependently on the actual behavior patterns that might be expected even if -- and even after -- a political conception of justice is accepted by all." If only Lenin had considered this approach to justice, he might have spared Russians from a half a century of misery.
Sen makes room for some occasional "agitation" in the pursuit of justice, but it is that kind of agitation that is familiar to democracy: "outrage can be used to motivate, rather than to replace, reasoning." Later, he adds, "The role and reach of reason are not undermined by the indignation that leads us to an investigation of the ideas underlying the nature and basis of the persistent inequities . . ." When we "try to determine how justice can be advanced, there is a basic need for public reasoning, involving arguments coming from different quarters and divergent perspectives that we must expect to be able to settle the conflicting reasons in all cases and arrived at agreed positions on every issue. Complete resolution is neither a requirement of a person's own rationality, nor is it a condition of reasonable social choice, including a reason-based theory of justice."
What I would like to see in another book on this subject whose landscape is as broad as that reviewed and covered by Sen is a discussion of what we are learning from neuroscience, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cultural anthropology about what makes us human, and what makes us particularly social animals. This blog has mentioned a number of recent works from these fields including Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, Michael Gazzaniga's Human, Marco Iaccoboni's Mirroring People, and Frans DeWaal's The Age of Empathy, just to cite a few. Sen's approach to justice could be further informed and enriched by this literature. For humans, our reasoning capabilities are not the only characteristic of the human mind (brain) that causes us to make the choices (both personal and social) that we make. The human brain still carries with it all the evolutionary features that formed the neurological system of preceding species, particularly those that relate to feelings and emotions. Sen, I believe, would be open to this inquiry, because how else do we enrich our knowledge of the kind of "moral sentiments" that were identified by Adam Smith, David Hume, and others whom Sen admires.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Mark Currides and Leroy Phillips, Jr., Contempt of Court (1999)
This is a story about injustice. A true story. And if there was ever a story that seems to support Richard Wrangham's vision of male-dominated societal violence in Demonic Males (see July 1, 2010 post), this could be it. But human violence in this story --- here, a racially-motivated lynching at the beginning of the 20th century --- is not explained by competition for scarce food resources, nor does it appear to be explained by territorial expansion of a group. This is a type of violence that is arguably unique to humans ---the ugly side of our humanity.
This is a story about a crime --- an assault and the rape of a white woman in Chattanooga, Tennessee. No one disputed that nor did anyone assert a justification for this crime. This is also the story of another crime: the unproven accusation that a black man committed the crime and the emotions of a community that would allow any black man, regardless whether he could have committed the crime, to pay the penalty for the first crime. When the accused tried to seek justice through the legal system to the full extent allowed by law, and to which any white man would have been entitled, the criminal justice system conspired to thwart his realization of justice. Before a court --- in this case, the United States Supreme Court --- had its final say, a mob of racial bigots, with the acquiescence of those assigned to protect the accused's rights, grabbed him from his jail, hung him from a bridge over the Tennessee River, and riddled his body with bullets.
I first heard this story last year at a legal ethics program of the Virginia Bar, where the author, Mark Currides, presented the story in order to illustrate a nestful of questions about judicial and attorney ethics issues. The American Bar Association had recently published an article about Currides' book, as it was the 100-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Shipp , the only case involving an actual trial at the Supreme Court. The story of the accused's lawyers is a phenomenal one in the history of American jurisprudence --- both those who were assigned to represent the accused at his criminal trial, and those who took over to pursue his appeals, when the accused was persuaded by his own trial attorneys (and the judge) not to pursue an appeal after a jury had rendererd a guilty verdict at the trial that would surely result in his execution.
Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan persuaded five fellow justices of the Supreme Court to allow the accused an appeal under the Habeas Court Act --- something virtually unheard of in 1906, because it involved federal oversight of a State court proceeding. Harlan was almost unique in his sensitivity to racial justice at that time in history; he dissented in the case of Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld the concept of separate but equal facilities for the different races, in which he penned the statement, "Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." But cases like this, which fortunately are exceptional and now, few, render the artistic depiction of Lady Justice, with blindfold, a wounded representation. Injustice is certainly blind too. It took decades before Justice Harlan's view of "our constitution" was accepted. But the Shipp case was a turning point. Racial lynchings began to decline dramatically after Shipp, when state judicial officers and law enforcement began to realize that the federal government could second-guess their actions and the local community could no longer protect them. And by the time of the school desegregation cases of the 1950s, the federal government was no longer relying on state and local police to protect those who were pursuing their federal rights (as happened in Chattanooga in 1906), but federal troops were sent to protect them.
There is a final contemplative thought to be considered after a reading a book like this: justice often moves at an incremental pace, often too slow in hindsight. Phrases like "with all deliberate speed," which Chief Justice Warren penned in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education remedy opinion, seem to recognize this fact. Contempt of Court is a story sandwiched in between many other stories that document the slow pace of securing racial justice over two centuries in time: for example, covering the period preceding Shipp, Judge Leon Higginbotham's history of the colonial origins of slavery in the United States, In the Matter of Color, Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (1978) and John Quincy Adams' decade-long, yet failed effort from 1835-1845 to get Congress to reconsider the slavery issue before the civil war as reported in William Lee Miller's Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and The Great Battle in the United States Congress (1998), and after Shipp, Richard Kluger's reporting on the judicial battles over racial desegregation in Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Racial Equality (1976). While one of the virtues of a democracy is that its incremental decision-making process makes it possible to gather the consent of the governed and reaffirm the legitimacy of the governing body so that violent conflict is not necessary to resolve critical and disputed issues. But at this stage in our democracy, we should recongize that there are some issues in need of resolution that can't wait as long as democracy may take to respond. Racial inequality and its attendant injustice is one of them, and conflict, including physical conflict, has been resorted to resolve the conflict. It is here that some fundamental principles of justice can help us identify those issues that cry out for impartial resolution at a faster pace, which is the subject of the next book to come of the bookshelf.
This is a story about a crime --- an assault and the rape of a white woman in Chattanooga, Tennessee. No one disputed that nor did anyone assert a justification for this crime. This is also the story of another crime: the unproven accusation that a black man committed the crime and the emotions of a community that would allow any black man, regardless whether he could have committed the crime, to pay the penalty for the first crime. When the accused tried to seek justice through the legal system to the full extent allowed by law, and to which any white man would have been entitled, the criminal justice system conspired to thwart his realization of justice. Before a court --- in this case, the United States Supreme Court --- had its final say, a mob of racial bigots, with the acquiescence of those assigned to protect the accused's rights, grabbed him from his jail, hung him from a bridge over the Tennessee River, and riddled his body with bullets.
I first heard this story last year at a legal ethics program of the Virginia Bar, where the author, Mark Currides, presented the story in order to illustrate a nestful of questions about judicial and attorney ethics issues. The American Bar Association had recently published an article about Currides' book, as it was the 100-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Shipp , the only case involving an actual trial at the Supreme Court. The story of the accused's lawyers is a phenomenal one in the history of American jurisprudence --- both those who were assigned to represent the accused at his criminal trial, and those who took over to pursue his appeals, when the accused was persuaded by his own trial attorneys (and the judge) not to pursue an appeal after a jury had rendererd a guilty verdict at the trial that would surely result in his execution.
Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan persuaded five fellow justices of the Supreme Court to allow the accused an appeal under the Habeas Court Act --- something virtually unheard of in 1906, because it involved federal oversight of a State court proceeding. Harlan was almost unique in his sensitivity to racial justice at that time in history; he dissented in the case of Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld the concept of separate but equal facilities for the different races, in which he penned the statement, "Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." But cases like this, which fortunately are exceptional and now, few, render the artistic depiction of Lady Justice, with blindfold, a wounded representation. Injustice is certainly blind too. It took decades before Justice Harlan's view of "our constitution" was accepted. But the Shipp case was a turning point. Racial lynchings began to decline dramatically after Shipp, when state judicial officers and law enforcement began to realize that the federal government could second-guess their actions and the local community could no longer protect them. And by the time of the school desegregation cases of the 1950s, the federal government was no longer relying on state and local police to protect those who were pursuing their federal rights (as happened in Chattanooga in 1906), but federal troops were sent to protect them.
There is a final contemplative thought to be considered after a reading a book like this: justice often moves at an incremental pace, often too slow in hindsight. Phrases like "with all deliberate speed," which Chief Justice Warren penned in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education remedy opinion, seem to recognize this fact. Contempt of Court is a story sandwiched in between many other stories that document the slow pace of securing racial justice over two centuries in time: for example, covering the period preceding Shipp, Judge Leon Higginbotham's history of the colonial origins of slavery in the United States, In the Matter of Color, Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (1978) and John Quincy Adams' decade-long, yet failed effort from 1835-1845 to get Congress to reconsider the slavery issue before the civil war as reported in William Lee Miller's Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and The Great Battle in the United States Congress (1998), and after Shipp, Richard Kluger's reporting on the judicial battles over racial desegregation in Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Racial Equality (1976). While one of the virtues of a democracy is that its incremental decision-making process makes it possible to gather the consent of the governed and reaffirm the legitimacy of the governing body so that violent conflict is not necessary to resolve critical and disputed issues. But at this stage in our democracy, we should recongize that there are some issues in need of resolution that can't wait as long as democracy may take to respond. Racial inequality and its attendant injustice is one of them, and conflict, including physical conflict, has been resorted to resolve the conflict. It is here that some fundamental principles of justice can help us identify those issues that cry out for impartial resolution at a faster pace, which is the subject of the next book to come of the bookshelf.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Sean B. Carroll, The Making of the Fittest (2006)
This is a wonderful book to read following Genome (November 27, 2010 post). It tells another set of stories derived from sets of three-letter words utilizing combinations of the letters of A, C, G, and T. Published just seven years after the publication of Genome, and written just as the human genome was in its final stages of being decoded, The Making of the Fittest reveals just how much more we have learned about our DNA in such a short period of time.
Sean Carroll is the author of another book, previously published, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which documented the genetic source of both embryonic development as well as physical development outside the embryo after birth. I cited this book in the previous post.
The key words in this volume are chance, selection, and time. As someone who was intrigued and stimulated by French biologist Jacques Monod's book, Chance and Necessity, almost 40 years ago, these three words, and Carroll's interpretation of them in the context of what we now know about DNA and evolution, reaffirm what I have long-believed about randomness and causality: that events in the universe (biological, chemical, and physical) are both random and determined and there is no flawed incongruity in saying so. While randomness may appear to be a function of limited foresight --- cognitive uncertainty and unpredictability, as Ridley suggests in Genome, randomness is neither predestined or (intelligently) designed. Yet hindsight informs us that these same events are part of a causal sequence, many of which are quite orderly and repeatable.
Prior posts on this blog reveal that I am a skeptic of the intelligent designer thesis. (See May 24, 2010 and May 12, 2010 posts). The Making of the Fittest is probably the most devastating condemnation of intelligent design ever published. One cannot read and understand this book without coming to the conclusion that it is simply impossible for any type of intelligence to program life and contemplate mutation and evolution in the manner that it actually occurs. While those in the intelligent design community believe that it is impossible to contemplate the complexity and variability in life without an intelligent designer (a code for God), Carroll demonstrates that it is impossible to contemplate the complexity and variability in life as the output of a design. Theists will condemn this statement as the view of someone who believes that life has no purpose: but theists misunderstand and confuse purpose, which is a psychological event, with random mutation, which is a biological and informational event.
Both Carroll, Ridley and many others have reported that there is a universal common ancestor of all species dating back to billions of year ago, and the species alive today all share common DNA and RNA in their respective genomes that has been copied, translated, inherited, and preserved over the eons. What makes species differ is variety in the genome, and "[t]he source of all variety is mutation." Carroll notes that mutation has several connotations that have led to false impressions about mutation: first, that all mutation is bad and is not creative, and second, that if mutations are random (which he says they are), then a random process cannot account for all the complexity we find in living things today. "This misconception is based upon a failure to distinguish between mutation and selection. The mutational process is blind, natural selection is not. Mutation generates random variation, selection sorts out the winners and losers. Furthermore, natural selection acts cumulatively," says Carroll.
And there are a variety of mutations of the genetic code. The most common is the equivalent of a typographical error in the process of copying the genetic code --- a substitution of one of the four letters for another. But there are also mutations involving deletions of code and insertions of repeating code or duplications. Sometimes these mutations actually mean something --- changing something about the phenotype in which the genetic code resides, but many, many times these changes mean nothing --- they don't change a thing about how the gene works. Some genes simply lose their meaning over time because they are no longer used, and these are called fossil genes. And some mutations that do have meaning simply do not survive to live another generation because selection is neither accomodating nor forgiving. When mutations occur repeatedly and have meaning --- in the sense that it changes something about the phenotype in which it resides --- and selection favors the survival of that mutation, then given enough time (many generations, thousands of years) we can find new species evolving. Carroll has reduced his mantra of chance, selection and time to this expression: "i) given sufficient time, ii) identical or equivalent mutations will arise repeatedly by chance, and iii) their fate (preservation or elimination) will be determined by the conditions of selection upon the traits they affect."
The Making of the Fittest illustrates this proposition through several well-documented examples, but the star in this story are the genes that code for proteins that develop opsins found in photoreceptors in the eye. Opsins are involved in vision and in converting a photon of light into an electrochemical signal that is transmitted along neural pathways --- in humans to the areas of the brain responsible for vision. These genes and their predecessors are very old, and selection has operated on mutations of the genetic code that develop opsins to cause different species to have varying levels of visual acuity, color recognition, and other funcitonal properties.
Life can be described in terms of both variation (complexity) as well as order -- by which I mean that there is repetition and some level of stasis. For some, it is unfathomable that complexity and order can exist absent some intelligent designer. But biological science, chemistry, and even physics establishes that variation and order in living things exist quite well without a designer. Monod's "necessity" is a matter of selection, and for very long periods of time external conditions --- natural environment, predators, and even a given specie's social environment --- are relatively static leading to little or no change that gives rise to the appearance of order. Much in the process by which genetic code is copied over and over again: there are few mistakes and faithful copies of genes are repeatedly made preserving the existing order of things. But beneath the surface of appearances, mutations occur, and these mistakes are not planned, they are not purposeful, and they are random.
Sean Carroll is the author of another book, previously published, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which documented the genetic source of both embryonic development as well as physical development outside the embryo after birth. I cited this book in the previous post.
The key words in this volume are chance, selection, and time. As someone who was intrigued and stimulated by French biologist Jacques Monod's book, Chance and Necessity, almost 40 years ago, these three words, and Carroll's interpretation of them in the context of what we now know about DNA and evolution, reaffirm what I have long-believed about randomness and causality: that events in the universe (biological, chemical, and physical) are both random and determined and there is no flawed incongruity in saying so. While randomness may appear to be a function of limited foresight --- cognitive uncertainty and unpredictability, as Ridley suggests in Genome, randomness is neither predestined or (intelligently) designed. Yet hindsight informs us that these same events are part of a causal sequence, many of which are quite orderly and repeatable.
Prior posts on this blog reveal that I am a skeptic of the intelligent designer thesis. (See May 24, 2010 and May 12, 2010 posts). The Making of the Fittest is probably the most devastating condemnation of intelligent design ever published. One cannot read and understand this book without coming to the conclusion that it is simply impossible for any type of intelligence to program life and contemplate mutation and evolution in the manner that it actually occurs. While those in the intelligent design community believe that it is impossible to contemplate the complexity and variability in life without an intelligent designer (a code for God), Carroll demonstrates that it is impossible to contemplate the complexity and variability in life as the output of a design. Theists will condemn this statement as the view of someone who believes that life has no purpose: but theists misunderstand and confuse purpose, which is a psychological event, with random mutation, which is a biological and informational event.
Both Carroll, Ridley and many others have reported that there is a universal common ancestor of all species dating back to billions of year ago, and the species alive today all share common DNA and RNA in their respective genomes that has been copied, translated, inherited, and preserved over the eons. What makes species differ is variety in the genome, and "[t]he source of all variety is mutation." Carroll notes that mutation has several connotations that have led to false impressions about mutation: first, that all mutation is bad and is not creative, and second, that if mutations are random (which he says they are), then a random process cannot account for all the complexity we find in living things today. "This misconception is based upon a failure to distinguish between mutation and selection. The mutational process is blind, natural selection is not. Mutation generates random variation, selection sorts out the winners and losers. Furthermore, natural selection acts cumulatively," says Carroll.
And there are a variety of mutations of the genetic code. The most common is the equivalent of a typographical error in the process of copying the genetic code --- a substitution of one of the four letters for another. But there are also mutations involving deletions of code and insertions of repeating code or duplications. Sometimes these mutations actually mean something --- changing something about the phenotype in which the genetic code resides, but many, many times these changes mean nothing --- they don't change a thing about how the gene works. Some genes simply lose their meaning over time because they are no longer used, and these are called fossil genes. And some mutations that do have meaning simply do not survive to live another generation because selection is neither accomodating nor forgiving. When mutations occur repeatedly and have meaning --- in the sense that it changes something about the phenotype in which it resides --- and selection favors the survival of that mutation, then given enough time (many generations, thousands of years) we can find new species evolving. Carroll has reduced his mantra of chance, selection and time to this expression: "i) given sufficient time, ii) identical or equivalent mutations will arise repeatedly by chance, and iii) their fate (preservation or elimination) will be determined by the conditions of selection upon the traits they affect."
The Making of the Fittest illustrates this proposition through several well-documented examples, but the star in this story are the genes that code for proteins that develop opsins found in photoreceptors in the eye. Opsins are involved in vision and in converting a photon of light into an electrochemical signal that is transmitted along neural pathways --- in humans to the areas of the brain responsible for vision. These genes and their predecessors are very old, and selection has operated on mutations of the genetic code that develop opsins to cause different species to have varying levels of visual acuity, color recognition, and other funcitonal properties.
Life can be described in terms of both variation (complexity) as well as order -- by which I mean that there is repetition and some level of stasis. For some, it is unfathomable that complexity and order can exist absent some intelligent designer. But biological science, chemistry, and even physics establishes that variation and order in living things exist quite well without a designer. Monod's "necessity" is a matter of selection, and for very long periods of time external conditions --- natural environment, predators, and even a given specie's social environment --- are relatively static leading to little or no change that gives rise to the appearance of order. Much in the process by which genetic code is copied over and over again: there are few mistakes and faithful copies of genes are repeatedly made preserving the existing order of things. But beneath the surface of appearances, mutations occur, and these mistakes are not planned, they are not purposeful, and they are random.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Matt Ridley, Genome (1999)
A television show, Law and Order, opens each episode with a narrative line about the role of the police and prosecutors in the criminal justice system, which closes, "And these are their stories." Matt Ridley might have opened Genome by stating, "There are 23 chromosomes that make up the human genome, and each have special roles (plural) in determining or influencing our development, our physical attributes, our behavior, the kind of diseases we suffer or have immunity from, how long we might live, and when we might die. And these are their stories." Don't misunderstand me. Genome is not a complete encyclopedia of either genomics or the human genome. Just 23 interesting stories from one of the world's fine science writers, each story artfully tied to one of the 23 human chromosomes, from largest to smallest, covering topics such as life, species, history, fate, environment, intelligence, instinct, self-interest, sex, disease, stress, personality, development, life and death, memory, gene therapy, politics and ethics, eugenics, free will and determinism. The breadth of the subject-matter covered by this volume speaks to almost all of the topics covered by the books previously described in this blog, including a central theme: that units of information are the most fundamental units of life. (See September 28, 2010 post).
Ridley calls the genome a book, the chromosome a chapter, the gene a story, an exon a paragraph, a codon a word consisting of three letters, and a base is a letter, either (in the case of DNA) an A, C, G, or T (or U in the case of RNA), for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, each consisting of one or two aromatic rings and arrangements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and/or oxygen atoms. These chemical units are the basic units of information that comprise life forms, but alone they do not give rise to life. What gives rise to life is (1) the pairing of these letters along a double helix that makes up DNA, and (2) their subsequent transcription into RNA to form three letter codons, which, (3) are subsequently "translated" into a specific amino acid depending on which three of the four letters are transcribed and their sequence. (4) The particular chain of amino acids creates a protein. By this process, it is said that "genes" code for "proteins." While the RNA amino acid chains may have been the earliest form of life, "life" as we know it received a boost with the creation of cellular membranes to form the first cells that carried the proteins containing genetic information central for the cell's organization. This development is still not fully understood.
This ability of the genes to copy themselves, read and transmit their story, under the right conditions, is the ability to create another life form. My son once asked asked me, "What is Life?" a question posed in his high school biology class, and I replied that at its most fundamental level it is carbon-based, with a mechanism to replicate itself. The only two things I would add, consistent with the very first book discussed in this blog, Seth Lloyd's Programming the Universe (see August 17, 2009 post) is the ability of these units of information to communicate among themselves --- an electrochemical means --- to say "Let's stick together," or "Let's avoid each other," and then to store itself as if in memory. This is what we find in the genome, whatever the species.
This story never ceases to amaze me. Life began with RNA --- which by itself can replicate itself, and translate and transmit its meaning, as well as catalyze with --- break up or join with --- other chemicals, creating amino acids and proteins. The storage device for these words and paragraphs is DNA. An RNA gene found on chromosome 1 translates the information found in DNA to proteins, which become the primary agent for carrying out the direction specified by the information contained in the genes within a cell.
I cannot cover every "chapter" in Genome, but four topics that reappear throughout this blog --- so we can connect the dots --- are important in my mind: (1) is behavior found in our genes? (2) the role of our genes in our development after birth, (3) human memory and the mind; and (4) determinism vs. free will.
Is behavior found in our genes? This topic was first confronted in the post on Richard Powers' novel Generosity (November 30, 2009 post), Frans DeWaal's The Ape and The Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post), and subsequently Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (October 13, 2010 post). The answer then, as it is now, is no. There is no gene for spitting or laughing or speaking English or for believing in a god. What genes do code for enables or influences behavior, but they do not determine specific behavior. Just as it would be incorrect to say that behavior is entirely written in our genes, it would also be incorrect to state that behavior is entirely attributable to environment, including the nurturing, learning, social and cultural environments. Behavior is the outcome of the genome that defines us and the environment in which we develop and live.
Ridley notes the significance of instinct, something which was important to Darwin in The Origin of Species. Behavior that is instinctive to a species is arguably heavily enabled or influenced by genetic information. So we may refer to a language instinct, to borrow Steven Pinker's words, but a language instinct does not develop without some environmental influence. The genes that become proteins instruct the creation of the mouth, the tongue, and the air passages that enable human speech, and further instruct in the creation of the modules of the brain and the neuronal pathways between them that enable human speech and perhaps even language syntax. But at some point in the course of a life, learning takes over. The ability to learn --- social behavior --- is also something that is enabled or influenced by genetic information, but genes are not the end of the story.
The role of genes in development. This story was detailed in Sean Carroll's book Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which accounted for the role of the Hox and hedgehog genes in providing a program for both embyonic development and development after birth. These genes regulate cell division, the timing at which genes are switched on to control development, and determine such things as symmetry in the body of an animal, where arms, legs, antennae, fins, fingers and the like appear. Ridley retells this story on Chromosome 12. This is one of the most fascinating stories in evolutionary genetics as these are among the oldest of genes.
Memory. One of the more important subjects in the study of the brain is its plasticity, the brain's ability to change by removing, adding or strengthening neural connections. "When you learn something," Ridley notes, "you alter the physical network of your brain so as to create new, tight connections where there were none or weaker ones before." Connections between never cells "not only provide the mechanism of memory, but are memory." Ridley is not clear on how specific genes are tied to learning and memory, but he suggests that proteins connected with certain genes "are probably needed for holding the synapse closely together." We know more about the process by which memories are created and stored in the brain: sensory information is received in the perirhinal cortex found in the medial temporal lobe and sent to the hippocampus and to the diencephalon for temporary storage. If the information is significant enough for more permanent storage, it is sent back to the neo-cortex as long-term memory. Eric Kandel's research, documented in his memoir, In Search of Memory, traces the electro-chemical process in the brain by which connections between the neuronal connections at the synapses of neurons are strengthened.
Learning "is the opposite of instinct," Ridley says. "Instinct is genetically-determined behavior; learning is behavior modified by experience. . . .Human beings achieve by instinct the same things that animals do. We crawl, stand, walk, cry and blink in just as instinctive a way as a chick. We employ learning only for the extra things we have grafted on to the animal instincts: things like reading, driving, banking and shopping." Consciousness, Ridley quotes another, "is to enable [the child] to learn things which natural heredity fails to transmit." The brain is created by genes that designed the brain to be modified by experience.
Determinism vs free-will. The final chapter is almost whimsical --not truly a story about Chromosome 23, but an excuse to pontificate on whether free-will is possible given that a combination of genetics and the environment seems to determine everything about us. Free-will, in my view, if it exists, is enabled by the brain --- it is tied to the same type of issues that Ridley discusses in connection with learning and memory. Human behavior, says Ridley, is unpredictable in the short-term, but quite predictable in the long-term. As an example, he cites that at any given time during a day one can choose to eat or not to eat, but over the course of a day one will have to eat. When one eats is a function of genetic and external influences that makes behavior unpredictable, but not undetermined. "Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism:" being able to control voluntary movement in the gap between short-term when behavior is unpredictable and the long-term when it is predictably determined, It is in the brain of humans, and perhaps some other animals, that the ability to control voluntarily movement is found. And genes have enabled this ability in the design of the brain.
Ridley calls the genome a book, the chromosome a chapter, the gene a story, an exon a paragraph, a codon a word consisting of three letters, and a base is a letter, either (in the case of DNA) an A, C, G, or T (or U in the case of RNA), for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, each consisting of one or two aromatic rings and arrangements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and/or oxygen atoms. These chemical units are the basic units of information that comprise life forms, but alone they do not give rise to life. What gives rise to life is (1) the pairing of these letters along a double helix that makes up DNA, and (2) their subsequent transcription into RNA to form three letter codons, which, (3) are subsequently "translated" into a specific amino acid depending on which three of the four letters are transcribed and their sequence. (4) The particular chain of amino acids creates a protein. By this process, it is said that "genes" code for "proteins." While the RNA amino acid chains may have been the earliest form of life, "life" as we know it received a boost with the creation of cellular membranes to form the first cells that carried the proteins containing genetic information central for the cell's organization. This development is still not fully understood.
This ability of the genes to copy themselves, read and transmit their story, under the right conditions, is the ability to create another life form. My son once asked asked me, "What is Life?" a question posed in his high school biology class, and I replied that at its most fundamental level it is carbon-based, with a mechanism to replicate itself. The only two things I would add, consistent with the very first book discussed in this blog, Seth Lloyd's Programming the Universe (see August 17, 2009 post) is the ability of these units of information to communicate among themselves --- an electrochemical means --- to say "Let's stick together," or "Let's avoid each other," and then to store itself as if in memory. This is what we find in the genome, whatever the species.
This story never ceases to amaze me. Life began with RNA --- which by itself can replicate itself, and translate and transmit its meaning, as well as catalyze with --- break up or join with --- other chemicals, creating amino acids and proteins. The storage device for these words and paragraphs is DNA. An RNA gene found on chromosome 1 translates the information found in DNA to proteins, which become the primary agent for carrying out the direction specified by the information contained in the genes within a cell.
I cannot cover every "chapter" in Genome, but four topics that reappear throughout this blog --- so we can connect the dots --- are important in my mind: (1) is behavior found in our genes? (2) the role of our genes in our development after birth, (3) human memory and the mind; and (4) determinism vs. free will.
Is behavior found in our genes? This topic was first confronted in the post on Richard Powers' novel Generosity (November 30, 2009 post), Frans DeWaal's The Ape and The Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post), and subsequently Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (October 13, 2010 post). The answer then, as it is now, is no. There is no gene for spitting or laughing or speaking English or for believing in a god. What genes do code for enables or influences behavior, but they do not determine specific behavior. Just as it would be incorrect to say that behavior is entirely written in our genes, it would also be incorrect to state that behavior is entirely attributable to environment, including the nurturing, learning, social and cultural environments. Behavior is the outcome of the genome that defines us and the environment in which we develop and live.
Ridley notes the significance of instinct, something which was important to Darwin in The Origin of Species. Behavior that is instinctive to a species is arguably heavily enabled or influenced by genetic information. So we may refer to a language instinct, to borrow Steven Pinker's words, but a language instinct does not develop without some environmental influence. The genes that become proteins instruct the creation of the mouth, the tongue, and the air passages that enable human speech, and further instruct in the creation of the modules of the brain and the neuronal pathways between them that enable human speech and perhaps even language syntax. But at some point in the course of a life, learning takes over. The ability to learn --- social behavior --- is also something that is enabled or influenced by genetic information, but genes are not the end of the story.
The role of genes in development. This story was detailed in Sean Carroll's book Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which accounted for the role of the Hox and hedgehog genes in providing a program for both embyonic development and development after birth. These genes regulate cell division, the timing at which genes are switched on to control development, and determine such things as symmetry in the body of an animal, where arms, legs, antennae, fins, fingers and the like appear. Ridley retells this story on Chromosome 12. This is one of the most fascinating stories in evolutionary genetics as these are among the oldest of genes.
Memory. One of the more important subjects in the study of the brain is its plasticity, the brain's ability to change by removing, adding or strengthening neural connections. "When you learn something," Ridley notes, "you alter the physical network of your brain so as to create new, tight connections where there were none or weaker ones before." Connections between never cells "not only provide the mechanism of memory, but are memory." Ridley is not clear on how specific genes are tied to learning and memory, but he suggests that proteins connected with certain genes "are probably needed for holding the synapse closely together." We know more about the process by which memories are created and stored in the brain: sensory information is received in the perirhinal cortex found in the medial temporal lobe and sent to the hippocampus and to the diencephalon for temporary storage. If the information is significant enough for more permanent storage, it is sent back to the neo-cortex as long-term memory. Eric Kandel's research, documented in his memoir, In Search of Memory, traces the electro-chemical process in the brain by which connections between the neuronal connections at the synapses of neurons are strengthened.
Learning "is the opposite of instinct," Ridley says. "Instinct is genetically-determined behavior; learning is behavior modified by experience. . . .Human beings achieve by instinct the same things that animals do. We crawl, stand, walk, cry and blink in just as instinctive a way as a chick. We employ learning only for the extra things we have grafted on to the animal instincts: things like reading, driving, banking and shopping." Consciousness, Ridley quotes another, "is to enable [the child] to learn things which natural heredity fails to transmit." The brain is created by genes that designed the brain to be modified by experience.
Determinism vs free-will. The final chapter is almost whimsical --not truly a story about Chromosome 23, but an excuse to pontificate on whether free-will is possible given that a combination of genetics and the environment seems to determine everything about us. Free-will, in my view, if it exists, is enabled by the brain --- it is tied to the same type of issues that Ridley discusses in connection with learning and memory. Human behavior, says Ridley, is unpredictable in the short-term, but quite predictable in the long-term. As an example, he cites that at any given time during a day one can choose to eat or not to eat, but over the course of a day one will have to eat. When one eats is a function of genetic and external influences that makes behavior unpredictable, but not undetermined. "Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism:" being able to control voluntary movement in the gap between short-term when behavior is unpredictable and the long-term when it is predictably determined, It is in the brain of humans, and perhaps some other animals, that the ability to control voluntarily movement is found. And genes have enabled this ability in the design of the brain.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald, Pictures of the Mind (2010)
Until the 1990s, much of what we knew about specific parts of the brain came from clinical observations occurring in the course of evaluating patients who had suffered brain lesions or other trauma. The neurologist knew that a certain part of the patient's brain had been damaged and knew that the patient's behavior was altered in some way. From these observations, the expert could conclude that the damaged part of the brain had some role in the emotional and/or cognitive life of the patient and generalize. Autopsies could, in some cases, lead to similar kinds of findings. But there are ethical limitations on intruding too deeply into the brain of a living patient unless it is essential to the patient's welfare. Michael Gazzaniga discusses these limitations in his book Human (September 27, 2009 post).
Imaging technology --- particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) --- has changed that, and Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald introduces that technology to explore how much we have learned about the brain, memory, our humanness and sense of self, and psychiatric therapy in just the past 20 years. She also explores the role of imaging technology and brain scans in the courtroom, as criminal defendants seek to excuse their antisocial behavior and explain that excuse to a jury.
Boleyn-Fitzgerald's book is not a bad follow-on to De Waal's Age of Empathy (see previous post), as imaging technology has been useful to see the brain's reaction to perceptions of others in pain. But there is almost a new-age component to this book, a suggestion that imaging technology will confirm that Eastern contemplative traditions --- in contrast to Judaeo Christian religious traditions --- are more closely linked to our mental welfare. Confirming what DeWaal noted, Boleyn-Fitzgerald reports "the insula --- a part of the limbic system that serves as the key interface between physical sensations and emotions --- and in the temporal parietal junction, which appears to play an important role in processing and understanding the emotional states of others" are associated with compassion and empathy. The fMRI research also shows that these areas of the brain are also very active when Buddhist monks meditate, and, when combined with knowledge of the brain's plasticity, these associations suggests that the brain may be trainable (particularly in younger ages) through meditative therapy to learn to become more empathetic and less self-centered. That is the primary message that Boleyn-Fitzgerald delivers here --- what we learn from scanning the brain will inform us better about methods or strategies to promote mental and social health.
Medical imaging technology has played a role in identifying the parts of the brain that control our decision-making and the formation of judgments. Consistent with Gazzaniga's research as reported in Human, as well as the research of Antonio Damassio and Marc Hauser, there is a predispostion founded in feelings and emotional responses --- not utilitarian calculation --- for the mind to solve moral dilemmas in a manner that is not inconsistent with the moral rules societies tend to live by. Imaging studies support this research.
"One property of human consciousness," Boleyn-Fitzgerald writes, "emerging from the scanners --- one fact that now seems inarguable --- is that the neural activity associated with the subjective experience of self cannot be located in a single area of the brain. This finding matches what we now know about the entanglement of neural circuits associated with emotion, cognition, memory, and moral decision-making." Our brain is decentralized, and there are separate parts of the brain that the scanners show are activated when "I" is acting and feeling in the present and "me" is trying to explain and understand what is happening. Gazzaniga explained this in terms of one part of the brain telling a story about ourselves, and the other part of the brain tries to interpret our story. Knowing this, Boleyn-Fitzgerald believes, will better enable us to know our "self" and our "identity," and assist in our ability to regulate our self.
Imaging technology --- particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) --- has changed that, and Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald introduces that technology to explore how much we have learned about the brain, memory, our humanness and sense of self, and psychiatric therapy in just the past 20 years. She also explores the role of imaging technology and brain scans in the courtroom, as criminal defendants seek to excuse their antisocial behavior and explain that excuse to a jury.
Boleyn-Fitzgerald's book is not a bad follow-on to De Waal's Age of Empathy (see previous post), as imaging technology has been useful to see the brain's reaction to perceptions of others in pain. But there is almost a new-age component to this book, a suggestion that imaging technology will confirm that Eastern contemplative traditions --- in contrast to Judaeo Christian religious traditions --- are more closely linked to our mental welfare. Confirming what DeWaal noted, Boleyn-Fitzgerald reports "the insula --- a part of the limbic system that serves as the key interface between physical sensations and emotions --- and in the temporal parietal junction, which appears to play an important role in processing and understanding the emotional states of others" are associated with compassion and empathy. The fMRI research also shows that these areas of the brain are also very active when Buddhist monks meditate, and, when combined with knowledge of the brain's plasticity, these associations suggests that the brain may be trainable (particularly in younger ages) through meditative therapy to learn to become more empathetic and less self-centered. That is the primary message that Boleyn-Fitzgerald delivers here --- what we learn from scanning the brain will inform us better about methods or strategies to promote mental and social health.
Medical imaging technology has played a role in identifying the parts of the brain that control our decision-making and the formation of judgments. Consistent with Gazzaniga's research as reported in Human, as well as the research of Antonio Damassio and Marc Hauser, there is a predispostion founded in feelings and emotional responses --- not utilitarian calculation --- for the mind to solve moral dilemmas in a manner that is not inconsistent with the moral rules societies tend to live by. Imaging studies support this research.
"One property of human consciousness," Boleyn-Fitzgerald writes, "emerging from the scanners --- one fact that now seems inarguable --- is that the neural activity associated with the subjective experience of self cannot be located in a single area of the brain. This finding matches what we now know about the entanglement of neural circuits associated with emotion, cognition, memory, and moral decision-making." Our brain is decentralized, and there are separate parts of the brain that the scanners show are activated when "I" is acting and feeling in the present and "me" is trying to explain and understand what is happening. Gazzaniga explained this in terms of one part of the brain telling a story about ourselves, and the other part of the brain tries to interpret our story. Knowing this, Boleyn-Fitzgerald believes, will better enable us to know our "self" and our "identity," and assist in our ability to regulate our self.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Frans DeWaal, The Age of Empathy (2009)
Good book. Poorly chosen title. Whether DeWaal chose the title The Age of Empathy or the publisher thrust it upon him, it was clearly inspired by the euphoria following the November 2008 election of Barack Obama as President of the United States as though the election launched a new era of human behavior. He shares a similar hope with Jose Saramago's hope for a kinder, social society as expressed in The Notebook (September 28, 2010 post). Now, two years later, on the heels of the midterm elections in the United States, empathy is hardly a name that I would assign to these times.
Nor does the title align well with one of De Waal's essential points about human duality, which is illustrated in the following passage:
"Humans are bipolar apes. We have something of the gentle, sexy bonobo, which we may like to emulate, but not too much; otherwise the world might turn into one giant hippie fest of flower power and free love. Happy we might be, but productive perhaps not. And our species also has something of the brutal, domineering chimpanzee, a side we may wish to suppress, but not completely, because how else would we conquer new frontiers and defend our borders? One could argue that there would be no problem if all of humanity turned peaceful at the same time, but no population is stable unless it's immune to invasions by mutants."
Even De Waal admits that empathy --- the ability to identify with and feel a connectedness to another --- is as much a part of us (and other species) as selfishness, violence, and egocentrism. "I rate humans among the most aggressive primates," he writes, "but also believe that we're masters at connecting and that social ties constrain competition. In other words, we are by no means obligatorily aggressive. It's all a matter of balance: Pure, unconditional trust and cooperation are naive and detrimental, whereas unconditional greed can only lead to the sort of dog-eat-dog that Skilling advocated at Enron until it collapsed under its own weight." So contrary to the opening line of the book, "Greed is out, empathy is in," there will never be an "age" dominated by empathy or any other single other characteristic of our personality.
Our capacity for cooperation, altruism, and other social instincts is certainly biological, and it is a product of evolution. We have much to learn about what makes us human from learning about the behavior of other species from which humans evolved as we do from observing our own behavior. This is De Waal's primary thesis. And this thesis is no stranger to this blog and previous posts, including De Waal's own The Ape and the Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post), Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (October 13, 2010 post), Dacher Keltner's Born to Be Good (July 16, 2010 post), Holldobler and Wilson's The Superorganism (November 4, 2009 post), Michael Gazzaniga's Human (September 27, 2009), Marco Iacobonni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), and Christine Kennealy's The First Word (August 31, 2009 post).
De Waal takes aim at three myths: (1) the myth that our ancestors --- 4 foot bipedal apes --- ruled the savanna in Africa; (2) that human society is a voluntary creation of autonomous men; and (3) that our species has been waging war for as long as it has been around. Our ancestors were likely both prey and predator and survival favored genes that encouraged collaboration and companionship. The idea that humans were autonomous falsely presumes they had no need for anybody else and could voluntarily choose to live apart, uncommitted to anyone else or any place. A warlike initial state of nature that philosophers like Rousseau imagined that was overcome by social compacts is actually the reverse of human evolution: war on a grand scale, like we have known for centuries, came only after social hierarchies were formed and wealth was created. The early human species was probably defined more by social commitments and small scale collaboration that promoted primitive economic exchange and division of labor.
At the biological core of our humanness is the limbic system, which, from an evolutionary perspective, is one of the oldest parts of our neural network in the human brain. It is a part of the brains of other species as well. Antonio Damassio identifies the limbic system as a critical regulator of feelings and emotions in The Feeling of What Happens, and it is central to understanding human consciousness. De Waal says the limbic system allows emotions such as affection and pleasure, and paved the way for family life, friendships, and other caring relationships. Other parts of our neural network allow us to store memories of these feelings and emotions and allow us to recall the context in which we previously experienced them and then to "understand" them. A key line here is De Waal's statement, "Bodily connections come first --- understanding follows." Mirror neurons, as described in Iacobonni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), are active in these other parts of the neural network known as the brain that allow us to "read" the minds of others, enabling us to connect with others, and facilitate the the experience we call empathy. "De Waal calls this emotional contagion: seeing another's emotions arouses our own emotions, and then we build "a more advanced understanding of another's situation." Later, he adds, "Empathy engages brain areas that are more than a hundred million years old. The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might want or need."
True to his dualism, just as De Waal recognizes that emotional contagion probably starts immediately with the mother-child relationship and that early communication fosters a bond, a second phase begins just months later in the course of child development when the child begins to develop a sense of self. And empathy, De Waal believes, "requires both mental mirroring and mental separation." The former occurs when we see another person in a particular emotional state. The latter occurs when we parse our own emotional state from the other, and this allows us to "pinpoint the actual source of our own feelings." De Waal attributes our dualism to the existence of VEN cells in the brain --- Von Economo neurons --- that differ from other neurons and are unique to humans and their recent ancestors. Physically, VEN cells are long and spindle-like and reach deeper into the brain. Research shows that when parts of the human brain that contain these cells are damaged, behavior is marked by a loss of perspective-taking, empathy, embarrassment, and future orientation. Besides humans and certain apes, these cells are also found in dolphins, whales, and elephants, where behavioral research shows they have the capacity for empathy that is not found in other species.
De Waal frets that the reluctance of some segments of human society to talk about animal emotions has "less to do with science than religion." Eastern religions, which tend to embrace the connectedness between humans and other species, don't show this reluctance, but the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim religions tend to place humans on a pedestal as the only intelligent life on earth and show greater reluctance to connect themselves to other species as opposed to abstract spirits that purportedly have equal or greater intelligence. De Waal believes this is because of their origin in an existence where humans were desert nomads --- where other animal life was sparse compared to other geographic regions on earth.
From our capacity for empathy evolves reciprocal behavior and ultimately altruistic social rules. But given the dualism that reflects both our empathetic self and our self-centered self, we also have competitive behavior and ultimately social rules to regulate that competition. This leads De Waal to identify two types of fairness principles that are at the core of these social rules: fairness that seeks a level playing field (equality) and fairness that links rewards to effort, and both are "essential," De Waal says.
My observation is that the pendulum swings between the two types of fairness --- one which is grounded in empathy and the other which is grounded in the sense of self. One type of fairness does not displace the other entirely. So if this was the Age of Empathy, the Age of Greed and Discord is merely sublimated for a period of time. But De Waal appears to be the optimist in contrast to Jose Saramago, the pessimist, on this point, whom I quoted in The Notebook (September 28, 2010 post), concluding, "It is most likely, however, that there is no remedy for any of the above and that civilizations will continue to collide, one against the other."
Nor does the title align well with one of De Waal's essential points about human duality, which is illustrated in the following passage:
"Humans are bipolar apes. We have something of the gentle, sexy bonobo, which we may like to emulate, but not too much; otherwise the world might turn into one giant hippie fest of flower power and free love. Happy we might be, but productive perhaps not. And our species also has something of the brutal, domineering chimpanzee, a side we may wish to suppress, but not completely, because how else would we conquer new frontiers and defend our borders? One could argue that there would be no problem if all of humanity turned peaceful at the same time, but no population is stable unless it's immune to invasions by mutants."
Even De Waal admits that empathy --- the ability to identify with and feel a connectedness to another --- is as much a part of us (and other species) as selfishness, violence, and egocentrism. "I rate humans among the most aggressive primates," he writes, "but also believe that we're masters at connecting and that social ties constrain competition. In other words, we are by no means obligatorily aggressive. It's all a matter of balance: Pure, unconditional trust and cooperation are naive and detrimental, whereas unconditional greed can only lead to the sort of dog-eat-dog that Skilling advocated at Enron until it collapsed under its own weight." So contrary to the opening line of the book, "Greed is out, empathy is in," there will never be an "age" dominated by empathy or any other single other characteristic of our personality.
Our capacity for cooperation, altruism, and other social instincts is certainly biological, and it is a product of evolution. We have much to learn about what makes us human from learning about the behavior of other species from which humans evolved as we do from observing our own behavior. This is De Waal's primary thesis. And this thesis is no stranger to this blog and previous posts, including De Waal's own The Ape and the Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post), Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (October 13, 2010 post), Dacher Keltner's Born to Be Good (July 16, 2010 post), Holldobler and Wilson's The Superorganism (November 4, 2009 post), Michael Gazzaniga's Human (September 27, 2009), Marco Iacobonni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), and Christine Kennealy's The First Word (August 31, 2009 post).
De Waal takes aim at three myths: (1) the myth that our ancestors --- 4 foot bipedal apes --- ruled the savanna in Africa; (2) that human society is a voluntary creation of autonomous men; and (3) that our species has been waging war for as long as it has been around. Our ancestors were likely both prey and predator and survival favored genes that encouraged collaboration and companionship. The idea that humans were autonomous falsely presumes they had no need for anybody else and could voluntarily choose to live apart, uncommitted to anyone else or any place. A warlike initial state of nature that philosophers like Rousseau imagined that was overcome by social compacts is actually the reverse of human evolution: war on a grand scale, like we have known for centuries, came only after social hierarchies were formed and wealth was created. The early human species was probably defined more by social commitments and small scale collaboration that promoted primitive economic exchange and division of labor.
At the biological core of our humanness is the limbic system, which, from an evolutionary perspective, is one of the oldest parts of our neural network in the human brain. It is a part of the brains of other species as well. Antonio Damassio identifies the limbic system as a critical regulator of feelings and emotions in The Feeling of What Happens, and it is central to understanding human consciousness. De Waal says the limbic system allows emotions such as affection and pleasure, and paved the way for family life, friendships, and other caring relationships. Other parts of our neural network allow us to store memories of these feelings and emotions and allow us to recall the context in which we previously experienced them and then to "understand" them. A key line here is De Waal's statement, "Bodily connections come first --- understanding follows." Mirror neurons, as described in Iacobonni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), are active in these other parts of the neural network known as the brain that allow us to "read" the minds of others, enabling us to connect with others, and facilitate the the experience we call empathy. "De Waal calls this emotional contagion: seeing another's emotions arouses our own emotions, and then we build "a more advanced understanding of another's situation." Later, he adds, "Empathy engages brain areas that are more than a hundred million years old. The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might want or need."
True to his dualism, just as De Waal recognizes that emotional contagion probably starts immediately with the mother-child relationship and that early communication fosters a bond, a second phase begins just months later in the course of child development when the child begins to develop a sense of self. And empathy, De Waal believes, "requires both mental mirroring and mental separation." The former occurs when we see another person in a particular emotional state. The latter occurs when we parse our own emotional state from the other, and this allows us to "pinpoint the actual source of our own feelings." De Waal attributes our dualism to the existence of VEN cells in the brain --- Von Economo neurons --- that differ from other neurons and are unique to humans and their recent ancestors. Physically, VEN cells are long and spindle-like and reach deeper into the brain. Research shows that when parts of the human brain that contain these cells are damaged, behavior is marked by a loss of perspective-taking, empathy, embarrassment, and future orientation. Besides humans and certain apes, these cells are also found in dolphins, whales, and elephants, where behavioral research shows they have the capacity for empathy that is not found in other species.
De Waal frets that the reluctance of some segments of human society to talk about animal emotions has "less to do with science than religion." Eastern religions, which tend to embrace the connectedness between humans and other species, don't show this reluctance, but the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim religions tend to place humans on a pedestal as the only intelligent life on earth and show greater reluctance to connect themselves to other species as opposed to abstract spirits that purportedly have equal or greater intelligence. De Waal believes this is because of their origin in an existence where humans were desert nomads --- where other animal life was sparse compared to other geographic regions on earth.
From our capacity for empathy evolves reciprocal behavior and ultimately altruistic social rules. But given the dualism that reflects both our empathetic self and our self-centered self, we also have competitive behavior and ultimately social rules to regulate that competition. This leads De Waal to identify two types of fairness principles that are at the core of these social rules: fairness that seeks a level playing field (equality) and fairness that links rewards to effort, and both are "essential," De Waal says.
My observation is that the pendulum swings between the two types of fairness --- one which is grounded in empathy and the other which is grounded in the sense of self. One type of fairness does not displace the other entirely. So if this was the Age of Empathy, the Age of Greed and Discord is merely sublimated for a period of time. But De Waal appears to be the optimist in contrast to Jose Saramago, the pessimist, on this point, whom I quoted in The Notebook (September 28, 2010 post), concluding, "It is most likely, however, that there is no remedy for any of the above and that civilizations will continue to collide, one against the other."
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Oren Harman, The Price of Altruism (2010)
Is behavior genetically determined? This was a question that was posed in in Richard Powers' Generosity (see November 30, 2009 post), and the answer that still makes sense after reading the Price of Altruism is that specific behavior --- whether human or nonhuman --- is not genetic, but that the attrinutes that genes actually code for contain information that enable or predispose species to certain types of behavior. Environment and nurture (learning) transmit information to us as well --- above and beyond the information transmitted by genes --- and they also influence behavior.
The Price of Altruism is a wonderful title for this book --- a double entendre --- reflecting the author's mission to tell the story of one of the brightest persons of the 20th century that nobody really knew, George Price, and to tell the story of the efforts of numerous professionals in science and the social sciences to determine just who we humans are and how did we become who we are, a story that is told in various ways in a number of other books previously discussed in this blog. The behavioral mystery that George Price and the others whose intellectual pursuits paralleled that of Price --- including Bill Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, Robert Trivers, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Frans deWaal, and others --- sought to unravel is why do humans behave altruistically, even if it means that the altruistic choice sacrifices the survival of the individual? In this context, the "price" of altruism refers to sacrifice, or alternatively, reciprocal exchanges that encourage cooperation rather than competition.
Central to this inquiry is whether "moral" behavior has a genetic origin, and, if so, what is the evolutionary mechanism that selects for moral behavior? Or is moral behavior the consequence of environment, and can humans and other animals shape their environment to yield a certain behavioral pattern?
George Price seemed the unlikeliest of persons to be a player in this inquiry. He cannot seem to devote himself to a single subject of interest for more than a year before moving onto the next. Price, a veritable Forrest Gump of intellectual inquiry --- he was involved with the Manhattan Project, could be found at Bell Labs at the time of the development of the transistor and knew Claude Shannon (see August 23, 2009 post), he developed something he called the Design Machine, a forerunner of CAD-CAM design software that led him briefly to work at IBM, and he dabbled in economics, game theory, and psychology (ESP), even though he had no training in those subjects either. Nothing seemed to intrigue him longer than a year or two and in his personal life he was simply not committed to anything, at least for any significant period of time. Price left the United States for London in 1967 with no particular goal in mind, until he became interested in the development of cooperative behavior. While in London, Price became familiar with William Hamilton's paper on "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior," another subject in which he had no formal training, which led him to begin corresponding with Hamilton. Soon Price was wading into the debate over whether natural selection operated on the level of the genotype, the phenotype, kin groups, or larger groups. (See November 4, 2009 post).
The big topic in this book is the relationship between the biological and evolutionary imperatives for reproduction and survival and a system of moral rules. Is selflessness --- altruistic behavior--- stronger because it is directed at close kin, or others in a close social community, or strangers? And is there a biological basis for altruistic behavior?
The contributions of George Price to the study of genetic evolution and kin selection theory and group selection are better described elsewhere. But the importance of Price's work and what he contributed to the work of others on this subject is summed up as follows:
"After all, the feeling that genes do not simply 'run the show' comports not only with our vanity but also with our exceedingly healthy intituion about reality, as well as with what science is teaching us. Of course Haldane, Maynard Smith, Hamilton, and Price knew this, too. For when they spoke of genes for altruism, they were really only using a shorthand for genes that increase the probability that their bearers will behave altruistically. So long as such behaviors have a heritable component, evolutionary reasoning applies. Despite the incautious remarks of scientists and, more often, of science writers this does not mean that a behavior is determined; culture and education are still acknowledged as playing a central, even exclusive role. There may be no behavior in humans, strictly speaking, that has no genetic component, but that's a world away from saying that our genes determine who we are and what we choose. As biologists and anthropologists and mathematicians and philosophers who study the subject have come to see, natural selection based on cultural variation has produced behaviors that have nothing to do directly with genes." [Emphasis supplied].
Harman's gift in this book is not just the biography of George Price, but also the intellectual heritage that both preceded and followed his life on the subject of the evolutionary origins of social behavior. Despite a 7-year long interest in this subject while in London, Price continued to divert his interest other interests. He "converted" from atheism to Christianity, and made a serious effort at trying to make his life more "Christ-like," which left him living among London's homeless and downtrodden, giving away what little assets he had to give to help others. He fell into a life poverty and sickness, and toward the end of his life appeared to contemplate that there may be more to life than altruism and sacrifice. He committed suicide in early January 1975.
The Price of Altruism is a wonderful title for this book --- a double entendre --- reflecting the author's mission to tell the story of one of the brightest persons of the 20th century that nobody really knew, George Price, and to tell the story of the efforts of numerous professionals in science and the social sciences to determine just who we humans are and how did we become who we are, a story that is told in various ways in a number of other books previously discussed in this blog. The behavioral mystery that George Price and the others whose intellectual pursuits paralleled that of Price --- including Bill Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, Robert Trivers, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Frans deWaal, and others --- sought to unravel is why do humans behave altruistically, even if it means that the altruistic choice sacrifices the survival of the individual? In this context, the "price" of altruism refers to sacrifice, or alternatively, reciprocal exchanges that encourage cooperation rather than competition.
Central to this inquiry is whether "moral" behavior has a genetic origin, and, if so, what is the evolutionary mechanism that selects for moral behavior? Or is moral behavior the consequence of environment, and can humans and other animals shape their environment to yield a certain behavioral pattern?
George Price seemed the unlikeliest of persons to be a player in this inquiry. He cannot seem to devote himself to a single subject of interest for more than a year before moving onto the next. Price, a veritable Forrest Gump of intellectual inquiry --- he was involved with the Manhattan Project, could be found at Bell Labs at the time of the development of the transistor and knew Claude Shannon (see August 23, 2009 post), he developed something he called the Design Machine, a forerunner of CAD-CAM design software that led him briefly to work at IBM, and he dabbled in economics, game theory, and psychology (ESP), even though he had no training in those subjects either. Nothing seemed to intrigue him longer than a year or two and in his personal life he was simply not committed to anything, at least for any significant period of time. Price left the United States for London in 1967 with no particular goal in mind, until he became interested in the development of cooperative behavior. While in London, Price became familiar with William Hamilton's paper on "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior," another subject in which he had no formal training, which led him to begin corresponding with Hamilton. Soon Price was wading into the debate over whether natural selection operated on the level of the genotype, the phenotype, kin groups, or larger groups. (See November 4, 2009 post).
The big topic in this book is the relationship between the biological and evolutionary imperatives for reproduction and survival and a system of moral rules. Is selflessness --- altruistic behavior--- stronger because it is directed at close kin, or others in a close social community, or strangers? And is there a biological basis for altruistic behavior?
The contributions of George Price to the study of genetic evolution and kin selection theory and group selection are better described elsewhere. But the importance of Price's work and what he contributed to the work of others on this subject is summed up as follows:
"After all, the feeling that genes do not simply 'run the show' comports not only with our vanity but also with our exceedingly healthy intituion about reality, as well as with what science is teaching us. Of course Haldane, Maynard Smith, Hamilton, and Price knew this, too. For when they spoke of genes for altruism, they were really only using a shorthand for genes that increase the probability that their bearers will behave altruistically. So long as such behaviors have a heritable component, evolutionary reasoning applies. Despite the incautious remarks of scientists and, more often, of science writers this does not mean that a behavior is determined; culture and education are still acknowledged as playing a central, even exclusive role. There may be no behavior in humans, strictly speaking, that has no genetic component, but that's a world away from saying that our genes determine who we are and what we choose. As biologists and anthropologists and mathematicians and philosophers who study the subject have come to see, natural selection based on cultural variation has produced behaviors that have nothing to do directly with genes." [Emphasis supplied].
Harman's gift in this book is not just the biography of George Price, but also the intellectual heritage that both preceded and followed his life on the subject of the evolutionary origins of social behavior. Despite a 7-year long interest in this subject while in London, Price continued to divert his interest other interests. He "converted" from atheism to Christianity, and made a serious effort at trying to make his life more "Christ-like," which left him living among London's homeless and downtrodden, giving away what little assets he had to give to help others. He fell into a life poverty and sickness, and toward the end of his life appeared to contemplate that there may be more to life than altruism and sacrifice. He committed suicide in early January 1975.
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