An Atheist Invocation

The universe is an empty thing, bound and developing according to the logic of its nature, but devoid of mind, consciousness, or purpose. In this mindless universe, living things evolved from replicating chemicals, and these living things evolved a new thing – purpose, will, desire. Because replicators with a sense of purpose were often more successful at leaving prosperous progeny than those without one.

One of these species of replicators is our own. And we have evolved so many purposes, goals, desires. Some time ago, long before we were human, we discovered that we could accomplish some of those goals better if we worked together – and we developed community, solidarity. But others of us love to place their personal goals above the goals of others – to dominate the community in their selfish greed.

I celebrate the solidarity of our human species that lets us, alone in an empty universe, work together for our common, noble goals, and overcome the powerful few who would set their selfish, private goals above the good of the community, and I celebrate the human, compassionate spirit that gives us the strength to fight, and overcome, the forces that would oppress us.

Rationality, morals and Jonathan Haidt

Rationality, as it turns out, far from being the defining quality of humans, is very often used by humans only post hoc, to justify decisions we have already made based on unconscious, irrational processes.  In fact, rationality may actually have evolved, not so much to help us make effective plans in the physical world, as to help us out socially, by “explaining” our decisions to our peers.  This, at any rate, is one of the key lessons from Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.  At least, that is a main “take-away” for me, which fits in well with some of the other reading I’ve been doing over the past couple of years, including Gerd Gigerenzer’s Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty, and Hilary Kornblith, et al, Naturalizing Epistemology.  Although, as a person who makes my living as an engineer, I may have more respect than psychologist Haidt for the role of rationality in helping us deal with our non-social reality. 

This particular argument about rationality, Haidt documents well with experimental data (although the  Gigerenzer book offers a caution in its chapter specifically on how statistical analysis is misused in most published psychology research).  Some of Haidt’s other themes are also very interesting, but raise more issues for me; at least, I have more questions about them. 

Haidt’s main interest, in the book is with moral psychology, including how moral systems actually function in our (conscious and unconscious minds), and how and why we evolved moral systems in the first place.  (The evolution of moral systems by natural selection is counter-intuitive to a naïve, “red in tooth and claw” view of nature and “survival of the fittest”.)  Haidt’s scientific work is mostly descriptive; i.e., he is trying to find out how moral psychology actually works, not how it ought to work.  His main foray into the prescriptive, in this part of the book, is to advise us that we should try to understand how our minds (including our moral systems) actually work, and not shrink away from the knowledge, even if it makes us uncomfortable.  This is a prescription I heartily endorse.  Later, he veers into some prescriptions I think less of, as I discuss below.

A main element in his taxonomy of moral systems is that they center around a number of separate “modules”, which function unconsciously, and provide the automatic moral reactions that our reason later tries to justify.  He identifies six of these: Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation.  He defines them all, and suggests reasons why it might have been beneficial for our ancestors, long ago, to evolve such centers.  He and his colleagues identified these modules experimentally (by questionnaires, interviews, and laboratory experiments).  When he gets around to discussing politics, he says liberals care mostly about the care/harm module, a little less about liberty/oppression and fairness/cheating, and not much at all about the other three.  Conservatives, on the other hand, care equally about all six, although they interpret some of them (care/harm and liberty/oppression) somewhat differently.  This makes it possible for conservatives to appeal to more people than liberals*, since they can reach them on more levels.  It can also make it very hard for one group to understand the other.  For instance, in interpreting some family law situation, liberals may focus strictly on the wellbeing of the child (care/harm), which conservatives care about, too, but conservatives also care about parental rights (authority/subversion), state interference (liberty/oppression), and perhaps others; liberals tend to think these other things are irrelevant.  He also says that his research has found that conservatives are better at predicting what liberals will think about a situation than the other way around, because the conservatives share the liberals’ concerns, but add to them, while the liberals don’t see the conservatives’ other concerns, at all.

Haidt’s assumption of six discrete modules bugs me.  For instance, it is pretty well established that people tend to accept traditional authority as long as it is associated with responsibility, i.e., as long as the authority figure carries out a traditionally determined social role seen as having benefits for the community as a whole.  It is not necessary for there to be any particular proportionality (let alone equality) in the distribution of benefits between the authority and the people.  But if the traditional responsibilities are seen as being ignored, then people are more willing to rebel against the authority.  (See, for example, Barrington-Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt.)  So, is there a seventh module, responsibility/irresponsibility?  Or is this subsumed under loyalty/betrayal, or fairness/cheating?  Or both?  Or all three?  For that matter, couldn’t loyalty/betrayal just be a special case of fairness/cheating?  And are liberty/oppression and authority/subversion really cognitively independent?  At the very best, there seems to be a lot of overlap between these categories.

Ultimately answering these questions may require a detailed mapping of the moral modules on the brain/somatic structures that implement or create them.  If this were done, then (for no particular reason but my gut feeling), I conjecture that:

1. There would be more than six modules, and,
2. Boundaries between modules would be fuzzy.  There would be physical overlap between the structures implementing different modules, with some sub-structures involved in two, three, many different modules.

I suspect that it is difficult to structure the type of research Haidt was doing so as to be free of question-begging.  You have to make decisions, consciously or unconsciously, as to what types of traits you are going to look for, and you are more likely to find the traits you identified than to stumble across ones you never thought of (although Haidt does describe how discrepancies in early results led him to expand his taxonomy from an original five modules to the final six).

A significant amount of Haidt’s book is spent discussing group selection and its role in evolution.  Many of his observations on this topic I have come across, elsewhere.  One that I have not is his belief that there can be, and has been, significant pro-social genetic evolution in historic times (or at least from late prehistoric, but definitely human, times).  Essentially, he believes that culturally determined group behaviors (such as religious practices) can create selective pressures that weed out individuals less willing to conform to group norms.  This he sees as a form of actual group selection, because groups whose members were selected to make them cohere more closely,  passed on more genes than groups who did not. 

I have no doubt that some kind of group selection for moral, cooperative behavior did occur (see previous blog posts, linked to at the end of this one).  I’m inclined to be dubious about Haidt’s very late time frame, though. He justifies it by comparison with intentional selection (by breeders) of domestic species, which can cause significant genetic change in a small number of generations.  But I think selective pressures in a rich, cultural environment are much more diffuse than in a controlled breeding situation.  He does give a nod to the time-frame difference, and admits that the genetic response he envisions would happen much more slowly than in domestic breeding.  But if the cultural pressures are sufficiently diffuse, they will not outweigh chance, and selection will not occur, at all.  I think there are just too many ways to escape conforming, in most social situations.  I think the level of late, culturally induced genetic change that Haidt envisions is unlikely.

Haidt’s ideas on group selection are intimately connected with his ideas on religion, social organization, generally, and politics.  It seemed to me that once he entered these areas, his scientist’s insistence on evidence tended to weaken.  He becomes much more willing to assert things without offering any (or at least, much) proof.

Haidt clear wants to believe that religion is a good thing.  He is critical of the so-called New Atheists and their tendency to see religious belief as the root of all evil.  I tend to be critical of the New Atheists, also, but I think the social utility of religion is much less than Haidt thinks it is.  Haidt makes a strong case for the utility of religion early in human history (or prehistory) as something that helped improve the coherence of groups.  I think group cohesion, partly helped by shared religion, almost certainly helped human groups to survive in early times, and to outperform (and perhaps out-breed) groups that were less cohesive.  (Dennet, Dawkins, and other New Atheist use these facts in constructing a theory of meme-level selection, which Haidt thinks feeds back into genetic-level change.)

Haidt makes a much less compelling case for the value of close group bonding in modern times, in a globalized world, with awesome weaponry of mass destruction.  He makes a claim that having a vast network of small, closely bonded groups (including religious ones), makes, in-and-of-itself, for a safer and more stable overall society.  He offers essentially no evidence for this claim.  In the interest of convincing us, he over-emphasizes the positives, and downplays the negatives.  By implication, we should think of groups like U.U. Social Action Committees, or the League of Women Voters, and not Daesh, Westboro Baptist Church, or the KKK.

He discusses some research on the survival of small insular groups, which he believes supports his position.  Groups like communes and religious communities are found to survive longer (as groups) if, (1) they demand costly sacrifices of their members, and (2) they “sacralize” the sacrifices (i.e., refer them to God’s will).  Surely, it is not obvious that this is a net good, at least for the members of the group.  What actual benefits does their membership in the group provide that outweigh what they are asked to give up?  Haidt doesn’t even raise that question, let alone try to answer it.  He seems to take for granted that survival of the group is a sufficient value, in-and-of itself.  It seems to me, on the other hand, that the members might well be better off if the group dissolved, and they were re-absorbed back into the mainstream.  (Survival of the group is not a precondition for survival of the members, after all.)  The study Haidt cites seems to support Dawkins’s idea of religion as a parasitic meme at least as well, if not better, than Haidt’s idea of religion as a positive force.  Another comparison that comes to mind is with drug addiction (i.e., a community of willing addicts).

Thinking of group survival as a “good” makes me think, re. morality, in general:  is survival, pure and simple, a sufficient justificatory basis for morality?  Or do other things matter?  How about knowledge and truth for their own sakes, and not just instrumentally?

Because, when it comes to religion, Haidt does not seem to be a believer.  The impression I got is that he is an atheist.  But religion, as a social phenomenon, appeals to him deeply, and he wants to believe it is good, and should be promoted.  But if religious beliefs are all wrong about matters of fact, does its appeal (to some people), and its (supposed) social utility justify our supporting and encouraging it?  This seems to skirt perilously close to Plato’s Noble Lie.  There is something elitist (and ignoble), it seems to me, about promoting beliefs you personally think are false, because of their social utility.  (Tolerating them may be another matter.)

When Haidt turns to political analysis, he leaves the scientific method even further in the dust.  He wants to prove that each of the different political constellations (which he identifies as “liberal”, “libertarian”, and “conservative”) has its own share of truth; therefore, we should learn to broaden our moral views, so that we can effectively listen to each other.  He gives examples.  For libertarianism, he gives a story entitled “Markets Are Miraculous”.  And a “story” is exactly what it is:  an entirely fictional, made-up scenario about an imaginary insurance scheme that proves exactly nothing.

Haidt’s approach to politics invites comparison with George Lakoff.  Lakoff has also been very concerned that people improve their understanding of the latest scientific theories of how cognition functions, and apply them to political work, and, like Haidt, he believes that conservatives tend to do a better job of this, here and now, than liberals do, and this concerns him.  But Lakoff unabashedly sides with liberals, and his interest is clearly that liberals should learn to better apply science in support of liberal moral views (although I know a lot of people who fail to understand that this is what he is saying).  Haidt, on the other hand, strikes me as a former liberal who has become more conservative with age.  He wants liberals to compromise on their principles, and he offers some fairly lame arguments for why they should do so.

Grains of salt are required.  But the insights into the psychological structure or rationality and morality that Haidt’s work provides make his book worth the reading.

*I use the word “liberal” in this essay in the conventional, modern American way, because that is the way Haidt uses it, and not in the classical way still more in favor, I think, in Europe, which is closer to what Americans call “libertarian”.

Related posts:

http://persistentwondering.blogspot.com/2009/08/natural-history-of-morals.html

http://persistentwondering.blogspot.com/2009/12/altruism-and-human-evolution.html

http://persistentwondering.blogspot.com/2012/09/irrational-atheists.html 

Similarity and Natural Kinds

Preface:  I’ve been reading “Naturalizing Epistemology” by Hilary Kornblith, Ed., which reprints a couple of papers by W.V.O. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized” and “Natural Kinds”, along with papers by others that relate to questions raised by Quine in those essays, or raised by others in response to those essays.  The present post was inspired by ideas in the first few essays in that book.

“Similarity”, I think, arises from replaceability.  Two objects are similar to the degree to which you could replace one with the other without salient change in the state-of-affairs under analysis.  Obviously “salient” and even “change” are terms in need of further analysis.

Perceptually, we have “hardwired” (innate) and “softwired” (learned) structures in our brains (primarily – with some functionality distributed elsewhere in our somas) to identify different kinds of similarity.  Hardwired structures include things like edge detectors and angle detectors.  Softwired structures are built up from such.  Questions that can be asked include:  How would such features have come to evolve?  Why are they so apparently efficacious?  Just how reliably efficacious are they?

The nature of organisms suggests categorization of environmental factors on the basis of their effects on the organism.  Some factors encourage growth or reproduction.  Some limit these or produce death or extinction.  With complex organisms, some factors have these effects on a part of the organism, only, and may have very different effects (or little effect, at all) on other parts – stimulating production of this hormone, while retarding production of that, for example.  Replaceability of these factors with respect to their organic effects is the basis of categorization, and the source of similarity.  The salience of change can be suitably quantified in each case (e.g., rate of cell reproduction or hormone production).

Since they derive from our interactions with the world, our categories and sense of similarity relate closely to the world.  But there is still an element of subjectivity.  All categories are relative to an analysis.  Some categories may be relatively stable across all conceivable analyses we may do.  These we tend to characterize as “natural kinds”.  But even natural kinds such as species can have fuzzy edges for certain analyses.  (Exactly where, on the evolutionary tree, does a particular species begin?)  An intelligence arising from a very different history (a silicon-based life form, say, or a spontaneously evolving “artificial” intelligence) might cleave the world very differently than we do.  But in some categories (mineralogy, biological lineages) if it made an analysis at all, there would probably be considerable correspondence with our own.  Natural kinds are not meaningless, nor arbitrary, but neither are they perfectly precise.

Adaptation? Or Carpe Diem?

A lot of the language we use to describe evolution by natural selection is borrowed from the language of design, but natural selection doesn’t work the same way design does, so the metaphors are not very apt.  Sometimes confusion results.  Examples are “adaptation” and “purpose”.  In design, a purpose pre-exists, and materials are adapted to it.  In evolution, a change (mutation) occurs, and a use may or may not be found for it.  If the change has utility, it may be by refining some pre-existing ability to exploit the environment, which looks a little bit like design (but isn’t).  Or the utility of the change may only be relative to exploiting some previously unavailable (or less available) resource in the environment.  That looks a lot less like design, and a lot more like seizing an opportunity.

For instance, an organism with splayed toes might occasionally acquire, as a genetic aberration, webbing between the toes.  In a dry environment, this alteration might be dysfunctional (“non-adaptive”) and die out, or it might be neutral, and occur from time-to-time.  To an organism dwelling on riverbanks, though, it might open new frontiers for (better) exploitation.  If there is relatively little competition for the new, riverine resources, compared to the already well-exploited resources on dry land, the mutation may spread and become fixed, other mutations (changes in leg shape, body fat, feather type, bill type) which previously would have been useless or harmful now become beneficial, and may, if they occur, also become fixed.  Speciation may occur.

This chance-and-opportunity model is not much like design.  It’s more like exploration.  In this view, ecological “niches” are less like problems waiting to be solved than like frontiers that some mutation may make available for exploitation.

The Mulder Argument

The essence of mystical/magical/religious thinking, that which distinguishes it from truly philosophical thinking, may well be something that could be termed “the Mulder Argument” (after fictional FBI agent Fox Mulder on the television show “The X-Files”).  This argument is given in four words: “I want to believe.”  I’ve run across this argument in many forms.  Once, when I had backed a theist who thought she could prove the existence of her God completely into a corner, she escaped by saying, “I just can’t accept a world like that.”  Others, asked to provide any sort of justification for their claims fall back on, “I just know.”  Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, must be much more ruthless than this.  If philosophy is “love of wisdom”, than you must love it wherever it leads you.  If you don’t like the direction, learn to live with it.  I summed this up to myself, years ago, in a epiphany which I worded as: “My desires are not probative.”

Since it is very central to my view of the world that all important traits of organisms can be explained by evolution by natural selection, I have had some concerns over the question:  “How could such a false argument become so ubiquitous in the human species?”  Isn’t a trait counter-adaptive if it consistently leads one to believe things that are false?  I think I’ve finally come at an answer to these questions, and come at it through another puzzle, specifically, through trying to reconcile my own principle of the non-evidentiary nature of desire with a premise given at various places in Marx and Gramsci, vis. the philosophy of praxis, which states quite the opposite, i.e., that reality is made by humans, especially acting socially, and that in this sense, the desire, or more precisely the will, is in fact probative.

I think it all boils down to taking the correct domain for each argument.  Reality is not something that is taken passively by organisms, but is something dynamically modified by them in the course of their existence.  This is a very important insight.  Organisms alter their “environment” just as much as the environment causes modifications in organisms.  In this sense, for a thinking organism like a human, believing in something can often be instrumental to its being so.  But there are limitations on this principle.  If I believe that I will change the government, then perhaps I can.  But if I believe I can literally move mountains with my mind, or with prayer, then that will not happen.  I will have to add a liberal quantity of muscle, time and the application of earth-moving equipment to my faith, if I want to bring this result about. 

Human minds have evolved to be capable of rational thinking, but it is by no means assured that all thinking that goes on therein will be rational.  If I believe that I will change the government, or find food, or win a fight, or find a wife, then perhaps I will.  If I believe that I cannot, then certainly I will not.  It would be more rational to believe that “maybe I can, if I try hard enough,” rather than simply “I will,” but the more rational belief is more complex, and more susceptible to doubt, and may therefore be inferior to the simple (if less correct) version in many matters of practical success or survival, i.e., matters directly susceptible to natural selection.  This would be enough for evolution to select for a tendency to find your desires probative.  In order to be equally efficacious, in many practical life matters, as the irrational belief, the rational belief would have to be combined with an iron determination.  Iron logic and iron determination may be a more admirable combination than sloppy thinking and blind faith, but it is perhaps a more difficult combination for random mutation to generate.  As for the cases in which blind faith leads to an incorrect judgment, well, believing in God or not believing may in general have far less effect on the existence or non-existence of your posterity than whether or not you believe you will successfully woo your wife.

Note that I am not saying that there is a “gene” for the Mulder Argument.  I am just saying that a predilection for believing what you want to be true, however complexly coded in genes, memes and individual experience, may in general lead to some differential reproductive success.

But none of this makes blind faith a rational argument for deducing the nature of things as they are, as opposed to (within a limited domain) things as they will be.  The will to believe probably yields even more success if it is tempered with a realistic appraisal of when to apply it and when not to (and, just possibly, when it really makes no difference one way or the other).  This is essentially what Gramsci was trying to get at with his oft-cited “pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.”  Despite the theological overtones, this same insight is reflected in a quotation popular within another tradition I’ve had some exposure to:  “Oh Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change [including the evidence of your own non-existence!], the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Starting from Zero

I’ve never read Hegel, but I recently reread Russell’s chapter on Hegel in A History of Western Philosophy as background to some early Marx we were reading for the Democratic Socialists of America Boston local’s reading group. Per Lord R, Hegel starts from the idea that “the Absolute” is “pure being”, deduces that this means it has no qualities, and finds this self-contradictory because to have no qualities is to be nothing. This is the antithesis – “The Absolute is nothing” – and leads to the first synthesis: “The Absolute is Becoming.”

What struck me is that Hegel thinks he is starting from zero, using only one premise – that reality cannot be self-contradictory – but of course he really is applying many premises: that there is something that may reasonably be thought of as “absolute reality”, that “pure being” is a meaningful concept, which entails having no attributes, that to have no attributes (or qualities) is to be nothing, that the union of being and being nothing is becoming.

It seems there is a basic flaw in a philosophy which tries to start from zero, or from some very small set of premises, building up from these by synthesis; to wit, that we cannot do it. We always, in fact, have to start with a lot. Descartes’ radical doubt leads, perhaps, to “cogito ergo sum” (more precisely, perhaps, “...something is”, but to go further, he needs to introduce more premises, “undoubting” certain things. He selects premises that purport to justify the undoubting – clear and distinct ideas, and the goodness of God – but this is basically B.S., not justified by his method, as stated.

Really, what we do, always, is to start with everything we know, or think we know, and start juggling it about. We apply reasoning (rules of inference) that feel right to us and (perhaps) we try to codify these into a system of logic. We apply various tests in doing this. What tests depends on the person and what he or she brings to the process. Examples are empirical tests (how well do these premises and this logic predict future experience) and faith-based tests (do these premises and this logic lead to conclusions that conflict with “revealed” scripture?) We can apply tests, at any time, to some of our a priori beliefs about facts, and or to our rules of inference, but each test involves accepting other facts and rules, at least temporarily and contingently. We can never test the whole shebang.

This process is irreducibly ad hoc and messy, which is no doubt what has led many philosophers to reject it, and to try and find a purer and simpler alternative. But they were deluding themselves.

The actual process “works”, more or less, because our sensual and reasoning faculties have evolved by natural selection. If they failed badly at the task of extracting meaning from the universe, we would have become extinct, or at least these faculties would have. But this is no guarantor of “ultimate knowledge”, whatever that is. Aspects of our reasoning system may be selectively neutral, such that there is no effective, general difference in survival rates from reasoning one way or the other. These aspects, then, would not be fine tuned by natural selection. Like blue eyes and brown eyes, both may survive indefinitely in the species. I suspect this may be particularly true of the ways we construct abstract structures of meaning to explain our experience to ourselves.

Different ways of knowing can also serve the same person better or worse under different conditions. Something like what I called “faith based” learning is certainly the most satisfactory way of learning for a child, who will learn much too slowly if she must test every new factoid empirically, rather than trusting the wisdom imparted by her elders. In fact, realistically most of what we learn throughout all our lives, we learn from others whom we trust, either because of their social position as teachers, authors, or what-have-you, or simply because we believe they have no reason to lie. In complex situations, we have to apply other tests – such as when we find that the “experts” don’t agree with each other. And empirical experience is the ultimate arbiter, to which faith, for any reasonable person, must bow. Galileo’s telescope trumps the Pope.

Altruism and human evolution

The song "Easy to Be Hard" from the 1967 musical "Hair" posed the question: "How can people be so heartless?" Ever since Darwin, though, biologists have struggled with the opposite question: "How can people be so nice?" If traits arise through intense competition between living organisms in a war of all against all, how does a tendency to altruism arise in a population? What benefit does altruist behavior have that it contributes to the survival and reproductive success of the altruist?

How we define "altruism" is crucial to the form that the explanation will take, although the underlying facts, of course, are not changed by the definition. There is no question but that a heritable, genetic trait, in order to be selected for by natural selection, must provide some differential reproductive advantage to the gene complex coding for that trait. So if we define "altruism" as describing traits that benefit ONLY others, and confer NO adaptive advantage on either the organism bearing or the gene complex, then necessarily genes are selfish, and altruism cannot arise by natural selection. If such "altruistic" behavior in fact is not only neutral, but places the bearer at a selective disadvantage, then it cannot long survive, even if it arises by chance.

But this is a trivial result of the nature of selection, and a particular definition of "altruistic", and leaves a lot of real-life facts unexplained. Nature is full of examples of behavior that SEEMS altruistic, in the sense that it seems to be for the benefit of others, and of immediate cost to the organism exhibiting the behavior. Simply stating that there must be some hidden benefit to the organism, or at least to some of the gene complexes which code for the nature of the organism, does not explain how each particular behavior could develop.

So, rather than sacrifice a perfectly good word to preserve a trivial result (and make do, in consequence, with cumbersome phrases like "seemingly altruistic"), I prefer to define "altruistic behavior" simply as behavior that seems to benefit primarily others, at an immediate net cost to the altruistic individual. This definition of altruistic defines "fuzzier" classes of behaviors and organisms than the alternate definition, but classes that have the decided advantage that the constituent behaviors and organisms actually exist.

Elliot Sober’s book The Nature of Selection makes a strong connection between the evolution of altruistic behavior, and the process of "group selection". Group selection is a controversial concept among biologists, part of what Sober refers to as the "unit of selection" debate. The question is on what entities or "units" does natural selection work? The oldest tradition, starting with Darwin, focus on the organism (or phenotype). Individual organisms vary in traits, and have different rates of survival and reproduction deriving from those traits, causing certain types of organisms, with certain combinations of traits, to be "selected" as being better adapted to their environment, and others to die out.

Other candidates for the unit of selection exist. Many biologists have strongly argued for the individual gene as the only proper unit to be considered. Others extend this to complexes of genes. More lately, some theorists have argued for selection at the level of the group or "deme", or even at the species level. I won’t go into detail on all this. Sober argues strongly for a multi-level view; i.e., that all of these may be, from time to time, the level at which selection operates, and the particulars must be carefully examined in each case. In particular, he argues that the "genes only" school arises as a trivial result of the fact that the mathematics in each case can be reduced to calculations based on the averaged relative fitness of each gene. But to really understand the process, he believes you have to look at causality – at what level are the actual natural forces shaping evolution being applied?

The way Sober defines "group selection", there must be a trait or property definable only at the group level which confers a selective advantage on individual organisms. There is actually some flexibility in whether the "benchmark" of selection is the individual organism, a particular gene or gene complex, or the group, but focusing on the organism will do for now. The crucial feature is that the property that confers the selective advantage must be definable only at the group level. For instance, predators may avoid large individuals, but show even more aversion to groups of large animals; in that case, being a member of group of organisms with a large average size will confer a selective advantage to each organism in the group, irrespective of its own, individual size. There may be other selective effects in operation. For example, if smaller size happens to confer some selective advantage on organisms competing with other organisms within the group, then there will be two countervailing evolutionary forces at work, and the result is indeterminate (in the mathematical sense that one must look to other factors for a resolution), but this does not alter the fact that there is a group selective force at work.

Altruism seems, at least in many cases, to be a situation where group selection and individual selection act at cross purposes. Since altruists help other group members, there is a significant selective advantage to being a member of a group containing a large number of altruists. But this advantage accrues to selfish individuals, as well as to altruistic ones. Since selfish individuals gain the selective advantages of group membership without the personal costs, they may have a higher "fitness" value for intra-group competition. Which one wins out – whether selfish organisms or altruistic ones will predominate or "go to fixation" (one trait driving the other into extinction) – will depend on the relative strength of the two forces. The existence of individual (organism-level) selection as a countervailing force leads to an inherent instability in the fitness of altruism based on group selection, absent other forces.

I am mostly concerned with the evolution of altruistic behavior within primate species, and in particular within our own. I think group selection, as Sober defines it, is a large factor in this, but I think other factors can be identified, reinforcing what otherwise might seem to be an inadequately strong effect. One such factor is kin selection. Kin selection is a more powerful force than group selection, because an individual’s genes benefit more directly from the individual’s actions. This effect is most strong when I act for the benefit of my (biological) offspring. Even if I sacrifice my life for my children, this may well preserve my genotype much more effectively than had I failed to take the risk. The force of kin selection is somewhat less strong when I act for the benefit of siblings, who generally share most of my genetic material, and so on with decreasing force through first cousins, second cousins etc. I suspect that altruistic behavior may have originated, very early in the evolution of primate lineages, as a generalization of kin-selective behavior. Once it evolved, the group-selection advantages – the increase in fitness experienced by each individual member of a cooperative group – would have exercised at least a weak selective effect.

I think sex selection (selection by females of certain preferred traits in sexual partners) may also have played a part in the evolution of certain types of altruistic behavior, particularly in hominid lineages. Humans are unique in that our infants require a great deal of care – more care, and for a longer period than other primates, possibly more than any other animal. Stephen J. Gould has connected this to the neotenous nature of our species – we retain as adults, features that are infantile in other apes – for instance we continue to learn at a higher rate through much of our lives. But also we are born at a less developed stage. This may be in part because of our large brain size – a more fully developed brain and skull would be too large to pass through the birth canal.

For whatever reason, the result has been that human infants require much care, over a long period. This has led to other evolutionary changes; for example, it very likely led to the "always on" nature of human female sexuality. Other primate females, unlike human women, are interested in sex, and sexually interesting to males, only during the period in which they are fertile. By making sexuality a constant, hominid females could attract males to serve as ongoing helpmates, if not actually helping much with child rearing tasks (then or now), at least supplementing the female’s efforts in other areas, such as providing food and protection when the female was engaged with the child. This would have led to a tendency on the part of females to select for at least certain types of altruistic behavior, those that could fall under the rubric of being a "good provider". Constant sexuality, and the resulting pair-bonding, also led to another revolution – awareness of paternity, thereby extending the possible scope of kin selection.

Another factor I think played a big effect in the evolution of altruistic behavior, not only in human lineages but in other primates as well, at least those most closely related to us, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, is something we might call police action. Part of primate altruism involves cooperation and sharing – but it is not strictly necessary that these benefits be equally distributed between altruists and selfish individuals. Groups of individuals can choose NOT to share with individuals they don’t feel to be deserving. Groups can also band together to limit the power of otherwise dominant individuals who are perceived as abusing their power, and in extreme cases can even drive a selfish individual from the overall group. Evolution of policing behaviors would strongly support the group-selective benefits deriving from the evolution of altruistic forces, by lessening the selective advantage enjoyed by selfish individuals within the group, and the combination of traits would thus tend to be much more stable than altruism alone.

I’m no population geneticist, and I’m not going to be able to put together mathematical models to demonstrate all this, but it seems to me that these factors: kin selection, group selection, sex selection and evolution of cooperating behavior complexes (policing) together make up a sufficiently powerful set of forces to be adequate to ensure the evolution by natural selection of human altruism. The details I’ve laid out may not be quite right, but something like this history must be have occurred – because, indisputably, human altruism exists.

The lyric from "Hair" teaches us one important lesson: how natural all this seems to us. Because (saving a few who have imbibed too much Libertarian philosophy), we all tend to respond in the way the lyric suggests – we are surprised and startled by "heartlessness". By and large, in our day-to-day activities, we humans are more likely to go out of our way to be nice to each other than to be mean. Granted, exemplary occurrences of altruism are remarkable, and inspire awe and admiration, but it is meanness that shocks us, nags at our consciousness, and leaves us with the conviction that something must be done.

Sober's causation

I have almost finished reading Elliot Sober's The Nature of Selection. It is a complex book, which inspired many marginal notes and a number of journal entries, and which I am sure I will need to come back to more than once to fully appreciate. With some temerity, perhaps, I have decided to address a couple of issues related to this book in my next couple of posts on this blog. This week, I am going to reflect on an idea about causality that Sober puts forth. Next week, hopefully, I will revisit the evolution of altruism, which I have discussed before (9/28/09).

Sober's causality claim relates specifically to what he calls "population level" causality, as distinguished from "individual level" causality. An example he uses to illustrate this difference is: suppose a golfer is trying to sink a putt, and a squirrel runs by after he hits the ball, and kicks it. Improbably, the ball deflects off of some obstruction, but sinks in the hole, anyway. From an individual level, we would wish to say that the squirrel's kick caused the ball to sink in the hole, because it started a chain of events that resulted in the ball sinking. But from a population level, we would not wish to say that "squirrel kicks sink balls," because we are convinced that, usually, this would not happen.

On the population level, Sober first points out, non-controversially, that causality is not implied by correlation. My own favorite example illustrating this truism is the theory that fire fighters cause damage at fires. It is observed that damage at fires is positively correlated with the number of fire fighters that arrive at the scene. If correlation is taken as proof of causation, the conclusion is that fire fighters cause damage. In fact, of course, the number of fire fighters and the amount of damage are correlated because they have a common background cause - the intensity of the fire.

Sober believes that by strengthening the criteria, it is possible to derive a probability-based definition of population-level causation. The rule he argues for is this: an event x is a (positive) causal factor of an event y if the probability of y given x is greater than or equal to the probability of y given (not-x) under all possible background conditions, and the inequality is a strict inequality in at least one condition. In other words (or, rather, in symbols):

x CF y <=> ∀z (P(y|x ⋅ z) ≥ P(y|!x ⋅ z)) ⋅ ∃z (P(y|x ⋅ z) > P(y|!x ⋅ z))

Here I am defining the relation "CF" given by "x is a causal factor of y". I will be using the dot operator both for the logical "and" between propositions and the probabilistic conjunction of events, and also using ! for a logical "not" and for negating an event (the event !x is the event that x does not occur). This should be contextually unambiguous. Hopefully your browser will display the symbols properly - if not, you may need to change your character set to "UTF-8". I've tested it with both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.5.6. (Firefox, annoyingly, sticks extra space above and below all equations, leading to very ugly page renderings.)

The reason for the universal modifier on the first part of the above expression is interesting. Sober argues that it is not enough for causality to increase the likelihood of an event in most circumstances, but decrease it in others (even in a minority of cases). If you allow any negative cases, he argues, the causality claim reduces to P(y|x) > P(y|!x), which simply represents correlation. So to have a definition of causality stronger than mere correlation, the first event must raise the probability of the second event, or be neutral, in all circumstances, and must positively raise it (strict inequality) in at least one.

Sober raises some issues with the above formulation regarding the causal independence of the background issues from the factor being examined. Specifically, he requires that the "background events" (z) not be "causally relevant" (either positively or negatively) to the proposed cause being investigated (x). If they are, this leads to undefined conditional probabilities of the form P(y|x ⋅ !x). Conceptually, this represents a form of double counting. Recasting this requirement in the quantificational form gives something like:

x CF y <=> ∀z (z ∈ B => P(y|x ⋅ z) ≥ P(y|!x ⋅ z)) ⋅ ∃z (z ∈ B ⋅ (P(y|x ⋅ z) > P(y|!x ⋅ z)))

B = {z: !(x CF z) ⋅ !(z CF x) ⋅ !(x CF !z) ⋅ !(z CF !x) ⋅ (z ≠ x) ⋅ (z ≠ y)}

The last two inequalities are necessary to avoid undefined conditional probabilities in P(y|!x ⋅ x), and because the strict inequality P(y|x ⋅ y) > P(y|!x ⋅ y) is always false.

The set notation above is kind of nasty, because it carries the "free variables" x and y outside of the expression. But we can eliminate this notation by expanding the independence criterion in place (although it gets a little unwieldy):

x CF y <=> ∀z ((!(x CF z) ⋅ !(z CF x) ⋅ !(x CF !z) ⋅ !(z CF !x) ⋅ (z ≠ x) ⋅ (z ≠ y)) => P(y|x ⋅ z) ≥ P(y|!x ⋅ z))
⋅ ∃z ((!(x CF z) ⋅ !(z CF x) ⋅ !(x CF !z) ⋅ !(z CF !x) ⋅ (z ≠ x) ⋅ (z ≠ y)) ⋅ (P(y|x ⋅ z) > P(y|!x ⋅ z)))

Now that certainly looks circular. I hesitate only because I'm not 100% certain that it is impossible to iteratively expand the "CF" terms, at least in a finite universe. I took a stab at it in a universe containing only 4 events {x, y, B1, B2}, but the problem quickly exceeded my limited powers of symbolic manipulation. But, anyway, I think the definition is circular.

Actually, I don't know why I even bother to fret over it, since Sober actually admits that it is a circular definition - but he argues that it is a useful definition, anyway. Hs references a 1979 Nous article by N. Cartwright, which supposedly goes into this in more depth. It would be interesting to read that, but I have no easy way of tracking it down.

I am not going to dispute that a definition can be conceptually useful, even if circular, outside certain strictly formal contexts. But I think we need to ask in each case where does the circularity come from, and why it is necessary, and/or useful. In this case, I have a suspicion that it is because we have an underlying, intuitive definition of causation that has nothing to do with the definition that is being attempted, here. This is also reflected in my sense that this idea is only useful if we "prune" it somehow, as suggested by my reference to a "finite universe" above. For another example of pruning, I think we are only interested in background conditions that have some causal effect, themselves - totally neutral conditions are not interesting. In other words:

B = {z: !(x CF z) ⋅ !(z CF x) ⋅ !(x CF !z) ⋅ !(z CF !x) ⋅ (z ≠ x) ⋅ (z ≠ y) ⋅ (z CF y)}

But how do we prune the universe of possible events, other than applying some other, a priori, theory of causation? And in that case, how is Sober's causation test any different then just using correlation as an empirical test of the a priori theory?

I'd be the first to admit that my reasoning above is a little mushy. But a specific example, I think, shows that Sober's definition doesn't quite jibe with our intuitive ideas about causation, and may not ultimately be satisfactory as a definition of population-level causation.

Imagine a rectangular pool table, with the long axis oriented north-south. From time to time, billiard balls are introduced approximately on the 1/3rd line (the imaginary line dividing the southern 1/3 of the table from the northern 2/3). Some of these balls will be struck with a cue. The horizontal angle with which the cue strikes the ball is normally distributed such that 90% of the variation is w/in ± 70 degrees of the mean, which is to the north. There is friction in the table, and spin (variation in the incident angle of the cue with respect to the radial angles from the center of the balls to the point of impact), and the impulse imparted by the cue is finite, so that a ball may strike a side wall, or other obstruction, and come to rest before hitting the north wall. As balls accumulate, they may strike, or be struck by, other balls. Impacts are approximately elastic (with frictional/damping losses). Additionally, a number of bumpers are introduced between the 1/3rd line and the north wall. The precise position of the bumpers is varied, from time to time. Usually, when a ball strikes a bumper, it will be a glancing blow, and the ball will continue in a generally northerly direction; however, occasionally the impact will be square enough that the ball will rebound to the south. This rebound may be sufficient to carry the ball south of the 1/3 line (e.g., if the obstruction is close to the line).

Finally, the entire table will be lifted and tilted, from time to time (but infrequently), either to north or to south, with the conditional probability of a southward tilt, given that a tilt occurs, equal to 50%. The tilt is of finite (temporal) duration - i.e., there is a probability greater than zero but less than 1 that a ball on the table will reach the south wall during a south tilt. Note that any ball which has ended up south of the 1/3rd line due to a rebound has a greater probability of touching the south wall during a southward tilt than it did when it was first introduced into the game.

When a ball strikes either the north or south wall, it is removed from the game. Its probability of striking the other wall, at that point, is zero.

It is hard to say that, in this game, the impact of the cue is not a "causal factor" in increasing the percentage of the ball population that touches the north wall, even though there are some members of "B" (combinations of bumper location, ball position, cue angle, other factors) under which the impact will, in fact REDUCE the probability of reaching the north wall. But by Sober's definition of causality we would, in fact, need to make that claim.

I find myself inclined to throw out Sober's definition, or rather, to view it only as a sort of statistical test of some underlying idea of causality. I'm inclined, further, to view population-level causation as just an aggregation of individual causation-events (including those that have actually occurred, plus hypotheticals). "Squirrel kicks cause balls to sink sometimes, but most of the time they don't." So squirrel kicks are not considered a "cause" of successful putts, at the population level.

I don't think this has a negative affect on Sober's substantive arguments about the nature of selection. His arguments about "units of selection", for example, depend on the distinction between "selection of" some kind of entity and "selection for" some specific quality or trait. The question is, at what level does the cause of the selection operate? One (admittedly artificial) example he uses for illustration is to postulate several groups of otherwise similar organisms which are homogenous within each group with respect to some quality - say tallness - but vary between groups. Suppose some predator differentially picks off the shorter organisms. Is this an example of group selection (the predator is selecting organisms from groups of short organisms), or individual selection (the predator selects shorter organisms)? The question cannot be resolved strictly by looking at results, because in either case there is selection of the same organisms. One needs to look at the cause - what trait is being selected for? Does the predator simply favor shorter animals? Or does it avoid tall groups of animals? A test of the causal assumptions would be to examine what would happen if a shorter organism happened to be found in a taller group. Would it be subject to the same level of predation as if it were in a group of small organisms? In that case, the individual selection model would be supported. Or would it have the same security as its taller group members? In that case, a group selection mechanism is indicated. Of course, this test might be empirically impossible, if this were a real-life example, but it illustrates the role that a concept of causality plays in determining the unit of selection. I see no way, though, in which this argument depends on Sober's specific formulation of his law for population-level causality.

P.S. I am not 100% certain how I feel about the explanatory necessity of the concept of "causation". For instance, if I say "an object subject to a given force F will experience an acceleration proportional to its mass", does it add anything useful to the explanation to say "the force causes the object to accelerate"? The idea of cause is important to Sober, and he bases a lot of his "units of selection" arguments on the concept. I have no dogmatic objection to this, but I can't help but wonder if the concept of causation isn't somehow reducible.

Episteme

I have two fundamental epistemological premises: that the evidence of my experience is the best available (really only available) data I have for learning about the world, and that most people who study, think, speak and write about the world are not intentionally lying. These seem to be pragmatically a minimal set. I don’t see how one can practically set forth on the project of learning without them.

Note that the use of the words “most” and “intentionally” in the second premise imply two corollaries: some people are lying, and some people may be unintentionally stating mistruths. (In fact, I might argue that we are all unintentionally stating mistruths to a greater or lesser extent, but that would be more of a theorem than a premise.) Also, saying experience is the “best available” data doesn’t imply that it yields infallible insight.

The two premises do not form a complete (i.e., sufficient) set. All they really say is that I can trust what I experience, and what people tell me about what they experienced (including second or third hand, etc. reports) – but with a grain or two of salt. They don’t say anything about how to come up with that grain of salt, or to know how many grains to apply. They don’t, in other words, tell me how to distinguish the veracity of conclusions I draw from these sources, or how to distinguish between competing theories. They don’t specify any rules of inference, at all.

I’m afraid all I can say about making distinctions is, “It’s ad hoc.” I am no Descartes, to offer a single unified answer to the question of how to distinguish true ideas from false ones. Certainly, I do not believe that because I can hold some idea “clearly and distinctly” that it must be true (although it might suggest truthfulness prima fascie). Instead, it’s more a matter of how well does an idea “fit in” with the other body of ideas I have constructed, over time, from the same evidence. “Consistency”, in a word. But how do I decide if an idea is consistent? Certainly not the idea of the excluded middle. I am quite convinced that it is possible for a thing to be both A and not A. The clearest examples come from human emotions: do I want to spend a month’s vacation in Venice this year, even though the press of work before and after will be terrible, it will cost a lot of money, my Italian is rusty, and I will have to find a house-sitter and/or worry about my pets and everything else in my house? I do, but I don’t. Fuzzy logic may offer better (if inherently less certain) models. But I am convinced that real antinomies can also be supported, as matters of fact (at least as humans perceive fact) in the real world, as well. Or at least, I’m not convinced that they can’t.

Ad hoc. I know it when I see it. Maybe. More or less. (I do, but I don’t.) Kind of like Descartes, perhaps, except I substitute “vague and fuzzy” for “clear and distinct”?

This could be depressing, if, like many philosophers past, I desired the nature of my mind (or soul) to approach some ideal of perfection – to make me like a god. But I don’t believe in gods. Rather than being depressed at failing to approach a fictional divinity, I prefer to celebrate the humanness of it all. Because this messy, ad hoc, but often very effective process of distinction is the stuff of life, after all, and quintessentially human, if only because humans, by and large, do it exceptionally well. Not that we do it infallibly – there are a lot of people in the world who are dead certain of things about which I am certain they are dead wrong. But by and large, in the billions of tiny, every day distinctions and decisions we make over the course of our lives, we do mostly pretty well.

We do this, of course, because we’ve been programmed that way by natural selection. Our brains have evolved to do a job, and they do it rather well (just as flies fly very well, and frogs do an excellent job of catching them). We have certain decision making processes built into our equipment. By studying our thinking in a natural scientific sort of way, it is possible to get clues as to what they are. Philosophers, I think, who have tried to set rules of thought start with some biological rule and then codify it – so clarity and distinctness counts, biologically, as evidence, and so, on some level, does the excluded middle. But we can’t stop there. We move on to fuzzy logic, paradigmatic categories... and who knows how far beyond?

My guess is that, as in most things, the brain works by having a bunch of rules, without any necessary regard as to whether they are consistent in any a priori theoretical sense. Different rules are stimulated by a particular experience, others suppressed, memory of past experience and feedback loops are brought into play, until the system “settles” in some state (“settles” is a relative term for a system that is constantly in motion), and we feel that this “makes sense” or doesn’t. This is what I mean by “consistent” with the rest of my body of knowledge. It is, in fact, the biological basis of, in a sense the definition of, “consistency”. The rules exist because, at some time in the past, they have been found helpful in negotiating the world – they have been empirically proven. They may be “hard coded” rules, proven in the dim historical past of our heritage, but, again like most things in the brain, the “hard coded” rules can be modified, and new rules created, by our individual experience. And such learned rules may be passed on to subsequent generations via the “Lamarckian” evolutionary process represented by our culture and its systems of education.

Thinking in this natural historical way about distinction and rules of inference, etc., may not “prove” validity, in the sense that philosophers have traditionally sought such proofs. But it may give pretty damn’ good evidence of empirical functionality. And, I would argue that this empirical, matter-of-fact kind of “proof” is most suitable to our real-life existence as human beings in a material world, even if it fails for some fictional existence as souls aspiring to a divine one. If philosophy is the pursuit of the “good” and if good must be good for something, then this is the kind of knowledge and truth that is “good for humans”.