The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was notorious among his contemporaries for his cynical view of human nature.
Hobbes held that we always act out of self-interest. Once, a friend observed him giving money to a beggar and asked Hobbes if what he had just done did not disprove his own theory of human motivation.
Hobbes replied that he had given money to the beggar not out of kindness, but because it gave him pleasure to see the pleasure the beggar obtained through his gift.
Reasoning like Hobbes’ (an example of “reductionism”) is rampant in many academic disciplines, and especially in the new glamour sciences of “cognitive neurology,” “genetic technology” and “evolutionary psychology.”
A molecular biologist friend of mine in Cambridge once told me that the saddest aspect of the work of people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins was the way they identified evolution with atheist materialism.
The result, among those Christians, Muslims and others who had little understanding of science, was inevitable: reject Darwinian evolution altogether.
A clash of fundamentalisms – one religious, the other atheist – follows. But one does not have to be a theist to see the fallacies in biological reductionism (or “Biologism”).
This is how the reductionist argument goes.
The human brain is undoubtedly a physical organ that has evolved over millions of years. So, start with this fact and make the leap to the materialist creed that conscious awareness, self-consciousness and our sense of personal identity are nothing but neural activities located in our brains.
The next step follows: the mind, too, is an evolved organ. Natural selection and environmental adaptation explain all there is to us human beings.
As Steven Pinker, a prominent evolutionary psychologist of mind puts it: “The mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our natural ancestors.” Human persons are not embodied subjects, merely living organisms seeking to optimize their reproductive capacity.
If the ultimate motivation for our behavior is making the world safe for our genes, this has some rather disturbing consequences which don’t seem to have been noticed by those who advocate such views.
To begin with, any claim to objective knowledge disappears. The evolved mind serves not truth but reproductive success.
So, presumably Pinker’s arguments and beliefs are also designed to promote his “selfish” genes. If not, how does he exempt himself from his own assertions?
Moreover, all talk about love and justice, as well as truth, are ultimately self-serving. You may think you are sacrificing your life for others, but what you are really doing is enabling the group that shares your genetic material to survive.
All the ethical norms that govern your behavior are boiled down to promoting the “inclusive fitness” of your kinship group (sacrificing your life for other groups, let alone your enemies, is skated over in the literature).
More generally, the reasons we give for the things we do (from occupying Wall Street to speculating on Wall Street, from composing music to pirating music videos) are mere rationalizations.
Only the evolutionary psychologists can reveal to us the real reasons, which are not actually reasons at all but biologically determined forces that motivate and determine our behavior.
Evolutionary psychologists see us as the unwitting playthings of an immensely complex biological organ (the brain) that deceives us into thinking that we are still living in the time of our hominid ancestors or the pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer human groups.
Whether we are choosing our life partners or deliberating about energy policy, we are simply reflecting behavior learned in Stone Age savannahs.
Those forms of behavior that favor the replication of the genome will preferentially survive, whether we know it or not. And, unless we are evolutionary psychologists, we don’t know it.
Hardly a week passes when we are not offered, in the serious scientific journals no less than in pulp tabloids, biological “explanations” of marital infidelity, economic risk-taking, rape or painting in terms of the influence of our genes or neurons acting on us directly – or indirectly through their cultural proxies (so-called “memes,” analogous to genes).
However, I am still waiting to read a scientific paper that gives a biological explanation of the emergence of biological science among humans. Also, a scientific account of what motivates people to become evolutionary psychologists, and why others are impressed by their “explanations.”
I am mystified that clever academics, some philosophers and literary critics among them, blithely quote those cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists who announce that our sense of being “persons” and of having free will are nothing but illusions foisted on us by neural activity determined by our evolutionary past.
Why on earth should we believe such statements when they, too, must be biologically determined?
Moreover, isn’t it remarkable to find, say, in the same university medical department, doctors promoting “autonomy”/ “choice” as the supreme value in bioethics while their colleagues undermine all notions of selfhood and free will?
Is it not hypocritical of people to accept academic awards and book royalties for work that was all pre-programmed in their neural circuitry and over which they had no choice?
But since all moral arguments, too, including outrage at hypocrisy and double standards, are presumed to be neural reflexes or hangovers from our Stone Age past, I suppose they can be safely ignored.
Until, of course, pseudo-sciences like evolutionary psychology are thrown out of our universities. The cries of moral outrage, then, will be deafening.
VinothRamachandra is secretary for dialogue and social engagement for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He lives in Sri Lanka. A version of this column first appeared on his blog.
Secretary for dialogue and social engagement for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He lives in Sri Lanka.
