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Evolution and Culture
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Evolution and religion
The growth of evolutionary theory had provided a fatal injury to the
pretension of religion.
Empiricism: the existence of things should be grounded on experience.
An entity that intervenes in space and time (as God should have done
when he created the universe and sent his son to earth) provides
empirical evidence for its existence.
Yet we have no empirical evidence for the existence of deities. All
claims that there exist deities is devoid of evidence.
But we have evidence for evolution (e.g.: physiological, fossils and
biogeography).
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Prior to the development of a convincing theory of evolution there was
an argument of sorts for the belief in God and an argument that could
be seen to have meet the naturalistic standards.
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The argument from design
Roughly, the argument goes as: the world or some of the things in it
show unmistakable mark of design; therefore there must be a designer
(i.e. God).
Even if it succeeds in showing that the world must have a designer, it
has little or no power to disclose what the designer is like.
If the existence of an ordered object requires the hypothesis of a
designer, it is difficult to see why God himself by being supremely
ordered doesn’t require a designer.
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Moral
The argument from design only specifies the theoretical apparatus so
vaguely that it becomes meaningless. All it explains is the presence of
some order or structure. It gives not a single detail of the actual
structure found in the world.
There is no possible comparison with the richness of explanatory power
of evolution theories.
Since it is difficult to separate the question from whether there are any
gods from how things are and stand in the world, Darwinism
undermines any good reason to believe in God. For if science is the only
discipline licensed to say how things stand, although we have no reason
to say that God doesn’t exists, we got no evidence that God exists.
Science doesn’t contradict religion, But it makes it increasingly
improbable that religious discourse has any subject matter.
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Big gap
The remaining big gap religion may try to bridge concerns the origins
of life.
If the inspection of the world we inhabit give us no reason for
believing in a supreme being, it doesn’t make much sense to posit one
to explain the beginning of life. The intervention of a divine being to
initiate life would be the best explanation only insofar as we already
proved its existence.
The deepest implication of evolution is that it should ultimately make
clear that we neither have nor need an all-powerful father figure to
take on the task that seem presently beyond us.
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Humans and other species
The distinctiveness of humans are language, thought and culture.
But language is basic, for without it no thought and no culture.
But this shouldn’t be surprising, for each species presents some
distinctive feature (e.g. the beaver is the only mammal digesting
wood).
The limits of a creature’s consciousness are linked to its particular set
of capacities (e.g. a dog is conscious of the scent of a rabbit who
happened to be there).
Language provides us with an extraordinary enhanced set of
capacities and consequently with an enhanced realm of
consciousness.
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Language and evolution
1. Human language, like the giraffe’s neck or the peacock's tail, has
evolved to a state that can easily be seen as different in kind from
related features of any of its relatives. Nothing, though, suggests that
these features didn’t evolve naturalistically.
2. The evolution of human language allowed the possibility of other
changes in human life that wouldn’t have been possible without
language. These changes profoundly distanced our species from the
others.
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Explaining behavior
Evolutionary biology (Wilson) and subsequently evolutionary
psychology attempted to explain human behavior in terms of
evolution.
This looks is reductionist approach.
But explanation of behavior cannot get off the ground without taking
on board both structure and context (e.g the disposition one has to
eat some food can derive from the agent’s structural features but
without an appropriate context, dining room, fork, etc. the agent
would not act).
This reflects the nature/nurture debate.
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Evolutionary psychology
The underlying idea is that the roots of human behavior in the brain
(modules) must be understood as adapted to the conditions of life in
the Stone Age and must thus be understood as processes of evolution
in the Stone Age.
Argument:
The brain must have been selected by genes and this took a time
much longer than modern humans have existed.
The longer period over which modern human evolved from prehuman ancestors and in particular evolved their characteristically large
brain is generally identified as the Pleistocene or late Stone Age.
Hence, it is this period of history to which the human brain is an
adapted structure, i.e. the modules evolved.
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The genocentric fallacy
A crucial premise in the evolutionary psychology argument is that
adaptive features of an organism can only be incorporate into a
lineage if they are ‘encoded’ in genes.
The obvious and acknowledged deficiency of this position is the
possibility of cultural evolution. Patterns of behavior may be
imitated by conspecifics and adaptive changes in patterns of behavior
may be selected trough the greater reproductive success of organisms
that adopt them. Examples of this changes are birds songs and prey
choices.
Non-genetic evolution is uncontroversially possible.
The possibility of cultural evolution, though, doesn’t get to the hearth
of the difficulties with the gene-centered perspective.
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Main problem for gene-centered accounts
The role of genes in evolution has been grossly misrepresented insofar
as genes are described as carrying blueprint for the organism, recipes
for putting together organisms and suchlike.
At a more deeper level some think that information about biological
structure flow exclusively and unidirectionally from the genome insofar
as it is believed that the genome directly codes the production of
proteins.
This is misleading. Although the production of proteins is necessarily
for the appearance of many traits is never close to sufficient. Many
parts of the DNA don’t code proteins and the ones which regulates the
production of proteins don’t do it directly, i.e. they do not specify a
specific protein.
The genome is best understood as a library of recipes. Which recipe is
implemented is often determined by features of the cell quite distinct
from the nuclear DNA.
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There are mechanism by which the cell acts on the genome so as to
affect the circumstances under which genes are expressed.
There are thus more to reproduction than the transmission of DNA.
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Moral:
The conception of the genome as the sole repository of hereditary
information about the organism has served to maintain an ultimately
disastrous rift between theories of evolution and theories of
development.
The genome is merely one developmental resource.
Everything necessary for the reproduction of the developmental cycle
is equally necessary for understanding the evolutionary trajectory of
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the organism.
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Evolutionary psychology and culture
The evolutionary psychology argument omits to consider the importance
of culture in human evolution. It merely consider our species as adapted
to life in the stone age and thus as maladapted to present urban life.
It may be that the genome may not have changed sufficiently from the
transition from Stone Age until nowadays. But the genome is only one
among many of the resources that lead to the development of
contemporary humans.
There is a great deal of flexibility in human development. Yet Culture
can only shape nature.
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Analogy vs. Homology
Homology: different species have a similar trait through descendent
from a common ancestor with an ancestral version of the trait (e.g.
the flipper of the whale and the wing of the bat).
Analogy: some traits, though similar, may have evolved
independently reflecting a similar selective pressure without having a
common ancestor trait (e.g. the wing of a bird and the wing of the
bat).
The parallel with other species offered by evolutionary psychologists
are examples of analogy. As such all they can point to is the existence
of some evolutionary tendency to acquire those traits. They are silent
about the actual evolutionary trajectory of a trait.
Given the differences among the contrasting species, these (analogue)
traits are contingent on other factors.
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Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, and Culture
The broad sense of evolution includes the king of cultural processes
that it is precisely the aim of evolutionary psychology to reject.
The main problem/difficulty is to decide between different kinds of
evolutionary processes as explanations of particular behavioral traits.
From the evolutionary psychology viewpoint the question resumes to
know which behavioral traits can be explained in purely genetic terms
or transmission.
Genetic explanation is more appropriate for features that appears in
some but not all members of a species, and for which different
between its appearance and non-appearance is attrubuable to
differences in genes.
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Evolutionary psychology goes the other way around. It seeks to
identify universal features of human psychology and then claim that
these features are to be explained genetically.
E.g. rape: Evolutionary psychologists do not explain the fact that most
men don’t rape by appeal to some men have mutant genes that cause
them to rape, but rather that it is typical or normal for men to have a
disposition to rape.
Rape as a genetic abnormality doesn’t work for the theoretical
purposes of evolutionary psychology. Being an obligate rapist is very
unlikely to be an evolutionary successful strategy.
If the disposition to rape is a developmental failure, whether
genetically or environmentally cause, there should be no selective
explanation for it and it is outside the scope of evolutionary
psychology.
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Genomes, Chimps and us
Our genomes are almost 99% identical to those of chimpanzees.
Do we conclude that we are 99% identical to chimpanzees?
If this means anything it is certainly false.
The correct inference is that neither we nor the chimpanzees are
identical to our genomes.
Moral:
To the extent that genomes are among the most invariant of features of
different organisms, they should be the last place we should expect to
find explanations of the most specific features of organisms.
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Anti-reductionism
Reductionism in science is the view that holds that to understand a
thing scientifically we must take its parts and see how they fit together,
and how the behavior of the whole derives from the behavior of the
parts.
The first limit of this approach is the attempt to atomize organisms into
traits and provide distinct explanations for the evolution of the traits.
The second abuse of reductionism is the overemphasis on genetics:
genes are ideal entities for the reductionist.
The complexity of the developmental process in the human (which is
greater than in any other species). The human mind develops under
continuous and interacting influences from within and without. It is
thus impossible to specify a one to one relation between elements of
the genome and elements of the mind.
Development must somehow be put back into our view of evolution.18