No Single Reason in the World

"Evolution poses a metanarrative, a story of history, that seems plausible to modern people — unlike, say, the old story of the infinite stack of turtles that holds up the earth. The notion that 'why' questions might find their home in 'because it's better for survival and reproduction' is one that could really guide us."

- Ezra elias kilty Cooper

A thoroughly worked-out and proven scientific theory is one which has successfully replaced a puzzle with a logical necessity — that is, replaced something interesting with something trite.

But take the dull proven truths of one domain, and apply them to another where they haven't (and probably can't) be proven, and — wow! They're interesting again!

And that's because they're false.

The biggest influence on a human mind may be the meat it starts with. It's misleading to claim, however, that the initial state and suitability of that meat was determined by its winning the Gene Olympics, unless you mean the kind of Olympics where every participant is guaranteed a medal.

A species is more or less defined by the ability of its individuals to reproduce other examples of the species. It's reasonable, then, that biology traced the origin of species to aspects of reproduction: selectivity, mutation, combinatorics. The eradication of species, on the other hand, tends to have little to do with genetics per se, and species isn't the only categorization applicable to the organic world. Culture holds more than can be described by the taxonomy of species. An individual existence holds more than can be described by the taxonomy of culture.

By speaking of "the species," we've set our boundaries as survival and reproduction. That doesn't mean that most of what actually goes on among individual members of that species is directly determined by maximal survival and reproduction. Natural selection isn't obsessive or hyperactive enough to bother with optimization. It forgets important details; it remembers worthless trivia and childish habits; it scoops up its soup with its knife; it barely gets by, until it doesn't.

Which is just as well. Perfection wouldn't have much give, and life is what takes place in the wiggle room.

In brief: What does not kill me makes me living.

One possible definition of a function is that it is something whose implementation can be seen as 'contributing to the survival and maintenance of an organism'. But this gets us into the familiar circularity that bedevils ('classical') evolutionary functionalism in biology as well:

1. The fact that an organism is alive at a given time shows that it is 'fit to survive'; i.e. 'this (living) organism is fit' is analytic.
2. In the case of an organism that has failed to survive, the only ones where we actually know the precise cause of extinction usually do not give evidence of maladaptation in the usual sense: i.e. for the immanent 'unfitness' of the organism itself. ... If for instance the passenger pigeon had been maladapted, it would not have been as common as it was; by all criteria except edibility and vulnerability to shot it was a superbly adapted and successful organism. It is rather the case that human technology and greed were such that nothing could have survived under those precise conditions.

* * *

I suggest that what really counts, the first reason we have for believing in the potential fruitfulness of a type of explanation, and for holding onto it in the face of a lack of obvious warrantability (or even in the face of evidence that it makes no sense) is some kind of criterion of INTELLIGIBILITY, which serves as a quasi-esthetic control on the evaluation of explanations. I think that we often judge (what we call) the 'explanatory' power of a statement or model on the basis of the PLEASURE, of a very specific kind, that it affords us. This pleasure is essentially 'architectonic'; the structure we impose on the chaos that confronts us is beautiful in some way, it makes things cohere that otherwise would not, and it gives us a sense of having transcended the primal disorder.

- On Explaining Language Change, Roger Lass

Functionalist arguments tend to take the following form:

1. There must be an explanation for this trait.
2. This is an explanation.
3. Q.E.D.

But maybe the trait has nothing to do with functionality, except insofar as it didn't kill all humanity before breeding age. Or maybe there were a wide range of functional possibilities, in which case we still haven't explained why this is the one we got. Or what we see is non-optimal genetic detritus left by something that was once optimal in some way we can't imagine. Maybe it's genetic cruft that became optimal later. Maybe some eccentrics somewhere don't show the trait and yet still somehow manage to be classified as human.

Prehistory involved too many unknowable factors, human culture is too volatile and varied, and confirmation or disproof is too unlikely for the hypothesizing of "evolutionary psychology" and "evolutionary sociology" to be much better than a Just-So Story.

As a harmless diversion, is it at least no worse than a Just-So Story?

That would depend on just how the diversion is used. A fable which asserts inevitability and hierarchical value with the language of psychology and ethics might be handy in all sorts of situations. Greed and selfishness aren't personal failings or noxious to society; they're the fucking foundations of life itself, boy!

And who's going to argue with life?

You and what army?

A besetting evil of popular science is its literalization of figurative language. "Light's both a wave and a particle? Freaky!" "That's right, Jimmy. Let's freak!"

A begetting evil, too. Cooperation pays off with publicity, which leads to sales, which leads to new contracts, which leads to....

Foremost among the snags of this sociobiological language is the equivocal use of words like ‘selfish’, ‘altruistic’, ‘spite’ and ‘manipulate’, a use which not only suggests psychological egoism to the surrounding peasants, but clearly at times misleads the writers themselves....

‘We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.’

[Dawkins] now comments ‘That was no metaphor. I believe it is the literal truth, provided certain key words are defined in the particular way favoured by biologists.’ (This caveat can apply only to gene and selfish, since the other words have not been discussed. The ones that really need attention, of course, are machine, vehicle and blindly programmed.)

- "Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism", Mary Midgley

Survival isn't a value judgment. It's merely the stark fact of survival. A gene isn't Roderigo Borgia, scheming toward that ultimate prize. It's not even Sir Toby Belch staggering towards bed. A gene is an imperfectly replicated or shuffled blueprint which might sometime be replicated or shuffled imperfectly.

And that's all that's needed by way of explanation.

Evolutionary theory liberated biological science from a priori notions of hierarchy and final causes, and from the distortions they inevitably introduce.

But from its first expression, interpeters have tried to bring those notions back, to change Darwin's descent into ascent, to mistake a stereotype as the grail at the end of a quest. By turning approximate analogies into rigid allegories, Dawkins became recidivism's latest success.

Social Darwinians find themselves with a self-evidently secure norm that still for some reason needs to be policed, defended, and encouraged. (Here's where you might apply that volume of Judith Butler, by the way.) Eternal vigilance is the price of determinism.

Paradoxical — but familiar, right? As in: "Our God is all-knowing and all-powerful and rewards us greatly here and in the hereafter. And this is why we feel persecuted and threatened with eradication."

What would it mean to be "guided" by a theory of necessity? To "follow" the inevitable?

That's called chasing your own tail. And success tastes like ass.

Why should people want to formulate a unenforceable "law" in the first place? What gives that meme its competitive edge?

As John Ashcroft can tell you, the benefit is the latitude it gives the formulator. When the nominally "unnatural" or "prohibited" is in fact thoroughly part of quotidian existence, we have our pick of targets, and we can pick them off at our leisure.

Thus we might, for example, note homosexuality as a distressing anomaly while letting other nonprocreative sexual experience off with a wink and a smile.

But what if we stay logically consistent, and treat masturbation, oral-genital contact, and the female orgasm as equally abhorrent unto the Gene our Lord?

Again, that has a familiar ring. And haven't I read some secular exegeses that came perilously close to "Women Were Designed For Homemaking"? (via reading/writing)

Treating evolution as if it had a "design" has proven to be almost as pernicious an error as straight theocratic denial. Dawkins's flavor is just the backside of Creationism, with Mean Gene blasphemously enthroned as the intelligent designer. I'm not inclined to raise hosannas.

Errata

right. evolution as a social narrative is already evolution bastardized, because it's pretty much all statistics, and there is *nothing* comforting about statistics except for cold-blooded skeptics like me. the teleological mistake is defining means in terms of the wrong ends, as an aggravation of defining means & ends at all: for no given point in, say, human history can you cut a cross-section through it and say that *anyone* was adapted to do this, whatever "this" is at the population level. people, however, like to cut cross-sections through history, often with more aesthetic aims in mind. the ideas both of "adaptation" and "whatever it is you're adapted to" are emergent phenomena, which is a much healthier trendy phrase -- we did not evolve to fight wars or make love or what have you; those are things we do along the way, from randomness to randomness.

but people don't like randomness? god knows why. it's so fantastic.

but: what are you talking about?

Another reader seems similarly puzzled:

Water has a design. Things that use water may get in trouble if they behave as if it doesn't. It has a design because that's the way it is here in universe-land. Attaching anthro-valent purpose to the design is no different than attaching any other purpose, or _ key item _ no-purpose-at-all-in-the-sense-of-no-design. Rules are rules. It doesn't matter who made them. It matters how they're enforced.

The point is that rules of physics call on a different enforcement agency than rules of thumb. "That's the way it is" may mean "Better than random results have been found in this test population of two dozen middle-class American college students," which is a far cry from "That's the way it always is and always will be"— which, however, is not so far from "That's the way it must be," which in turn marches very closely to "Thou shalt." Teleology without supporting evidence handwaves us into that latter parade.

If you're one of the majority of patients for whom the newest chemotherapy isn't at all useful (despite a statistically positive effect), that doesn't make you an evolutionary anomoly, even though it might modify your role as an active gene carrier. People who exhibit behavior other than what's been announced as significant results remain fully significant. Those results (almost by definition) reflect something more transient than species — such as recent chemotherapy patents, or wide-spread syndication of "Everybody Loves Raymond." "Rules are rules," but premature acquiescence will leave you unnecessarily stuck with that chemotherapy and that TV show, looking for romance in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

We regret any inconvenience.

Addendum: No Single Reason in the World

Readers inquire:

God the Ambivalent hises up his tartan petticoats, hauls out his schlong, and pisses on the beach every once in a while, to search for buried treasure. Hence these bluffs and cliffs, out of which the rockin' bones prick. (See, for instance, "Rockin' bones, rockin' bones, rock rock rock it" by The Rockin' Bones; or don't.) I think I was trying to talk about evolution, was it?

Do the pseudopodium form at different parts of the amoebae body?

Usually, yes.

My recent series on the origin of evolutionary sociology nattered on mercilessly; I, like you, would welcome a change of subject. But self-publication must go where self-indulgence directs, and, you know, other folks are still talking about it, and I recently had my attention drawn to a phenomenon I wished I'd included, and, oh dear, oh well, I apologize to you and to my best intentions.

To recap a bit: When a respected compeer questioned the evolutionary value of homosexuality, I answered "Who needs one?" Sex as aggression, sex as social duty, and sex as friendly gesture are all fully capable of baby-making, and homosexual lust doesn't interfere with them. Heterosexual lust, as usually defined, is therefore not necessary for reproduction. Just look at the Hapsburgs.

But there's another common trait that's 100% effective at eliminating baby-making: infertility.

The human Y chromosome consists of decaying debris. Its presence triggers maleness, but its contents are mostly ignored. And they mostly have to be. Senile and solipsistic, the Y genes don't take part in recombination, and so there's no way for their basic structures to be reinforced over time. Genetic rot and drop-offs are common.

Among the few bodily traits blueprinted in the Y are some which help bring spermatozoa fully to term, so to speak, pampering the little dears till they grow up to be big and strong like daddy's. When chromosome rot strikes out that genetic mapping, the eventual result is someone who's indisputably male but almost always infertile, with few and immobile sperm.

How many offspring will an infertile man's genes selfishly acquire? None — considerably less than the average number of offspring among my gay and lesbian acquaintances. That's about as little support from natural selection as possible.

And yet a significant percentage of men are infertile. Why is this permitted?

If you want to, you can try to work out some convoluted untestable Rube Dawkins explanation of how it might actually benefit the species.

I have a simpler, and thus preferable, answer. It's permitted because natural selection and genetic reproduction are too dumb and too hamstrung by earlier choices to be able to prevent it. Too many changes would need to be coordinated. Oh, maybe if we're left to breed undisturbed (with a pinch of radiation) for another hundred million years or so, a row of cherries will line up. How likely is that?

Admittedly, this is reductio ad absurdum. But I believe that most interesting aspects of human behavior are closer to that reductio ad absurdum than to the bill of Darwin's finch.

I can't prove my belief. I don't even want to prove my belief. I do want evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary sociologists to disprove my belief before they leech funding and publicity from legitimate science. Wild speculation from iffy evidence can be a beautiful thing — in a creative writing department.

Failing towards Freedom : Footnote

Samuel Butler's most cited statement on evolution must be "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg." But his most prescient was "The power to make mistakes is one of the criteria of life as we commonly think of it."