The Gene Game
Did you know that you have an insatiable desire to hang a painting on your wall of a grassy field with a few trees, maybe a pool of water? It is supposed to depict the African savannah where humans might have first evolved. On a summer evening, after the NPR news, I first heard Steven Pinker claim that everyone preferred such pictures. Pinker said that surveys of people’s preferences for art throughout the world showed that this was the case, though he didn’t identify any of these surveys. However, the NPR interviewer was entranced by Pinker’s theory.
Art
Dennis Dutton makes the same claim in his 2009 book The Art Instinct, modeled on Pinker’s book The Language Instinct. Pinker and Dutton are not talking about high art—it’s instead soothing images that bring us back to the place that we all were supposed to come from—the African savannah. Pinker and Dutton both think that’s where our very, very distant ancestors may have lived. Their premise is that an innate memory of the old home place is coded in the brain of every human being. Its depiction is so soothing that you want to have a painting of an African savannah, or at least a reproduction if you can’t afford a painting. Unfortunately, the savannah wasn’t necessarily home sweet home. Pinker and Dutton haven’t kept up with paleoanthropology. Lucy and her kin, the very archaic hominims described by Don Johanson, lived in a heavily forested terrain (Johanson and Maitland, 1981).
Dutton in his book cites surveys of the art preferences of young children. The tastes of five-year-old children presumably reveal our innate art instinct before it is contaminated by memories of vacations, pet dogs, whatever. One study indeed reports that all children like to look at scenes depicting open fields with a few trees (Falk and Balling, 2010). But if you search the literature, you will find conflicting studies that state that young boys prefer seascapes, while young girls prefer pictures of people to landscapes (Dietrich and Hunnicutt, 1948; Taunton, 1982). Other studies show that all Norwegians, male and female, prefer to have seascapes on their walls, so you will be reassured that your species memory is not anomalous. These surveys should also rest your mind concerning the images on the calendars and catalogs that you surely get through the mail—they are not the products of aberrant, diseased brains directed toward persons possessing aberrant, diseased minds. One of the many catalogs that fills up our paper recycling box comes from Cabela’s, the “World’s Foremost Outfitter.” Cabela’s sells a range of useful outdoor gear and clothing as well as an array of camouflage suits that you can wear if you wish to impersonate a tree to get close to a deer. If the images of the items at Cabela’s were evidence of our presumed visual species-memory, we might conclude that our distant ancestors lived in a verdant Garden of Eden full of herds of deer and moose, flocks of pheasants, streams full of fish. Cabela’s catalogs have pages and pages showing framed pictures, wall-hangings, bedspreads, towels, coffee-mugs, hat racks, and toilet paper holders (virtually anything you can think of) depicting moose, deer, pheasants, grouse, trout, bass, and sundry creatures who can be eaten, as well as bears.
The Pinker-Dutton claim is a typical exercise in evolutionary psychology. A story is crafted about events in the very distant past, and hypothetical genes are postulated that pass on some relevant aspect of behavior to every human throughout time. Everyone now acts or thinks in some way because they have these putative genes. The masters of the genre are Leda Cosmides and John Toobey. Their 1992 book The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture is a pastiche of just-so stories about how prehistoric people acted and studies of human behavior that probably have a genetic basis, such as infant-mother communication.
For example, we all supposedly have a “cheater-detector” gene, and a scenario could easily be crafted to account for natural selection favoring a selective sweep for this putative gene in which a hunter-gatherer seated before the collective fire detects someone eating more than his/her fair share of the hunt and dispatches the villain, thereby increasing the frequency of the cheater-detector gene that enabled him to detect the cheat. Scenarios that actually have been published in scholarly journals, place the evolution of the cheater-detector gene further back in time to our primate ancestors. It really is puzzling in the light of everyone now having a cheater-detector gene why thousands of investors were fleeced in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
The evolution of language lends itself to these kinds of just so stories. Some of the stories provide relief from the tedium of academic conferences! At a UNESCO-sponsored conference in Paris in the 1980s, the room was warm and darkened and I was about to doze off, but I must have still been awake when I heard that the evolution of human speech could be traced back to an astronomical event. The speaker had said that the conjunction of Mars and Venus 4,500 years ago caused consonants to burst forth from the mouths of the startled Hebrews. The speaker was speaking English, but everyone at the conference had a set of headphones and a switch that allowed hearing a simultaneous translation into French, German, or English. I put my headphones on and switched to French to be certain that I wasn’t dreaming. There is always a slight delay in “simultaneous translation,” but the French translation had come to a halt. After about a minute, the translator, suppressing a giggle, repeated the message.
Sex
A 2011 paper in Nature, which accepts less than five percent of studies submitted to it, suggests to some people that human social structures, particularly those governing sex, are fixed by genes that derive from our primate ancestors. The paper’s message (Shultz et al., 2011), as conveyed to the readers of the New York Times by Nicholas Wade in his December 20, 2011, article, is genetic determinism. Wade reported that all nonhuman primates have the same social structures wherever they live, whether it’s in a savannah, mountainous region, or rain forest, reflecting genetic determinism. The paper actually doesn’t seem to make that claim, but Wade holds to the view that genes govern us. His 2009 book The Faith Instinct is based on that premise. Wade linked the Nature monkey and ape paper with Bernard Chapais’s views on human sexual mores.
Chapais, who teaches at L’Universite de Montreal, also seems to hold to the belief that genes rule us. He states that human social structure is similar in all cultures owing to our genes, but he qualifies that claim by stating that culture “hides” this. The message in the Times article is this:
Evolutionary change in any particular lineage is highly constrained by the lineage’s phylogenetic history. . . . This reasoning applies to all species, including ours. But in humans, cultural variation hides both the social unity of mankind and its biological foundation.
Presumably, Chapais somehow can remove the veil of culture. Chapais then accounts for both family groups and sexual promiscuity:
Human multifamily groups may have arisen from the gorilla-type harem structure, with many harems merging together, or from stable breeding bonds replacing sexual promiscuity in a chimpanzee-type society.
Are we ruled by either or both chimpanzee and gorilla genes? If it’s a harem, it must be a gorilla gene that rules you. If it’s simply lots of sex, it must be a chimpanzee gene. Chapais’s 2008 book Primeval Kinship apparently claims that a further stage in human social organization occurred that suppressed sexual promiscuity. Individual bands allied with those with whom they exchanged daughters. The scenario bears a striking resemblance to the marriages that bound the royal houses of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, which unfortunately did not tie the “bands” (read Germany, England, France, Austria, Russia) together and ended in the destruction of the prevailing social order in World War I. It moreover is hard to believe that anyone thinks that “sexual promiscuity” no longer characterizes human conduct. Chapais’s notions of “normal” human sexual mores may reflect what he thinks should be going on in Montreal. But even if everyone in Montreal behaved as Chapais would have us believe, it’s irrelevant. The behavior of everyone on earth does not conform to the practices of WEIRDO culture—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democracies. As Joseph Henrich and his colleagues in their 2010 review article on WEIRDO behavior in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences pointed out:
In the tropical forests of New Guinea, the Etoro believe that for a boy to achieve manhood he must ingest the semen of his elders. This is accomplished through ritualized rites of passage that require young male initiates to fellate a senior member (Herdt 1984/1993; Kelley 1980). In contrast, the nearby Kaluli maintain that male initiation is only properly done by ritually delivering the semen through the initiate’s anus, not his mouth. The Etoro revile these Kaluli practices, finding them disgusting. To become a man in these societies, and eventually take a wife, every boy undergoes these initiations. Such boy-inseminating practices, which are enmeshed in rich systems of meaning and imbued with local cultural values, were not uncommon among the traditional societies of Melanesia and Aboriginal Australia (Herdt 1984/1993), as well as in Ancient Greece and Tokugawa Japan (Henrich et al., 2010).
I doubt that either Chapais or Nicholas Wade are unaware of the range of “normal” human sexual practices throughout the world and at different epochs. Harems were accepted in the Ottoman Empire until the twentieth century. Utah entered the United States only when harems were legislated out of existence in the late nineteenth century. Harems still persist in dissenting Mormon fringe groups. Harems still remain part of the “normal” social fabric in large parts of the world. Family structure varies throughout the world. And whether someone is judged to be “promiscuous” depends on who they are. Catherine the Great, the empress who ruled Russia in the eighteenth century, had a string of lovers, but no one dared call her promiscuous. The father of her son Paul, the czar who succeeded Catherine, was her first lover.
It also is doubtful that the social structures of nonhuman primates are always uniform. Stuart and Jeanne Altmann in a 1971 study showed that baboons have very different social structures in different ecosystems. The Altmanns showed a female from a baboon troop living in a forest habitat reacting to a dominant male from a baboon group living in arid conditions. The male’s “baboon-culture” licensed sex at will. That apparently wasn’t the case in the female’s baboon-culture. She whirled around and bit him when he attempted to mount her. Jeanne Altman’s 1980 book Baboon Mothers and Infants demonstrated the adaptability of baboon culture. The pendulum swings. The Altmann studies are a generation removed from the authors of the 2011 Nature paper, Nature’s reviewers, and Nature’s editors. Genetic determinism now is in fashion. Michael Tomasello and his colleagues have shown that chimpanzees and other species are capable of learning complex tasks and interacting with humans, discerning the intentions of people with whom they are in contact by “reading” subtle cues and associating these cues with actions (Tomasello, 2003, 2009), but his insights unfortunately get less attention outside his field of study.
I really should have started this account of genetic invention with Noam Chomsky. The theories proposed by evolutionary psychologists derive from Chomsky’s nativist views on the nature of human language.
Suppose that every human brain contained an innate store of knowledge that enabled any teenager to effortlessly attain the skills and judgment necessary to safely drive, without instruction, taking advice, or really learning anything. An innate “Universal Grammar of Driving,” the UGD, an organ of the human brain, would instantiate a knowledge base concerning the acquisition of all matters pertaining to driving anywhere in the world, the explicit premise being that no one learns to drive by either observing competent drivers coping with various situations, deriving general principles from these examples, or for that matter, by heeding explicit instructions. Absent the UGD, it supposedly would not be possible for anyone to master the art of driving. The knowledge stored in the UGD simply would be activated by the teenager’s exposure to local conditions. The UGD could contain a set of “Principles” such as:
A. KEEPING TO ONE SIDE OF THE ROAD
B. STOPPING AT RED LIGHTS
C. STOPPING AT CERTAIN SIGNS
The UGD also could include a set of “Parameters” that acted on these Principles so as to allow the novice to drive properly in different places. The ordered parameters would activate innate alternatives that applied to each Principle. For example, the Parameters associated with Principle A might include:
1. KEEP TO THE LEFT
2. KEEP TO THE RIGHT
1.1. PASS ON THE RIGHT
2.1. PASS ON THE LEFT
3. PASS ANYWHERE
The UGD would account for a person “acquiring” the driving technique of Massachusetts—for example, on exposure to traffic in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the novice teenager at the wheel would instantly acquire the innate knowledge coded by Parameter 2, acting on Principle A, so as to drive on the right side of the road. Principle 2.1 then would be activated so as to convey the knowledge that s/he should pass on the left of a moving vehicle. The driver’s knowledge base perhaps could then be “mathematically” described by the string (A, 2, 2.1). However, since the teenager was acquiring driving in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the epicenter for study of innate human knowledge of language, arithmetic, art, and so on, which also has high rates set for collision insurance, Parameter 3 might instead be activated. Similar Parameters and sectional constraints would mark the teenage driver’s acquisition of knowledge of STOPPING—for example:
1. RIGHT TURN AFTER STOPPING
2. NO TURNS AFTER STOPPING
3. IGNORE ALL SIGNS
If a UGD existed, you might expect teenage drivers to rapidly became proficient. However, that claim also would be disputed by your insurance company.
But the actual driving records of teenagers would not refute the possibility of a UGD modeled on the theories proposed by Noam Chomsky and like-minded scholars. Their theories postulate innate knowledge and are not concerned with actual behavior, so it would be advisable to have a responsible adult, who can apply the emergency brake, sit next to the teenager at the wheel even if a UGD existed.
When the layers of jargon that envelop Chomskian linguistics are peeled away, they are more extreme than the deliberately silly case of the Universal Grammar of Driving. Noam Chomsky’s views on human language reduce to the claim that the brain of every “normal” human being who ever was, lives today, or will ever be, contains an identical store of knowledge that enables him or her to rapidly and effortlessly acquire any language that has ever existed, exists, or will occur. This store of knowledge, the Universal Grammar, enables a child to “acquire” any language without tedious processes such as associative learning, imitation, or any form of learning. A child merely has to be exposed to a particular language and it will be activated in the child’s brain. The UG is conceptually similar to the preloaded computer “wizards” that allow you to select English, French, German, Chinese, whatever, as the language that you will use to run an application. According to Chomsky and his adherents, who include most linguists, you did not learn to speak whatever language was used by your parents and the persons with whom you were in contact as a child. All you had to do was to hear English, or German, or Tibetan, and that triggered the correct download. Noam Chomsky’s model is an improvement on any current computer software wizard that entails a mouse-click or touch-screen fingerprint to select the correct download—it is voice activated.
The hypothetical Universal Grammar is one of the key elements of Chomsky’s “Faculty of Language.” The concepts derive from Rene Descartes’s seventeenth-century views on language, and the terms reflect those used by nineteenth-century phrenologists. As was the case for phrenology, language is instantiated in the brain by a domain-specific organ or set of organs—modules, or in recent years, domain-specific language circuits. Every “normal” human being had, has, or will have in the case of future generations, the same, identical UG. The argument that Chomsky and like-minded linguists make for every normal person’s UG being identical typically starts with their asserting that every normal person has a heart, hands, and a nose. The incorrect jump in their argument is that all hearts, hands, and noses are functionally identical, which isn’t the case. The false linguistic conclusion they reach is that the hypothetical Universal Grammar is functionally identical in every normal human being—this is impossible.
Darwin’s Demise in Chomskian Lingustics
Chomsky must postulate an identical Universal Grammar in every dead, living, or yet-to-be-born human because the Universal Grammar is the causal agent for any human acquiring any language. This entails every person who was ever born or will be born having the same identical UG, because any normal child can acquire any human language. As noted earlier, if variation existed on the UG, as is the case for hearts, hands, noses, or any organ of the human body, then some children would be unable to acquire a particular language because some critical feature would be missing from their UG. Some child raised in a German-speaking setting might not have the features necessary to activate German, though he or she might be able to activate Chinese. We would find thousands of children who could not acquire their native language.
The logical consequence in Chomskian linguistics is that Darwinian natural selection cannot exist because natural selection critically depends on the presence of variation. Charles Darwin in the first two chapters of On the Origin of Species stressed the presence of biological variation. Darwin didn’t understand the genetic bases of variation, but he realized that variation is the feedstock of natural selection, as well as for artificial selection guided by agriculturalists and animal-breeders. Biological variation is an undisputed fact. Everyone does not have the same heart; everyone does not have the same hands. And human brains vary to the degree that it is often difficult to interpret the findings of fMRI brain-imaging studies.
The traditional solution taken by linguists to the problem of variation is to instead ignore it and discuss the behavior of an “ideal speaker-hearer.” This approach has yielded insights on the nature of language as well as missed opportunities (some of the problems are discussed in the following and in Lieberman, 2006). Chomsky’s solution is bolder; he simply sets Charles Darwin aside. As Chomsky puts it,
It is perfectly safe to attribute this development [of innate language structures] to “natural selection,” so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to no more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena (Chomsky, 1972, p. 97).
At the 1975 Conference on the Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech, organized by the New York Academy of Sciences, Chomsky repeated the preceding lines almost verbatim. He makes the same claim in his 2012 book The Science of Language.
Why Most Americans Cannot Speak Correct English
If Noam Chomsky were to accept the view that natural selection is the driving force of evolution, he also would find it impossible to account for why he and most Americans can speak English. As chapter 3 pointed out, natural selection on humans never ended. Natural selection will shape any aspect of human biology that contributes to survival of an individual and his or her children. The ability to digest cows’ milk as an adult isn’t learned—it entails having an innate, genetically transmitted, biological mechanism. In human groups who possessed herds of animals that could be milked, natural selection acted to yield individuals who had the genes that enabled them to digest milk as adults, thereby enhancing their survival and their children’s survival. Natural selection acted on different genes to confer the ability to use milk as an additional food source in different parts of the world at different times (Tishkoff et al., 2007). Other human groups who didn’t have domesticated milk-producing animals didn’t evolve adult lactose tolerance—that’s why lactose-free food is stocked on the shelves of your supermarket.
While you can survive without drinking milk as an adult, without language you would be nothing. No object used in daily life, your clothing, your home, anything resulted from an innate mechanism, nor was the manner in which it is used innately transmitted to you. That is also the case for aspects of human behavior. You didn’t have a gene that caused you to look both ways before you crossed the street, or a gene that enabled you to lace your shoes. Virtually all aspects of daily life are culturally transmitted, the result of cultural aggregation and transmission. And the medium of transmission is human language. Thus if your ancestors had been using any particular language for an extended period—let’s say the last three thousand years (the period when adult lactose tolerance or high-altitude adaptation evolved by means of natural selection)—then if any innate Universal Grammar (UG), or Optimality Theory (OT), or other variant of Chomsky’s Faculty of Language were necessary to “acquire” that language, natural selection would have acted to optimize it.
The United States is an optimal experiment-in-nature, since the ancestors of most Americans did not speak English before they arrived here. Because languages differ dramatically, you might have never been able to acquire English if your ancestors were speaking Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, and so on. Your UG would have been optimized for your ancestral language, rendering it useless or deficient for acquiring English. Only Americans whose ancestral lineage was English—which includes neither Chomsky nor me—would be able to speak “correct” English. As chapter 3 pointed out, Americans having Chinese ancestors surely would not be able to even master the syllable structure of English because the time depth of the Chinese languages exceeds the period in which natural selection yielded adult lactose tolerance, or the respiratory capacity to adapt to extreme altitude.
Back to the 1960s
Chomsky’s views on innateness and language seem to be an amalgam of Rene Descartes’s seventeenth-century notions of Universal Grammar (which was supposed to prove the existence of the soul) and the findings of twentieth-century studies on how short-lived animals’ genetically transmitted behavior is triggered by the environment. He still tenaciously holds to the view that similar mechanisms account for how children acquire language. Geoffrey Pullum, who heads the Language and Linguistics program at Edinburgh University, was surprised to hear Chomsky once again repeat his tale of the rock, rabbit, and granddaughter at a conference that took place in October 2011 in London to an audience of invited academics. The tale, which appears in several of Chomsky’s publications, is
To say that “language is not innate” is to say that there is no difference between my granddaughter, a rock and a rabbit. In other words, if you take a rock, a rabbit and my granddaughter and put them in a community where people are talking English, they’ll all learn English. If people believe that, then they believe that language is not innate. If they believe that there is a difference between my granddaughter, a rabbit and a rock, then they believe that language is innate (Chomsky, 2000, p. 50).
The tale of the rock, rabbit, and granddaughter would make sense if “duckling” were substituted for “granddaughter” and “quacks” for language.
The experimental data underlying Chomsky’s views on how children acquire language appears to devolve from a 1960s debate on the nature of bird brains. Psychologists then were debating the degree to which animal behavior was malleable. One point of view was that brains are very malleable, and “imprinting” experiments supported that view. Duck or chicken eggs would be incubated in a laboratory isolated from adult ducks or chickens. The newly hatched chick or duckling, if exposed to a person, would follow that person about as though he or she was a mother duck or hen. The premise was that during a “sensitive” period after birth, the bird brain was completely malleable and would take the first object or person it saw as its mother. Gilbert Gottlieb was a young psychologist who wondered whether this malleability extended to everything birdlike. It didn’t.
Gottlieb and his friends found that mallard ducklings did not respond to wood duck maternal calls, nor did wood duck ducklings respond to the maternal calls made by mallard ducks. In a brilliantly executed project reported in a 1975 paper, Gottlieb showed that ducks didn’t have to learn everything needed to be a duck. Duck information was preloaded in their brains that merely had to be triggered. When a duck egg that was about to hatch was briefly exposed to recordings of adult ducks quacking and was then kept isolated from other ducks, months later the duck would quack appropriately. When duckling eggs were not exposed to quacks, the grown ducks never quacked like a duck. There is a “sensitive” period that starts shortly before a duck is hatched in which a duckling in its egg, or shortly thereafter, merely has to hear duck calls for it to acquire the calls. This makes sense for animals that have a short life span. They don’t have to learn to quack, nor do they probably have to learn other things that are necessary to be successful in duck-life. There is an innate, domain-specific “Faculty of Quacking” in the brain of every mallard duck, wood duck, or other type of duck. But that doesn’t work for children—try to get your child to speak Tibetan by playing a CD of someone speaking Tibetan shortly after she or he is born.
Chomskian linguistics purports that if baby Susan or Sam hears English, French, or whatever language is being spoken, she or he will master English, French, and so on by age four or five years. That doesn’t happen; children don’t rapidly master either speech or syntax. Carol Chomsky in her 1969 book found that English-speaking children were not up to speed at age eight years. Robin Burling’s 2002 review article confirms that French- and English-speaking children haven’t mastered the syntax of either language until they reach their teens. Children don’t even talk as fast as adults or achieve adult articulatory proficiency until their teens (Smith, 1978; Smith and Goffman, 1988). Melissa Bowerman showed that Dutch children who heard hours of German every night on the TV programs that their parents watched neither spoke or understood German until they later studied German in school. Children learn to talk and master a language by using that language over a period of at least a decade.
Another questionable thesis of Chomskian linguistics is the “poverty of the stimulus.” Accordingly, absent UG, children would never master the syntax of their native language, unless they were overtly corrected whenever they uttered a grammatically incorrect sentence or phrase. Mommy, Daddy, or someone else, would have to continually correct them. That usually doesn’t happen; hence, Chomsky concluded that there must be a UG in every child’s brain. A mathematical exercise, Gold’s theorem (1967), is the theoretical basis for the poverty of the stimulus argument. Gold’s exercise showed that “negative” information, explicit correction of a child’s errors, is necessary for perfect transmission of the syntax of a language. Apart from the fact that children are indirectly corrected when they make mistakes—adults or older children will often immediately echo a young child’s garbled utterance, correcting the error—Gold’s theorem was shown to be irrelevant two years later when Horning, using similar mathematical methods, showed that negative information isn’t necessary if less than perfect correctness is attained. One of the mechanisms for language change is the fact that children do not exactly copy their caretaker’s speech. Horning’s Stanford University dissertation is accepted by specialists in computer modeling and mathematical logic. It generally is ignored in arguments for an innate Universal Grammar.
The 1957 Starting Point
None of this nonsense was proposed in Noam Chomsky’s first class at MIT. I was one of the four students. It probably was the fall of 1954, perhaps 1955—I don’t have a transcript of my MIT grades—and the young Noam Chomsky said nothing about evolution or innate faculties of the mind—Cartesian Linguistics was years ahead. Chomsky’s 1957 book Syntactic Structures had not yet been printed. Instead, we used a blue Ditto-Machine version! If I had preserved it, it would now be a collector’s item.
Chomsky claimed that in your mind/brain, the meaning of a sentence such as I saw the boy who ate ice cream fall down was represented by an “underlying” structure in which the simple “canonical” sentence The boy ate ice cream had been inserted into the framework of the canonical sentence I saw the boy fall down. The underlying representation was supposed to reflect how your mind discerned the meaning of the sentence. “Transformational” rules then acted on the underlying representation to produce the complex “surface” sentence, I saw the boy who ate ice cream fall down, that you spoke or wrote. Innate organs of the brain and evolution were never discussed. The theory presented in Syntactic Structures was elegant and Noam was a modest, charming teacher. I didn’t begin to see the problems until years later, when in MIT’s graduate program in linguistics it became evident that the underlying representation of a sentence of any language whatsoever, always was a simple English sentence. English apparently was the “universal” language of thought.
I also came to wonder about the ultimate objective of linguistic research. Linguists almost always attempt to describe the behavior of an “ideal speaker-hearer.” Variation is ignored or treated as “noise” that detracts attention from the true knowledge of language—the competence—that everyone surely possesses. The objective then becomes one of discovering “laws” of language, similar to the laws of Newtonian physics that govern the formation of sounds, words, and sentences—in short, a model that stands in stark contrast to what Ernst Mayr (1982) termed the “population thinking” of biology, where variation must be taken into account. The “laws” of Newtonian physics work because all rocks will fall at the same rate. In contrast, Chomsky’s grandchildren will reach different adult heights, even if they were fed the same food and held to a similar regimen in all aspects of childhood life. If you have ever read the information packed with a prescribed medicine, the range of “adverse” effects that can occur should convince you that people vary with respect to their reactions. Some few linguists have taken account of variation, such as William Labov (1972), who documented the manner in which dialects change over time. However, in most linguistic exercises, any unwanted deviation from the “competence” predicted by the theory in question is dismissed as a “performance” effect. Just how anyone decides what competence is remains a dark art, and it usually turns out to be behavior that supports someone’s pet theory.
Chomsky and linguists sharing his views have over the years devised ever more complex and opaque jargon, but the basic principle remains unchanged. They’re the same in his most recent publication (Chomsky, 2012b). The complex, grammatical, well-formed, sentences that you might hear or read are generated from a simple sentence into which other sentences have been inserted. The simple sentence is the object for semantic interpretation—what the sentence means. The sentence that you hear or read has been modified to match “sensory motor” constraints (Chomsky, 2012a, p. 13). I was studying electrical engineering at MIT when I first encountered Chomsky’s “formal linguistics,” which involved writing “rules of grammar” that are similar to the algorithms then used by software engineers to write computer programs. Whereas the art of software engineering has made remarkable progress since 1957, virtually no progress has been made even in describing English, the most intensively studied language on earth. Linguists continue to use algorithms that haven’t changed from the ones we used in Chomsky’s first class at MIT. Even linguists holding to Chomsky’s general conception of the nature of human language, such as Ray Jackendoff, admit that
Thousands of linguists throughout the world have been trying for decades to figure out the principles behind the grammatical patterns of various languages. . . . But any linguist will tell you that we are nowhere near a complete account of the mental grammar of any language (Jackendoff, 1994, p. 26).
The Key to Human Language, According to Chomsky
Chomsky has never abandoned the early version of Universal Grammar (UG), which had hundreds of innate “principles and parameters” that supposedly were preloaded into every human brain. The 1980 version of UG, with its large inventory of principles and parameters, seemingly disappeared in 2002, replaced by two Faculties of Language. However, UG has reappeared in his subsequent publications, such as his 2012 paper “Minimal Recursion.” Optimality Theory, which attempts to account for the manner in which children “acquire” the speech sounds and syllabic structure, also involves a battery of principles and parameters.
The “Faculty of Language, Narrow” (FLn) provides “recursion”—the hypothetical, defining core feature of human language (Hauser et al., 2002). The “Faculty of Language, Broad” (FLb) transmits those elements of language that are shared with other aspects of human behavior. Recursion, the FLn, boils down to being able to construct sentences that include clauses, like this sentence—or sentences such as I saw the boy who ate an ice cream cone fall down. Or even sentences that young children often form such as, I saw the elephant and the hippopotamus at the zoo. Chomsky’s core constituency now takes recursion to be the defining feature of human language. Hauser et al. (2002), the initial paper on recursion, stated that recursion was domain-specific, occurring in language and language alone. No other living species supposedly possessed recursion, which in their view distinguished language from all other aspects of human behavior. In subsequent publications and talks, Chomsky with Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch have defended this view of language with slight modifications (for example, Fitch et al., 2005; Fitch, 2010). Unfortunately, Daniel Everett came along and showed that a language spoken in the depths of the Amazonian rain forest, Piraha, does not have sentences that involve recursion.
The argument for recursion being the key to language is odd because virtually every aspect of human and animal behavior involves recursion. Think of a square dance or the more elaborate dances of the nineteenth century—a video of a dramatization of any of Jane Austen’s novels will demonstrate a couple holding each other as they swing around, moving in the path formed by a line of men and women to its head. Their dance steps are then repeated by the next couple. Recursive acts are inserted into other elements of the dance. Virtually all musical forms entail recursion. Walking involves recursively inserting movements such as heel strike into a larger pattern. If the syntactic “rules” used to describe sentence structure were used to record the actions taken by squirrels stashing nuts away for the winter, the squirrel syntax would involve recursion. As a squirrel dashed about looking for places to bury a nut, s/he would recursively perform the same sub-sequence—digging a hole, placing the nut within, and then covering it. Each nut burial constitutes a recursive act, placed within the framework of the squirrel’s dashing about, searching for suitable locations. The stereotyped innate grooming patterns of rats and squirrels are regulated by recursive neural firing patterns in their basal ganglia (Aldridge and Berridge, 1998). The grooming patterns involve rats performing a sequence of paw and body movements in complex sequences that include nested sub-sequences. Wayne Aldridge and Kent Berridge kindly sent me a video of a California ground squirrel performing his charming (to Ms. Squirrel) courtship dance. Mr. Squirrel whirls around, while his tail recursively does all sorts of things that will entice Ms. Squirrel to be his partner.
Birds can learn to recognize birdsongs that have different recursive patterns. In a study published in Nature in 2006, Timothy Gentner and his colleagues at the University of Chicago showed that starlings could recognize acoustic patterns that were differentiated solely by their recursive patterns. Though most people don’t think of starlings as “songbirds,” they sing long songs that are composed of smaller iterated “motifs”—acoustic segments that together constitute songs that the birds recognize. Eleven European starlings (Stuns vulgaris) were trained to classify sub-sequences of songs formed from starling motifs by grammars that involved recursion, as well as grammars that didn’t. The grammatical algorithms were similar in nature to those that linguists use to describe sentences. Nine of the starlings were successful in identifying birdsongs generated by recursion. Curiously, Chomsky’s published response to the starlings being able to learn these recursive syntactic rules was that it was the result of natural selection, which according to him, doesn’t account for the evolution of the neural bases or anatomy involved in human language and speech.
Amen Brothers, Amen Sisters!
I missed a golden opportunity at the plenary session of the 1995 Boston University Conference on Language Development when an apostate recanted. I failed to rise up, throw my arms upward and declare, “Hallelujah! Amen Sisters, Amen Brothers.”
Jill de Villiers, who for decades had studied how children learn to talk and master English syntax, declared that she now “believed in Universal Grammar.” Almost everyone applauded. That wasn’t the first or last time that I heard a linguist declare, “I believe in Universal Grammar.”
A theory, in the domain of science, cannot be “proved.” You don’t have a theory unless it can be tested—subjected to falsification. A belief is inherently different. How can anyone show that heaven does not exist? You can believe in the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, Tibetan deities, or other metaphysical entities. Belief rests in the domain of religion, not science. When Evangelical fundamentalists argue against Darwin, they often assert that the theory of evolution is “just” a theory, because it can’t be proved. That’s what it is, because a scientific theory cannot be proved—it, however, must be formulated so that it can be falsified.
Chomsky doesn’t really have a theory, because it cannot be falsified. He has repeatedly stated that the Faculty of Language specifies a speaker-hearer’s knowledge of grammar; it does not predict what s/he actually understands, says, writes, signs, or texts. When Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson in their paper, “The Myth of Language Universals,” pointed out that they could not find any evidence for the presence of the syntactic “language universals” that Universal Grammar ostensibly transmits, it had little effect. Since the Universal Grammar, by definition, transmits the features of all language, the features of any language or the absence of any feature fit its “predictions.” In short, the predictions of Universal Grammar cannot be falsified because it predicts nothing. It’s a matter of faith. That also turns out to be the case for recursion. In Chomsky’s 2012 essay “Minimal Recursion: Exploring the Prospects,” he again takes the same path, making it impossible to refute the claim that recursion is the defining feature of human language. On the first page of his essay, Chomsky states that the “range” of the “recursive procedure” could be “null.” Thus, though a language might lack recursion, seemingly refuting recursion being the defining property of human language, it wouldn’t matter. This apparently is Chomsky’s way of dealing with Daniel Everett’s finding that the language of the Piraha people lacks recursion. Everett’s groundbreaking study, whose message is far broader than recursion or its absence, will be discussed in the next, concluding chapter.
A Minor Miracle
Every faith needs at least one miracle. Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) fulfilled that end. Judy Kegl, an MIT-trained linguist, visited Nicaragua shortly after the Sandinistas had conquered the country. The Sandinistas had overthrown the right-wing Somoza dictatorship. Kegl’s Spanish was elementary, and so she relied on her Sandinista guides. The story that Kegl brought back was that deaf children in Nicaragua had been totally neglected by the former Somoza government. The new Sandinista government gathered the deaf children. A trained sign-language instructor was brought in from the Soviet Union, but the instructor became irrelevant. When the children were gathered together, they spontaneously developed a complex sign language without benefit of the Soviet teacher. The published paper (Kegl et al., 1999) claimed that the spontaneously created sign language, NSL, conformed to the principles of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. Magazine articles, documentary films, talks at major conferences, and so on publicized Kegl’s NSL story. It lives on in Chomsky’s circle of like-minded scholars.
The miracle story lasted seven years. When Laura Polich, who specializes in deaf education and is a fluent speaker of Spanish and sign-language expert, visited Nicaragua, she discovered that rather different events had occurred. The former dictator’s wife had sponsored a school for the deaf. An American Peace Corps volunteer had taught American Sign Language at that school, which had close contacts with schools for the deaf in Costa Rica. And the child who had played a central role in the development of NSL had attended a school for the deaf in Spain for eight years. Virtually all the information related by Kegl was wrong; the details are in Polich’s 2006 book, whose focus is on the benefits of sign-language instruction to the deaf.
Nicholas Wade swallowed Kegl’s story hook, line, and sinker. His September 4, 2004, New York Times article states that “a hearing person, miming a story about a cat . . . will make a simple gesture . . . but the deaf [Nigaraguan] children have developed two different signs to use in its place.” This supposedly proved to Wade and Steven Pinker, whom Wade quotes, that NSL exhibits the properties of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar in that it captures a principal quality of human language—“discrete elements usable in different combinations.” By this measure, Alan and Trixie Gardner’s home-raised chimpanzee Washoe who learned about 150 words of American Sign Language exhibited the principles of Universal Grammar when she described a duck using the ASL sign “water” followed by the ASL sign “bird.”
Our Moral Gene
At the start of this book, I discussed Sam Harris’s fMRI study, which aimed at isolating the human brain’s center of religious belief. Genes that confer morality and religion are a hot topic. The title of Marc Hauser’s book, Moral Minds, might lead you to believe that it was about moral conduct. Hauser starts off more or less on Mount Sinai with a Twitter-like version of Yahweh’s commandments. Hauser doesn’t mention worshipping false gods or keeping the Sabbath, but the rest is what you might have heard in Sunday School:
All of the following actions are universally forbidden; killing, causing pain, stealing, cheating, lying, breaking promises, and committing adultery (Hauser, 2006, p. 48).
However, if you read on into Moral Minds, you will discover that Hauser isn’t attempting to account for what people actually do or should do. “Knowledge” of morality is Hauser’s concern, and that leads to Hauser providing a free pass for any kind of behavior. Mahatma Gandhi, Gengis Khan, Jesus, the Buddha, Adolf Hitler, all acted morally—take your pick.
Hauser’s views on the nature of human morality are modeled on the Faculty of Language, which imparts “knowledge” of the syntax of all languages, ostensibly allowing anyone to “acquire” any language. In Hauser’s case, his “Universal Moral Grammar” licenses any mode of conduct. Page 53 of Moral Minds sets forth Hauser’s model, including the “ten principles” that constitute the “road map” for the rest of the book. I’ve omitted two principles in the following excerpt, but you can see where Hauser’s road leads to:
1. The moral faculty consists of a set of principles that guide our judgments but do not strictly determine how we act. The principles constitute the universal moral grammar, a signature of the species.
2. Each principle generates an automatic and rapid judgment concerning whether an act or event is morally permissible, obligatory, or forbidden.
3. The principles are inaccessible to conscious awareness.
5. The principles of the universal moral grammar are innate.
6. Acquiring the native moral system is fast and effortless, requiring little or no instruction. Experience with the native moral system sets a series of parameters, giving rise to a specific moral system.
7. The moral faculty constrains the range of possible and stable ethical systems.
8. Only the principles of our universal moral grammar are uniquely human and unique to the moral faculty.
10. Because the moral faculty relies on specialized brain systems, damage to these brain systems can lead to selective deficits in moral judgments. Damage to areas involved in supporting the moral faculty (e.g, emotions, memory) can lead to deficits in moral action—of what individuals actually do, as distinct from what they think someone else should or would do. (Hauser, 2006, p. 53).
If you didn’t get Hauser’s message by page 53, it becomes clear when you reach page 300 that anything goes:
The universal moral grammar is a theory about the suite of principles and parameters that enable humans to build moral systems. It is a toolkit for building a variety of different moral systems as distinct from one in particular. The grammar or set of principles is fixed, but the output is limitless within range of logical possibilities. Cross-cultural variation is expected as does not count as evidence against [it] (Hauser, 2006, p. 300).
One example of conduct sanctioned by universal moral grammar (pp. 111–112) is “honor killing.” Honor killing licenses brothers and fathers murdering a sister or daughter to preserve a twisted notion of family honor. The opening pages of chapter 4 of Moral Minds lists other examples of societies in which incest or causing pain to children to amuse yourself are “morally” acceptable. But despite Hauser’s attempting to craft a theory that is irrefutable, the lessons of history demonstrate that morality doesn’t hinge on genes.
Viking “Moral” Conduct and Viking Genes
Iceland is a stunningly beautiful place, and Icelanders are very friendly and helpful. But Iceland would not have been a vacation destination a thousand years ago. The Icelandic sagas record actual events. If you visit Iceland, you can stay overnight at a farmhouse close to where the events in Njal’s Saga, The Story of Burnt Njal unfolded. The English translation by Sir George W. DaSent starts with
There was a man named Mord whose surname was Fiddle; he was the son of Sigvat the Red, and he dwelt at the “Vale” in the Rangrivervales.
When my wife, Marcia, and I went to Iceland, we were able to find the stream at which heads were split open, and where the other bloody events related in the Saga took place about 1000 AD. You can walk over the fields where spears were thrust into the backs of a father and son tilling their land and where homes were set on fire so as to roast everyone inside. There were laws and lawyers in Iceland. If you acknowledged killing anyone at the Althing, the periodic assembly at which the law was read aloud, all was right. In this setting, similar means could be used to supplement one’s income during the summer months. Njal’s saga relates two farmers chatting and deciding that the season is now right for raiding. Nordic farmers and fishermen at their summer jobs were the Vikings who pillaged England and Ireland, looting, killing, raping—and bringing slaves back home.
My wife is the local coordinator for Amnesty International (AI). AI published a thick book each year that noted human rights abuses throughout the world. Iceland and Norway—the Viking home bases—are the only two countries that consistently have no entries. Iceland retained the Norse custom by which Erik’s sons bear the last name Eriksson, while Erik’s daughters’ last name is Eriksdottir. One of our Icelandic graduate students can trace all of her ancestors back to the year 1000, because genealogical records extending back to the year 1000 keep track of who is related to whom. That’s true for most other Icelanders and accounts in part for Iceland now being a center for research on human genetics. The other factor is an extremely high level of education and concurrent technical capabilities.
The Viking raids ended after 1030 AD, when Christianity came to Iceland. The genealogical records show that the gene pool of Iceland hasn’t changed since Viking days. Present-day Icelandic moral “performance,” what Icelanders actually do, is the polar opposite of Viking times. If any change in anyone’s “knowledge” of morality occurred in Iceland, it didn’t involve genes, or for that matter any aspect of biology.
A Free Pass for Genocide
Apart from its problems as scientific theory, Hauser’s claim for a genetic basis for morality provides a free pass for genocide. Germany during the Weimar Republic had a uniformed police force, the Ordnungspolizei. Anti-Semitism was entrenched in European culture, and Germany was no exception. However, a properly dressed family strolling in one of the Weimar Republic’s many parks in 1932 would have been met with courtesy by a policeman if they had any reason to request assistance or report any untoward occurrence—even if they were Jewish. Eight years later, that same policeman might have been positioning a three-year-old Jewish girl, who had been stripped of her clothes, on a board positioned over the pit in which the bodies of her mother, father, brother, and older sisters lay in pools of blood. He then would have placed his police-issue pistol against her head and pulled the trigger.
As the German army advanced into Poland in 1939, six Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei followed. Their mission was arresting left-wing activists, confiscating weapons, and murdering Jews. The Einsatzgruppen used simple methods. Captive Jews were forced to dig pits, then stripped naked; they were placed one-by-one onto boards positioned above the pit, and shot in the head. The Jews instead might simply be lined up at the edge of the pit before they were murdered. But Germany was short of troops, and so as Nazi armies advanced into Russia, ten police battalions were formed to further the work of the Einsatzgruppen.
The members of the police battalions were the “ordinary” German Ordnungspolizei who had kept order and patrolled the streets of Germany (Westermann, 2005).The Ordnungspolizei diligently did their duty and murdered about one million men, women, and children. However, it became apparent that they were under stress. Their police-issue pistols had to be reloaded after eight shots. This might have caused some degree of distress when the ordinary policeman at his ordinary daily job looked into the eyes of the three-year-old girl staring at him. She might have brought up the image of another three-year-old somewhere else at some other time. But it would be necessary to put the pistol against her head and pull the trigger. Nazi records note that individual members of the police battalions often asked for other assignments, but the battalions remained at work in Russia until 1944. Mechanized death camps using gas chambers and incinerators provided a more efficient means for mass murder and genocide and also harvested silver and gold fillings from the gassed Jews’ teeth and wedding rings, thereby offsetting operating expenses. Lampshades made of human skin provided arts and crafts diversion to the SS camp staff.
Selective sweeps can result in a mutation becoming established when it leads to a reproductive advantage. That was the case for lactose tolerance for people who kept herds, oxygen transfer at extreme altitudes for Tibetans, and resistance to endemic diseases in different human groups. However, no selective sweep replaced any German moral genes in the short Nazi era, nor did the moral gene return in 1945 when it became quite clear that Adolf Hitler had led Germany into the gates of Hell. The members of the police battalions were the Ordnungspolizei who had before the Nazi era issued traffic tickets.
Morality “Research,” Toy Experiments, and WEIRDOs
The June 25, 2010, issue of Science commented on the weird view of human nature that follows from running experiments on WEIRDOs—“people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic cultures” (Jones, 2010). A whopping 96 percent of the subjects who participated in all of the empirical studies in six top-tier psychology journals between 2003 and 2007 were WEIRDOs (Arnett, 2008). The experiments explored phenomena as diverse as visual illusions and moral judgments. A review article published in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences concurred (Henrich et. al., 2010). I noted some of the accepted, “normal,” sexual practices of some non-WEIRDO peoples that were cited by Henrich and his colleagues earlier, when discussing theories on the genetic bases of marriage, promiscuity, and harems.
WEIRDOs also were the subjects who played the highly constrained mind-games that form the empirical data for Moral Minds. WEIRDO responses on the thought experiment called the “trolley” dilemma and similar exercises were supposed to reveal the psychological and biological bases of moral judgments. The trolley experiment is a “thought-experiment”—some would say a “toy” experiment—in which a subject is asked whether he or she would save five or so people who would die on a runaway trolley car that would otherwise crash, by diverting it onto another track, where it will come to a safe halt. But the cost of saving five people would be mowing down an innocent person who happens to be crossing that track. The numbers of people in the trolley and innocent people sacrificed can be varied. One of the key elements of Hauser’s “moral” Universal Moral Grammar has to do with how the runaway trolley is diverted onto the track that will save its passengers. When WEIRDO subjects are asked if they will push a button that mechanically throws a switch to divert the trolley they say “yes.” If the WEIRDOs are taking the Moral Sense Test, a computer game on the Harvard University website, they will mouse-click “yes.” However, when WEIRDOs are asked if they would divert the trolley by pushing someone into its path, their response is “no.” Physical contact thus is taken to be a universal moral no-no. Hauser correctly states that he has run thousands of subjects on this and variants of the trolley problem who respond in this manner (p. 32, n. 26). You too can join the thousands of subjects. However, to take the Moral Sense Test, you must have decidedly WEIRDO qualifications—access to a computer linked to the Internet.
Marc Hauser no longer is a member of the Harvard University faculty; he resigned from his tenured professorship in August 2010 after an inquiry concerning the experimental data in some of his published papers, including some of the monkey studies discussed in Moral Minds. However, the Moral Sense Test is still is on the Internet, at http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu. The test consists of a set of short paragraphs that present “moral” dilemmas involving saving some persons at the cost of killing others, or performing some act that might be acceptable, but involves harming innocent people. Other scripts attempt to assess whether failing to act is as reprehensible as an overt act. One script asks whether it is moral to turn a lifeboat away from one drowning person so that you can instead rescue five persons who otherwise would drown.
The fMRI neuroimaging study by Shenhav and Greene (2010), who worked with Marc Hauser, monitored subjects while they judged the moral acceptability of the scripts on the Moral Sense Test. Their findings show that the Moral Sense dilemmas elicit neural activity in the regions of the brain involved in executive control—the prefrontal-basal ganglia circuits that were discussed in chapters 2 and 4. Shenhav and Greene conclude that the moral judgments engage a “domain-general” cognitive network rather than anything specific to morality. Whether the Moral Sense Test actually taps the cognitive decisions that guide moral actions in anyone’s life is another question. In the few real-life situations that I know of where similar decisions had to be made, there was no time to calculate the number of casualties versus saved people.
Other studies using WEIRDO subjects also conclude that “personal force”—coming into contact with someone—precludes pushing or shoving someone to save someone, and inhibits that action (for example, Greene et al., 2009). Yet the cadres of the Khmer Rouge who tortured and murdered their countrymen in almost unimaginably brutal ways would not have hesitated to push someone into the path of a truck. When I visited Cambodia, I learned that the “standard” way of killing a family was to start with the infants, taking them by their feet and swinging them so as to smash their skulls against the side of a tree in full view of their siblings, mother, and father. The mother then would be gang-raped and disemboweled, and then they would move on to kill her husband, by means that I would just as soon not describe. If we accept Hauser’s position that these acts were moral, the moral code of any culture is always “moral” because it has been formed by activating the innate “principles and parameters” of Hauser’s innate “Universal Moral Grammar.”
The Universal Moral Grammar also didn’t seem to be universal when Marc Hauser teamed up Linda Abarbanell, a Harvard University anthropologist whose field of expertise is Mayan peasant life in traditional parajes, small, relatively isolated hamlets in the highland region of Chiapas, Mexico. The Tseltal Mayans who were studied are the descendants of the Mayans of the classic civilization that crashed about 900 AD, leaving behind cities and temples abandoned to the jungle. The Tseltal Mayans practice slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture and most are illiterate. They almost never leave their paraje, where everyone knows everyone else and what they are doing. Traditional beliefs and religious practices have been preserved. In short, life is quite different than in Harvard Square. The Mayans’ responses to the puzzles on the Moral Sense Test, translated into the Tseltal language, also were different from those reached by the indigenous population of Harvard Square, or the virtual population on the Harvard University website. Physical contact played no role in Tseltal Mayan moral judgments. They had no problem pushing someone into the path of a truck to save its passengers from death. They also did not distinguish between harm inflicted on a person intentionally or through omission, such as killing someone or letting someone die through inaction. Both scripts elicited approbation.
The Abarbanell and Hauser (2010) paper has a long explanation of why Mayans judge killing someone by a deliberate action or through inaction equally wrong. Abarbanell and Hauser call attention to the cultural differences between WEIRDOs (they don’t use that term) and the Tseltal Mayan’s close-knit paraje community life. However, not a word is expended to attempt to explain why direct physical contact plays no role whatsoever in Mayan moral life.
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins, who works within the framework of evolutionary biology, doesn’t owe anything to Noam Chomsky. Dawkins also is a forceful advocate of atheism, unlike Darwin, who kept his doubts on religion in the closet. However, Dawkins has introduced an element of quasi-religious mysticism in his gene-centered view of selection.
According to Dawkins, evolution acts to maximize the transmission of the total inventory of an individual’s genes to a new generation rather than as Darwin claimed, the individual and his/her offspring. Since any individual shares genes with a group of related individuals, evolution thus would act to maximize the transfer of the genes shared by the group. That may involve an individual acting for the greater good of the group, rather than himself or herself—in short, altruism. It also follows that the more two individuals are genetically related, the more they will act to favor each other. One objective of Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene thus was to provide a biological basis for altruism.
Altruism doesn’t immediately seem to fit the Darwinian paradigm. Why should an individual act to further some other individual or group in the struggle for existence? If you accept the teachings of many religions, then altruism makes sense. Altruistic conduct will add points to your Karma if you accept the teachings of the Buddha. It might get you a ticket into Heaven or at least avoid Hell if you accept the teachings of the varieties of Christianity that stress good works. However, if you are attempting to explain how we act without invoking religious belief or cultural mores, then some other explanation is necessary. The “scratch-my-back” theory is often proposed to account for humans acting in an altruistic manner. I’ll do something for you, and you will probably reciprocate, but this scenario seems unlikely for many animals, insects and plants. In the 1960s, V. C. Wynne-Edwards (1962) introduced the concept of “group selection” to account for selection that seemingly was “for the good of the species” rather than any individual. Altruism in this sense applies to organisms that didn’t think. Any evolved behavior that involved a cost that did not enhance the survival of the individual’s offspring (seedlings, nuts, and so on, for plants) was considered to be “altruistic” or “cooperative.” Dawkins’s gene-centered theory can be regarded as an attempt to account for altruism without invoking group selection.
Darwin was wrestling with the problem of accounting for the “transmutation of species” when he hit upon natural selection. Natural selection is blind and acts absent any directing entity. Darwin’s notebooks and letters reveal that he foresaw that he would be accused of destroying belief in God. God is not a necessary agent in Darwin’s worldview. Dawkins is a “public” atheist, arguing against religious belief in any shape or form, but Dawkins has replaced God with the Gene as the directing force for the “transmutation” of species.
What Happens to Your Children—Testing the Selfish Gene Theory
If we take Dawkins’s selfish-gene theory at face value, then we should always favor our children in all circumstances. Apart from your siblings, your children’s genes are most likely to share some of your genes. Though we often may be at odds with our siblings, children tend to be favored—that propensity may be one of the aspects of human behavior that has a genetic basis. The succession rights of monarchies are ordered on this ground, although women are usually excluded and brothers are sometimes smothered, stabbed, poisoned, or imprisoned when succession is in doubt. But setting apart from machinations of royalty or wealth, it is clear that culture overrides any selfish gene or genes.
Consider Sally Hemings and her children, who as I noted earlier also were Thomas Jefferson’s children. Sally (Sarah) Hemings was in Jefferson’s lifetime said to be his mistress, but the term “mistress” doesn’t quite seem to fit a woman who has been your companion for 38 years and has borne six of your children. In contemporary accounts, Sarah Hemings was said to be “mighty near white . . . very handsome, long straight hair down her back.” That wasn’t surprising since she was the daughter of John Wayles, who was the father of Jefferson’s “white” wife. Wayles also had five other children with his “black” slave Betty Hemings. The quotation marks on “black” are appropriate because Betty Hemings also had a white father, John Hemings. Her mother was John Hemings’s slave Susannah. Most African-Americans have “white” ancestors because slave-owning fathers commonly sold their daughters and sons into slavery. The laws of Virginia treated the children of slaves as slaves.
If not for the corrupting slave-owning culture and laws of Virginia, Jefferson could have married Sally Hemings, and their six children would have had all of the advantages of Jefferson’s other children. Jefferson and Hemings’s four children who survived into adulthood all left Monticello and merged into “white” society, marrying white partners. Sally Hemings changed her name to Sarah Jefferson when she left Monticello after Jefferson’s death and lived with two of her freed sons. Is there a gene that counters the selfish gene that forces you sell your children into slavery?
A different pattern occurred in Mexico. In his old age, decades after the conquest of Mexico in 1521, Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. His book is one of the primary sources of Prescott’s (1843) History of the Conquest of Mexico and subsequent accounts. The conquistadors defeated the Aztecs through alliances with the Indian tribes that were subject to Aztec rule, taxes, and tribute. The tribute included providing victims for the sacrifices that formed part of Aztec religious practice. As the Spanish moved through villages in which young men and women were penned up in cages to be fattened for the Aztec priests who cut them open and pulled out their beating hearts, it was not surprising that the conquistadors found willing allies who fought to destroy Aztec dominance. The Greeks in the Iliad ate the animals that they had sacrificed to the Gods; the Aztecs ate the sacrifices to their gods—people.
Díaz del Castillo recorded instances in which grateful tribal leaders offered their daughters in marriage to the Spanish conquistadors. A priest performed rites that instantly converted the young women to Catholicism. The young woman Malinche who became translator, confidante, and mistress of Hernán Cortés was baptized and addressed as Dona Marina. Using the honorific “Dona,” Díaz del Castillo referred to her as “the great lady.” Her son was Don Martin Cortés. She married one of Cortés’s lieutenants, Don Jaramillo, when Cortés returned to Spain (he had a wife in Spain), and her daughter by that marriage was known as Dona Maria. Isabel Tolosa Cortés Moctezuma, the great-granddaughter of Moctezuma the Aztec leader, became the wife of Juan de Onate—founder and governor of Nuevo Mexico.
The selfish gene seems to have been at work in Mexico, and absent in Virginia and a good part of the thirteen colonies and, until 1865, almost half of the United States of America. It often still seems to be absent. Our genetic endowment does count in shaping human behavior, but it is clear that simplistic genetic determinism cannot account for the manner in which we act and think. Nor can nonfalsifiable theories that postulate innate domain-specific language or moral organs and genes bring us to an understanding of these human qualities.