Wednesday, October 20, 2010

What Does Altruism Tell Us About the Nature of the Universe?

10/20/2010—Evolution is seen as a threat not only to the account of Creation in Genesis but to all morality because it is an amoral process. Unlike God, evolution does not start out to choose the good. Evolution just happens as organisms live and die.

And it is not just religious believers who see this threat but many scientists have claimed that the notion of objective good goes out the window along with God and the Bible.

This is why altruism—the tendency of organisms to sacrifice themselves for others—along with other qualities like cooperation, became important topics in evolution. Explaining them in evolutionary terms might save morality from the materialist ash heap.

In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr reviews The Price of Altruism by Oren Harman, an account of the life and work of George Price. (review here) Price’s Equation showed how a trait could be passed within a group even while another trait in tension with it operated between individuals. So, selfish individuals might have an evolutionary advantage even though groups with cooperating individuals also have an evolutionary advantage. Both traits would be passed along.

As interesting as the review is, we who are not evolutionary biologists might better take a different view of all this. What if T.H. Huxley was right (and Price wrong)—what if evolution leads to morally abhorrent results and human beings have to learn to train themselves through culture against what we would do naturally? Huxley’s fear led to the decline of the natural law tradition and a general demoralization that continues to this day.

But what Huxley forgot is that we human beings are nature in all our complexity. Evolution did not just select this or that trait. Evolution selected us. All of our possibilities represent natural selection. Our cultures are natural also. And if large brained animals are associated with increasing levels of empathy, which they are in nature however it happened, then nature selects for goodness along with intelligence.

OK, so there is no God behind everything. That means Earth might lie in the path of an asteroid and that might be the end of us. But, on the other hand, the universe exhibits many of the traits that led the founders of our religions to see divinity somehow in it. The universe has not changed at all. It is still our basically good home. The religious mechanism—the supernatural God—is not necessary any more than it is necessary that we understand precisely how goodness evolved to consider it morally superior.

8 comments:

  1. Whenever the claim is made that we live in a hostile universe, I'm reminded of Alan Watts, who said, just as the apple tree bears fruit, the Universe creates life.

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  2. Our cultures are natural also. And if large brained animals are associated with increasing levels of empathy, which they are in nature however it happened, then nature selects for goodness along with intelligence.

    I'm being the devil's advocate here, but I don't understand how one determines, without question-begging, that the notion of goodness in the Universe is anything other than a human invention.

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  3. I'm sorry it took me so long to respond to this question. In context, goodness here meant that as we go up the evolutionary tree ("up" here is certainly loaded, but I only mean closer to primates and then humans), certain traits are favored, such as cooperation and empathy. When we then get to humans, our cultures emphasize such traits increasingly. Humans certainly invent calling those traits "good" but humans do not invent their presence. C.S. Lewis once said something along the line that if all cultures have a sense of "taking your turn and keeping your word", those attributes must be part of the structure of reality.

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  4. Hey, I can't view your site properly within Opera, I actually hope you look into fixing this.

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  5. C.S. Lewis once said something along the line that if all cultures have a sense of "taking your turn and keeping your word", those attributes must be part of the structure of reality.

    But the question I can't get past is whose reality? Sure, goodness as you've defined it is what enables humans to survive but sharks have made it through the last 100 million years or so without such niceties.

    As you say, the notion of 'going up the evolutionary tree' is certainly a loaded one and, in my opinion, impossible to answer.


    Also, the idea of large-brained, intelligent animals inevitably having human concepts of goodness seems questionable to me.

    Since it's a big universe out there, nature may well have produced intelligent species that have survived without such traits (a chilling thought indeed).

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  6. But what if nature cannot produce an intelligent species without a sense of moral purpose? Surely that would tell us something important about reality.

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  7. But what if nature cannot produce an intelligent species without a sense of moral purpose? Surely that would tell us something important about reality.

    To me, this is an extremely deep question, which tempts one to venture into the realm of science fiction. At any rate, to confirm the existence of such a species, its intelligence must itself be intelligible to our species. As Wittgenstein said in that regard, "If a Lion could speak, we could not understand him".

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  8. I have often thought that Wittgenstein should have said, if a lion could speak, we would understand him, because we would share the act of speaking. Only if we could not understand that the lion was speaking, would we not be able to understand him. [but who is to say that is not our situation now?]

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