Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Oren Harman
Started reading
January 9, 2022
Why do amoebas build stalks from their own bodies, sacrificing themselves in the process, so that some may climb up and be carried away from dearth to plenty on the legs of an innocent insect or the wings of a felicitous wind? Why do vampire bats share blood, mouth to mouth, at the end of a night of prey with members of the colony who were less successful in the hunt? Why do sentry gazelles jump up and down when a lion is spotted, putting themselves precariously between the herd and hungry hunter? And what do all of these have to do with morality in humans: Is there, in fact, a natural origin
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how could a behavior that lowered fitness be selected?
Part of some natural metric, the purity of selflessness is undermined by the scourge of self-interest: What looks like sacrifice may in fact be the road to personal gain.
From its lowly beginnings in some primordial soup through slime mold to ant to antlered deer to inquisitive monkey, the story of the search for goodness climbs all the way from the oceans and the jungles to titanic twentieth-century battles between systems of government and economics. From the promise of democracy and the free market to communism and the hope of equality, and from the liberations and perils of individualism to the inebriation of nationalism and unity, the quest to crack the altruism code traces an epic voyage. From baboons fighting in trees, to the Russian Revolution, to Nazi
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use quote to motivate
George Robert Price,
Testing note
Thomas Henry Huxley
The tiny marine creatures had been put there by God to help sailors avoid shipwreck on gloomy nights at sea. This was the doctrine of finalism, or teleology, the very backbone of a tradition of natural theology on which Darwin’s generation had been reared.
One way to look at the problem would be to study Nature’s imperfections, long recognized as a puzzle, and unsuccessfully explained away by the argument for design. Why on earth do flightless kiwis have vestiges of wings,
In October 1838 Darwin read An Essay on the Principle of Population by the clergyman and former professor of political economy Thomas Malthus.
The idea that population increases geometrically while food supply increases arithmetically was meant by Malthus to prove that starvation, wars, death, and suffering were never the consequence of the defects of one political system or another, but rather the necessary results of a natural law.
After all, if one great lesson had been gleaned from the journey, it was the awesome abundance of life on the planet. On the massive vines of “wonderful” kelp off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, plummeting forty-five fathoms into the darkness, Darwin found patelliform shells, troche, mollusks, bivalves, and innumerable crustacea. When he shook, out came “small fish, shells, cuttle-fish, crabs of all orders, sea-eggs, star-fish, beautiful holuthuriae, planariae, and crawling nereidous animals of a multitude of forms.” The “great entangled roots” reminded Darwin of tropical forests, swarming with
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In truth, Darwin knew, nature was one grand cacophonous battle—brutal, unyielding, and cruel. For if populations in the wild have such high rates of fertility that their size would increase exponentially if not constrained; if it is known that, excepting seasonal fluctuations, the size of populations remains stable over time; if Malthus was right, as he surely was, that the resources available to a species are limited—then it follows that there must be intense competition, or a struggle for existence, among the members of a species. And if no two members of a population are identical, and some
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Darwin spoke of a fierce struggle between members of the same species, but everywhere he looked Kropotkin found collaboration: horses forming protective rings to guard against predators; wolves coming together to hunt in packs; birds helping each other at the nest; fallow deer marching in unison to cross a river. Mutual aid and cooperation were everywhere.
Once a constitutionalist who believed, like Huxley, in the promise of benevolent administration, Kropotkin emerged from the great Russian expanses fully “prepared to become an anarchist.”
Here was the creed: Left to his own devices, man would cooperate in egalitarian communes, property and coercion replaced by liberty and consent.
If competition between individuals was, scandalously, Nature’s way, she had forgotten to whisper the news to some of her smaller creatures. Many an ant species, Darwin knew, was divided into fixed, unbreachable castes. The honeypot ant of the American deserts has workers whose sole job is to hang upside down, motionless, like great big pots of sugared water, so that they may be tapped when the queen and her brood are thirsty.
What Darwin found amazing was that besides the queen and a few lucky males, all the rest of the ants are effectively neuters. This made no sense if success in the battle for survival was measured by production of offspring.29
the queen and her mate were somehow passing on qualities through their own progeny—massive heads, gardening scissor teeth, and mysterious altruistic behavior—that they themselves did not possess, an obscurity that Darwin found “by far the most serious special difficulty, which my theory has encountered.”
If selection sometimes worked at a level higher than the individual, even the ultimate sacrifice of the stinging bee or ant centurion could evolve. This was quite an idea, for the very essence of Darwin’s theory, as he declared in The Origin of Species, was that “every complex structure and instinct” should be “useful to the possessor.”
In “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society: A Programme” Huxley asked readers to imagine the chase of a deer by a wolf. Had a man intervened to aid the deer we would call him “brave and compassionate,” as we would judge an abetter of the wolf “base and cruel.” But this was a hoax, the spoiled fruit of man’s translation of his own world into nature.
“From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator’s show,” Huxley wrote, “the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest . . . living to fight another day.” There was no need for the spectator to turn his thumbs down, “as no quarter is given,” but “he must shut his eyes if he would not see that more or less enduring suffering is the meed of both vanquished and victor.”
Darwin and Spencer believed that the struggle for existence “tends to final good,” the suffering of the ancestor paid for by the increased perfection of its future offspring. But this was nonsense unless, “in Chinese fashion, the present generation could pay its debts to its ancestors.”
Ishtar knew neither good nor evil, nor, like the Beneficent Deity, did she promise any rewards. She demanded only that which came to her: the sacrifice of the weak. Nature-Ishtar was the heartless executioner of necessity.
“beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family,” for man too the “Hobbesian war of each against all” had been the normal state of existence.
Then came the first men who for whatever reason “substituted the state of mutual peace for that of mutual war,” and civilization was born. Self-restraint became the negation of the struggle for existence, man’s glorious rebellion against the tyranny of need. But no matter how historic his achievement, ethical man could not abolish “the deep-seated organic impulses which impel the natural man to follow his non-moral course.” Chief of these was procreation, the greatest cause of the struggle for existence.
Darwin extended both Malthus’s partial theory and the general theory of the political economists to the organic world.” Russian values were of a different timber.61
But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought,
if the struggle could mean both competition with other members of the same species and a battle against the elements, it was a matter of evidence which of the two was more important in nature. And if harsh surroundings were the enemy rather than rivals from one’s own species, animals might seek other ways than conflict to manage such struggle. Here, in Russia, the fight against the elements could actually lead to cooperation.
Like Darwin, Huxley saw ants and bees partake in social behavior and altruism. But this was simply “the perfection of an automatic mechanism, hammered out by the blows of the struggle for existence.” Here was no principle to help explain the natural origins of mankind’s morals; after all, a drone was born a drone, and
the destruction of society if allowed free play within.” Far from trying to emulate nature, man would need to combat it. If he was to show any kindness at all outside the family (to Huxley the only stable haven of “goodness”), it would be through an “artificial personality,” a conscience,
Huxley’s “The Struggle for Existence,” anger swelled within him. He would need to rescue Darwin from the “infidels,” men like Huxley who had “raised the ‘pitiless’ struggle for personal advantage to the height of a biological principle.”
“Mutual Aid Among Animals”
Remembering his years in the great expanses of the Afar, Kropotkin now wrote: “wherever I saw animal life in abundance, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support.”
Intelligence, compassion and “higher moral sentiments” were where progressive evolution was heading, not bloody competition
For mankind, too, mutualism beyond the family had been the natural state of existence.75 “It is not love to my neighbor—whom I often do not know at all,” Kropotkin wrote, “which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals.”
Cf prisoners dilemma logic, team reasoning
War or Peace, Nature or Culture: Where had true “goodness” come from? Should mankind seek solace in the ethics of evolution or perhaps in the evolution of ethics?
“the fundamental theorem of natural selection”: “The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.”
Fisher argued that fitness depended on variation, but this led to a paradox: After all, the more natural selection weeded, the less variation was left. This meant that the mutation rate had to be higher than he allowed for. But since most mutations were harmful, if their rate was too high the fitness of the population would drop. On the other hand, if natural selection scrutinized too harshly, the population could be wiped out entirely.
Confusing
He was convinced that the mean IQ was falling due to the abstinence of the educated classes. Genetically speaking, capitalism was frustrating the survival of the fittest. By abolishing classes and getting rid of the differential birth rate, socialism would be the perfect corrective.
But what if the summit was in fact a foothill, not all that towering: Would organisms find themselves stranded with nowhere else to climb?
Wright’s answer was that in addition to natural selection another force sometimes operated, called “random drift.”
genetic drift will be divorced from the “goals” of evolution. Unlike its deliberate older brother, drift would not always push organisms to higher genetic peaks: If natural selection was the taskmaster of fitness, drift was the shifting sands underfoot, changing the course of weak and strong alike.
drift could do what natural selection could never accomplish: alter the genetic structure enough to allow a dramatic change in direction.
In Wright’s model this was tantamount to blowing a group from a peak into a valley.
opportunity. For a blow off a foothill might lead to the foot of a new and higher mountain.
Within a mixed group, that is, an altruist would suffer from intragroup competition at the hands of those out for themselves, but between, or intergroup, competition would favor groups with a greater proportion of altruists. In terms of the adaptive landscape, if altruists were blown off different peaks and somehow found themselves all grouped at the foot of the same mountain, they might start an ascent that would place them on the highest
Wright’s model depended on “group selection,”
It would work only if the alleyways were almost completely isolated from one another, which in turn made it very difficult for altruists to stumble into them by chance.
