The nineteenth-century philosopher Robert G. Ingersoll, a secular moral hero if ever there was one, found additional freedoms in a naturalistic worldview, including freedom from
the fear of eternal pain … from the winged monsters of the night … from devils, ghosts, and gods … no chains for my limbs—no lashes for my back—no fires for my flesh—no master’s frown or threat—no following another’s steps—no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl … I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds … . And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain—for the freedom of labor and thought—to those who fell in the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains—to those who proudly mounted scaffold’s stairs—to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn—to those by fire consumed—to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.72
The bright torch of science illuminates the darkness of humanity to reveal a human nature that is both moral and immoral, a product of our evolutionary heritage and our cultural history. We can construct a provisional ethical system that is neither dogmatically absolute nor irrationally relative, a more universal and tolerant morality that enhances the probability of the survival and well-being of all members of the species, and perhaps eventually of all species and even the biosphere, the only home we have ever known or will know until science leads us off the planet, out of the solar system, and to the stars. Ad astra!
Also by Michael Shermer
Science Friction
In Darwin’s Shadow
The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience (general editor)
The Borderlands of Science
Denying History
How We Believe
Why People Believe Weird Things
APPENDIX I
THE DEVIL UNDER FORM OF BABOON: THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS
Our descent, then is the origin of our evil passions!!—The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!
—Chades Darwin, M Notebook, 1838
In a poetic form of authorial acknowledgment, Jonathan Swift famously gave the nod to those who came before him with this poem, a favorite among naturalists:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Thus every poet, in his kind,
Is bit by him that comes behind.
We are all bit by those behind us, but nowhere is this clearer than in the tradition of science because of its cumulative and progressive nature of building on those who came before. “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants,” Sir Isaac Newton even more famously observed. The quote is itself part of a long historical tradition dating at least to the fourteenth-century scholar Bernard of Chartres, in reference to New Testament prophets standing on the shoulders of Old Testament prophets (as depicted in stone in one of the transepts of Chartres Cathedral): “We are like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants; we see more things than the ancients and things more distant. But this is due neither to the sharpness of our own sight, nor to the greatness of our own stature, but because we are raised and borne aloft on that giant mass.”1
The first half of this book, entitled “The Origins of Morality,” was built on the theory of evolutionary ethics, a study that began in the late 1830s when, among his scattered thoughts on the implications for his budding evolutionary hypothesis, Charles Darwin penned this muse in his M Notebook (opened shortly after returning home from a five-year voyage around the world): “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Biology, Darwin believed, not philosophy, is where we might find insights into our moral (not to mention our immoral) natures: “Our descent, then is the origin of our evil passions!!—The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!”2
Darwin’s founding of the study of evolutionary ethics belongs to a long tradition of ethical naturalism that dates back twenty-five centuries to Aristotle and eight centuries to Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas defined “natural law” as “that which nature has taught all animals”; thus, moral law must be rooted in the natural inclinations of the human animal. Because Darwin’s biological explanation of morality was grounded in such natural inclinations, this has been called “Darwinian natural right.”3 Morality is subsumed under the umbrella of human nature, just one of a pantheon of thoughts and behaviors legitimately targeted as subjects of study within the natural sciences. Morality—as an expression of human thought and behavior related to the judgment and evaluation of one’s own and others’ thoughts and behaviors—can be explored and examined by psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists, and other social scientists in the same manner that political beliefs, social attitudes, religious faith, and other human expressions of thought can be studied.4
Charles Darwin, then, was the first evolutionary psychologist and ethicist. In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, he made this logical inference from the data produced by zoology and anthropology: “The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.” Even though it was Darwin, more than anyone else, who demonstrated that humans are animals too, it was the moral sense—of all our exalted characteristics—that separates us from all other animals: “I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.”5 The evolution of the moral sense was a step-by-step process, aided by the same emotions generated by religious rituals and expressions, that would result in “a highly complex sentiment, having its first origin in the social instinct, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, confirmed by instruction and habit, all combined, constitute our moral sense and conscience.”6
Ever since Darwin the science of evolutionary ethics has waxed and waned, roughly passing through five stages: (1) Origins—from Darwin to the end of the First World War; (2) Synthesis—from the beginning of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory in the 1920s through the mid-1970s; (3) Controversy—from the birth of sociobiology in 1975 to the early 1990s; (4) Victory—from the triumph of evolutionary psychology in the early 1990s to 2000; and (5) Consolidation—the incorporation of group selection and hierarchical evolutionary theory from 2000 to the present. While my historical summation of the first three stages is descriptive, the last two are prescriptive. That is, although historians of science will not find much to quibble with in my description of the field’s origins, synthesis, and controversy, many scientists will disagree with my prescription of victory and consolidation.
Origins
In Charles Darwin’s time there was no one more enthusiastic about applying natural selection than its codiscoverer Alfred Russel Wallace. Yet, in my biography of Wallace, In Darwin’s Shadow, I argue that his purist mode of hyperselectionist thinking and his commitment to scientism led him, ironically, to conclude that natural selection cannot account for the human brain and morals. Like Darwin before him, Wallace minced no words about why humans and animals are different: “My view … was, and is, that there is a difference in kind, intellectually and morally, between man and other animals.”7 That difference, however, was not generated by natural selection, but was instead, Wallace concluded, the product of a higher intelligence because he could think of no possible reason nature w
ould have selected for such a large and varied organ. He said as much in an article on “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man”:
In the brain of the lowest savages and, as far as we know, of the prehistoric races, we have an organ … little inferior in size and complexity to that of the highest types … . But the mental requirements of the lowest savages, such as the Australians or the Andaman Islanders, are very little above those of many animals. How then was an organ developed far beyond the needs of its possessor? Natural Selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies.8
Therefore, Wallace concluded, “an Overruling Intelligence has watched over the action of those laws, so directing variations and so determining their accumulation, as finally to produce an organization sufficiently perfect to admit of, and even to aid in, the indefinite advancement of our mental and moral nature.”9 How did this evolution come about? Wallace argued that natural selection operated on the physical body of man long before a mind with consciousness existed. The races, represented by a “protoman,” were fully developed physically before civilization began. Once the brain reached a certain level, however, natural selection would no longer operate on the body; man could now manipulate his environment. The creation of mind had lessened the effectiveness of natural selection (and therefore the process of evolution). Ironically, a propensity toward cooperation and mutual aid may have played a role in this attenuation: “In the rudest tribes the sick are assisted, at least with food; less robust health and vigour than the average does not entail death. The action of natural selection is therefore checked; the weaker, the dwarfish, those of less active limbs, or less piercing eyesight, do not suffer the extreme penalty which falls upon animals so defective.”10
With this alteration of natural law, Wallace argued, came a shift from individual to group selection. While individuals would be protected by the group from the ravages of nature, groups themselves might continue evolving, especially those with high intelligence, foresight, sympathy, a sense of right, and self-restraint: “Tribes in which such mental and moral qualities were predominant would therefore have an advantage in the struggle for existence over other tribes in which they were less developed—would live and maintain their numbers, while the others would decrease and finally succumb.”11 Wallace argued that the harsher, more challenging climate of northern Europe had produced “a hardier, a more provident, and a more social race” than those from more southern climates. Indeed, he pointed out, European imperialism, particularly the British form, was causing whole races to disappear “from the inevitable effects of an unequal mental and physical struggle.”12 Ever the grand synthesizer, Wallace ends his argument with a flare of teleological purposefulness and an egalitarian hope for the future of humanity shaped via human-controlled group selection:
If my conclusions are just, it must inevitably follow that the higher—the more intellectual and moral—must displace the lower and more degraded races; and the power of ‘natural selection,’ still acting on his mental organisation, must ever lead to the more perfect adaptation of man’s higher faculties to the conditions of surrounding nature, and to the exigencies of the social state. While his external form will probably ever remain unchanged, except in the development of that perfect beauty which results from a healthy and well organised body, refined and ennobled by the highest intellectual faculties and sympathetic emotions, his mental constitution may continue to advance and improve, till the world is again inhabited by a single nearly homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity.13
One of Alfred Wallace’s intellectual heroes was the philosopher, social scientist, and social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. So enamored of Spencer was Wallace that he named his firstborn son Herbert Spencer Wallace. Thus, we should not be surprised to know that their ideas on evolutionary theory, in particular evolutionary ethics, were well in accord. When Spencer read Wallace’s 1864 paper “The Origin of the Races of Man” (quoted above), for example, Spencer immediately wrote Wallace and told him: “Its leading idea is, I think, undoubtedly true, and of much importance towards an interpretation of the facts … . I think it is quite clear, as you point out, that the small amounts of physical differences that have arisen between the various human races are due to the way in which mental modifications have served in place of physical ones.”14 In 1879 Wallace wrote to Spencer: “I doubt if evolution alone, even as you have exhibited its action, can account for the development of the advance and enthusiastic altruism that not only exists now, but apparently has always existed among men.” But Spencer did not always go far enough for Wallace in speculating about the origins of morality: “If on this point I doubt, on another point I feel certain, and that is, not even your beautiful system of ethical science can act as a ‘controlling agency’ or in any way ‘fill up the gap left by the disappearance of the code of supernatural ethics.’” 15
Spencer was actually ahead of both Darwin and Wallace in attempting a scientific analysis of ethics (even if it was not a strictly evolutionary one) when he published, in 1851, Social Statics; or The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed . This was not so much a descriptive theory on the origins of morality as it was a prescriptive theory on how morality should be applied to society in a rational and scientific manner. Spencer rejected utilitarian calculations of the greatest good for the greatest number. Instead, Spencer postulated, “the moral law of society, like its other laws, originates in some attribute of the human being.” Although he called it science, Spencer was really doing philosophy, making his case through logical deduction rather than empirical facts, beginning with a divine origin of morality: “God wills man’s happiness. Man’s happiness can only be produced by the exercise of his faculties. Then God wills that he should exercise his faculties. But to exercise his faculties he must have liberty to do all that his faculties naturally impel him to do. Then God intends he should have that liberty. Therefore he has a right to that liberty.” From this it follows that “All are bound to fulfill the Divine will by exercising them. All therefore must be free to do those things in which the exercise of them consists. That is, all must have rights to liberty of action.” Of course, my freedom to swing my arm in any direction I choose ends at your nose. Spencer deduced this, of course, concluding, “Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.”16
Spencer, as an editor of the magazine The Economist, was familiar with and accepted Adam Smith’s theory that humans had the mental capacity for sympathy. Smith, before The Wealth of Nations made him the fountainhead of classical liberal free-market economics, was a professor of moral philosophy who argued that the foundation of morality was based on the ability we have to put our self in someone else’s shoes. When you see someone grieving, you feel sympathy because you can project yourself into that situation and imagine how you would feel. An anticipation of self-grief generates genuine sympathy for the other person. In 1879 Spencer published The Data of Ethics, and in 1891 his Principles of Ethics, in which he abandoned supernatural intervention as a causal factor in the origins of morality and turned enthusiastically to Darwinian selection:
We have to enter on the consideration of moral phenomena as phenomena of evolution; being forced to do this by finding that they form a part of the aggregate of phenomena which evolution has wrought out. If the entire visible universe has been evolved—if the solar system as a whole, the earth as a part of it, the life in general which the earth bears, as well as that of each individual organism—if the mental phenomena displayed by all creatures, up to the highest, in common with the phenomena presented by aggregates of these highest—if one and all conform to the laws of evolution; then the necessary implication is that those phenomena of conduct in these highest creatures with which Moral
ity is concerned, also conform .17
While Spencer was arguably the most influential evolutionary ethicist outside of Darwin in the nineteenth century, he was not without strong critics, not the least of which was “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley was skeptical about how far evolutionary theory could be extended into the realm of ethics, but not for the same reason as Wallace, who questioned what selective advantage a system of ethics would have conferred on an individual or species. Instead, Huxley doubted that nature could be an ethical guide for us at all: “Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.” In one of the most powerful one-liners in the history of evolutionary thought (at least as it relates to ethics), Huxley definitely came down hard on the reality of what he saw as our brutal nature: “Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical process of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”18
Science of Good and Evil Page 32