I feel fortunate in that I happened to link up with a woman at the forefront in her time in getting outside that cage and seeing it for what it was and is.
You see, Riane took these insights, added to them, and built them into this forceful new theoretical framework. It hangs together as a theory of cultural evolution, of historical development, and as a weltanschauung or world-view; once you've grasped it, you can actually re-evaluate the whole of your intellectual experience. You can turn your head clear around and for the first time see life and it's possibilities in a balanced perspective.
In my own intellectual development, five systems of thought have been important to my mental growth. The first was the Christian mythos. The second was the Freudian. The third was the Marxian. The fourth was the field theoretical perspective of Kurt Lewin and the fifth has been systems science. Each reoriented my whole intellectual universe. But the sixth was Riane's perspective, and I now find it by far the most useful because it embraces more than any other, more questions, and corrects the imbalances of these perspectives. I feel it's very much a weltanschauung for the twenty-first century.
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Replicating Genes
with Robert Trivers
Are social behaviors genetically inheritable? Do they evolve through time like physical characteristics? The science of sociobiology has developed in order to study these questions. In the controversial field of sociobiology, there is no one as controversial as Robert Trivers, for he has certainly been the most daring in applying the "selfish gene" theory of sociobiology to human behavior and psychology. Recognized as one of the world's most eminent sociobiologists, Robert Trivers was born in 1943 in Washington D.C. to a Foreign Service Officer and a poet, as the second of seven children. His early academic interests ("after the Bible, " he clarifies) included astronomy and mathematics. He earned his B.A. from Harvard in U.S. History in 1965. Then he wrote and illustrated children 's books for two years before returning to Harvard, where he studied biology, and received his Ph.D. in 1972. He taught at Harvard until 1978, and after that at the UC Santa Cruz, where he continues to teach to this day. In May 1979 he joined the Black Panther Party, and has been referred to by his colleague Burney Le Boeufas "the blackest white man I know. "
Dr. Trivers is perhaps most famous for his theory of reciprocal altruism, which is a model for explaining and predicting altruism in animals precisely based on return-effect or chances of reciprocity. He has also written papers on parental investment and sexual selection, sex ratio theory, parent-offspring conflict and the social behavior of lizards and insects. He is the author of Social Evolution, a fascinating sociobiological textbook which was published in 1985 by Benjamin-Cummings of Menlo Park. He spends a good deal of time in Jamaica with his children, and has described himself as "Jamaican in my soul or spirit. " He is currently working on the evolution of "selfish genes " and resulting intra-genomic conflict, the effects of blood parasites on sexual selection in Anolis lizards, and deceit and self-deception. We met Bob on the evening of January 18th, 1 989 at the Woodshed, a country bar in Felton, California. Bob spoke to us about his theory reciprocal altruism, selfish genes, the evolution of sex, and muses with us on how and why consciousness evolved. There is a wild unpredictable quality to Bob's personality. He seems untamed and street-wise in a rather charming sort of way.
DJB
DJB: Bob, what was it that originally spawned your interest in biology and the evolution of social behavior?
ROBERT: When I graduated from college I was offered a job writing, and later illustrating children's books for part of a curriculum. The curriculum was called "Man: A Course of Study," and was meant to be the new social science, analogous to the new math, and the new physics. Since I didn't know anything about humans, they asked me to work on some animal material that they wanted to include in the course. I also didn't know anything about animals but they cared less about getting that stuff accurate.
So my first exposure to animal behavior came through this job, and I was impressed with two things. One, by watching movies of baboons, I was impressed by how psychologically similar they seemed to ourselves, and that any explanation therefore of our own psyche would have to include arguments that could apply to baboons as well. And the second thing was I learned about the concept of evolution through natural selection. So within about six months of graduating from college, I had had my life turned around. I had never had biology before, never had chemistry, and I became convinced that the basis for a scientific theory of psychology lay in animal behavior and evolutionary theory. So I threw myself into it.
DJB: Can you briefly describe your theory of reciprocal altruism?
ROBERT: Reciprocal altruism is very, very simple and encompassed in the folk saying, "You scratch my back, I'11 scratch yours." It simply posits that organisms, besides humans, or in addition to humans, are capable of trading altruistic acts over a period of time, in which each individual is sensitive to the tendency of the other individual to be reciprocal, or perhaps not to be reciprocal, or as I put it, to cheat on the relationship. So the theory of reciprocal altruism applied to humans says that traits like friendship did not evolve before reciprocal altruism as a prerequisite, but evolved after reciprocal altruism as a way of motivating and shaping our reciprocal relationships.
RMN: According to the theory of natural selection, species evolve to adapt to the local environment to align with the forces of the external world. For example, the Spots on the heads of gull chicks will co-evolve with the parental ability to recognize them. Have you considered the possibility that this process may operate both ways; i.e., that the environment may also adapt to conform with the needs of the organism it is nurturing and does natural selection support the idea of evolution as a co-creative transaction between the organism and the environment?
ROBERT: I have considerable difficulty with that notion, except in the sense that you probably don't mean it: that the environment consists of other living creatures, and so the environment and the species we're considering both evolve. The species we're thinking about imagining is selected by the environment it lives in, but the environment it lives in is itself made up of living organisms which are being selected by reference to their environments, which include the species we're imagining. But, if you ask can I see how the environment would evolve to nurture the species, I'm dubious.
DJB: What percentage of human behavior do you think is genetically hard-wired and what percentage of human behavior do you think is due to environmental learning, and what evidence can you call upon to support your viewpoint?
ROBERT: I don't think your question really permits any kind of precise answer. I think it's inherently impossible to assign a percentage to environment and a percentage to genetic influences. The only way you could do that would be to specify the full range of environmental contingencies, and the full range of genetic contingencies, and that seems like a hopeless way to operate. For example, traits like two legs and five toes on each leg are "hard-wired" genetically, but we can always produce an intervention in early embryology which will interrupt the natural train of events, and result in someone with no limbs, or with an unusual number of digits. So, if we include that environmental range, then the percentage of genetic determination drops below a hundred percent. I don't see any way to state how much of human behavior is genetically hard-wired, whatever that precisely means, or how much is environmentally determined.
DJB: Bob, you wrote the introduction to Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, the first place I ever heard of the concept of memes-that is, non-genetic clusters of information that replicate themselves from brain to brain much as genes do from body to body, and appear to evolve through a process akin to natural selection. In light of this theory, can you explain why some people forfeit opportunities for genetic reproduction in order to propagate memes-many artists and scientists, for example, never have chil
dren--and do you think it's possible that the goal of evolution is not really genetic replication, but rather information replication?
ROBERT: Once again, I just have to express myself as being dubious. I was dubious of the attention that Dawkins gave to the concept of memes in his original book, and I don't see ideas replicating themselves between people, and being selected in a process analogous to natural selection. I see each of us trying to influence others via our ideas, and each of us being selective regarding the ideas we accept and the ideas we reject, and the way in which we decide to modify ideas that we do accept.
A general term like information transfer, or information maximization, might work better. I just don't know how to relate to it within the one system of thought that I'm comfortable with, which is evolutionary theory. Regarding the notion that many artists and scientists have few or no children, I don't know what the evidence for that is. If it were true, I suppose I would fall back on some hunter-gatherer imaginary scene in which the shaman or the artist made a disproportionate contribution to the welfare of his or her local group, and this made up for any deficiency in personal reproduction.
RMN: You say that natural selection is described as disruptive when it favors extremes to create a polarity and you cite human sexual dimorphism as an example. What do you mean by this?
ROBERT: Well, you'd have to go a ways back in our own lineage, but if you go back in any species that has two sexes, you'd reach a species where there's only one sex, an original hermaphroditic form, which gave rise to the species with two sexes. Now, once you have two separate sexes, if selection operates against intermediates, then it'll tend to push the two sexes further apart.
So to use a crude compelling example, men with breasts or women with masculine characteristics may be less well off than firmly belonging to one sex or another. So to that degree selection operates against the intermediates, and we have to imagine, whenever we see dimorphism in nature--and sexual dimorphism is just one example--that somewhere along the line selection was disrupted, acting against the middle, and in favor of two different positions, not extremes, but two different forms or morphs.
RMN: So, by disrupted you mean it's moving away from the middle?
ROBERT: Yeah, I think so. The only other image of disrupted that I can think of is that if you have a normal distribution to begin with-- a single uniform distribution-- and you disrupt it, you'll end up producing two distributions instead of one.
RMN: The term "disruptive" sounds a little pejorative.
ROBERT: Well, if you'll pardon me, I wouldn't attach too much significance to the term disruptive as in disruptive selection. I see your objection and did when you were asking your earlier question, but it's just a term like normalizing selection and directional selection, just for describing a kind of selection. Now, getting back to the union of opposites--sure, in some cases, as in the sexes in producing offspring. But, I guess answering your question I realize that I came out of a world twenty years ago in which differences between the sexes or within species tended to be minimized and conflict tended to be minimized, and there was always some claim of a higher purpose, benefits for the group or the species, and insufficient attention was paid to conflict, even within relationships that have a cooperative goal. So regarding the sexes, yes, especially in species with male parental investment, especially in cases of monogamy, you can have a large overlap of self-interest between a male and a female, so they're involved in a higher goal, a common goal of, let us say raising offspring together.
RMN: Which is what life is all about, right?
ROBERT: Eventually. But that still should not obscure the fact that they have conflicting self-interest, and that their self-interest may not be maximized in the same way.
DJB: James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis have proposed a theory, which they have termed the Gaia hypothesis, to explain how and why life forms on our planet work in such a cooperative fashion together to achieve the delicate chemical ratios in our oceans and atmospheres, which are maintained in such perfect balance that life is made possible and sustained. They claim that the whole earth seems to function much in the way a single organism operates. Do you have any thoughts on this, and how does the "selfish gene" theory that you subscribe to explain this extraordinary phenomenon?
ROBERT: Well, I'm really not familiar with this area. From my bias, I've always imagined, in so far as I've thought about it at all, that the organisms are just busy concerning themselves with what's good for each other, and the result is some kind of steady state that is beneficial, more broadly put. Some organisms consume oxygen, others generate oxygen. There's going to be a balance struck between those two sets of organisms, some kind of density-dependent laws that come into effect.
I think that it would be a mistake to imagine that the organisms are attempting to set up something in the biosphere itself, or to create a biosphere, but I may be a little bit old-fashioned in that approach, and I know that geologists, and people that study the earth as a whole, do often imagine that it's like an organism, and maybe it is. I just don't know. Nothing in my line of work would suggest so, that I know of.
RMN: You refer a number of times in your book Social Evolution to the "apparent coincidences" of natural selection. When literally translated this term coincidence means simply the coordination of incidents. Would you venture further and postulate as to the directing force that is coordinating these incidents? Do you see any kind of teleology in nature or do you view all events as the product of mere chance? Does Natural Selection play dice with the universe, and is the only meaning to life in your view, really, more life?
ROBERT: I don't see any teleology in nature. The teleology was beaten out of me in my training. It was an important aspect of paleontology, for example, to learn there were no trends, inevitable trends, of groups tending to always get larger, or always go in one direction or another.
RMN: What are your views on genetic engineering and the possibility, which to some scientists is a very real one, that we will soon have the ability to control our evolution by programming our future genetic forms?
ROBERT: I have not been frightened by genetic engineering. I do not believe it will create monsters that will run rampant. I've always believed that natural selection would still be acting, and acting very strongly.
RMN: On the scientists that create the genetic mutations?
ROBERT: Well, I was thinking on the genetic mutants themselves. In other words, when the, say, anti-frost bacteria were first sprayed on plants here in California experimentally, people said, well Jesus what happens if you got a monster bacterium that's going to cut loose and cause all sorts of havoc, and run amok. I just didn't imagine that it would happen because monsters are being produced, probably daily, in this world, through mutation and recombination, and are being selected against, and I didn't see, and don't see any reason why artificial forms created in the lab wouldn't be subject to strong selection too. As for genetic engineering in the human species, I imagine it's inevitable, and Probably in a hundred or two hundred years we'll scarcely be able to imagine the genetic manipulations that'll be possible.
RMN: In your book Social Evolution you state that the primary function of sex is to generate genetic novelty in the offspring, which can better adapt to the changing environmental conditions. You also say that natural selection favors individuals who maximize the number of offspring. Two factors are being described here--that of quality and that of quantity. How do you see these factors operating in evolution?
ROBERT: The simple answer is that quality can always be converted into quantity for the purposes of evolutionary theory. So, one pair of parents can produce four offspring of low quality, where quality is measured as their ability to survive and reproduce, and another pair of parents can produce two offspring of high quality, were quality is again defined the same way. In that case, after awhile, the high quality offspring win out, are more numerous. That's just a tautological system, in which quality refers to eventual ability to
survive and reproduce, and therefore converts into quantity.
RMN: Do you see these influences as being equally potent-- fifty-fifty?
ROBERT: Yes.
DJB: Approximately 22,000 Americans commit suicide annually. Clearly suicidal behavior is non-adaptive, and it appears to he related to sexual development- that is, the behavior seems to emerge during adolescence, and is often triggered by the loss of a lover. How do you explain it evolutionarily?
Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… Page 10