14. Dualists of the Cartesian variety (still quite active in philosophy of mind circles) will balk at the idea that chemical process and emotional feeling are the same. Dualists recognize the correlation of brain process and mental experience but demand some autonomy for mental life and generally see my sort of analysis (of the chemistry of bonding) as too reductionistic. From this vantage point, the dualist also feels justified in maintaining a strict fact/value distinction and rejects the idea that brain science can tell us anything useful about ethics. But I accept Spinoza’s dual-aspect monism as a more fruitful way to think about the brain-mind. Monists like myself (and most affective neuroscientists) think of subjective feelings (like care or rage) as identical with the chemical brain changes. Feelings and chemical processes are different sides (aspects) of the same coin, so to speak.
15. See Thomas R. Insel, “The Neurobiology of Affiliation: Implications for Autism,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed. Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, and H. Hill Goldsmith (Oxford University Press, 2002).
16. Homeostasis means “steady state” and is an important concept for understanding everything from the human cell to the human brain. Our brains have an ever-changing internal milieu of fluids, pressures, chemicals, and electrical activities, all shifting slightly (and sometimes radically) to adapt to external environmental changes (e.g., thermoregulation is a shifting concert of adjustments that tries to establish a comfortable operating temperature—a steady-state homeostasis—for our bodies, as we alternately encounter hot, sunny exposure, cold windy nights, and all points in between). Just as thermoregulation is a homeostatic system (or blood-glucose regulation), so are other brain-based processes. Emotional changes can be affective chemical imbalances that eventually restore back to balance or mood equilibrium (homeostasis). And some neuroscientists suggest that our feeling state of relaxed pleasure (equilibrium) is a correlate for a physiochemical state of homeostasis. See N. Campbell, J. Reece, L. Mitchell, Biology, 5th ed. (Benjamin/Cummings, Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), chap. 40.
17. Interestingly, oxytocin has been shown to also boost endogenous opioid production in the brain, by gating or preventing the usual “tolerance effect” of opioids. This may mean that filial chemistries of oxytocin work in tandem with opioids to increase the pleasures of nurturing and being nurtured. See Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, chap. 13; and also R. A. Depue and J. V. Morrone-Strupinsky, “A Neurobehavioral Model of Affiliative Bonding: Implications for Conceptualizing a Human Trait of Affiliation,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 313–95.
18. Skepticism about the value of neuroscientific explanations is still abundant, and with good reason. Overly excited media and even researchers can draw simplistic generalizations from brain studies. It’s worth noting that my own description of the early development of bonding might work fine with no other appeal than human behavior. Why bother digging into the hormones and the brain for corroboration of what behavior already indicates? The answer is that a purely behavioral approach would miss two important points for my overall argument. One, we now understand that many of these nurturing and bonding behaviors are directly underwritten by the biochemical changes I detail, so articulation of the biology component hinders the relativistic, “social constructionist” interpretation of bonding behavior (the still-dominant but dubious interpretation in the humanities and social sciences). More importantly, talking about behaviors primarily keeps us from appreciating one of my central claims: that having early prototype favorites (being bonded in early childhood and afterward) feels good. The mysterious “black box” of inner-felt subjectivity eluded behaviorists for decades, but neuroscience is now illuminating the inner emotional experiences. Behaviors are triggered by feelings, and pleasurable feelings of intimacy are crucial in creating the community of my favorites.
19. In addition to these more obvious cases of family bias through emotional association, we have recent data of other kinds of mental bias based on earlier sensory associations. R. B. Zajonc shows, in his “Exposure Effects: An Unmediated Phenomenon,” that musical tone sequences previously encountered by a subject were almost always preferred to novel sequences—even when the subject had no conscious recollection of the earlier sequence and even when the sequence was delivered too rapidly for the subject to identify. See Zajonc’s article in Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium, ed. Antony S. R. Manstead, Nico Frijda, and Agneta Fischer (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 194–203.
20. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 256.
21. The exact quote is from George Eliot’s Adam Bede. “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life … to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?” See Four Novels of George Eliot (Wordsworth Editions, 2005), 361.
22. It’s important to acknowledge that family bonding is not all fluffy happy sunshine or drug-like euphoria. Far from it. George Bernard Shaw once said, “When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.” Heartbreak House (Echo Library, 2006), 43. More seriously, some mammals are terrible parents. Grizzly bear fathers must be run out of the territory by their pregnant female mates just before they give birth, or the fathers will eat their own cubs. One wonders if an increase of oxytocin levels in male bears at this time would eliminate the infanticide behavior. But regardless of these anomalies, I’ve been describing an evolved affective system for solving some specific survival challenges (e.g., offspring, siblings, and parents locking on to one another, etc.). It’s not a perfect system, because it doesn’t need to be. And in humans it can fail (bad parenting, isolation, etc.) or be overwritten with powerful bonds of obligation/duty (that are negative and fear based) rather than love (positive). Moreover, social interaction generally can be incredibly awkward and nothing like euphoria. But I don’t take these data as counterevidence, because on balance the system, albeit flawed, is very successful at fastening together small collectives. And that’s how Homo sapiens have survived.
23. I’m indebted to personal communication with social theorist Barry Schwartz, who helped me better articulate this controversial point. He kindly acted as intellectual midwife on this point, and I don’t presume to ascribe this view to him personally.
24. It is no longer enough (nor is it testable) to ascribe early nuclear bonding to sublimated incestual drives (Oedipus and Electra complexes), as psychoanalysts have suggested.
25. The quote is from an NPR Fresh Air interview (March 14, 2011). For the fuller story see Frank Calabrese Jr. with Keith Zimmerman, Kent Zimmerman, and Paul Pompian, Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster’s Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago’s Murderous Crime Family (Broadway Books, 2011).
26. In other words, the default biology between mammal parents and offspring is CARE or bonding, but negative emotions—from abuse or perceived abuse—can be written over the default code. Neurologist Antonio Damasio has developed a mechanism, called a “somatic marker,” to explain this flexible restructuring of the feeling brain. A somatic marker is the result of a brain process that codes experiences with emotional tone or coloration, engraving memories with affective associations that automatically and rapidly influence decision making. Rational deliberation is already heavily tilted or weighted in a certain direction by emotional biases. These biases result, in part, from somatic markers that have been stored in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex of the brain. Original codings can be changed or modified pursuant to new experiences. See extensive discussions of somatic markers in Damasio’s Descartes’ Error (Putnam, 1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt Brace, 1999).
27. “Epigenetics” is the technical term for the growing study of this middle ground between nature (DNA) and nurture (environment). The brain is capable of significant reorganization depending on the kinds of input experiences. Epigenetic on/off switches control gene expression and seem capable of almost Lamarckian levels of in
heritance. This is especially true in the early years of childhood development, but the brain also becomes more adaptable and open to reorganization after traumatic injuries.
28. See John Maynard Smith, “Group Selection and Kin Selection,” Nature 201 (March 1964), for one of the definitive early statements on the evolution of groups. Biologist and philosopher Michael Ghiselin has also persuasively argued that species themselves should be understood as individuals (and targets of selection) rather than as classes of individual organisms. See Ghiselin, Metaphysics and the Origin of Species (SUNY Press, 1997). Interpreting the group as an individual or recognizing kin selection of groups are both ways of isolating the same fact: selection operates at the level of populations too.
29. Social evolution is of course a remarkably complex phenomenon, aided by many causal processes. Even kin selection is an umbrella term that covers many processes besides behavioral adaptation. For a sophisticated discussion of the uniquely human mechanisms of social evolution, see Kim Sterelny’s work, in particular Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003). His recent suggestion of how “apprentice learning” evolved in early humans provides a compelling alternative to the modular evolutionary psychology approach. It would be interesting to see his same “information transmission” approach applied beyond his current concerns with craft skills, to the ethical education of our ancestors. One wonders how fairness and favoritism were scaffolded up from humble origins to the level of transmittable social norms.
30. Gould continues, “For example, in most sexually reproducing organisms, an individual shares (on average) one-half the genes of his sibs and one-eighth the genes of his first cousins. Hence, if faced with a choice of saving oneself alone or sacrificing oneself to save more than two sibs or eight first cousins, the Darwinian calculus favors altruistic sacrifice; for in so doing, an altruist actually increases his won genetic representation in future generations.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Biological Potentiality vs. Biological Determinism,” in Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (Norton, 1979), 255.
31. An excellent discussion of group selection, especially as it helped to create the human cooperation explosion, can be found in Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World, chap. 7.
32. See Jerry O’Wolff and Paul Sherman, Rodent Societies: An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective (University of Chicago Press, 2007). Also see John Hoogland, The Black-Tailed Prairie Dog: Social Life of a Burrowing Animal (University of Chicago Press, 1995).
33. In the spring of 2011, a hot debate emerged in the pages of Nature surrounding a recent about-face by Edward O. Wilson, one of the earliest and best popularizers of kin selection. Wilson has changed his mind about the power of kin selection to explain altruism. He now favors a distinct causal mechanism called “group selection” (sometimes confused with kin selection) that operates in social creatures who are not necessarily related. In other words, he reverses the order of selection. Creatures that live in collectives evolved cooperative behaviors first (based only on group membership) and later this cooperation intensified for genetically related kin groups. The majority of the scientific community has roundly rejected Wilson’s new suggestion, but it is still a live issue. For Wilson’s controversial paper, see Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, and Edward O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Eusociality,” Nature 466 (August 26, 2010): 1057–62. For scathing critiques, see Nature 471 (March 24, 2011): E5–E6, online.
34. Many evolutionary psychologists have argued unconvincingly, I think, for hardwired behavioral modules that solve these survival problems. According to thinkers like Steven Pinker, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Marc Hauser, specific altruistic behaviors in animals (e.g., self-sacrifice) or cognitive skills in humans (e.g., cheater-detection skills) are brain circuits that mechanically (or computationally) solve the relevant challenge. This approach fits well with both the computational model of mind from cognitive science and the behaviorism model from animal science, but I think it’s wrong. Instead, I think that affective systems (e.g., CARE, RAGE, SEEKING, etc.) are originally engraved in the brain and body of animals, and then epigenetic development and environment conditioning “educate” those feelings into complex behavioral tendencies. In other words, inner feelings (always treated skeptically by behaviorists) guide the preferential behaviors of altruistic animals. The chirping squirrel feels more panic when its own family is in danger, and so increases its alert calls. We still need more empirical work to validate this complex model (and one should always be vigilant against unwarranted anthropomorphism), but it is more compelling than the evolutionary psychology idea that a closed computational circuit comes pre-wired in the brain.
35. What’s missing in my series of extrapolating questions is something significant, but not very popular in contemporary ethical discussions. It is the intrinsic, dare I say spiritual, value of granting favors. The ancients would not be able to go from monkey justice to egalitarian laws without some serious consideration of the soul’s or the psyche’s health. The cost-benefit analysis of benevolent action was well known to them, but they argued for a more primordial reason for good deeds—namely, that they are pleasing to the soul (they are their own reward). Seneca says that he doesn’t give favor to his friends because he wants favors returned “in a circle.” Echoing Greeks like Plato and Aristotle, Seneca believes that virtuous giving is its own reward. He explains, “The wages of a good deed is to have done it. I am grateful, not in order that my neighbor, provoked by the earlier act of kindness, may be more ready to benefit me, but simply in order that I may perform a most pleasant and beautiful act; I feel grateful, not because it profits me, but because it pleases me.” Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, vol. 2 (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1962), epistle LXXXI, “On Benefits.”
36. Matt Ridley assumes the more pessimistic social contract view of “egocentric individual first” and social cohesion later, in The Origins of Virtue (Penguin, 1996). He recognizes an alternative “origin story”—a communist utopia of “all for all” (instead of “all against all”). On this collectivist utopian view (still popular on the far Left), selfishness is a fall from grace, brought on by proto-capitalist inequities in the distribution of goods. Ridley lampoons this, and maybe he’s right to do so. But my argument is different. The family is the small tribe at the very origin of each human’s development, so it is before both the egotist and the altruist (it is not derivative). Family is the original tribe that acts as the nursery for hatching out the subsequent values (selfishness and selflessness).
37. See Frans de Waal’s Tanner Lecture, included as part 1 in Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton University Press, 2009), 6–8.
38. See S. Brosnan and F. de Waal, “Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay,” Nature 425 (2003): 297–99.
39. A contentious debate in the evolution of mind is whether animals need cognitive skills (i.e., theory of mind, or intentional stance, etc.) in order to recognize the agency of other creatures, or if these complex social hierarchies are navigated instead by precognitive skills (i.e., sensory-motor and affective patterns). This is relevant to the question of how fairness might have evolved. Does an animal have to have a theory of intentions to recognize that its tribal companion is experiencing a fair or unfair distribution of resources? Or are non-theoretical emotional expectations enough to generate a social system of reciprocity and then fairness?
40. See William Saletan, “Mind Makes Right,” Slate, March 31, 2007. Ralph Adolphs, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has published many studies that show brain correlations in emotional and cognitive processing. His lab is very active in exploring neural substrates for moral reasoning/emoting. See his website for an extensive bibliography of papers: http://www.emotion.caltech.edu/.
41. See Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, especially the discussion of “moral sense” in the “General Summary and Conclusion,” chapter XX
I, in Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton, 1979).
42. Arranged marriages in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are still dominant. Over 90 percent of weddings in India are still arranged. Parents and/or matchmakers look to maximize the welfare of the entire multigenerational family by finding prosperous and resourceful spousal matches. The offspring of such a union will be the obvious first recipients of a successful new bond, but the extended family will also find significant indirect benefits.
43. Special thanks to an anonymous reviewer, who helped me to better articulate this point about Hume.
Chapter Three
1. Biologists Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd have produced a series of compelling articles and books, arguing that instinctual tribalism (which we share with other social primates) was united with unique “group selection” mechanisms that favored functional large-scale institutions. Dedication to more abstract large-scale groups always competes with tighter tribal instincts, but human culture has many “workaround” solutions to strengthen the wider group allegiance, even ensure sacrifices to larger group interests. These workarounds include the personal charisma of leaders and the uses of ideology (the exploitation of big-brained symbol systems) to inform and enforce socially stabilizing hierarchies and stratifications. Social insects like ants don’t need these workaround cultural evolution mechanisms because vast numbers of colony members are literally “family.” So, kin selection is probably enough to explain much of their social cohesion. My own discussion, in what follows, of a cultural grid of egalitarian fairness might be seen as part of this co-evolution thesis, which avoids reducing humans to the simple “human nature” theses we find in sociobiology and rational choice cost-benefit approaches. Despite the counterbalancing of human ideology, the tribal instincts are, I believe, older and stronger, and represent a real limit on the size of group membership. See Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, “Complex Societies: The Evolutionary Origins of a Crude Superorganism,” Human Nature 10, no. 3 (1999): 253–89.
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