Evolving ideas

The idea that someone’s morality comes from a god is like the idea that their cellular structure is assembled by a god. Biochemistry describes a different process in which macromolecules from food are broken down and/or sorted into the structures in a process of self-assembly. This occurs over developmental and evolutionary time and the idea of assembly from extrinsic sources is not plausible.

My comparison suggests that a science of morality might yield or has already yielded similar conclusions, viz. that morality develops over developmental and evolutionary timescales by a process of self-assembly. Key theoretical pointers are theory of mind and game theoretic notions for the two timescales, respectively.  There is much to elaborate on here, but this is not the purpose of this post. Suffice it say that anticipating this general outcome of research is not unreasonable. It fits the pattern of scientific discovery in general, replacing implausible but intuitively appealing skyhooks with a multitude of cranes to do the heavy lifting of explanation (to borrow Dennett’s admittedly tendentious phrasing).

For those who disagree with me, there are several versions of what it means to say there is no morality without a god. First this might mean that if you do not believe in a god (or in this role for such an entity) then you cannot be a moral person (implying that atheists are necessarily nasty). Second it might mean only that a god plays this role regardless of whether you are aware of that fact (so atheists and theists are equivalent). But there is a third and intermediate position which posits that your being aware of a god’s role in planting morality’s seed in you in will enhance your access to it in some way. The details of this are not important, but the fact that there are several ways this can be imagined (e.g., that you accept a universal love invisible to others, that you can hear a god’s advice, etc.) makes it intuitively more appealing and plausible, at least to deists or theists. (For completeness, the supernatural realm is not always so appealing and it is plausible to be angry or frightened by powerful agents, like witches, and wish to be an unbeliever).

But for those who agree with me, there are also several versions of what it means to say that religion is not a source of morality. First it might mean that religion is essential for the development of morality but is not its source (so that to be good you must be culturally Christian, if not a theist, for example). Second it might mean that religion has nothing to do with morality (so theists and atheists are equivalent). But again there is an intermediate position: perhaps religion has an impact on the development of morality over developmental and evolutionary timescales though it is not essential. (For completeness, you might posit that religion has only negative effects on the development of morality too – more below).

I find the third non-theist position plausible and to explain why I return to the analogy of biochemistry and eating. While it is true that self-assembly, not outside-directed assembly, is responsible for cellular structures, chemicals we ingest do affect physiology. The most obvious class of things ingested which can do this is drugs though all aspects of diet are relevant over developmental and evolutionary timescales. What might this mean in the context of morality?

Religions generate plausible intuitions about morality the most obvious flowing from the concept of an all-access agent (of which the Christian god is an example): crudely, if He knows everything that everyone is thinking (not just doing), then He will know what is right and what is wrong (much of this follows from Pascal Boyer’s thesis in “Religion Explained”). Moral problems are problems of social coordination and are often caused by having only partial information about another’s motives. Now this concept might be too recent in history to have impacted the evolution of morality, but it can surely affect the development of morality in individuals at least as an intuitive framework for moral expression (and possible negative connotations if access to such an agent is claimed as a special privilege). Arguably the causation here is mostly in the other direction with the plausibility of the intuition driving hazy notions about the nature of the agent (e.g., God seems to be aware of all relevant strategic information such as that spoken of in confession, but people don’t make much of His knowing any particular detail of the physical universe unless it is relevant – it isn’t often subject to debate despite the implications for how this feat of memory might be achieved (none of which is to imply it could not)).

On whether believing in all-access agents has good or bad consequences, I suspend judgement. It may be that believing in one intensifies feelings of conscience, which seems like a good thing or it may be that it promotes a command-and-control morality possibly inappropriate after childhood when most fellow humans are on an equal footing as regards privileged information (but seemingly reinforced by fictive kin notions like “God the Father”). Hence the possibility that religion is less like opium, more like an amphetamine: a moral stimulant.

All-access agents aside, religion has been around for a while so there might be a story a bit like lactase persistence waiting in the scientific wings (again with neoteny being a feature). Perhaps notions of other worlds or of reincarnation or life after death have effects on intuitions that are now tolerated or even required by our moral intuitions. I am not sure, but if there are necessary components of religion it seems plausible they may already be dispersed outside of any particular religion in the form of intuitively appealing notions and moral fables and parables.

The take home point is that nobody should prejudge the matter. Religious people do give blood more (a measure which gets round the confounding fact that charities are often religious) and religions are effective at organising the distribution of club goods from social welfare to suicide terrorism. Religion has an impact and it is likely to be complex. Understanding this is important especially if as a social democrat you are interested in the forces responsible for social solidarity and want to move beyond the religious right’s “family values” (think Mafioso – amusing comparison made by Stephen Fry) and the atheist left’s tendency to throw the baby out with the authoritarian bathwater (see this article or this talk for a slightly hyperbolic version of this sentiment).

Humans show variation in sexual behaviour which includes the presence of same-sex partner preferences in a minority. This manifestation of human sexual variation has been and is subject to moral censure in certain (sub)cultures, which has led to a charged debate about the naturalness or otherwise of homosexuality. Perhaps, if it can be established that some people are born gay, moralising conservatives can be silenced because a gay person cannot be expected to violate his or her inherent nature.

Now male-specific mating behaviours and preferences are thought to be programmed into the brain by in utero exposure to androgens (male sex hormones, e.g. testosterone) and some brain regions show differences between the sexes. But a recent rodent study published in the journal Nature (here; summary here; both require access) suggests that we need a radical rethink. Kimchi et al. worked with mice that carried null mutations in a gene, Trpc2, that codes for an ion channel expressed in the vomeronasal organ (VNO). The VNO, also known as Jacobson’s organ, is a small inclusion above the buccal (mouth) cavity that contains pheromone-detecting receptors and which receives its input from the nasal cavity via a duct. And, because the Trpc2 ion channel constitutes a shared component in the signalling pathways of many pheromone receptors, ablating the Trpc2 gene (which is what the null mutation does) renders the VNO inoperative and prevents pheromone detection.

Before this recent study it was known that Trpc2 knockout male mice were unable to distinguish between the sexes, indiscriminately mounting newly introduced males and females and failing to show the usual aggressive response towards intruder males. Kimchi et al. show that female Trpc2 knockout mice also failed to distinguish the sex of introduced mice, but the nature of their responses to them was surprising. The knockout females showed male-typical sexual and soliciting behaviours towards all comers of either sex (see videos here; requires access); they attempted to mount them, they thrusted towards them during mounting, they probed the anogenital region and they emitted complex ultrasonic vocalisations. This led the authors to suggest that these male-typical behaviour patterns are latent in normal females and are normally repressed by pheromonal signalling through the VNO.

An obvious conflating factor in interpreting these results in this way is that ablation of the Trpc2 gene might have effects earlier in development rather than in adult animals. But Kimchi et al. also removed the VNO from adult animals (taking care to prevent blood clots forming that might block olfaction altogether or excluding data when this was shown to have occurred post-mortem). In this way they were able to replicate their findings that loss of VNO functioning results in activation of male-specific behaviours in adult females. This effect was also robust to whether females were sexually naive or experienced and to whether experiments took place in cages or in semi-natural conditions.

Now the VNO is probably vestigial in humans and the TRPC2 gene is a pseudogene in catarrhine primates (Old World monkeys and the apes). In general the role of olfaction (of both odours and odourless pheromones) seems to have decreased in the Old World versus the New World monkeys and all the more so in humans versus all other primates. So although there is some evidence for expression of a pheromone receptor gene in the human olfactory epithelium, we might reasonably expect humans to exhibit rather different dependencies between pheromones and sex. It is obviously too early to conclude that Kimchi et al.’s findings bear directly on human sexual behaviour. And their experiments did not demonstrate the converse case by eliciting female-specific behaviours in males – these may or may not be latent in male mice.

However, I believe it is worth entertaining the hypothesis that in humans male- and female-specific behaviours can be activated by various cues and that developmental perturbations might result in altered sex-typical behaviours during adulthood. There are two important caveats to this: 1. adopting behaviour typical of the other sex is not the same as homosexuality (and the mice in this study seemed to be altogether lacking in partner preferences) and 2. latent sexual proclivites do not negate the possibility that variation in sexual behaviour is genetically influenced. Indeed the Nature study showed that either surgical intervention or genetic modification could release male-typical behaviours in females and they used this to establish that male/female differences were not localised in sexually dimorphic brain regions, but are instead achieved by a switch mechanism in adults. Mice can still be born with this switch set to a particular position.

But I think that the discovery of this mechanism should increase our expectation that environmental effects might be significant in the development of homosexual behaviours. This is because it puts disinhibition in a causal role. It is easier to imagine a range of environmental effects that could interfere with and thereby disinhibit sexual programmes than it is to envisage environmental perturbations that can reorganise sexual behaviour de novo.

Finally allow me to add that I believe that the question of the heritablity of sexual behaviour need have no bearing on moral judgements. This should be evident from two examples. First, I would guess that many would agree with me that paedophilia, or at least paederasty, is a moral problem regardless of whether experience or genes tend to explain more of the variation in this trait because in either case children are likely to suffer harm. Second, I imagine that the fact that some gentleman prefer blondes, even if this could be shown to be a culturally mediated preference, would not be a cause for alarm because this trait is not associated with violation of consent or with causing harm. For full clarity – I do not believe that homosexual behaviour is harmful or wrong, any more so than heterosexual behaviour.

The other day I heard, through the grapevine, that an esteemed colleague thought that evolutionary psychology had, as a discipline, established and sorted out its theoretical basis. All that remained to be done (which is a big all) was to test individual hypotheses through whatever empirical means were available. A body of knowledge needed building.

My initial reaction to this was to be sceptical. If evolutionary psychology is interpreted in its broadest sense – i.e. the application of evolutionary biology to the behavioural sciences, or more correctly, the behavioural sciences are rightly understood as a sub-discipline of biology – then what of the clash between gene-level selectionists and multi-level and group selectionists, for example? Most of this debate is happening in areas that attempt to describe and account for a phenomenon referred to as culture. Culture is claimed to have a distinct and describable ontological status, and some claim that it can evolve whilst others claim it affects gene-level evolution through processes such as niche construction. Folk appear to be trying to sort something theoretical out here using the standard tools of philosophy as well as mathematical modeling. (And, as you will perhaps deduce from my tone, I think there are some other core theoretical issues lurking in the very establishment of the problem.)

Any how, I do not want to bang on about cultural evolution and its ills here, just yet. But, what I wanted to ask folk was:

1) Do you think my esteemed colleague is correct?

2) If not, then what are the key theoretical challenges that remain for evolutionary psychology?

3) If you think she is correct, then what key experiments need doing in order to falsify this body of theory (or rather, in order to attempt a falsification, for it may, of course, not stand)?

The “question of the year” at Nature Genetics asks geneticists what they would do if the equivalent of the human genome could be sequenced for one thousand dollars. There are lots of interesting answers from geneticists there. But I think this opens up a more general question for (evolutionary) psychologists (and obviously behaviour geneticists) about what easy access to genetic information could provide. What sorts of questions could be addressed in psychology if genetics was easy and cheap?

Here’s one idea: we could find out how genetically similar friends are to each other (e.g. do they share single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs?). This might help address theories about altruism and the green beard effect or it might just stimulate more questions. The green beard effect is an abstraction from the logic of kin selection that shows how altruism can occur between non-relatives by a genetic mechanism. In this scenario a single gene or a group of genes in linkage disequilibrium (i.e. genes that tend to be inherited together) produce two effects: 1. a distinctive trait such as a green beard and 2. a tendency to be altruistic to others with this trait (or nasty to those without). Groups of green-bearded organisms can then start to spread in populations by mutual aid (or through individually costly punishment of outsiders). Evidence for this in non-humans is accumulating (see here, here and here for empirical support) and it would be lovely if such a system could be identified in humans by high-throughput methods.

Hi

I mentioned in a posting a little while back that I was writing a review of David Livingstone Smith’s book “Why We Lie”. This was one of two books trying to reconcile the Freudian Project with evolutionary concerns. Well, the review is now out and can be read online at (where a pretty pdf version is available for download too).

I should welcome comments and so forth.

All the best

Tom

I’ve been reading Timothy Wilson’s book, too. I think it’s life-changing and have been recommending it to all my friends. Although Wilson has no sympathy for the details of Freudian theory, his outlook is broadly Freudian in the sense that he thinks we need to look to the unconscious level for explanations of much of our behaviour (not just pathological behaviour, but routine everyday stuff). The book is also Freudian in having a therapeutic angle. Wilson thinks that if we understand the sources of our behaviour better we shall be more at ease with ourselves, and he outlines some strategies we can use for gaining self-knowledge. A major theme of the book is that introspection is not a good route to self-knowledge — being distorted by our self-conscious theories about ourselves, which are often just wishful thinking. A stranger may be able to predict your behaviour better than you can, since you’re more likely behave as the average person would than you are to act in accordance with your idealized image of yourself. (Wilson also outlines evidence that people overestimate both how much pleasure they will get from positive life events and how misery from negative ones. We are programmed to stay on an even keel, he suggests. I find that rather comforting.)

Tom asks about the role of personal-level stuff. I don’t think it has to be merely post-hoc commentary. It can have effects on subpersonal processing and may bias behaviour in important ways. Wilson talks about the advantages of adopting a positive self-image. Dennett has a similar story about the role of inner vebalization, and I’ve got my own version, too, which won’t I peddle here. The crucial point is that even if non-conscious processing is doing the immediate work, the conscious mind can still be an influential back-seat driver.

Hi

I have recently read Timothy Wilson’s book, Strangers to Ourselves, and David Livingstone Smith’s book, Why We Lie.

Both books note the idea/fact that a huge amount (most) of our psychological functioning is unconscious (and a product of natural selection) and both books try to understand the link between this machinery and the conscious level stuff that we also produce (again, the product of natural selection). In this sense, both authors are in the business of reinvigorating the Freudian project, but they are doing it under the auspices of some version of evolutionary psychology.

I don’t want to relate the detail of the books now (I am writing a review of Smith currently so will be happy to at some point in the future) but I wanted to initiate a discussion about this Freudian project. What interests me at the moment are questions pertaining to how we can even begin working on such a project. Personal level outpourings are hard to capture, hard to characterise and so forth, and all this makes noting their function a tough task; made all the harder by the fact that there is a deal of ambiguity in the underlying intentions of any personal level communication, I assume.

What I will say about the books is this: Wilson (especially from his work with Nisbett) sees a disjunction between the unconscious processing and the intentionality of the personal level. The personal level processing happens after the decision has already been made by the unconscious stuff, and may well have an element of confabulation etc. What then is the role of this personal level stuff? Smith argues that it can act, in certain specific situations, as a signal to others. So, both authors note that subtle social messages are conveyed through apparently oblique narratives used in social discourse and Smith thinks this may be a way of alerting others to social deviants etc. without drawing attention to the signalling.

How might ideas such as Smith’s be more fully worked up and tested?

I will stop here as I simply wanted to throw this set of ideas and questions out into blog-space and see what people thought.

All the best

Tom