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Evolution Made Me Do It EVOLUTION MADE ME DO IT An address given by Eileen Jacob to the Oxford Unitarian congregation, 16 October 2016 I’m going to start with a quote. The language is antiquated, but you’ll probably recognise the ideas in it: Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman, and in the savage state he keeps her in a far more abject state of bondage than does the male of any other animal; therefore it is not surprising that he should have gained the power of selection. Women are everywhere conscious of the value of their own beauty; and when they have the means, they take more delight in decorating themselves with all sorts of ornaments than do men. Did this make you cringe a little? It certainly makes me cringe. But even though they are over a century old, these words—and their assumptions— remain in print and continue to linger in popular culture. These words were written by Charles Darwin. That’s a very long legacy of justifying Victorian social mores and attitudes about human nature. More generally, that’s a long pedigree of justifying behaviour as biologically ingrained. It’s over a century of saying, ‘Well, evolution made me do it.’ But does evolution make us do things? If it does, what standard can we reasonably hold humanity to? Are we doomed, as a species, to default back to whatever behaviour science decides is normative? Unitarians are strongly influenced by the Enlightenment and Humanism, both of which take a positive view of human nature and our ability to improve through effort and time. We have the Enlightenment to thank both for the idea that we are rational creatures and for the scientific method, so understandably we Unitarians tend to like both these things. Humanism’s faith, as such, is in humanity’s ability to create its own salvation. As John Dewey put it, ‘Faith in the continued disclosing of truth through directed cooperative human endeavour is more religious in quality than is any faith in completed revelation.’ This positive-rational attitude of human nature is popular in Unitarianism. Here we hunt for spiritual truth, but why should we not apply the scientific method to our societies and ourselves? As Alexander Pope said, ‘The proper study of Mankind is Man.’ If we are creatures of this earth, then we are subject to the same biological laws as other creatures, and our behaviours must have evolutionary explanations. This premise underlies the field of sociobiology, which has contributed heavily to pop science. But as anthropologist Roger Lancaster points out, sociobiology ‘reduces meaningful social activity to a genetic base. It… 1 attributes human social characteristics to unconscious (but eerily mindful) chains of nucleotides [in DNA].’ It is a small step from scientific research to complicated moral implications, including jeopardizing free will and excusing immoral behaviour as inevitable facts of human nature. It undermines the idea that we as a species can make collective moral progress, as we remain driven by individualistic evolutionary selective pressures. Luckily for us Unitarians, there are problems with sociobiology and its underlying philosophy. There are also problems with our faith in rationality, but I’ll come to that in a minute. First, to put it bluntly: much of sociobiology is wrong, or at least it claims to explain far more than it should. Human behaviour on the individual level is the complex product of both genes and culture, and culture obeys no universal law, beyond perhaps that humans live in groups. Just as one example, let’s look at testosterone, or the quote-unquote ‘male hormone’. In pop science, this is the biological explanation for Darwin’s ‘man the hunter’, described in the opening quote. Testosterone makes us more aggressive, and since it is usually higher in men, men must be more aggressive than women. Women with above-average testosterone levels show ‘manlike’ qualities, including greater risk taking and assertiveness. Actually, science has so far failed to pinpoint what effects testosterone has on individual behaviour. Some studies show a correlation between testosterone levels and aggressive tendencies, but others do not. Stressful situations can in fact depress testosterone levels. As Roger Lancaster sums up: What can be documented about the relationship between male mood, aggression, and testosterone is actually the opposite of what usually gets asserted. Aggression… elevates testosterone secretion, not vice versa... And one of the strongest social correlations (but note: not causes) established by careful experimental studies is a surprising one: Men with low levels of testosterone tend to be irritable, tired, and nervous, whereas men with higher level of testosterone tend to be more alert, more optimistic, and friendlier than men with lower levels. So now testosterone has gone from the ‘gerr I’m a man’ hormone to the gregarious hormone. That’s quite a different picture! I bring this up to illustrate the problem with trying to apply rational science to human behaviour, particularly in the context of evolutionary explanations. The problem, in short, is that humans are not rational. Humans are fundamentally social creatures. This is one truth that has yet to be controverted. There is no such thing as the primordial individual. 2 Even hermits reject a society in which they were raised; they would not be hermits if there was no society to rebel against. This means that trying to explain social behaviour through evolution is often a fruitless task, as culture will always muddy the waters. We cannot disentangle ourselves from society. There’s a second side to this. Sociobiology has been dominated by Western males, subject to the same irrationality and social contexts as their subjects. Why did scientists jump so eagerly on the idea that testosterone drives a set of behaviours that Victorians decided were distinctly male? In hindsight, it’s naïve to think that multiple complex traits could be boiled down to a single hormone, without even considering the (still biological) possibility that the 49 other hormones in our body might interact with it. There is also greater diversity in human relationships and behaviours than such studies consider. There is no universal attitude to gender roles, for example. Societies may practise monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, or be frankly indifferent to marriage. The distribution of power between genders varies, and attitudes toward non-binary genders also vary. When you leave the Western society in which the vast majority of sociobiological studies occur, it becomes hard to pinpoint which supposedly universal behaviour you’re explaining in the first place. So, humans are not rational, and culture is an emergent behaviour that cannot be reduced to a single evolutionary story. Genes obviously influence the individual’s health and mental wellbeing, but on the collective level society has no genome. We are free to hold humanity to a higher standard than our animal friends, and it is not foolish to strive for a better future. Darwin would be shocked by the state of ‘woman’ today in Britain; it is in our power to continue to change. This message is not shocking, but it is one we have to hold on to in the face of pop science and our own love of rationality. Sometimes science is lifted on to a pedestal, and sometimes there is a reactionary love of mysticism; in reality both have roles to play. We must recognise that there are limits to our rationality, and that sometimes ethics should inform science, not vice versa. This is not to say that science has no role in our church. Science in combination with faith can produce wonderment. Science reveals a collective history for all of life; that is a fabulous creation story. As Edward Wilson says, ‘Those of us who have... [learned] the evolutionary scientific story of our roots know ourselves to be reworked stardust, biological beings with a multi-billion-year pedigree. We know these facts deeply, and for us they’re as empowering as any tale that has ever come alive… at the mouth of a cave or in the vaulting echoes of a cathedral.’ Don’t lose faith in science, but don’t lose faith in humans either. 3 .
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