Sociobiology

By E.O. Wilson (excerpts):

"Manipulation of the physical environment is the ultimate adaptation...Social adaptations, by virtue of their great power and sophistication, have achieved the highest degree of modification." [Me: Adaptation qua information processing]

"The hypothesis to consider, then, is that genes promoting flexibility in social behavior are strongly selected at the individual level...In order to generate the amount of variation actually observed to occur, it is necessary for there to be multiple adaptive peaks. In other words, different forms of society within the same species must be nearly enough alike in survival ability for many to enjoy long tenure."

"The alternative, found in some social insects, is flexibility in individual behavior and caste development, which nevertheless results in an approach toward uniformity in the statistical distribution of the kinds of individuals when all individuals within the colony are taken together...When one colony with its hundreds or thousands of members is compared with another of the same species, the statistical patterns of activity are about the same. We know that some of this consistency is due to negative feedback. As one requirement such as brood care or nest repair intensifies, workers shift their activities to compensate until the need is met, then change back again [me: shades of the greatest generation?]. Experiments have shown that disruptions of the feedback loops, and thence deviation by the colony from the statistical norms, can be disastrous [me: what happens when the military draft is deemed verboten?]."

"The controls governing human societies are not nearly so strong, and the effects of deviation are not so dangerous. The anthropological literature abounds with examples of societies that contain obvious inefficiencies and even pathological flaws--yet endure [me: is the selective process more rigorous nowadays; aren't inefficiencies tolerated less than they used to be?]...The explanation may be a lack of competition from other species, resulting in what biologists call ecological release."

"Moderately high heritability has been documented in introversion-extroversion, personal tempo, psychomotor and sports activities, neuroticism, dominance, depression, age of first sexual activity, timing of major cognitive development, and the tendency toward certain forms of mental illness such as schizophrenia. Even a small portion of this variance invested in population differences might predispose societies toward cultural differences."

"Sharing is rare among the nonhuman primates...But in man it is one of the strongest social traits, reaching levels that match the intense trophalactic exchanges of termites and ants. As a result only man has an economy. High intelligence and symbolizing ability make true barter possible. Intelligence also permits the exchanges to be stretched out in time, converting them into acts of reciprocal altruism. Money...is a quantification of reciprocal altruism."

"The microstructure of human social organization is based on sophisticated mutual assessments that lead to the making of contracts. As Erving Goffman correctly perceived, a stranger is rapidly but politely explored to determine his socioeconomic status, intelligence and education, self-perception, social attitudes, competence, trustworthiness, and emotional stability...The presentation of the self can be expected to contain deceptive elements."

"Deception and hypocrisy are neither absolute evils that virtuous men suppress to a minimum level nor residual animal traits waiting to be erased by further social evolution. They are very human devices for conducting the complex daily business of social life. The level [of deception and hypocrisy] in each particular society may represent a compromise that reflects the size and complexity of the society. If the level is too low, others will seize the advantage and win. Complete honesty on all sides is not the answer. The old primate frankness would destroy the delicate fabric of social life that has built up in human populations beyond the limits of the immediate clan. As Louis J. Halle correctly observed, good manners have become a substitute for love."

"Sexual behavior has been largely dissociated from the act of fertilization. It is ironic that religionists who forbid sexual activity except for purposes of procreation should do so on the basis of 'natural law.' Theirs is a misguided effort in comparative ethology, based on the incorrect assumption that in reproduction man is essentially like other animals."

"Human societies have effloresced to levels of extreme complexity because their members have the intelligence and flexibility to play roles of virtually any degree of specification, and to switch them as the occasion demands."

"The hereditary factors of human success are strongly polygenic and form a long list, only a few of which have been measured...Under these circumstances only the most intense forms of disruptive selection could result in the formation of stable ensembles of genes. A much more likely circumstance is the one that apparently prevails: the maintenance of a large amount of genetic diversity within societies and the loose correlation of some of the genetically determined traits with success."

"Ethnographic detail is genetically underprescribed, resulting in great amounts of diversity among societies."

"Culture, including the more resplendent manifestations of ritual and religion, can be interpreted as a hierarchical system of environmental tracking devices...To the extent that the specific details of culture are nongenetic, they can be decoupled from the biological system and arrayed beside it as an auxiliary system...Among the fastest cultural responses in industrial civilizations are fashions in dress and speech. Somewhat slower are political ideology and social attitudes toward other nations, while the slowest of all include incest taboos and the belief or disbelief in particular high gods."

"Slowly changing forms of culture tend to be encapsulated in ritual...The sacred rituals are the most distinctively human. Their most elementary forms are concerned with magic, the active attempt to manipulate nature and the gods...based the quite logical notion that what is done with an image [or effigy] will come to pass with the real thing. This anticipatory action is comparable to the intention movements of animals, which int he course of evolution have often been ritualized into communicative signals. The waggle dance of the honeybee, it will be recalled, is a miniaturized rehearsal of the flight from the nest to the food."

"It is a reasonable hypothesis that magic and totemism constituted direct adaptations to the environment and preceded formal religion in social evolutions. Sacred traditions occur almost universally in human societies. So do myths that explain the origin of man or at the very least the relation of the tribe to the rest of the world. But belief in high gods is not universal...The concept of an active, moral God who created the world is even less widespread. Furthermore, this concept most commonly arises with a pastoral way of life. The greater the dependence on herding, the more likely the belief in a shepherd god of the Judaeo-Christian model. In other kinds of societies, the belief occurs in 10 percent of the cases."

"The enduring paradox of religion is that so much of its substance is demonstrably false, yet it remains a driving force in all societies. Men would rather believe than know, have the void as purpose, as Nietzsche said, than be void of purpose."

"To sanctify a procedure or a statement is to certify it as beyond question and imply punishment for anyone who dares to contradict it."

"The extreme plasticity of human social behavior is both a great strength and a real danger. If each family worked out rules of behavior on its own, the result would be an intolerable amount of tradition drift and growing chaos. To counteract selfish behavior and the 'dissolving power' of high intelligence, each society must codify itself. Within broad limits virtually an set of conventions works better than none at all. Because arbitrary codes work, organizations tend to be inefficient and marred by unnecessary inequities. As Rappaport succinctly expressed it, 'Sanctification transforms the arbitrary into the necessary, and regulatory mechanisms which are arbitrary are likely to be sanctified.' Reform meets repression, because to the extent that the rules have been sanctified and mythologized, the majority of the people regard them as beyond question, and disagreement is defined as blasphemy."

"The Achilles heel of the [ethical] intuitionist position [e.g. Rawls] is that it relies on the emotive judgment of the brain as though that organ must be treated as a black box [ethical intuitionism--the belief that the mind has a direct awareness of true right and wrong that it can formalize by logic and translate into rules of social action]...the human genotype and the ecosystem in which it evolved were fashioned out of extreme unfairness. "

"Moral ambivalency will be further intensified by the circumstance that a schedule of sex- and age-dependent ethics can impart higher genetic fitness than a single moral code which is applied uniformly to all sex-age groups. For example, it should be of selective advantage for young children to be self-centered and relatively disinclined to perform altruistic acts based on personal principles. Similarly, adolescents should be more tightly bound by age-peer bonds within their own sex and hence unusually sensitive to peer approval. The reason is that at this time greater advantage accrues to the formation of alliances and rise in status than later, when sexual and parental morality become the paramount determinants of fitness."

Kohlberg stages of moral development:
Moral value is defined by punishment and reward.
1. Obedience to rules and authority to avoid punishment.
2. Conformity to obtain rewards and to exchange favors.

Moral value resides in filling the correct roles, in maintaining order and meeting the expectations of others.
3. Good-boy orientation: conformity to avoid dislike and rejection by others.
4. Duty orientation: conformity to avoid censure by authority, disruption of order, and resulting guilt.

Moral value resides in conformity to shared standards, rights, and duties.
5. Legalistic orientation: recognition of the value of contracts, some arbitrariness in rule formation to maintain common good.
6. Conscience or principle orientation: primary allegiance to principles of choice, which can overrule law in cases where the law is judged to do more harm than good.

"Richness of information and precise transmission of mood are no less the standards of excellence in human music."

"Part of man's problem is that his intergroup responses are still crude and primitive, and inadequate for the extended extraterritorial relationships that civilization has thrust on him. The unhappy result is what Garrett Hardin (1972) has defined as tribalism in the modern sense:

Any group of people that perceives itself as a distinct group, and which is so perceived by the outside world, may be called a tribe. The group might be a race, as ordinarily defined, but it need not be; it can just as well be a religious sect, a political group, or an occupational group. The essential characteristic of a tribe is that it should follow a double standard of morality--one kind of behavior for in-group relations, another for out-group.

It is one of the unfortunate and inescapable characteristics of tribalism that it eventually evokes counter-tribalism (or, to use a different figure of speech, it 'polarizes' society).

Fearful of the hostile groups around them, the tribe refuses to concede to the common good...Justice and liberty decline. Increases in real and imagined threats congeal the sense of group identity and mobilize the tribal members. Xenophobia becomes a political virtue. The treatment of nonconformists within the group grows harsher. History is replete with the escalation of this process to the point that the society breaks down or goes to war. No nation has been completely immune."

"[The autocatalysis model of human evolution] holds that when the earliest hominids became bipedal as part of their terrestrial adaptation, their hands were freed, the manufacture and handling of artifacts were made easier, and intelligence grew as part of the improvement of the tool-using habit. With mental capacity and the tendency to use artifacts increasing through mutual reinforcement, the entire materials-based culture expanded. Cooperation during hunting was perfected, providing new impetus for the evolution of intelligence, which in turn permitted still more sophistication tool using, and so on through cycles of causation."

"After A.D. 1400 European-based civilization shifted gears again, and knowledge and technology grew not just exponentially but superexponentially...There is no reason to believe that during this final sprint there has been a cessation in the evolution of either mental capacity or the predilection toward special social behaviors. The theory of population genetics and experiments on other organisms show that substantial changes can occur in the span of less than 100 generations, which for man reaches back only to the time of the Roman Empire. Two thousand generations, roughly the period since typical homo sapiens invaded Europe, is enough time to create new species and to mold them in major ways. Although we do not know how much mental evolution has actually occurred, it would be false to assume that modern civilizations have been built entirely on capital accumulated during the long haul of the Pleistocene."

[Me: Might there be some genetic implications in the choice-migration to America of similar-minded persons (risk-taking, individualistic, devout, etc.?--the migration of the intellectuals from Europe during WWII?--the Jews?--are there genetic implications in regional migrations?]

"The network of contacts among individuals and bands must also have grown. We can postulate a critical mass of cultural capacity and network size in which it became advantageous for bands actively to enlarge both. In other words, the feedback became positive."

"By adding the additional postulate of a threshold effect, it is possible to explain why the process [of autocatalytic evolution through warfare] operated exclusively in human evolution. If any social predatory mammal attains a certain level of intelligence, as the early hominids, being large primates, were especially predisposed to do, one band would have the capacity to consciously ponder the significance of adjacent social groups and to deal with them in an intelligent, organized fashion...Such primitive cultural capacity would be permitted by the possession of certain genes. Reciprocally, the cultural capacity might propel the spread of the genes through the genetic constitution of the metapopulation. Once begun, such a mutual reinforcement could be irreversible...By current theory genocide or genosorption strongly favoring the aggressor need take place only once every few generations to direct evolution. This alone could push truly altruistic genes to a high frequency within the bands...Furthermore, it is to be expected that some isolated cultures will escape the process for generations at a time, in effect reverting temporarily to what ethnographers classify as a pacific state [me: see the Britons]."

"Mankind has never stopped evolving, but in a sense his populations are drifting. The effects over a period of a few generations could change the identity of the socioeconomic optima. In particular, the rate of gene flow around the world has risen to dramatic levels and is accelerating, and the mean coefficients of relationship within the local communities are correspondingly diminishing. The result could be an eventual lessening of altruistic behavior through maladaptation and loss of group-selected genes. It was shown earlier that behavioral traits tend to be selected out by the principle of metabolic conservation when they are suppressed or when their original function becomes neutral in adaptive value. Such traits can largely disappear from populations in as few as ten generations, only two or three centuries in the case of human beings. With our present inadequate understanding of the human brain, we do not know how many of the most valued qualities are linked genetically to more obsolete, destructive ones. Cooperativeness toward groupmates might be coupled with aggressivity toward strangers, creativeness with desire to own and dominate, athletic zeal with a tendency to violent response, and so on. In extreme cases such pairings could stem from pleiotropism, the control of more than one phenotypic character by the same set of genes."