"We're not animals"

[mindstalk]

Told to take this discussion somewhere else, I'm dumping my expanded thoughts here.

"We're not animals." There's the biologist response, of "oh, yes we are." There's the logician response, of "if we're not animals, then what was the point of bringing up homosexual behavior in the wild? And then animal rape should be irrelevant to us." And there's the philosopher response of muttering about the naturalistic fallacy. Whether rape or gayness are natural, or happen in other species, is irrelevant to their wrongness or rightness for us. Rape's wrong because it hurts people. Gay behavior is okay because it doesn't. Evolutionary background is irrelevant. We can use condemnation and prison to discourage behavior we don't like regardless of the reasons behind it. Murder's natural, under some circumstances; infanticide is natural. But we don't make excuses for those.

"Naturalness" would be relevant only if a behavior was *so* natural that it wasn't controllable, that the threat of punishment wouldn't deter men from raping. But being imprisoned would still prevent the rapist from committing further rapes (at least, outside of prison); "I can't help myself" isn't exactly a good argument for being allowed out on the street. And if men were that much of an uncontrollable ravaging horde then female separatism -- or isolation of males -- would make a lot of sense. Fortunately, morality, empathy, and fear are (imperfectly) effective in restraining aggression.

Evolution isn't an excuse for bad behavior; bad excuses aren't a reason for denying facts of natural history.

Thoughts? Can this be said better? Am I wrong?

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

You can find such information, it's just not in articles written by sociobiologists and their ilk. Here's one good example.

There's as much politics as there is science involved in discussing these issues. I've read Wilson's work, and my two reactions were that he knows vastly more about ants than about mammals and that it was clear that the ideas he came up with depressed the hell out of him. Thankfully (at least when applied to social vertebrates) kin selection is utter nonsense.

I think one of the key points that gets ignored is how great a part cultural transmission of data plays, not just in humans, but in vast numbers of mammals and birds. For example, if a female baboon isn't taught by a mother or aunt how to raise young (or at minimum doesn't have a chance to observe them caring for an infant baboon), it is an utterly incompetent mother and its young are very likely to die. This knowledge has been transmitted among primates (and possibly many other social animals) for many 10s of millions of years.

Of course, I have an MA in cultural anthro, and so am somewhat biased.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Why is vertebrate kin selection utter nonsense?

young: Yeah, I remember Goodall noting the effect of a good upbringing on the next generation. Or in some cases of a poor upbringing, the effect of practice (to the benefit of the later children.)

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Why is vertebrate kin selection utter nonsense?

I last worked with this data intensively 15 or so years ago, so I don't remember all the details (I'm very much looking forward to memory upgrades), but two major points I remember are:

1) The low level of genetic difference between related and supposedly un-related populations, especially in a local area.

2) A variety of social vertebrates practice adoption, which makes no sense under kin selection.

One side-note about Goodall's data, it's fascinating, but if also utterly useless if you are looking for a picture of chimpanzee social behavior in anything other than a heavily modified and highly stressed environment. Ultimately, it's not much better than zoo data, both because of the size of the Gombe reserve, and (more importantly) because Goodall fed and medicated the chimps to the point that she raised their population well above the local carrying capacity, producing severe overcrowding since they had nowhere else safe to go. So, the amount of aggression she found is unsurprising, almost all severely stressed and overcrowded animals become aggressive.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Adoption could make plenty of sense, if the natural circumstances of adoption tended to be that a related mother had died, so the adoptee was a nibling or cousin, and if the cost of adoption to the adopter's direct reproduction isn't too high. Extreme case: sterile female adopting her sister's children.

It'd also make sense, in a more neutral way, if there are no natural circumstances of adoption, and an instinct to take care of available infants normally only picks up one's own offspring.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Except that there have been a fair number of cases of unrelated adoptions among primates and various carnivores (I remember at least one involving cape hunting dogs). I have not studied this extensively, and I have also run more than one case (IIRC 2 or 3 cases) of cross-species adoption with no human intervention involved.

This implies to me that adoption does occur "naturally" and not only among closely related animals.

Then there is the fact that at least among old world primates, nurturing young is largely learned behavior(I don't know anything about nurturing young being learned or not among other social mammals, but I'd be slightly surprised if learning didn't play at least some part).

Combine these two facts, and what I see is that nurturing young is specifically not genetically determined, and most especially not determined based on kin selection.

Given that the entire basis of kin selection involves a drive to increase relative survival of the individual's genes in relation to the overall species genepool, the lack of a strong instinct for specifically nurturing related young, combined with the fact that various varieties of mammals are willing to adopt both non-related young and on occasions young of a different species, and the result looks a whole lot to me like kin selection is fatally flawed.

In any case, Gould's ideas have always made vastly more sense to me, both because of his science and his ideology, which I consider to be effectively inseperable at least when discussing issues of human evolution. One of the many reasons I dismiss much of what Dawkins has to say is his claims about "objective science". I'm (mostly) willing to believe in objective physics and chemistry. There is IME no one studying human evolution or aspects of biology directly relating to human evolution who does not have both a social and a scientific agenda in their studies. Gould is at least willing to admit this fact about himself, Dawkins claims objectivity (at least regarding the social aspects of his science), which to me says he's either a liar or a fool.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Thing is, what does a handful (or few handfuls) of adoption examples really tell us? To me it's compatible with nurturing instincts being imprecise and capable of going "wrong". I'd make an analogy with homosexuals, or intersex individuals. Or with the fact that we 'adopt' pets, that we find baby mammals of various kinds cute, plus adult cats and dogs. Our "baby!" triggers aren't finely tuned to human babies, but are rather broader in scope, and can pick up lots of false positives. If we can find a kitten to be cute and nurturable, perhaps a dog can as well.

Hagfish, on the other hand, are not cute.

And as far as anecdotes go, I've seen a lot of stories from new parents, especially fathers, who saw the newborn and report some switch flipping. "This is MINE and I will nurture and protect it." Which of course doesn't tell them how to change a diaper, but at least gets them willing to try.

(I've also been hearing that the details nursing is something human babies have to learn, which surprised me. OTOH, I think there are sucking instincts which get them in the right direction.)

And again, kin selection doesn't require an internal drive to favor kin, or an instinct for identifying kin; it selects for behaviors which tended in the recent past to have a net effect of favoring kin.

Example: many nesting birds will feed whatever chicks they find in the next, with surprisingly little discrimination, and brood on alien eggs introduced to the nest. 'Adoption' of a sort. Maladaptive, except that alien eggs or chicks don't happen to them much, naturally. When it does, when the population starts being parasitized by cuckoos, they get a lot more sensitive. Similarly, communally nesting birds will be a lot more aware of which chick is *theirs*, while isolated nesting birds will feed whatever open mouth is in their nest.

So... some animals doing adoptions, either because their baby-filter is too wide or because they unusually ran across some other young and took it in, or both, I don't think disproves much about kin selection, though it may well tell us something about nurturing instincts.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I don't think disproves much about kin selection, though it may well tell us something about nurturing instincts.

From my PoV at least, it looks much like both the level of genetic determination of behavior is fairly low even for behaviors one would expect to be highly determined, and also that if there are any instinct or learned behavior surrounding nurturing seem to support Gould's ideas of species-level selection, which is an idea that has always made sense to me.

However, my primary point regarding at least social mammals (I know vastly less about birds, and would be very surprised if anything I discuss below held true for any of the less intelligent Classes) is that one of the crucial things evo psych neglects is behavior that learned and then transmitted from one individual to another. I don't just mean among humans, but also among all primates, and to an extent among all social mammals and perhaps all mammals. There is also significant evidence of long-term learned behavior among birds (including everything from species-wide tool use, to species-specific song details). In short, mammals and birds rely upon both genetics and "culture" to transmit information from one generation to the next, and as the animal's brains and social structures grow more complex, cultural transmission becomes an increasingly important method of transmission.

I have literally never seen any writing in evo psych that even acknowledged, much less discussed this perspective, which I believe is largely due to ideological bias among evo psych professionals. I firmly admit that as a trained anthropologist and a social progressive, the importance I place upon "culture" due to a mixture of the evidence I have seen and my own ideological bias.