tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610803938756668468.post139549273866730781..comments2024-03-28T03:16:27.198-04:00Comments on Todd Seavey: Evolving TraditionTodd Seaveyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08589187886030112999noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610803938756668468.post-71620883175922301462009-02-07T12:30:00.000-05:002009-02-07T12:30:00.000-05:00And at this point my real goal, which is breaking ...And at this point my real goal, which is breaking down the left-right barrier — but without the usual bland, pro-Establishment “moderation” that entails — starts to become more apparent.Todd Seaveyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08589187886030112999noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610803938756668468.post-6735939749125827752009-02-06T23:18:00.000-05:002009-02-06T23:18:00.000-05:00You said today’s post would reply to my point last...You said today’s post would reply to my point last night, but having read this I think I should refine and clarify.<br><br>The reason sociobiology is claptrap and this stuff doesn’t belong in the Month of Darwin is that the discussion is missing the primary element needed to talk about Darwinian evolution: some reason to believe that anything the sociobiologists are talking about has a genetic basis.<br><br>Let’s take your own example of Wednesday: ethics. (The same argument applies to the behavior discussed in today’s post.)<br><br>A reasonably simple computer simulation shows that, in the case of the prisoner’s dilemma, the correct strategy to follow is tit-for-tat. (Start by cooperating, then do to the other guy whatever he did to you last time.) As a way of optimizing your outcome, if you play repeatedly, other strategies, even complex ones, do not do as well. This is a game-theoretic statement, having nothing to do with biology or human behavior.<br><br>Now, we observe that societies tend to have ethical frameworks roughly like tit-for-tat. We can advance three putative explanations:<br><br>1) This behavior is genetically coded. The reason people do this is that they’re “hard wired” to do it. Humans that were not so hard-wired were selected against, and suffered a reproductive disadvantage.<br><br>2) This behavior is a cultural construct. Cultures that don’t behave this way run into trouble and tend to be eclipsed by those that do.<br><br>3) This behavior is learned by the individual though early childhood interactions.<br><br>Now, the mere fact of a universal existence of the tit-for-tat behavior tells us nothing whatsoever about which of these three explanations (or some other) is right.<br><br>In fact, there is good reason to think that explanation 1 is actually unlikely. This wasn’t known to Darwin – or actually even until quite recently – but it appears that there are only a total of 25,000 or so genes in the human genome. (See e.g. <a href="http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/faq/genenumber.shtml)" rel="nofollow">http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/faq/genenumber.shtml)</a> It seems rather unlikely, then, that given all the things the genome needs to code (all the proteins needed to build the body) that it would have a specific one for this sort of ethical behavior, in order for Darwinian selection to act against it. No independent gene = no natural selection.<br><br>What of course this member of “the left” finds interesting here is they way this discussion blurs the usual positions of the two parts of the political spectrum. The most common view of the American Right is that the existence of these sorts of ethical behaviors is unique to human beings, and were brought into the world by God, via Judeo-Christianity. Here, for example, is a link to a recent debate at my alma mater, Princeton, at which no less a Right personage than Dinesh D’Sousa made just this point to Peter Singer.<br><br><a href="http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2009/01/28/pages/5588/index.xml" rel="nofollow">http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2009/01/28/pages/5588/index.xml</a><br><br>I know that you don’t subscribe to this sort of facile characterization of views on the Conservative end to the political spectrum (though you do seem to lump the beliefs of “the left” into these simple buckets). Actually, the way I would look at it is that at least in this regard, it would be correct to say that “the left” has a perspective more closely approximating your view than those of the Right.Mitch Goldennoreply@blogger.com