Part 4:12G The by-products of natural selection explanation for our unconditionally selfless moral instincts

As will be described in Part 4:12H, the main theory that developed to counter the right-wing, selfishness-emphasising biology of the Wilson-led Sociobiology/​Evolutionary Psychology camp was the extremely dishonest Multilevel Selection ‘explanation’ for our unconditionally selfless, moral instincts. However, while this account, which was put forward by left-wing, selflessness-emphasising biologists, was (as will be discussed in Part 4:12H) extremely dishonest, its proponents did start out on the truthful, right track by recognising that an extra element, or ‘step’, must have been involved for the fundamentally selfish natural selection process to produce our unconditionally selfless moral instincts.

If I very briefly restate how the love-indoctrination process was able to produce our unconditionally selfless moral instincts, the existence of this ‘step’ becomes clear.

As briefly described in Part 4:4D, and as will be fully explained in Part 8:4B, the love-indoctrination process accounts for one of the three great mysteries in biology of how the fundamentally selfish natural selection process could have produced our unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic, moral instincts. (The other two great mysteries, which have now also been truthfully explained in this presentation, in Parts 3:2 and 8:4C respectively, are what caused the human condition, and how did our fully conscious mind emerge.) The process of love-indoctrination is made possible by the fact that genetic traits for nurturing are selfish (which genetic traits normally have to be if they are to carry on and become established in a species), for through the nurturing and fostering of offspring who carry her genes the mother’s genetic traits for nurturing are selfishly ensuring their reproduction into the next generation. However, while nurturing is a genetically selfish trait, from an observer’s point of view it appears to be unconditionally selfless behaviour—the mother is giving her offspring food, warmth, shelter, support and protection for apparently nothing in return. This point is most significant because it means from the infant’s perspective, its mother is treating it with real, unconditionally selfless love. The infant’s brain is therefore being trained or conditioned or indoctrinated with unconditional selflessness and so, with enough training in unconditional selflessness, that infant will grow into an adult who behaves unconditionally selflessly. Apply this training across all the members of that infant’s group and the result is a fully integrated society. The ‘trick’ in this ‘love-indoctrination’ process lies in the fact that the traits for nurturing are encouraged, or selected for genetically, because the better infants are cared for, the greater are their, and the nurturing traits’, chances of survival. This process does, however, have an integrative side effect in that the more infants are nurtured, the more their brains are trained in unconditional selflessness.

So, the selfish natural selection process fostered maternalism, which had the by-product-effect, or side-effect—which is the aforementioned ‘step’—of training an infant’s brain in unconditional selflessness. When I came up with the idea of love-indoctrination in the 1970s, my mind had abandoned trying to work out how the selfish natural selection process could have created our unconditionally selfless, moral instincts and had started searching for some by-product of natural selection that might have enabled such instincts to develop. It was when I started carrying out this search and recognised the potential significance of a mother’s maternal care appearing to her infant as real love, or unconditional selflessness, that the idea of love-indoctrination occurred to me. So looking for a secondary, by-product of natural selection was the right path to take in cracking the riddle of how the selfish natural selection process could have created unconditional selflessness, and it was this path for a by-product of natural selection that the left-wing biologists who were trying to contest the ‘nature is all about selfishness’ account also first started down, but their thinking soon diverged into a cul-de-sac of dishonesty. The following is a description of what transpired.

In a series of articles and papers that were released between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, the prominent selflessness-emphasising, left-wing American biologist Stephen Jay Gould railed against the selfishness-emphasising right-wing biology of Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology. In 1986 he labelled Sociobiology ‘Cardboard Darwinism’ (‘Cardboard Darwinism’, The New York Review of Books, 25 Sept. 1986), and, eleven years later, referred to its successor, Evolutionary Psychology, as ‘Darwinian fundamentalism’ and ‘ultra-Darwinism’ (‘Darwin Fundamentalism’, The New York Review of Books, 12 Jun. 1997). In the 1997 article, Gould accurately recognised the fallacy of kin selection’s ‘there-is-no-group-significance-involved-rather-it’s-entirely-about-the-individual-ensuring-it-reproduces-its-genes’ interpretation, writing that ‘genes struggling for reproductive success within passive bodies (organisms) under the control of genes’ is ‘a hyper-Darwinian idea that I regard as a logically flawed and basically foolish caricature of Darwin’s…intent’ (ibid). However, when it came to actually countering the ‘selfishness-is-a-universal-biological-truth, get-used-to-it, we-humans-don’t-have-an-unconditionally-selfless-instinctive-moral-instincts-rather-we-have-selfish-ones’, all Gould could do (like me) was basically give up and accept that natural selection is a fundamentally selfish process, writing that ‘The answers to moral questions cannot be found in nature’s factuality in any case, so why not take the “cold bath” of recognizing nature as nonmoral, and not constructed to match our hopes? After all, life existed on earth for 3.5 billion years before we arrived; why should life’s causal ways match our prescriptions for human meaning or decency?’ (ibid). But, in giving up on the ability of natural selection (‘nature’s factuality’, as he described it) alone to ‘answer’ the ‘moral questions’ and fulfil ‘our hopes’ of explaining the origin of humans’ extraordinary unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic, truly moral instincts—‘our prescriptions for human meaning or decency’—what Gould did (like I did) was start searching for secondary, by-products (or side-effects) of natural selection that might have enabled our moral instincts to develop.

The main argument given by Gould in his 1986 and 1997 publications to counter the ‘selfishness-is-all-that-is-occurring-in-nature’ account was actually first presented in 1979 by Gould and another prominent selflessness-not-selfishness emphasising, left-wing American biologist, Richard Lewontin. In a famous joint paper, Gould and Lewontin argued for the importance of the by-products (what they referred to as ‘spandrels’) of natural selection in explaining some biological outcomes. They complained of ‘natural selection…[being regarded] as so powerful…it…becomes the primary cause of nearly all organic form, function and behavior…[such that other influences] are usually dismissed as unimportant’, and called for a ‘pluralistic approach’ that involves both natural selection and ‘alternatives to the adaptationist [natural-selection-only] programme’ (‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, 1979, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Vol.205, No.1161, pp.581-598). To support their case for a ‘pluralistic approach’—one involving both natural selection and by-products of natural selection—they referred to Darwin, who, having acknowledged in his Introduction to The Origin of Species that there is ‘much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species’, concluded that same Introduction with the sentence: ‘I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.’ Yes, being such a truthful and thus effective thinker, Darwin would have also been coming down this road of realising some by-product of natural selection must have been involved in creating our extraordinary unconditionally selfless, moral instincts.

In developing the ‘pluralistic’ idea—which, again, involved natural selection and by-products of natural selection—Gould suggested in his aforementioned 1997 ‘Darwinian fundamentalism’ article ‘that the platform of evolutionary explanation houses an assortment of basic cranes, all helping to build the edifice of life’s history in its full grandeur…Natural selection may be the biggest crane [but]…you need a lot of cranes to build something so splendid and variegated [as life’s history in its full grandeur]’. Gould’s inference here was that the ‘grande[st]’, most amazing creation of all in ‘life’s history’, which is humans’ unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic, truly moral instinctive self or soul, must have been developed by a matrix of by-products of natural selection; ‘a lot of cranes’, not only ‘natural selection’.

So, it was being recognised that by-products of natural selection must play a significant part in explaining some biological outcomes, particularly our unconditionally selfless, ‘moral’ instincts. The question then being, which by-products? It was at this point that the truthful thinking that had been going on became derailed. Examples of biological outcomes that required more than adaptations from natural selection to explain them were certainly provided by Gould and Lewontin—even the example of the extinction of dinosaurs being caused by a meteorite, a scenario entirely outside the scope of natural selection, was referred to—but no accountable by-product of natural selection explanation was put forward to explain our unconditionally selfless, moral instincts. It was simply argued that the involvement of by-products of natural selection was possible, which is true, but the actual origin of our unconditionally selfless, moral instincts remained unanswered.

All that had happened was that the idea of pluralism to explain our unconditionally selfless moral instincts had been developed in a way that created the illusion that the origin of our moral instincts had been explained. You can see the illusion emerging in Gould’s comment that ‘you need a lot of cranes to build something so splendid and variegated’ as ‘life’s history in its full grandeur’. Since the ‘grande[st]’ creation of all in ‘life’s history’ is humans’ unconditionally selfless, moral instincts, what Gould was implying was that obviously a matrix of by-products of natural selection, ‘a lot of cranes’, created our moral soul and that’s all we need to know. The thinking was to the effect that ‘Our unconditionally selfless, moral instincts exist and they had to have emerged somehow, and natural selection on its own can’t explain how, so clearly they must have been created by a matrix of by-products of natural selection, so that’s all we need to know; our moral instincts exist and they were created by a matrix of by-products of natural selection!’

This simplistic and duplicitous ‘pluralistic’ argument employed by left-wing, selflessness-emphasising, kin-selection-defying biologists of an ‘assortment of basic cranes, all helping to build the edifice of’ our ‘moral’ ‘decency’ or nature has continued. In the Preface to the 2011 book Origins of Altruism and Cooperation (an assemblage of presentations given at a 2009 conference held at Washington University on ‘Man the Hunted and the Origin and Nature of Human Sociality, Altruism and Well-Being’), the anthropologist Robert Sussman and the psychiatrist and geneticist Robert Cloninger wrote that ‘Social scientists and biologists are learning that there is more to cooperation and generosity in both human and nonhuman group-living animals than an investment in one’s own nepotistic patch of DNA. Research in a great diversity of scientific disciplines is revealing that there are many biological and behavioral mechanisms that humans and nonhuman primates use to reinforce pro-social or cooperative behavior. For example, there are specific neurobiological and hormonal mechanisms that support social behavior. There are also psychological, psychiatric, and cultural mechanisms.’ So, it was being alleged that a matrix of ‘many biological and behavioral mechanisms’ created ‘pro-social or cooperative behavior’, but how exactly? Certainly ‘hormonal’ and ‘neurobiological’ ‘psychological’ and ‘psychiatric’, along with ‘cultural’, influences are involved in the ‘support’ of ‘social behavior’, but that doesn’t explain our social behaviour at all! Yes, a by-product of natural selection, namely the love-indoctrination process, did create our ‘pro-social or cooperative behavior’, and then those love-indoctrinated moral instincts did clash with our emerging conscious mind to create the psychologically upset state of our human condition—at which point all our ‘neurobiological’ ‘psychological’ and ‘psychiatric’ behaviours emerged and then different ‘cultur[es]’ were created to try to manage that upset. Our hormonal system was also obviously affected by, and became involved in, the development of this upset state. Yes, all the ‘hormonal’, ‘neurobiological’, ‘psychological’, ‘psychiatric’ and ‘cultural’ aspects of our make-up are by-products of natural selection and they are all involved in human behaviour—but that doesn’t explain the ‘origins of altruism and cooperation’ at all. The illusion is that that our moral instincts have been explained when they haven’t—but in the desperation to counter the right-wing doctrine that ‘cooperation and generosity in both human and nonhuman group-living animals’ is nothing more ‘than an investment in one’s own nepotistic patch of DNA’ such extreme illusion was deemed necessary. It was all just more ‘smoke and mirrors’, but this time from the left-wing camp. (More will be said about the 2011 book Origins of Altruism and Cooperation in Part 4:12J.)

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The reason why, at the point of recognising that by-products of natural selection must have been involved in creating our unconditionally selfless moral instincts, the honest, effective thinking diverged into a cul-de-sac of dishonesty is because this next step depended on recognising that the particular by-product involved in creating our moral instincts was that of nurturing. And, as was explained in Part 4:4F, the problem with acknowledging the importance of nurturing in human life was that it was an unbearably confronting truth for upset, human-condition-afflicted humans to have to face.

As described in Part 3:11H, while those in the left-wing typically sided with selflessness-emphasising forms of idealism to relieve themselves of the agony of the human condition because they had become too upset to continue fighting against idealism (a responsibility that was left to those in the right-wing), because of that extreme upset they have actually been more afraid of encountering the ideals and confronting the human condition than those in the right-wing; in short, those in the left-wing needed a form of idealism to support but have typically been the most afraid of any ideals or truths that brought the issue of the human condition into focus. Their strategy was to mimic selfless idealism, to appear ideal without actually being ideal and thus able to truthfully acknowledge and face the real issue of their own and the human race’s upset human condition. Part 3:11H charts the development of ever more guilt-relieving but dishonest forms of idealism that the left-wing took up to support, but in the case here, while supporting the ideals of selflessness was fine, when it came to actually confronting the agony of the human condition itself, which the truth of the importance of nurturing required, they stopped dead in their tracks and wouldn’t go any further. The difference between the right-wing and the left-wing is that, unlike the right-wing, the left-wing were promoting themselves as supporters of the real truth (in this case, the truth of our unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic moral instincts), but when that support actually required confronting the truth of the human condition (which the truth of nurturing raised), they suddenly stopped being supporters of the real truth! This fundamental difference between the right-wing and the left-wing is the reason why the left has posed a far more dangerous threat to the human journey than the right. To be pretending to let the truth out when you actually weren’t and, moreover, couldn’t, was a far more dishonest, subversion-of-the-truth and irresponsible practice than the outright lying being perpetrated by the right-wing. Masquerading lies as the truth is so much more sinister than lying itself.

I should reiterate that even Darwin, who was remarkably secure in self and thus not someone needing to join the ranks of the pseudo idealistic left, found himself unable to go the next step of recognising the importance of nurturing. While at one point in The Descent of Man he did actually touch on the idea of nurturing being the origin of our social instincts, writing that ‘The feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of the parental or filial affections, since the social instinct seems to be developed by the young remaining for a long time with their parents; and this extension may be attributed in part to habit, but chiefly to natural selection’ (1871, ch.4), he didn’t develop the idea into a full account of the origins and consequences of humans’ moral nature. As discussed in Part 4:11, he baulked at that step, presumably because he didn’t feel secure enough to engage in ideas that involved fully confronting the human condition.

The overall problem, therefore, for biologists from both the left-wing and the right-wing is that they have been operating in a mechanistic, reductionist paradigm that determinedly resisted any encounter with the human condition, which meant they couldn’t hope to explain such fundamental questions as the human condition and how we acquired our unconditionally selfless moral instincts—which is the fundamental point being made about this ‘Fourth Category of Thinker: The great majority of the human race who avoided the whole issue of a psychosis in our human situation (…etc).’ If you’re avoiding ‘the whole issue of a psychosis in our human situation’ you are in absolutely no position to explain it. Again, as R.D. Laing pointed out, ‘Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life.’

The great questions in biology, indeed the three holy grails of biology, have been to truthfully explain the human condition, which is done in Part 3:2; to truthfully explain the origins of humans’ unconditionally selfless moral instinctive self or soul, which is what the love-indoctrination explanation given in Part 8:4B does; and to truthfully explain how we developed full consciousness when other species haven’t been able to, which is explained in Part 8:4C. What we are particularly concerned with here, however, is the second of these holy grails in biology of the origin of our unconditionally selfless moral instincts. How could a fundamentally selfish process have produced unconditionally selfless instincts in a species, namely the human species? The immense frustration of mechanistic, reductionist biology is its inability to solve any of the three holy grails of biology, including this question of the origin of our moral instincts. Unarguably, mechanistic, reductionist biology has made progress in many areas of inquiry into the nature of our world but biologists now realise that any further advancement depends on solving these three questions, and their inability to do so means mechanistic, reductionist biology is now stalled, piled up and festering at this gateway that it can’t seem to get through no matter how hard it perseveres. And the reality is it will never get through because, in the case of our moral instincts, the ability to solve the riddle of how a fundamentally selfish process could have produced unconditionally selfless instincts depends on not living in denial of Integrative Meaning, or the fundamental psychosis/​alienation of our human situation, or, most particularly, the importance of nurturing both in the maturation of our species and in our own lives. The extent of Stephen Jay Gould’s insecurity of self and thus inability to complete the honest path he set out on and find the particular by-product of natural selection that explains the origins of our moral soul, namely nurturing, is reflected in how determinedly he resisted the idea of reconciling science and religion, maintaining that they are ‘nonoverlapping magisteria’ (‘Nonoverlapping Magisteria’, Natural History 106, Mar. 1997). Of course, as will be emphasised in Part 8:1, religion and science must ultimately be reconciled for, as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Charles H. Townes has observed, ‘they [religion and science] both represent man’s efforts to understand his universe and must ultimately be dealing with the same substance. As we understand more in each realm, the two must grow together…converge they must’ (The Convergence of Science and Religion, Zygon, Vol.1 No.3, 1966). For the exceptionally insecure, however, recognising the science-and-religion-reconciling truth of Integrative Meaning has been an anathema—in his ‘Darwinian Fundamentalism’ article that was mentioned earlier Gould actually asserted that ‘natural selection’ is ‘directionless, nonteleological’. Gould was someone who was only prepared to imitate the truth, not confront it.

Proof of how mechanistic, reductionist science has been both unwilling and unable to face the truth of the significance of nurturing in explaining the origins of our unconditionally selfless moral nature, is that I, and the supporters of the ideas contained in this presentation, have tried many times to have not only this nurturing explanation for our moral nature recognised by the scientific establishment, but also all the other critically important explanations, such the origin of the human condition and how we humans became conscious—and yet every time these efforts have been rebuffed. These attempts are documented in Part 8:6, however, to present just one example, in 2005 I submitted an abstract of a paper titled ‘Nurturing as the Prime Mover in Primate Development and Human Origins’ for the International Primatological Society’s 2006 Congress in Uganda, but was rejected on the grounds that ‘Both reviewers felt this abstract presents no data nor a testable hypothesis and is therefore inappropriate for this congress.’ Despite arguing that my nurturing, love-indoctrination explanation for humans’ moral instincts ‘contains a great deal of supportive evidence in the form of many summaries of data-supported studies of bonobos and other primates by leading primatologists’, and ‘is an entirely testable, validatable hypothesis, as the evidence just described about bonobos shows’, and submitting this protest to the President and 38 members of the IPS Congress Committee (including the primatologist Richard Wrangham in his capacity as President of the IPS), the rejection was upheld! (My full correspondence with the IPS can be read at <www.humancondition.com/ips-2006-congress>). Of course, science has a long history of deriding new ideas as ‘untestable’. For instance, Bishop Wilberforce, the opponent of natural selection in the great debate about Darwin’s theory at Oxford in 1860, said it was a ‘theory which cannot be demonstrated to be actually impossible’ (Wilberforce’s review of Origin of Species in Quarterly Review, 1860, p.249); while the geologist and bishop Adam Sedgwick said it was ‘not a proposition evolved out of the facts’ (‘Objections to Mr Darwin’s Theory of the Origin of Species’, The Spectator, 7 Apr. 1860) and that it was ‘based upon assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved’ (Sedgwick in a letter to Darwin, 24 Nov. 1859). The palaeontologist Louis Agassiz similarly complained that ‘absolutely no facts…can be referred to as proving evolution’ (William Penman Lyon, Homo versus Darwin: A judicial examination of statements recently published by Mr Darwin regarding ‘The Descent of Man’, 1872, p.140); while more recently—and revealingly, I would say, in terms of an apparent prejudice—the philosopher Karl Popper commented, before later changing his mind, that ‘Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory’ (Unended Quest, 1976, p.168).

Further powerful evidence that it is the human-condition-confronting nature of the nurturing explanation for our moral soul that was the cause of the rejection is the fact that the rejection (of the nurturing explanation) has a significant precedent. As documented in Part 8:5B, the American philosopher John Fiske first put forward the essence of the nurturing explanation for our moral instincts only 15 years after Darwin published his idea of natural selection in The Origin of Species in 1859. But despite some very eminent scientists of that era describing Fiske’s hypothesis of ‘altruistic Love’ having ‘developed in the course of evolution from the necessities of maternity’, as a ‘far more important’ ‘principle’ than Darwin’s selfish, ‘natural selection by means of the struggle for survival’, in fact, as ‘one of the most beautiful contributions ever made to the Evolution of Man’, it was eventually totally ignored and left to die!

The fundamental issue here is that until the human condition was explained humans couldn’t cope with the truth of the importance of nurturing in human life, and while I am finally presenting the compassionate framework that makes it psychologically safe to admit the importance of nurturing, the explanation is still being rejected because although humans are now defended the problem remains of having to confront so much denied truth about our human condition. As pointed out in Part 3:10, truth day is also exposure day; it is, in fact, the long anticipated ‘judgment day’—so while it is ultimately a ‘day’ of compassionate understanding, not condemning ‘judgment’, there is still a great deal of denied truth to have to suddenly encounter and accept. In terms of the progress of new ideas in science, especially ideas that challenge established paradigms, their reception invariably follows a pattern whereby the old paradigm doesn’t want to move to the new one, not only because it’s confronting but because scientists are attached to the paradigm they have either created (or contributed to) or become accustomed to. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer summarised the stages of resistance new ideas in science have historically had to undergo when he ‘said that the reception of any successful new scientific hypothesis goes through predictable phases before being accepted’. First, ‘it is ridiculed’ and ‘violently opposed’. Second, after support begins to accumulate ‘it is stated that it may be true but it’s not particularly relevant’. Third, ‘after it has clearly influenced the field [including members of the establishment quickly remodelling/​plagiarising the ideas as their own discoveries, which unfortunately is something I have experienced] it is admitted to be true and relevant but the same critics assert that the idea is not original’. Finally, ‘it is accepted as being self-evident’ (compiled from two references to Schopenhauer’s quote—New Scientist, 15 Nov. 1984 and PlanetHood, Ferencz & Keyes, 1988). The physicist Max Planck succinctly described the historical reality of scientific progress when he said that ‘science progresses funeral by funeral’ (see his Scientific Autobiography, 1948), while the famous playwright George Bernard Shaw warned of the true nature of progress when he wrote that ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’ (from his play Annajanska, 1919).