Part 4:12E Evolutionary Psychology

We will now follow, to its conclusion, Wilson’s kin selection-based attack on the truth and see how it eventually evolved into a theory that actually dismissed our wonderful moral soul as ‘nothing more than a euphemism’, after which we will look at how a selfless-emphasising biological movement emerged to counter Wilson’s selfishness-emphasising biology.

As mentioned, in his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Wilson wrote that (again, the underlining is my emphasis) ‘Sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior. For the present it focuses on animal societies…[However] One of the functions of sociobiology…is to reformulate the foundations of the social sciences [the study of human societies] in a way that draws these subjects into the Modern Synthesis’ (p.4 of 997). So, ‘For the present’, Wilson was only focusing on non-human ‘animal societies’. With this comment, however, the door to a full-blown attack on our wonderful unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic, truly loving moral instinctive self or soul had been set ajar—so we now need to see how that door was flung wide open and the all-out attack delivered.

Firstly, it cannot be stressed enough how extremely dishonest and dangerous this attack was. While the selfless behaviour of all social non-human multicellular animal species can be explained by reciprocal selflessness, which is actually an indirect, subtle form of selfishness (because genes have to ensure they reproduce and carry on), humans’ capacity to behave selflessly, such as charity workers caring for the poor and the suffering, is not based on reciprocity. We humans have an unconditionally selflessly orientated, genuinely altruistic, truly loving, moral conscience. As was briefly explained in Part 4:4D, and will be fully explained in Part 8:4B, while the highest level of selflessness that can normally be developed genetically is reciprocity, where a favour is given on the proviso that it is returned, there was a way for the integrative process of the development of order of matter to overcome this impasse and develop unconditionally selfless behaviour and that was through the nurturing, love-indoctrination process, which is how we humans acquired our unconditionally selfless, moral conscience. Therefore, since ‘God’ is the personification of the selfless, cooperative, loving, integrative ideal state, we humans were ‘created…in the image of God’ (Gen. 1:27) because we did once live in that fully integrated, unconditionally selflessly behaved, cooperative, loving ideal state. The eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant spoke the truth about the magnificent purity of our moral capacity for unconditional selflessness when he wrote (and, significantly, had inscribed on his tombstone) the following passage: ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’ (Critique of Practical Reason, 1788). The exceptionally honest Darwin was no less impressed when he said, ‘the moral sense affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871, ch.4). And yet the ‘awe’-inspiring, marvellously unconditionally selfless, al-true-istic, Integrative Meaning/​God-representing moral grandeur of our species’ original instinctive orientation or soul or psyche (from the Greek word psykhe, meaning ‘breath, life, soul’ (Online Etymology Dictionary)) was poised to be dismissed as nothing more than a reciprocity-based, subtle form of selfishness, an inconsequential ‘euphemism’! But again, for upset humans such a dismissal of our moral sense was extremely relieving because it eradicated the guilt our moral conscience had been causing us—‘Hey, with the kin selection-based theory of Sociobiology we can dismiss our condemning, ideal-behaviour-demanding, guilt-producing, human-condition-causing moral sense as just a subtle form of selfishness. Phew, I feel so much better!’ But while this dismissal of our moral conscience as nothing more than a subtle form of selfishness was immensely guilt-relieving for upset humans, it amounted to an all-out assault on the truth about the very nature of our species’ instinctive self. In terms of the all-important need for biology to deliver understanding of human behaviour, biologists had instead decided to implement the biggest lie imaginable! For biologists this was the highest form of irresponsibility because the human race was depending on them to get to the truth about ourselves and deliver ameliorating insight into our troubled human condition, not bury us deeper in alienating lies. Unless humans found the biological understanding of ourselves we were doomed to live in tortured alienated darkness forever.

The truth is kin selection doesn’t even begin to explain our moral nature. As Bryan Appleyard was quoted earlier as saying, biologists living in the denial-committed, mechanistic paradigm ‘still have a gaping hole in an attempt to explain altruism. If, for example, I help a blind man cross the street, it is plainly unlikely that I am being prompted to do this because he is a close relation and bears my genes.’ But such has been the agony of the human condition that denial-committed biologists weren’t put off from wrenching that ‘gaping hole’ even further apart with their lying. And so only a year after Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was published the aforementioned, ardently truth-hating zoologist Richard Dawkins joined the great biological assault on truth, stating in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene that ‘We [humans] are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes [p.v of 352] …we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes…Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense [p.2] …we are born selfish [p.3]’ (1976 edn).

Emboldened, Wilson took the step he threatened to take in Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, when he predicted that Sociobiology would eventually be applied to ‘the study of human societies’, publishing in 1978 (just two years after Dawkins’ book) the provocatively titled On Human Nature, in which he focused directly on biology’s supposed ability to explain (actually to dismiss) our wonderful moral soul as nothing more than a subtle form of reciprocity-based selfishness, asserting that our ‘Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function’ other than to ensure ‘human genetic material…will be kept intact’ (p.167 of 260). It took a decade or so after On Human Nature was published for this soul-destroying (literally and metaphorically) application of kin selection to fully catch on, but by the 1990s it had—so much so, in fact, that biologists gave this misinterpretation of selfless social behaviour, particularly the misinterpretation of human’s unconditionally selfless, moral, social behaviour, its very own title: ‘Evolutionary Psychology’. Yes, it was being claimed that biology could now explain the psychology of our human situation, our human condition no less! After all, they put the word ‘psychology’ into the name!

So how does kin selection-based Evolutionary Psychology claim to explain the psychology of the human condition? It might initially be thought that asserting that humans’ born-with, instinctive moral sense is nothing more than a subtle form of kin selection-based selfishness was legitimising selfish behaviour, but as Dawkins explained in The Selfish Gene, ‘My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true…if you would extract a moral from it [from his book The Selfish Gene, it would be to]…Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish’ (p.3). In terms of avoiding the agony of the human condition, the value of dismissing our moral instincts as a subtle form of kin selection-based selfishness and, by so doing, maintaining the argument that selfishness is the ‘universal’ characteristic of nature, is that it said that it wasn’t our fault that we are selfish; it said that we can’t help it if we are selfish because it’s just the natural state ‘we are born’ with. It said we are excused, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do something to rectify that state—‘Let us try to teach generosity and altruism’, as Dawkins advised. So, according to Sociobiology, now called Evolutionary Psychology, ‘we are born selfish’, an attitude we then have to try to control or overcome. We are born ‘bad’ but have to try to be ‘good’, and since the dilemma of ‘good and bad’ in the human make-up is what the human condition is, Sociobiology and its elaboration, Evolutionary Psychology, was supposedly explaining the human condition! The fundamental psychological predicament of humans had supposedly been explained using biological/​evolutionary reasoning—hence the supposed justification for re-badging Sociobiology as Evolutionary Psychology: evolutionary biology was supposedly now explaining the psychology of the human condition!

In 1994 the science writer Robert Wright presented an introduction to Evolutionary Psychology with his brazenly titled book, The Moral Animal—Why we are the way we are: The new science of evolutionary psychology. In it he wrote that ‘What is in our genes’ interests is what seems “right”—morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order’, ‘In short: “moral guidance” is a euphemism’ (pp.325, 216 of 467)! Yes, here is the full-scale attack on our soul that I foreshadowed—Evolutionary Psychology’s dismissal of our wonderful moral soul as nothing more than ‘a euphemism’! So, ‘We can forget our soul, forget the whole idea of our moral sense of right and wrong having any real basis, that’s rubbish, it’s just our genes being subtly selfish, it’s just a form of kin selection-based reciprocity—in fact, the whole idea that there is a cooperatively orientated, loving, unconditionally-selfless, other-people-must-be-considered, ideal-behaviour-demanding moral conscience in us humans has no foundation. The sense of guilt we humans have been enduring from our moral conscience has no biological basis’!! With regard to the specific issue of the human condition, Wright then wrote that ‘Evolutionary psychology professes to be the surest path to a complete explanation of human behaviour, good and bad, and of the underlying psychological states: love, hate, greed, and so on. And to know all is to forgive all. Once you see the forces that govern behavior, it’s harder to blame the behaver’ (ibid. pp.347-348). So, here we see it being directly stated that ‘Evolutionary psychology’ is presenting ‘the surest path to a complete explanation’ of the human condition, the ‘good and bad’ aspect ‘of human behaviour’! Not only that, it was being stated that this explanation will bring about the psychological amelioration and rehabilitation of the human race—that ‘to know all is to forgive all. Once you see the forces that govern behavior, it’s harder to blame the behaver’!!

There was no holding back now, but the truth is this kin selection-based theory of Evolutionary Psychology doesn’t go anywhere near addressing the issue of the human condition, let alone solving it and by so doing bringing about the amelioration of that condition. Rather, as has been carefully explained and evidenced throughout this Part 4:12, the whole kin selection argument is completely dedicated to avoiding the whole issue of the human condition. To claim that the human condition had been explained and could now be ameliorated, when, in fact, the human condition was being determinedly avoided with the effect that the psychosis and neurosis in humans was actually being greatly added to, not diminished, was an extremely sophisticated form of delusion and deception.

I would now like to more fully spell-out how Evolutionary Psychology claimed to be able to ‘explain’ the human condition. As just mentioned, the value of kin selection’s dismissal of our moral instincts as being selfish is that it said that ‘It isn’t our fault that we are selfish because it’s just the natural state ‘we are born’ with. We are excused, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have to try to do something about it’—‘Let us try to teach generosity and altruism’ (as Dawkins urged). So, according to Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology, ‘we are born selfish’ which we then have to try to control. We are born ‘bad’ but have to try to be ‘good’, and since the dilemma of ‘good and bad’ in the human make-up is the human condition, Evolutionary Psychology was supposedly explaining the human condition.

This trick of making our instincts appear to be what makes us capable of ‘universal ruthless selfishness’, as Dawkins said, and our conscious mind the noble force that has to control this supposed barbaric instinctive part of ourselves, that has to ‘try to teach generosity and altruism’, was explained earlier in Part 4:9, when, under the heading ‘Fourth Category of Thinker: The great majority of the human race who avoided the whole issue of a psychosis in our human situation by simply blaming our selfish and aggressive behaviour on supposed brutish and savage animal instincts within us that our intellect supposedly has to control’, the following was stated: ‘So instead of our conscious intellect being the guilty party, in the sense of being that part of ourselves that caused us to ‘fall from grace’ and have to be banished from the Garden of Eden of our original innocent, cooperatively orientated, all-loving, moral instinctive state (as Moses, Plato and all our mythologies have so honestly admitted), our conscious intellect was made out to be the faultless, good part of ourselves—a manipulation of the truth that condemned our instincts as the villain: ‘Wonderful, we are good, our conscious self is good and our instincts are awful, what a relief, I, my conscious thinking self, feels terrific.’ Never mind that this was all an outrageous, reverse-of-the-truth lie. What a trick! Instead of our instinctive past being a ‘paradise’, ‘Golden Age’ of ‘togetherness’ before ‘the dawning of individual consciousness’ brought about a world of highly intelligent people living an immensely insecure, ‘shrill, brittle, self-important life’, which in truth is ‘a graveyard where the living are dead’, our instincts were deemed bad while our intellect was viewed as wonderful! What a complete and terrible assault on the truth, but what a relief for our upset, corrupting intellect! We, our conscious thinking self, had finally made ourselves out to be the hero that we have always intuitively believed we were, and in fact are, but it was a hollow ‘achievement’ based on an absolute lie! We had lifted the burden of guilt, the psychological insecurity of the issue of our less-than-ideally-behaved human condition, but we had done so fraudulently. The elements involved in the human condition of moral instincts and a corrupting intellect weren’t being looked at honestly, rather, the complete opposite was occurring—those elements were being totally misrepresented. The human condition wasn’t being confronted—it was being hidden behind an absolutely incredible mountain of lies!’ (Note, the sources of the few quotes within this text can be found in Part 4:9.)

So, our instincts are the villains while our conscious thinking self is the blameless mediating ‘hero’ that had to try to control those supposed vicious instincts within us—what a reverse-of-the-truth lie, but what blessed relief it offered from the agony of the human condition.

In 1998, only a few years after Wright’s book was published, the lying continued with Wilson’s release of another book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, in which he took the art of denial to yet another level, suggesting Evolutionary Psychology’s alleged ability to explain the moral aspects of humans meant biology and philosophy, the sciences and the humanities, indeed science and religion, basically reality and ideality (ideality in the form of our moral instincts, which had now been dismissed as a mere ‘euphemism’), the dilemma of the human condition no less, could at last be solved. In it he spoke of ‘the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities…of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge…to create a common groundwork of explanation’ (p.6 of 374), and went so far as to not just use the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as Wright had done, but actually use the words ‘human condition’, claiming that ‘The strongest appeal of consilience is…the value of understanding the human condition with a higher degree of certainty’ (p.7). An extract from Consilience, published in the prestigious journal The Atlantic Monthly (Apr. 1998), in an article boldly titled ‘The Biological Basis of Morality’, featured this introduction: ‘Philosophers and theologians have almost always conceived of moral instincts as being transcendent or God-given. Is it possible, though, that ethical reasoning derives not from outside but from our very nature as evolving material creatures?’ Just how bold Wilson was in his claim to have made sense of the philosophical, spiritual and religious aspect of human life using kin selection is also apparent in one of the headings used in the extract, ‘The Origins of Religion’. Religions have been the custodians—albeit using abstract, metaphysical terms—of Integrative Meaning (represented as it is by the concept of ‘God’), of the existence of our ‘Garden of Eden’, innocent, integrated past and its representation in us of our moral ‘soul’, and of our species’ present corrupted, ‘fallen’, human-condition-afflicted, ‘sinful’, psychologically upset state. These truths certainly can be explained biologically without invoking a ‘transcendent’, interventionist, ‘creationist’, ‘intelligently-designing’ God, as has been done in this presentation. Similarly, the deeper issue of ‘the human condition’, the dilemma of the existence of ‘good and evil’ in the human make-up, can be explained biologically, as has also been done in this presentation. But to use biological lies to ‘explain’ these subjects and, by so doing, fraudulently ‘produce’ the reconciliation or ‘consilience’ of science and religion was an act of diabolical dishonesty, an outrageous assault on truth. Of course, in terms of needing to avoid the scientific demystification of God and of what our soul actually is and of the true nature of our moral sense, the essential ‘achievement’ of Wilson’s work was that he had seemingly provided a way to deny these truths. Indeed, he made his overall point unequivocally when he wrote in Consilience that ‘[Jean-Jacques] Rousseau claimed [that humanity] was originally a race of noble savages in a peaceful state of nature, who were later corrupted…[but what] Rousseau invented [was] a stunningly inaccurate form of anthropology’ (p.37). It has been said that the most forceful and thus effective lie is the lie that puts forward the complete opposite of the truth—well, this statement by Wilson is yet another example of an all-out, no-holds-barred, unrestrained, outrageous reverse-of-the-truth lie.

At this point we need to comprehend the enormity of what has occurred: Wilson has said that his kin selection-based biology explained the human condition and made possible the psychological rehabilitation of the human race, and explained the origins of religion and brought about the consilience of all knowledge—and yet he has now dismissed and disowned all of these amazing claims as being entirely wrong. That is some incredible manoeuvring: ‘I have scientifically argued that I have saved the world, but no, it wasn’t science at all and I haven’t achieved anything of the kind.’ But Wilson’s capacity for what is clearly outrageously reckless hubris is, as we are going to see, not a one-off feat, for it is about to happen all over again. Yes, Wilson has gone on to invent another grand synthesis that he claims solves everything, when in truth it solves nothing and actually buries the human race deeper in the mire of alienated sickness. It is a track record of out-of-control delusion, madness no less; but that is, in fact, the reality of the situation that the human race as a whole has arrived at—a state of out-of-control madness that Wilson is really only a reflection of. So while all this lying has become absolutely extreme and it would seem that it couldn’t possibly get any worse, we are going to see that it’s actually going to get a whole lot worse—to the extent that if anyone were to be watching what is happening on Earth from outer space they would be glued to their Earth-watching channel in absolute astonishment at the level of lying taking place in this corner of the universe.