How can you convince someone that morality has genetic/evolutionary components who thought that it was entirely learned?

‘Nature’, according to the poet, Tennyson (1903), is ‘red in tooth and claw’ – a memorable phrase that encapsulates the prevailing view of Darwinian selection, that is to a say, a pitiless struggle among living things for personal survival. And merciless conflict is indeed ever-present in nature, as the geneticist J.B.S Haldane (1968) vividly describes:
‘Now, the most conspicuous features of animal organization are those which are designed … for competition with other living creatures … They may kill them, as we kill rabbits and potatoes, or merely eat parts of them, as we eat parts of the apple tree and the flea drinks part of us. A few, such as the blowflies, beetles, and ‘worms’, actually mostly insect larvae, which eat our bodies if they get the chance, eat only dead food, apart from bacteria …. The plants generally compete by pushing, rather than biting. Look at a plantain spreading its leaves over the grass of your lawn, or a tree cutting off the sun from the plants below it till they die … they are all engaged in a merciless struggle for life’ (p. 44).
And not only must species compete between themselves, sociobiological (or ‘selfish gene’) theory as outlined by Richard Dawkins (1976) and E.O.Wilson (1975), stresses the inevitability of competition at the genetic level between organisms of the same species. The only ‘interest’ of an organism’s genotype is to replicate itself and preserve copies for the next generation; those most ‘fit’ to their environments (in the Darwinian sense) will be those that survive. As Dawkins puts it:
‘To a survival machine, another survival machine … is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or river in one important respect: it is inclined to hit back. This is because it too is a machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and it too will stop at nothing to preserve them’ (1976, p. 66).
Why then, would we ever suppose that the moral behaviour demonstrated by humans in everyday life would have any kind of innate or heritable component? Surely, if we behave morally, we behave morally in spite of our nature, not because of it…
Before addressing this question further, it is perhaps necessary to specify precisely what psychologists mean by ‘moral’ behaviour. The Oxford English Dictionary distinguishes two forms of morality: first deals with ‘goodness or badness of human character or behaviour’ and the second refers to ‘conforming to accepted standards of human conduct’ (OED, 1996). The following analysis will argue that both these interpretations of morality (‘good’ behaviour and ‘should’ behaviour) may have evolutionary roots, and one method of persuading a hypothetical acquaintance of this proposition might be ‘reducio ad adsurdam’, that is to say, imagining the converse to be true: what would the world be like if humans had absolutely no inborn moral compunctions or codes? We will also consider the paradox of ‘free-will’: animal behaviour is not considered to be either moral or immoral, since animals are not assumed to have any choice in their behaviour. But if human morality depends upon free-will, how then can it also be genetically determined?
We might start by asking how our imaginary friend ever acquired the language necessary to express the belief that morality was entirely learned. Unlike, say, turtles which, upon hatching, at once, make their own way to the sea to live fully independent lives, humans are the beneficiaries of a vast amount of parental nurturing, not becoming viable independent adults at least until their teenage years. We may, as Chomsky (1959) argued, possess innate language structures, but without a ‘language acquisition support system’ provided by a parent or surrogate, language will simply not develop (Brown, 1970), as demonstrated by the notorious case of ‘Genie’ – a child isolated and deprived for the first thirteen years of her life (Curtiss, 1981). Similarly, deprivation studies have also shown the absolute necessity of parental nurture for emotional, cognitive, social and physical development (eg., see Skuse, et al, 1992). But why should parents even bother to look after their children, when they might otherwise be viewed as an unnecessary drain upon one’s time and resources? For sociobiologists, phenomena such as ‘good parenting’, and ‘family loyalty’ are simply examples of kin selection (coined by Hamilton, 1964) – a behavioural adaptation that may be observed throughout much of the animal kingdom, from ‘suicidal’ bacteria that will sacrifice their own lives to ensure the survival of many relatives (Crespi, 2001) through to ‘kamikaze’ honeybees fighting off honey-raiders to preserve the family or adult birds who will mimic having a broken wing in order to distract predators away from their young, but, in the process, becoming prey themselves (Dawkins, 1976). In each case, the familial investment, at whatever cost, is justified by the preservation of copies of the organisms own genes.
There is, of course, always a danger in extrapolating directly from ‘moral’ animal behaviour to that of humans. As Lewontin (1992) succinctly puts it:
‘There is, in fact, not a shred of evidence that the anatomical, physiological, and genetic basis of what is called aggression in rats has anything in common with German invasion of Poland in 1939’ (1992, p. 96).
Lewontin further explains that a resemblance between animals and humans may be simply ‘analogous’, that is, bearing a resemblance – and nothing more. However ‘homologous’ behaviours would involve the same underlying biological processes. So how can we be certain that the human propensity to care for one’s young is not simply a case of learned behaviour, ie., acquired through the observation of one’s own parents, rather than through our genes? Here, a number of statistical surveys appear to strongly favour the biological argument, in that degree of relatedness in humans strongly predicts the degree of altruism shown towards children in their immediate environment. Pinker (1994) reports that a step-parent is forty to a hundred times more likely than a biological parent to kill a young child, even when confounding factors – poverty, the mother’s age and the traits of people who tend to remarry are taken into account.
Our imaginary acquaintance might, at this point, counter-argue that genetic evolution might help explain a few basic pro-social behaviours such as parents caring for their young, but it could not possibly apply to more extreme examples of people helping others – perfect strangers, perhaps – in distress.
Here we would need a different argument and solution; that proposed by Robert Trivers (1971) is known as reciprocal altruism. From this perspective, the potential costs of altruism to the individual are offset by the possibility of receiving help from others. However, such a system of mutual helping is threatened by potential ‘cheats’ who will benefit from the altruism of others without reciprocating in turn. For Trivers, Natural Selection has already ‘solved’ the problem by hard-wiring our tendencies towards feeling guilt and shame, together with a collective desire to punish those who transgress social norms. Moreover, Game Theory, based upon the well-known ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ scenario has shown mathematically that when given a choice between ‘compete’ and ‘co-operate’ it ultimately serves all parties to co-operate (Axelrod, 1984), a theory that was first posited by Kropotkin (1903) following years of studying the wildlife of Siberia struggling for survival in harsh environmental circumstances.
And nature might even build-in a tolerance of, or even a requirement for the existence of an anti-social minority of cheats, whose behaviour we might deem ‘psychopathic’ or ‘sociopathic’. Curry (2005), citing the work of Mealey (1997) describes ‘genetic polymorphism’, involving ‘frequency-dependent, genetically-based individual differences in employment of life strategies’ (Curry, p. 178). According to Mealey, game-theory predicts that a small proportion of ‘natural-born hawks’ can survive by preying on the majority ‘doves’ – a survival strategy involving high risks, but also high rewards.
But surely (our imaginary friend might butt in here), that would only explain a minority of members of a group or tribe behaving anti-socially. What about Colin Turnbull’s (1971) study of the ‘Ik’ tribe in Uganda? As a result of losing their traditional tribal lands, Ik society eventually disintegrated, through several years of near-starvation, leaving an unharmonious tribe of irreversibly selfish individuals to whom most of the ‘moral’ principles that we normally adhere to, such as the notion that parents should look after their children, or that people should help their families or other tribal members seemed simply absurd (Turnbull even cites a case of Ik parents allowing their children to be captured by lions and eaten). And we would have to concede that this is quite a powerful argument. But nonetheless, that extreme circumstances result in extreme behaviours when survival is concerned, does not necessarily obviate the possibility of a ‘normal’ hard-wired pro-social disposition that manifests in more benign environmental conditions.
We might also note, that however appalling the Ik’s behaviour might have seemed, they nonetheless observed the universal ‘incest taboo’, even though they were happy to starve their own family members – which indicates an enduring hard-wired social ‘morality’ of sorts.
One finally tack our hypothetical acquaintance might take, would be to present evidence of the ‘cultural transmission’ of pro- or anti-social learning. Blackmore (1997) has argued that Dawkins’ (1976) concept of the meme, as a replicating entity embodying an idea, concept or behaviour might explain altruism as effectively as gene theory:
‘Imagine the sort of meme that encourages its host to be friendly and kind. They might be memes for throwing good parties, for being generous with the home-made marmalade, or being prepared to spend time listening to a friend’s woes. Now compare this with memes for being unfriendly and mean—never giving dinners or buying drinks, and refusing to spare your time to listen. Which will spread more quickly?
The first type. People like to be with nice people. So those who harbour lots of friendliness memes will spend more time with others and have more chances to spread their memes’ (1997, p. 3).
Or our friend might also mention Bandura’s classic ‘Bobo doll’ experiment (1963) which clearly suggested that moral behaviour might be modelled on the observation of the moral behaviour of others. However, in neither instance is a sociobiological basis for morality necessarily undermined. In Blackmore’s case, why should we even enjoy harmonious interactions with others if it was not already in our natures? As for Bandura’s ‘social learning’ paradigm: given that people are equally free to provide models of anti-social behaviour as they are of ‘good’ behaviour, that humans can function as social animals surely suggests an innate preference for the latter.
It was noted at the start of this analysis that the idea of ‘innate morality’ is actually paradoxical: if our pro-social, altruistic and ethical choices are somehow ‘hard-wired’, then we can no more describe resulting behaviours as ‘moral’ than we would the behaviours of animals. And so one interpretation of the evidence presented here for an evolutionary basis for morality would be the bleak conclusion that free-will is, perhaps, merely illusory and morality a redundant concept. On the other hand, perhaps the notion of hard-wiring of human behaviour is a misconception. In particular, the Ikstudy of Turnbull (1972) strongly suggests that while we might be predisposed towards familial and reciprocal altruism and co-operative behaviours, we are by no means compelled to act in those ways, and that environmental factors will inevitably interact with and mediate the influence of our genes – a point stressed by Ridley (1996); genes and environment are inextricable, with each perspective offering only a partial explanation of human behaviour, with neither influence being immutable. Even Richard Dawkins (1976), who is popularly portrayed as the most deterministic of evolutionary theorists, concedes that we are by no means powerless to resist whatever our genetic imperative may be:
‘Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something no other species has ever aspired to’ (p. 3)
(Rather as if Nature sets out the page upon which we must write the story of our lives, it nonetheless allows us considerable leeway to colour outside of the margins.)
But the research findings of Turnbull’s are also striking for their rarity (upon its publication The Mountain People attracted widespread disbelief that a human tribe could be so lacking in quintessentially ‘human’ qualities), and might simply represent the ‘exception that proves the rule’. They would certainly offer our hypothetical acquaintance an example of the way society might present itself, once its natural moral tendencies have been completely eroded – or the way society might look if it had no innate moral tendencies to begin with. Similarly the lack of vital psychological development exhibited in deprived and feral children (Curtiss, 1981) and Skuse et al, (1992) suggests that without an innate disposition towards parental care-giving, human social behaviour – and perhaps human life itself – would cease to be a viable proposition if children lacked the sufficient nurture to thrive until the point of reproductive maturity. And without the reciprocal altruism, co-operation and involving the pooling of resources for mutual benefit, as is observed in hunter-gathering societies the world over, it is questionable whether humans would have ever been capable of adequately feeding themselves.
As for universal societal taboos such as incest that appear, on the one hand, to be universal, but seem to serve no purpose (in that contravening them is essentially a ‘victimless crime’ in the case of consenting adults), it is difficult to identify any causal factor, other than that offered by selfish gene theory: the avoidance of dysfunctional mutations caused by inbreeding. So while, whether we are talking about internal (dispositional) or external (ie., societally-imposed) morality, it may be ultimately impossible to ‘prove’ evolutionary causation, in the face of evidence presented here there would appear to be very strong argument for an innate human disposition towards a range of behaviours we choose to class as ‘moral’. Without this innate moral tendency, humans might all be as developmentally stunted as ‘Genie’, as combative and uncooperative as the Ik, and recognising no sexual or other societal norms. These are, of course, mere speculations, but our present task has been to persuade an unconvinced acquaintance that morality is not entirely learned, rather than to argue that morality is entirely innate. It might be safest to conclude that both positions are equally untenable.