The Folly of Fools (47 page)

There is one more key requirement to true science. Science asks that, whenever possible, knowledge be built on preexisting knowledge. Key assumptions may already be contradicted (or supported) by preexisting knowledge, and where no such knowledge exists, science suggests the value of producing it. Errors in the foundation—of both buildings and disciplines—are the most costly. Yet there is surprising resistance in many quarters of social science to adopt—much less embrace—this feature of real science.

The structure of the natural sciences is as follows. Physics rests on mathematics, chemistry on physics, biology on chemistry, and, in principle, the social sciences on biology. At least the final step is one devoutly to be wished and soon hopefully achieved. Yet discipline afterdiscipline—from economics to cultural anthropology—continues to resist growing connections to the underlying science of biology, with devastating effects. Instead of employing only assumptions that meet the test of underlying knowledge, one is free to base one’s logic on whatever comes to mind and to pursue this policy full time, in complete ignorance of its futility.

By contrast, mathematics gave physics rigor, physics gave chemistry an exact atomic model, and chemistry gave biology an exact molecular model. And biology? You would think it would have much to give—most important, an explicit, well-tested theory of self-interest, but also a vastly expanded set of evidence, including a detailed understanding of many underlying variables (immunological, endocrinologic, genetic) that would otherwise remain obscure.

THE MORE SOCIAL THE DISCIPLINE, THE MORE RETARDED ITS DEVELOPMENT

In physics, we imagine precious little self-deception. What difference does it make for everyday life whether the gravitational effect of the mu meson is positive or negative? None at all. So the field is expected to advance relatively unimpeded by forces of deceit and self-deception—with one exception. Physicists will overemphasize the importance and value of their work to others. They will talk of producing “a theory of everything” and make other grand claims, but their social utility, in my opinion, is primarily connected to warfare. Their major function has been to build bigger bombs, delivered more accurately to farther distances, and this has probably been their main function reaching back into prehistory. When I read of nine billion euros spent on a supercollider in which tiny particles are accelerated to incredible speeds and then run into one another, I think “bombs.” This factor may lead to more resources being directed toward physics and to some subareas than is objectively sensible, but it is unlikely to have much effect on constructing theory.

In my opinion, a key to the development of the very solid and sophisticated science of physics is the complete absence from its subject matter of social interactions or social content of any sort. More generally, I imagine that the greater the social content of a discipline, the more slowly it will develop, because it faces, in part, greater forces of deceit and self-deception that impede progress. Thus, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics have direct implications for our view of ourselves and of others, so one might expect their very structure to be easily deformed by self-deception. The same can be said for some branches of biology, especially social theory and (separately) human genetics. Many of these illusions have in common that function is interpreted at a higher level than is warranted (for example, society instead of individual).

SELF-DECEPTION IN BIOLOGY

For roughly a century, biologists had the social world analyzed almost upside down. They argued that natural selection favored what was good for the group or the species, when in fact it favors what is good for the individual (measured in survival and reproduction), as Darwin well knew. More precisely, natural selection works on the genes within an individual to promote their own survival and reproduction, which is usually equivalent to what is beneficial for the individual propagating the genes. Yet almost from the moment Darwin’s theory was published, scientists in the discipline reverted to the older view of benefit as serving a higher function (species, ecosystem, and so on), only now they cited Darwin as support for their belief. In turn, the false theory was just the kind of social theory you would expect people to adopt in a group-living species whose members are concerned with increasing one another’s group orientation. This theory also can be used to justify individual behavior by claiming that such behavior serves group benefit (for example, murder justified as population regulation) and can be used to create the ideal of a conflict-free world.

For example, take the classic case of male infanticide, first studied in depth in the langur monkeys of India, and now known for more than one hundred species. Male murder of dependent offspring (fathered by a previous male) was rationalized as a population-control mechanism that kept the species from eating itself out of house and home. Male murder thus served the interests of all. Of course, it did no such thing. Since a nursing infant inhibits its mother’s ovulation, murder of the infant brought the bereaved mother into reproductive readiness quicker, which aided the male’s reproduction but at a cost to the dead infant and its mother. In some populations, as many as 10 percent of all young are murdered by adult males—each murder gaining on average only two months of maternal time for the new male. These deaths are unrelated to population density (as would be expected if they served a population-regulation function), but they are correlated with the frequency with which males take over new groups. What this work shows is that an enormous social cost can be levied every generation by natural selection on males, even though there is only a modest male gain (two months of female labor) compared with the female loss (twelve months of maternal care).

It was famously argued that male aggression is intrinsically good for the species, since it is always better for the species if the stronger of two males takes control of a favored female. But this is precisely what is not known. Whether an aggressively successful male has genes at other loci that are beneficial to his progeny is an open question that must be answered in each separate case (especially by the choosing female). Perhaps the success of aggressive males spreads genes only for aggressiveness, which are otherwise useless for the species (or a female’s daughters). In any case, male elephant seals fighting for access to females clumped together on breeding islands typically kill about 10 percent of the young every year (fathered by other males) by trampling them to death during fights. In what sense is male aggression good for the species? Are they eliminating inferior genes underfoot?

Close relationships are also easily imagined to be conflict-free. Thus, mother/offspring coevolution is allegedly favored—each party evolving to help the other. As we saw in Chapter 4, nothing like this is actually true of real families. Even in the formation of the placenta, the mother does not help the invading fetal tissue—she puts up chemical and physical obstacles (the better to avoid later excess investment). Likewise, in the 1960s, bird watchers liked to imagine that the families they loved to observe were free of conflict, but this was soon proven wrong when rates of extra-pair paternity exceeding 20 percent were regularly reported.

Thus, for years evolutionary biologists have used a form of argumentation that helped cement in the social sciences and elsewhere the notion that evolution favored what was good for the family, the group, the culture, the species, and perhaps even the ecosystem, while minimizing the reality of conflict within any of these entities. Anthropologists soon rationalized warfare itself as favored by evolution because it too was such a nifty population-regulation device. Note that the error is virtually irrelevant for nonsocial traits. The human locking kneecap allows us to stand erect without wasting energy in tensed legs. It evolved because it benefited the individual with the new kneecap, but if you said it evolved to benefit the species, you would not misinterpret the kneecap. Not so for social traits. Here, as we have seen, we can exactly invert the meaning of a trait by failing to see how it is favored among individuals, even though it may be more costly to others. Instead we imagine that everyone benefits. This often amounts to reaffirming Pangloss’s theorem—that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Likewise, altruism toward others presents no great problem for species-advantage thinking, because as long as benefit is greater than cost, there is a net benefit for the species. Of course, at the individual level, altruism is a problem to explain and requires special conditions, such as kinship or reciprocal relations, with internal conflict in both cases. The latter generates a sense of fairness to evaluate nonreciprocal relations, an adaptation unnecessary under a group-selected view.

IS ECONOMICS A SCIENCE?

The short answer is no. Economics acts like a science and quacks like one—it has developed an impressive mathematical apparatus and awards itself a Nobel Prize each year—but it is not yet a science. It fails to ground itself in underlying knowledge (in this case, biology). This is curious on its face, because models of economic activity must inevitably be based on some notion of what an individual organism is up to. What are we trying to maximize? Here economists play a shell game. People are expected to attempt to maximize their “utility.” And what is utility? Well, anything people wish to maximize. In some situations, you will try to maximize money acquired, in others food, and in yet others sex over food and money. So we need “preference functions” to tell us when one kind of utility takes precedence over another. These must be empirically determined, since economics by itself can provide no theory for how the organism is expected to rank these variables. But determining all of the preference functions by measurement in all the relevant situations is hopeless from the outset, even for a single organism, much less a group.

As it turns out, biology now has a well-developed theory of exactly what utility is (even if it misrepresented the truth for some one hundred years) based on Darwin’s concept of reproductive success. If you are talking about utility (that is, benefit) to a living creature, then it is useful to know that this ultimately refers to the individual’s inclusive fitness, that is, the number of its surviving offspring plus effects (positive and negative) on the reproductive success of relatives, each devalued by its relatedness to them. In many situations, the added precision of this definition (compared to reproductive success alone) makes no difference, but by resolutely acting as if they can produce a science out of whole cloth, that is, independent of noneconomic scientific knowledge, economists miss out on a whole series of linkages that may be critical. They often implicitly assume, as we noted in the first chapter, that market forces will naturally constrain the cost of deception in social and economic systems, but such a belief fails to correspond with what we know from daily life, much less biology more generally. Yet such is the detachment of this “science” from reality that these contradictions arouse notice only when the entire world is hurtling into an economic depression based on corporate greed wedded to false economic theory.

The mistake is partly related to the fact that “utility” has ambiguity built into it. It can refer to utility of your actions to you or to others, including the rest of your group. Economists easily imagine that the two kinds of utility are well aligned. They often argue that individuals acting for personal utility (undefined) will tend to benefit the group (provide general utility). Thus they tend to be blind to the possibility that unrestrained pursuit of personal utility can have disastrous effects on group benefit. This is a well-known fallacy in biology, with hundreds of examples. Nowhere do we assume in advance that the two kinds of utility are positively aligned. This must be shown separately for any given case.

One recent effort by economics to link up with allied disciplines is called behavioral economics, a link with psychology that is most welcome. But as usual, economists resolutely refuse to make the final link to evolutionary theory, even when going through the motions. That is, even those economists who propose evolutionary explanations of economic behavior often do so with unusual, counterlogical assumptions. For example, a common recent mistake (published in all the best journals) is to assume that our behavior evolved specifically to fit artificial economic games.

To imagine how bizarre this is, consider the ultimatum game described in Chapter 2. People often reject unfair offers of a split of money by anonymous others (for example, 80 percent to the proposer and 20 percent to the recipient) even though they thereby lose money. Thus, the game measures our sense of fairness: How much are we willing to suffer in order to punish someone acting unfairly toward us? But a group of economists (with some anthropologists thrown in for added rigor) has made the extraordinary argument that people are acting as if they had evolved to fit this unusual lab situation. Put differently, that we reject unfair offers at a cost to ourselves in order to punish the perpetrator in a completely anonymous exchange means to them that the bias evolved to fit exactly this situation—one-time exchanges with no possible return benefit for the actor, or relatedness, only a group benefit. Once again, group trumps individual. But this is as logical as arguing that our terror watching a horror film evolved to fit movie showings. Biologists have brought living creatures into the laboratory for centuries to study their traits, but no one I know of has shortcut the study of the
function
of the trait by imagining that the trait evolved to fit the laboratory.

A recent Nobel winner in economics wondered how it was possible for his well-developed science to fail completely to predict the catastrophic economic events that started in 2008. One part, of course, is that economic events are intrinsically complex, involving many factors, and the final result, the aggregate of the behavior of an enormous number of people, though not quite as complex as the weather, is almost as difficult to predict. As for the cause the economist located, it was infatuation with beautiful mathematics at the cost of attention to reality. Surely this is part of the problem, but nowhere does he suggest that the first piece of reality they should pay attention to—and this has been obvious for some thirty years now—is biology, in particular evolutionary theory. If only thirty years ago economists had built a theory of economic utility on a theory of biological self-interest—forget the beautiful math and pay attention to the relevant math—we might have been spared some of the extravagances of economic thought regarding, for example, built-in anti-deception mechanisms kicking in to protect us from the harmful effects of unrestrained economic egotism by those already at the top.