Human Nature and the Limits of Darwinism

Whitley R.P. Kaufman, Whitley R. P. Kaufman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137592873
• eBook ISBN: 9781137592880
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

 This book compares two competing theories of human nature: the more traditional theory espoused in different forms by centuries of western philosophy and the newer, Darwinian model.  In the traditional view, the human being is a hybrid being, with a lower, animal nature and a higher, rational or "spiritual" component. The competing Darwinian account does away with the idea of a higher nature and attempts to provide a complete reduction of human nature to the evolutionary goals of survival and reproduction.  Whitley Kaufman presents the case that the traditional conception, regardless of one's religious views or other beliefs, provides a superior account of human nature and culture. We are animals, but we are also rational animals. 

Kaufman explores the most fundamental philosophical questions as they relate to this debate over human nature—for example: Is free will an illusion? Is morality a product of evolution, with no objective basis?  Is reason merely a tool for promoting reproductive success?  Is art an adaptation for attracting mates? Is there any higher meaning or purpose to human life? Human Nature and the Limits of Darwinism aims to assess the competing views of human nature and present a clear account of the issues on this most pressing of questions.  It engages in a close analysis of the numerous recent attempts to explain all human aims in terms of Darwinian processes and presents the arguments in support of the traditional conception of human nature.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Whitley R.P. KaufmanHuman Nature and the Limits of Darwinism10.1057/978-1-137-59288-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Bridging the Two Cultures

Whitley R. P. Kaufman¹

(1)

Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, Massachusetts, USA

End Abstract

For the last 500 years, the natural sciences have enjoyed an astonishing record of success in uncovering the mathematical laws that govern the natural world. Science has revolutionized human society, both in terms of technological advances that have vastly improved our standards of living and in its intellectual influence as a new way of understanding the world that has put the traditional worldview, that of religion, on the defensive. It has been one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history, starting in Europe and spreading rapidly to the rest of the world. The term “science” has become a generic term of praise, an ideal standard by which to measure all other disciplines (“he’s got it down to a science”). In just a few centuries, science has replaced religion as the leading intellectual authority on the nature of reality—at least, among intellectuals and academics, if not always among the general population.

And yet there remains one glaring gap in the record of the natural sciences: the human mind, the very thing that is of most interest to us, and further that is the last great redoubt of the traditional worldview. Geoffrey Miller calls this the “last citadel” for science to conquer. ¹ Steven Pinker declares there is “one wall standing in the landscape of knowledge… It divides matter from mind, the material from the spiritual, the physical from the mental, biology from culture, nature from society, and the sciences from the social sciences, humanities and arts.” ² With respect to understanding the body, we turn to science—medicine in particular—to help it function well and repair it from illness or injury. Medical doctors are held in high prestige, and religion has almost entirely ceded the healing function to these applied scientists. Yet the scientists of the mind—the psychologist and psychiatrists—have nothing approaching this prestige. To the contrary, the field of psychology suffers from a bewildering variety of schools without a single unifying framework, and has struggled to make itself relevant to the vast majority of people in making sense of their mental world: their goals, beliefs, values, and ideals. As Steven Pinker writes, “the topics in psychology that most interest laypeople—love, hate, work, play, food, sex, status, dominance, jealousy, friendship, religion, art—are almost completely absent from psychology textbooks.” ³ The dominant theory of psychology, even among intellectuals, remains “folk psychology,” the traditional, pre-scientific theory of mind dating back to the ancient world, with its familiar body of entities such as beliefs, desires, and values. Psychology largely remains in a pre-scientific mode, as if the scientific revolution never happened, built upon the traditional conception of the nature of mind.

While theology has almost entirely disappeared as an academic discipline (other than in religious colleges), its place has been taken by the humanities as the arbiter in those things that really matter to us: values, goals, meanings, including the study of art, ethics, literature, political philosophy. Thus, today we see in intellectual life what C.P. Snow famously called the “two cultures”: a division between the natural sciences, which provide a theory of the behavior of matter in all its manifestations (including the human anatomy), and the humanities, which take as their field of study the human mind, both as individual entity and as social entity. (To be sure, the social sciences do not clearly belong to either culture; they sit at the uneasy border between the natural sciences and the humanities and do not constitute a third separate culture so much as an as-yet unsuccessful attempt to overcome the division. The social sciences face a dilemma: the more they attempt to be scientific, the less they speak to topics that matter to people. The last great psychological theory to have a widespread cultural impact was Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, a theory now widely considered to be a discredited pseudoscience. Thus the principal divide remains the sciences versus the humanities as two distinct ways of understanding the world.)

The humanities, however, are widely considered to be in a crisis mode in the universities, as students increasingly turn to more “practical” fields such as science and engineering. The prestige of the humanities in our culture has dropped dramatically, and the field is increasingly derided as a “soft” and unscientific form of inquiry. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields receive vastly more federal research funding than the humanities do, and critics widely cite the failure of the humanities to make progress in their disciplines in the way the sciences have as evidence that the humanities are a dead end in human inquiry. Increasingly, one hears the claim that the humanities—not merely the academic study of the humanities, but the field of arts and literature in general—are simply a failed enterprise. Biologist Jerry Coyne, for example, has challenged “literature professors and critics” to give “examples of truths actually revealed for the first time by literature, rather than affirmed by it,” and he claims not to have “received a single convincing answer.” ⁴ Philosopher Alexander Rosenberg goes even further, calling the entire discipline of the humanities an “illusion,” with the implication that they should be eliminated as academic disciplines entirely (notwithstanding that he is a member of a philosophy department). ⁵

It is important to note that Rosenberg’s target is not merely the academic discipline of the humanities—admittedly an easy target, given the frequent excesses of humanities professors—but the very idea of humanism itself. That is, his target is the folk belief in such queer entities as “minds” and the explanation of behavior in terms of motives, purposes, values, and the like. ⁶ For, according to Rosenberg (and this is a very widespread theory, though few are as blunt in endorsing its full implications), the real causal work is being done at the material level. So the humanities, including all of folk psychology, will have to be replaced by a “neuroscientific explanation of human behavior”; only then will we have a true science of human beings. ⁷ According to Steven Pinker, we stand at just that moment when the “last wall” is falling, the wall between matter and mind. “New ideas from four frontiers of knowledge—the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution—are breaching the wall with a new understanding of human nature.” ⁸

It does not seem an overstatement to say that we stand at one of the great turning points in history, or at least in intellectual history. The assault on the last wall has begun, the wall that divides the two cultures and the two kinds of substance, mind and matter. Science has turned its methods on human beings themselves. The great question before us is how far will natural science be able to take us. Will science be a totalizing theory, a theory of everything, a unifying theory of the two great aspects of reality, mind and matter? Will science provide us with a successful explanation of human behavior, comparable to its account of the natural world: stars, planets, atoms, chemicals? Can it provide a full theory of mind itself: our ideas, goals, values, purposes, motives, beliefs? Or will science discover its own limits—will mind prove irreducible to materialist explanation? Are human beings just another, albeit far more complex, organization of material particles? Or are they something different, not amenable to mechanistic scientific explanation?

The Problem of the Scientific Study of Values

The enormous challenge to the idea of applying the methods of science to human beings is that the concepts and theories of science, focused on the idea of mechanical forces operating between material entities, seem ill-suited to the explanation of rational, intelligent behavior. Human beings are moved, at least to all appearances, by purposes, goals, and values, not by mechanistic forces. They are teleological beings, guided by a telos or purpose. The sort of methods appropriate to investigate inanimate, inert objects such as particles or planets do not fare well with respect to rational beings who deliberate about their goals. It is for this reason that behaviorism became influential in the first half of the twentieth century, for it promised to explain human behavior without recourse to mental vocabulary, entirely in terms of mechanistic stimulus and response. But this approach was doomed from the beginning. Intelligence cannot be reduced to causal stimulus–response patterns. Take for example a debate on a moral or political issue, say capital punishment: a decision to favor or oppose the death penalty is the result of deliberation about values and about facts (e.g. deterrence); to analyze it as merely a “response” to a “stimulus,” ignoring the role of the internal deliberations and of the conscious goals being aimed at, misses everything that is important and unique about human behavior and rationality itself.

There is yet another equally daunting problem, perhaps even more daunting, in applying the methods of science to human affairs. Being teleological beings (at least, to all appearances), humans make decisions by deliberating about the goals they should pursue. But science has no method for investigating goals or ends—indeed it has long been definitive of the scientific method that it excludes any teleological inquiry. Science seeks description, not prescription. So at most it could give us a descriptive account of human behavior, but not a prescriptive one. But at the end of the day, we still have to answer the question: what goals should we pursue? What choices should we make? This is not just a matter of the big social issues such as capital punishment, but of choices at every level: how should we live our lives? So the problem is a double one: first, can an entirely descriptive account make sense of the normative aspect of human behavior? Can it explain the apparent goal-directedness of human action? And second, can science provide us guidance as to what goals to act on? We need to know what we should aim at in order to know how to act. What should we do, on matters such as capital punishment or even on individual questions such as what career to pursue or who to vote for.

This problem creates a dilemma for the scientific explanation of human behavior with respect to the question of human goals and purposes. One option, though hardly plausible, is to deny that there are such things, to hold that the very idea that humans are purpose-seeking creatures is a delusion. ⁹ The second option is equally problematic: to admit the reality of purposes but to admit that science, while it can help us choose the best means to achieve our goals, has no guidance to offer on how to choose the proper goals in the first place. This second option would be to acknowledge the limited usefulness of science to our most basic concerns, and hence the failure of the project to achieve a full scientific account of human behavior.

There would thus appear to be an insuperable barrier between the domain of science, the study of facts, and the domain of the humanities, the latter of which involves the study of beings that must be understood in the context not only of facts but also of values. However, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, it has been widely hoped, could offer a way around this is/ought barrier. For the idea of an evolutionary function would seem to allow a way of treating values and purposes as entities susceptible to scientific analysis. The key idea of function in biology allows the explanation of behaviors without recourse to teleology. Behaviors—whether mating, feeding, fleeing, or whatever—evolved because they led to reproductive success. Hence an entirely mechanistic natural process—natural selection—can give rise to forward-looking behavioral tendencies, giving us the appearance of teleology. Even complex behaviors can thus be explained functionally, in terms of a disposition or tendency to defend oneself, pursue prey, and seek mates. Rationality itself, on this view, can be explained in terms of the functional benefits of intelligence, allowing for a flexible assessment of alternative possibilities. Thus the idea of function could provide a bridge between the physical and mental world; complex mental...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Bridging the Two Cultures
• 2. The Traditional Theory of Human Nature
• 3. Does Science Refute Free Will?
• 4. Reason, Truth, and Evolution
• 5. Does Science Undermine Morality?
• 6. Is Utilitarianism a Scientific Morality?
• 7. Art, Beauty, and Darwinism
• 8. Literary Darwinism: Can Evolution Explain Great Literature?
• 9. Darwinism and the Meaning of Life
• 10. Conclusion
• Backmatter