Darwin's Wager

B. Miles James

Description

When the father of gene-centred evolutionary biology, George C. Williams, asked the world's largest university press to publish a popular-level expos of Darwin's wager, he was told the idea was far too radical to put in front of the reading public.Because Darwin wagered in 1871 that humankind is born just another cannibalistic great ape, and that it falls on culture, not biology, to civilise us. Darwin's wager explains mathematically the enormous power of culture, yet that only by acknowledging this can societies become moral and just. Though many, including the United States, may well never get there.Darwin's wager has been buried, suppressed, for a century and a half. Darwin couldn't get the idea out, and the giants of modern evolutionary biology couldn't get the idea out. So on this 150th anniversary we will fight Darwin's final battle for him.

Sujets

• Philosophy of science

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781800468412
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2021 James B. Miles

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.


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ISBN 978 1800468 412

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Darwin’s wager
noun [ Dar·win’s wa·ger ] [ dahr-winz wey-jer ]
1. the mathematical insight, attributed to Charles Robert Darwin, that it is our cultures, and the behaviours they have fashioned, that stop us eating one another
Contents
1
Darwin’s “other solution”
2
A deeply unpleasant task
3
The Darwin Wars
4
“Atlantis is really Sicily”
5
DNA neither knows nor cares
6
“that opportunity’s open to everybody on the planet”
7
“I too would like to be a fallen soldier”
8
Quantum mysticism, and Moscow ambulances
9
The death of scientific racism
10
A land without opportunity
11
“with much error, as yet unseen by me”

Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgements
When one of London’s most respected literary agencies, Sheil Land Associates, said that any publisher of serious non-fiction should want this manuscript “in a heartbeat” I was over the moon, but remained nervous. Because I will never forget that in February 2003 the world’s largest university press, Oxford, would tell the father of gene-centric evolutionary biology that Darwin’s own understanding of human evolution was just too radical to put in front of the reading public.
So at this 150 th anniversary, this sesquicentenary, of Darwin’s 1871 wager I would like to acknowledge the people who have helped get us here. First and foremost the late George C. Williams, my friend and mentor, and the father of modern evolutionary biology. I would also like to thank the handful of philosophers who have spent their careers battling for Darwin’s wager, sometimes without even knowing it. In particular, thanks to the philosophers Richard Double, Bruce Waller, and Derk Pereboom. I would like to thank Richard Oerton for his continuing efforts. Thanks to my brother, Dr Chris Miles, for his always excellent advice. Thanks to Rod Mackenzie and Dr Yorick Rahman for their ideas on both the text and the cover, and for their endless good humour. There are other friends and family members that I would love to mention, but as the subject matter of this book may enrage I am leaving them unacknowledged. This was Darwin’s battle, George’s battle, my battle; it should not have to be their battle.
I was fortunate to have had one of the few London literary agents steeped in non-fiction publishing, as my agent at Sheil Land, Ian Drury, was formerly publishing director for non-fiction at Weidenfeld & Nicolson. So thank you, Ian. Thanks to all at Matador, and to Ben Cameron at Cameron Publicity & Marketing.
Darwin’s wager has been buried for a century and a half. Darwin couldn’t get the idea out, and the giants of contemporary evolutionary biology – not just George Williams, but extending to John Maynard Smith, Bill Hamilton, and George Price – couldn’t get the idea out. Whether Darwin’s understanding of human evolution is finally acknowledged will probably depend as much on readers as it does on these theorists. The first chapter, the précis chapter, has been made freely available for download ( DarwinsWager.com ), so please deliberate and confabulate, and with the author’s gratitude.
1
Darwin’s “other solution”
“How did we evolve from being merely social to being moral?
… But when Darwin turns to his other solution, he lets us down.”
– Helena Cronin , The Ant and the Peacock:
Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today , pp.326–7.

Darwin knew that for very good reasons his theory of evolution by natural selection could not account for morality. Darwin understood the struggle for existence, and his theory explained aggression, but also sociality and co-operation. Yet, mathematically, co-operation had to be severely limited in mammals, restricted to the “merely social”. Darwin was aware of the competition and the bloodletting, where a newly dominant young male gorilla “killing and driving out the others, establishes himself”, as he wrote in Descent of Man . He knew about baboons using weapons to attack other baboons, where they would roll down great stones, and about orang-utans using sticks and fruit as missiles, although he also appreciated that primates could collaborate in warfare. But natural selection could not explain the evolution of human sentiments like justice, fair play and virtue. The numbers simply wouldn’t work for Darwin. To explain human morality he needed another answer outside of biological adaptation. To explain morality he needed what has disparagingly been called his “other solution”: his odds-on wager that humankind is born just another brutal and amoral ape, and that it falls on culture, not biology, to civilise us .
It is not Darwin who “lets us down”. The evidence today is that it is only Darwin’s wager – when allied to recent breakthroughs in philosophy – that seems to explain the human condition, from the kindness to the cruelty, the wonder to the heartbreak. Because it has been my privilege to spend the last twenty years working alongside some of the world’s foremost scientists and philosophers investigating what are often described as the two great paradoxes of human self-understanding: the potential contribution of evolution to human morality, and the role played by free choice and reason in the human moral sense. As we try to make sense of an increasingly unstable world, we have been searching for our answers in the wrong places. Thanks to Darwin’s wager we have the ammunition we need to fight back against the darkness and the division, although we have come close to leaving it too late.
Darwin believed natural selection operated at the level of the individual. Following his own theory to its logical conclusion he saw no good way for biological evolution at the level of the individual to have produced morality. For Darwin culture must actively combat biology. As a biologist Darwin did not wish to reach this conclusion, but he ultimately resolved to apply his own theory to humankind without fear or favour. In the mid 1960s George C. Williams, my friend and mentor, revolutionised Darwin’s work when he moved selection from the level of the individual to the level of the gene, what Williams referred to as the theory of genic selection, and what later became popularly known as selfish gene theory. Though in so doing Williams realised that what had been Darwin’s better-than-evens wager had now become a mathematical near-certainty. Meanwhile, detailed field observations were showing the other apes to be even more brutal and amoral than Darwin had realised, and George himself accurately predicted species-wide cannibalism within our nearest ape kin decades before it was finally recorded.
Yet because all the other leading figures in the development of modern gene-centred evolutionary biology, including names like John Maynard Smith and Bill Hamilton, were also coming to the same conclusion as Williams and Darwin, a backlash was perhaps inevitable from certain more intellectually conservative circles. This reaction against Darwin’s wager argues that humankind had out-evolved the rest of nature; proposes that our species had broken from the four-billion-year pattern of natural selection to be moral at the genetic level . This backlash was originally known as human sociobiology, and sociobiology named us as, biologically and uniquely, “the decent animal” (E.O. Wilson, 1975a). Today the backlash is called evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary psychology names us as, biologically and uniquely, “the moral animal” (Wright, 1994). It is largely, although not exclusively, thanks to evolutionary psychology that Darwin’s own understanding of human evolution has all but been written out of the records.
I first got to know George Williams in the late 1990s after I wrote a paper on the paradox of human morality for the journal Philosophy . Williams’ groundbreaking 1966 Adaptation and Natural Selection is argued by Harvard’s Steven Pinker to be “the founding document of evolutionary psychology” (1997a, p.56) because, as George’s Nature obituary put it, “his major contribution, the theory of gene-level natural selection, left