Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 61-minute seminar, Ilia S. Durovic addresses why sociobiology and evolutionary theory matter to Western Buddhist practitioners caught between monastic teachings and a secular worldview. He traces the historical roots of Darwinism through the European Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, showing how Darwin’s theories, though scientifically grounded, emerged from a specific cultural moment shaped by Spencer’s competitive philosophy, Malthus’s pessimism, and Lyell’s geology. Durovic then examines three major stumbling blocks for modern synthesis biology—the origin of life, the emergence of complexity, and the prevalence of altruism in animals—arguing these remain scientifically unresolved. He critiques sociobiology’s project to reduce all human behavior to evolutionary advantage as intellectually interesting but morally loaded and scientifically flimsy, drawing on Karl Popper’s critique that Darwinism is unfalsifiable metaphysics rather than testable science. The talk aims at practitioners struggling to reconcile inherited materialism with Buddhist values.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Ilia Empathy and Kindness 1 – IS.mp3
UUID: 35df817f-c114-4809-9301-952bcb57acd0
Teacher: Ilia S. Durovic
Collection: Ilia Seminars
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~6,966
Thank you very much. So it’s a delight to see you all again for an interesting, but somewhat difficult topic and this will be the last conference I will be giving for some time, probably until the end of the year. I have other responsibilities which will not allow me to give these conferences for some five, six months, but towards the end of the year, in October or November, I hope to resume giving this cycle of conferences. Then the first question I think one has to address is why precisely one should talk about sociobiology and its underpinning the theory of evolution in a Buddhist temple and in a Buddhist Studies Institute. How is this relevant to what we do?
It is largely relevant because our audience is not a traditional Buddhist audience. Our audience is not an audience of Asian Buddhists who have been Buddhist for generations, who were raised in the Buddhist tradition, and who often have a faith based Buddhism, which does not raise any particular questions, the roots are very profound. Our audience is exclusively a Western audience and an audience of new converts. It’s exceptional to have Buddhist practitioners with more than 10 of experience among Western Buddhists. Twenty, thirty years is even rarer.
In addition, the students are struggling to practice the Buddhist teachings in a society which is completely at odds with basically all the core Buddhist values. They come to the center or the institute for a couple hours a week and spend seventy-eighty hours a week in a secular milieu which has become very militant in its secularism. Then what we do see a lot of is a form of dissociation, one might even say of schizophrenia. The students behave one way in the center for the couple hours they are there and they behave a completely different way on the outside and the two do not meet. Now, this is not at all the goal of Buddhist practice.
So the goal is for behavior at the center and outside, behavior where one is alone and in public to be basically identical. Therefore, it seemed necessary to bring out the unstated doubts of students. The unstated doubts of the students arise from the fact that we live in a society which is totally built on the Industrial Revolution and its heritage, which is a certain vision of science and modernity. Most of the students are unable to address this critically and therefore take it on board very indirectly when you open your emails on Yahoo every morning, you swallow huge swathes of popular scientific culture, which is just taken on board without any analysis or digestion. This creates great doubts in the students’ minds when they come to the center and they receive traditional Tibetan presentation.
And in recent months we lost a long-standing Buddhist student precisely to the discipline of sociobiology, because obviously the doubts had become too important. So instead instead of letting the pressure build up secretly within the students minds, I think it is much more beneficial to pierce the abscess, to bring out the doubts, to address the issues, to see what in the Buddhist teachings is compatible or incompatible with modernity and to be perfectly honest with you, and that’s something we’d address today, what within modernity is scientifically established? What is theory and what is mere hypotheses? One of the biggest problems in my experience with popular science is that hypothesis is presented as theory and theory is presented as fact and evidence. Then this causes great mental turmoil among the students, who might think that something which is merely a working theory in the laboratory is demonstrated beyond doubt.
So, today we’re going to address the fundamental contradiction between social biology’s account of animate creatures, creatures, which is that animate creatures are directed in the traditional accounts by self interest or by interest of the group and that this leads to the transmission of certain characteristics, certain forms of behavior, behavior, and the Buddhist account of what impels animate creatures, what we call sentient beings. And I’d like to start with a quote by an author I am quite fond of, Kenan Malik. I find the quote quite germane. Contemporary theories of humanism tend to regard a human being less as a subject capable of acting upon the world, than as an object through whom nature acts. It is this vision of humans as objects that is most troubling.
I think this is a message all of us in modern societies hear loud and clear. We have impulses, it is natural, because we are basically the kindred of animals. There’s no particular reason to struggle against these impulses. Or as a famous British writer Somerset Maugham said a century or so ago, his rule in life was, do what you want with due heed for the policeman around the corner. This I think is message of modernity.
The question we have to ask is, is this message legitimate? Now, to understand ideas, just like to understand persons, one has to know their history. People do not arise out of nothing ex nihilo. They have a background, we see now they have baggage. You want to know the baggage before you get to know the person.
Ideas have baggage too. You want to know how an idea has arisen because that tells you a lot about what is in the background, the skeletons in the cupboard of that idea? And specifically the question we have to ask is, for which reason did Darwinism then its multiple later avatars, the modern synthesis biology and sociobiology, arise only in the West and in no other society. The data which Darwin was studying was accessible to all observers. When Darwin traveled to Tierra Del Fuego and all the South American coast, he went on travels which Chinese explorers did before him, which for that matter the Vikings did, the Greeks were great travelers, I mean the variety of nature was present to all, so why was it Darwin, a westerner, from a very specific culture, the culture of the late industrial or the middling industrial revolution and the beginning of the Victorian era, why was it Darwin who basically developed these theories?
And I think if we understand the background, it will become clearer. So a foundational myth of Western civilization, which we have largely forgotten, but which remains very much in the background, is the myth of the fall from perfection, the myth of the Garden of Eden. It is easy for us in a post Christian society to be dismissive of the impact Christian ideas had and they will provide the backdrop to Darwin for us. The core understanding in the myth of the fall from perfection is that of a perfect creation, which to a greater or lesser degree was marred by imperfection in the process of the fall. But the underlying theme is that creation was perfect.
There was a perfect order, there was perfect meaning, and that perfect meaning can still be glimpsed, still be seen. This is a dominant idea in Western thought for twenty centuries, and this is a dominant idea in Darwin’s thought all the way up to his first itinerary, the famous Voyage on the Beagle. So if we read the passages of the book of Genesis, which give an account for creation, we get and try to read them with new eyes, I think most of us know these passages, we get a very sharp sense of what the relation between man and his environment was for 20 centuries. God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness. Likeness.
In other words, the human species is eo ipso privileged at creation and let them have dominion. And this is a leitmotif in the book of Genesis. Man rules, man has dominion over nature. So God created man in his own image and gave him the task to be fruitful and multiply, to replenish the earth, in other words to cultivate the earth, to subdue it and to have dominion over it. This is the Western outlook on the relation between man and the outside world.
Man is privileged, the nature of this privilege depends on which of the monotheistic tradition one is studying. For the Jewish and Muslim traditions man is privileged by the divine will, the divine fiat at creation. For the Christian tradition man is privileged because of this resemblance with God and because man and man alone has a soul. It is something which for us is very alien now living in a post Christian society. But up to a mere fifty years ago, man, for most Christians who went to church, not particularly Orthodox, had a soul.
And animals might or might not have minds, but they had basically no clear hope for the hereafter. Man was their custodian and they were basically that which was taken care of. This viewpoint was dominant, as we said, basically until the so called Age of Enlightenment. Enlightenment. The Age of Enlightenment is a major turning point in Western history which has not been sufficiently understood.
It is an attempt to move away from theistic monotheism Christianity, towards a form of deism. And an attempt in addition to account for history in the light of a profoundly optimistic view. The view of the natural evolution of man, the animal brain is still not talked about, the natural evolution of man towards ever greater perfection through knowledge. It is the ideal of the eighteenth century and lest you think this ideal is irrelevant in the twenty first century, let me point out that it is the dominant ideal which underpins the creation of all the countries created at the end of the eighteenth century, which means United States, which is perhaps still the dominant force in the world and all countries which to a greater or lesser degree share American values. And I’m afraid Australia has to be put in that category.
All of us in this room, unbeknownst to ourselves, share certain core values of the Enlightenment. This idea of the perfectibility of man, that man moves upwards through the force of knowledge knowledge, and this optimistic vision of history. There is a switch, a shift, which occurs inside the Enlightenment through the two industrial revolutions. The industrial revolutions dampen the optimism of the Age of Enlightenment. They lead to great skepticism regarding the harmonious relationship between members of society and we face a paradigmatic shift at the end of the eighteenth century.
I have tried to underline it briefly here. The Age of Enlightenment remains an age marked by hierarchical and aristocratic societies. It is an age which is marked by theism evolving towards deism. Whether you read the works of Rousseau, of Voltaire, the great thinkers of the enlightenment, they are deistic or in some cases agnostic. It remains an optimistic age and it is an age of humanism which basically has inherited the values of the Renaissance, the values of Pico della Mirandola and of Marsilio Ficino.
Within the Age of Enlightenment, for purely economic reasons, an inner transformation occurs with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and suddenly we pass from aristocratic societies to egalitarian societies. We pass from societies which have a vision of harmony within their members to societies which see the relationship of their constituents as competition and struggle. We move from deism to deism agnosticism or atheism. The optimism is strongly tempered or turns into pessimism. And humanism is transformed into one of the variants of materialism.
This is the age in which we still are. We are in the final years of the Industrial Revolution. We have inherited these values, they are self evident to us. It is self evident to us that the relation of all citizens is one of economic competition, that an effective society promotes competition between its members, how many guardrails there are depends on the society, and our societies have become profoundly materialistic. This is the backdrop of Charles Darwin and before addressing Darwin’s thought specifically, I’d like to cover with you some of the Western understandings understandings of what it means to be a man, and I wanted to shock you a bit, so what it means to be a beast.
People did not talk of animals up to one century ago, they talked of beasts. The man beast polarity is a profoundly ingrained one in Western thought. It is not one which is profoundly ingrained in Asian thought. So if we look at the models which are proposed, the main options in Western thought, the French philosopher Descartes represents the traditional, I would say, Christian model. Animals are automata, they are mechanisms.
Humans have freedom of choice because they have a soul. This is sufficient to make of humans ethical beings and to make of animals beings which or whose behavior is not part of ethics. Animals can have no ethics ethics because they have no souls. Animals participate in human destiny within creation because they are co fallen with man. Now this is the view which was Darwin’s view in 1830, in 1840, until the sudden shift in his outlook.
The second viewpoint is that of William James and William James and Thomas Huxley have very similar viewpoints. Both consider that animals and humans are basically automata, they are machines, they are mechanisms in other words. They just differ because James is more radical than Huxley. For James, consciousness itself is a fantasy, is an illusion we have. Whereas Thomas Huxley, and I think this is perhaps a dominant position among most nowadays, consider that the mind does exist as an activity of the nervous system and the brain.
These are, I would say, the three positions which have marked Western thought. The latter two, William James and Thomas Huxley’s, actually are direct inheritors of the great British philosopher Hobbes, who had this frightening line in my book, Human beings are matter which moves. This says it all, doesn’t it? And with this prelude we then pass directly to the work of Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin lived between 1809 and 1882.
He was raised a Unitarian. In other words, he was a Christian whose family did not subscribe to Trinitarian dogma. Striking in the case of Darwin is that Darwin planned on becoming a minister. So Darwin did not have any particular interest in the natural sciences. He was greatly influenced as a young man by William Paley’s famous work, which is now largely forgotten, but which was hugely influential at the period, Natural Theology, evidence of the attributes and existence of the deity collected from appearances of nature.
This is the most powerful answer provided by a Christian theologian to Voltaire’s Voltaire’s agnosticism and to Voltaire’s skepticism regarding the existence of a good God. Paley considers that nature itself is the book in which God’s teachings are made evident and he adduces evidence in favor of this. This had a great influence on Darwin and Darwin Darwin’s life basically changes suddenly. When he is invited out of the blue to do something which is very controversial for someone of his background, which is basically we would say now an upper middle class family, he was invited to travel on the Beagle in the company of sailors. Everyone knew that sailors were reprobates.
They were just next to the pit of fire and brimstone with Captain FitzRoy. The trip lasted five years and Darwin’s life completely changed. His fiance abandoned him as a result. He had ceased to be respectable, and Darwin’s outlook suddenly is confronted with reality. Darwin on the Beagle starts reading another forgotten work, which had tremendous impact on at the period.
Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. Now geology to us seems like a very tedious and boring science which helps you Australia maintain your living standard by finding mines of copper and gold. Geology was at the end of the eighteenth century the foremost challenge to Christian authority. Because the geologists through the discovery of the early fossils established that the Christian account of Genesis was incredible. It was impossible to believe that the world had been created in seven days.
Now this was believed literally. For us it is very difficult to put ourselves in such a mental universe. Leading erudites tried to calculate how many thousands of years before the eighteenth century God had created the world, and the figures range between 4,907. You would add up the lifespans of all of the patriarchs, you and unfortunately the genealogies of the patriarchs contradicted themselves, so you got different results depending on which genealogy you relied upon in the book of Deuteronomy. And on this basis one would conclude that the world had four to 7,000 years of age, until geologists discover fossils in strata which are obviously hundreds of thousands of years of age.
And this is what Lyell publicized. This is the first time Darwin’s certainties are shattered. And Darwin notes with FitzRoy, Captain Fitzroy was captain of the Beagle, in South America that the geological strata in South America cannot be accounted for by the traditional account of creation. Then Darwin, who was an orthodox Christian, Darwin embarked on the Beagle with two books, the New Testament in Greek and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Darwin moves more and more away from revealed Christianity, ceases attending church which at the period was a very difficult step to take socially and publishes in 1859 the Origin of Species, which we can say is the foundation of modern biology and whose ideas were co discovered by Alfred Wallace, a biologist who was stationed in Borneo, who had read Darwin’s journey on the Beagle and come to the same conclusions.
Darwin does not explicit explicit in the Origin of Species, because it was too controversial, that his theory of mutation, adaptation, and therefore evolution, applies to man as well. The very idea of change was controversial enough, change in biological families, in biological species. Darwin explicates these ideas in his most controversial work, The Descent of Man, in which Darwin, for the first time, unambiguously sees man as descending from the higher primates or from branches thereof. Now if we try to identify the main intellectual influences on Darwin, and this was a raison d’etre of his long introduction, it is quite puzzling to note that Darwin, who was a biologist, was not influenced by a single biologist or natural scientist of his age. He was influenced by Spencer, who was a philosopher and economist, by Malthus, who was an economist and the founder of modern demography, and by Charles Lyall, who was a paleontologist.
And this is quite intriguing. Darwin does rely on Cuvier, he does not rely on Lamarck on any of the great forerunners. The breakthrough in Darwin’s thought occurs in contact with empirical data in South America, in the Galapagos Island, in Tierra Del Fuego, then when Darwin fits a series of concepts, which come from a totally different different setting and uses him to interpret this data. And this is important for us. Darwin and there is a there was a mutual relationship between Darwin and Spencer, Darwin drew on Spencer for the concept of evolution, and a term which Spencer did a lot to popularize the notion of survival of the fittest.
He drew on Lyall at the beginning to point out the inadequacy of the biblical account of creation. As we said, the paleontological data, the geological data, did not support the biblical account. It was a tremendous crisis of authority for a pious Christian, we cannot begin to understand that. And he drew on Malthus for Malthus’ deep grained pessimism regarding the future of humanity, which was completely at odds with the optimism of the enlightenment, and on a revolutionary idea, which Darwin owes to Malthus, the notion of environmental constraints. Malthus sees human growth as limited by the environment, as limited specifically by the amount of food available.
He therefore sees history as a non linear process and Darwin was heavily influenced by this in his understanding of how species respond to the environment. And what I would like to do now is to cover with you the title and the table of contents of Darwin’s foundational work, The Origin of Species. It is often very interesting to read these classics with new ideas, and I would like to point out some keywords which will be central for our later reading of sociobiology. So I typed this out. Darwin’s foundational work on the origin of species, with as a subtitle, by means of natural selection.
This is Darwin’s key contribution, which as we saw comes largely from Spencer. Or, and you can see how shocking the presentation is for a contemporary audience. The preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. I am ready to bet that if you wrote an article in The Australian titled The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, you would get into very big trouble if it was published. Now what I wanted to point out by showing the influences on Darwin, and this would be one of the main points of this conference, is that yes indeed Darwin was a founder of modern biology in many senses.
But Darwin is a product of his time. Darwinism and its avatars, avatars, the modern synthesis, sociobiology, are not only sciences, they never were. Darwinism from the very beginning had an underlying political program to it, which Darwin himself may not have been aware of, but which Spencer definitely was aware of. Spencer was considered the foremost British philosopher and economist of the nineteenth century. Some compared him to Aristotle.
He was one of the pillars of the Conservative Party. He we can say is one of the main thinkers of laissez-faire capitalism, which sees relationships within society as a conflict of free agents struggling for economic dominance. These views are with us nowadays. They are with you in Australia, I am American, they were with us in America on a very powerful level, they influenced policy. So it is important to see that that Darwinism is an attempt to account for biological reality, it is a model which has strong predictive capacities, it remains a model which is rooted in a society, the society of England in the Industrial Revolution, one of the most brutal societies in history.
This country was built, was founded by the misfits who were transported from England to these shores because they did not fit in the world of the Industrial Revolution. And this society, this outlook is the one which Darwin brought with him, unbeknownst to him, when he tried to understand biological reality. So when we start referring to the theory of evolution, we have to be very aware of this. Now if we look at the table of contents of Darwin’s work on the origin of species, it is very interesting because it shows exactly what Darwin was trying to establish. The key for Darwin in the first two chapters is to establish variation.
This is trite for us. Darwin is trying to establish that animal species vary. This is completely at odds with a dominant viewpoint at his period, which is that species are frozen in time. There is no change. Up to Darwin, the official viewpoint is perhaps the exception of Lamarck, is that species were created by God, there might have been some small variation inside species which is unimportant, but the whole taxonomy was divine.
Darwin comes face to face with variation. Variation in function of environment when he travels from the first to the second Galapagos Island. This is so controversial that Darwin starts out by pointing out that variation occurs at home when you breed domestic animals, which is something a British reader of the nineteenth century would have been familiar with. You breed dogs to get certain characteristics and on this basis Darwin then infers that variation under nature is possible. The third chapter, the struggle for existence, is one of the darkest chapters of the Origin of Species.
It’s one of the ones with which Darwin himself was most uncomfortable. Darwin was no fond exponent of the struggle for survival. He found the whole concept extremely depressing, but he felt it reflected a reality. As we said, this concept was created closely independent on Spencer’s philosophy and then leads to Darwin’s conclusion that with variation and the struggle for existence, a natural selection of species which are better adapted to a given environment occurs. This is mainstream Darwinism.
Then, I will not develop too much further, I will point out however, in the final chapters of the table of content that Darwin draws very heavily on the geological data. This comes from Lyell’s work, which underlay much of Darwin’s research. And then adduces evidence demonstrating that there is an evolution of beings and his evidence is embryological, it’s the development of the embryo. Now this is basically as far as Darwin dares to go in the origin of species to point out that man is fully a part of his chain, because clearly as you all know, if you study the development of the human embryo, there is a phase where human embryo has a tail. Now Darwin sees this tail which eventually disappears as a reminiscence of a prior evolutionary stage.
And I would like to read you a passage at present from one of Darwin’s letters. It is in his letters that I think the anguish of Darwin comes through the most clearly. And that one realizes that Darwin was drawn, we would say, kicking and screaming to the theory of evolution and remained uncomfortable with its consequences all its his life. In a letter to oh, excuse me, first in this passage from his introduction to a late edition of the Origin of Species, Darwin says, I am convinced that natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive means of modification. This remained Darwin’s position to the end.
Darwin struggled to maintain a place for some sort of creator, some sort of demurrage, and was very loath to believe in an evolution purely controlled by chance. If one reads Darwin’s works, and especially his letters, Darwin would probably fall in the camp of those who believe in evolution by design in the late twentieth and early twenty first century, which is embarrassment for the hardline Darwinists. But Darwin was a product of his age. And in this letter, which I wanted to point out to you, the letter to Asa Gray, Darwin says, I cannot see plainly as others do and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world.
This a theme which has haunted Darwin all his life. However, in the following paragraph, he adds, I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws with the details whether good or bad left to the working of what we may call chance. Darwin, in other words, was of two minds. It was obvious to him the data pointed towards adaptation through mutation. The mechanisms of mutation were not understood in Darwin’s period, the genetic code was not understood, the concept of genes was not present.
At the same time, on the other hand, Darwin is very uncomfortable with this and would like guardrails. These guardrails are some sort of design. And Darwin actually goes public with his doubts and in a letter to Nature in 1880, he actually castigates Sir William Thomson for making a caricature of his theories and attributing all evolutionary change to natural selection. So this leads us to the present state of affairs in biology, what is commonly known as a modern synthesis. The synthesis of Darwin’s work and the great Austrian geneticist Mendel, the founder of genetics, whose great discoveries were made on peas.
It goes to show you can get very far with peas. The modern synthesis was formulated in the late thirties by Julian Huxley in a work which actually bears a name, Evolution the Modern Synthesis. And Huxley is trying to create a synthetic theory. Until that period, Darwinism had coexisted on one could say the tug-of-war, of Darwinism and what used to be called Mendelianism, with a shift however in that the focus is more on populations and less on the individual as the main agent through which selection occurs. However, there are major stumbling blocks for modern synthesis.
This by the way is a T cell in the bloodstream, one of the many various highly sophisticated cells in the human body, for which the theory of evolution in the modern synthesis has to account. Major stumbling blocks for the modern synthesis and actually for all of the Darwinisms, and I use the term intentionally because I feel that there is an ideological component to Darwinism, are threefold. The first is abiogenesis, the origin of life, the second is the dawn of complexity and the third which will concern us today is altruism. Now, all of these are highly problematical. The origin of life is one of the most problematical, because it has never been possible to replicate life in laboratory.
The closest one has come has been to produce organic molecules, amino acids actually, a famous experiment made in 1952, and more recently it has been possible to generate, but to generate intentionally strands of messenger RNA or DNA. It has been impossible to create in a laboratory setting the simplest of all cells, which is a cell without a nucleus, a prokaryotic cell. So, the first step and theories have to be tested at the boundaries, the first step is hugely problematic. There is to this day no convincing account. Some of the most interesting work has been done in the other direction, with Craig Venter trying to move backwards from prokaryotic cells to even simpler structures structures and see how the process could have occurred in the forward direction.
So this is the first stumbling block for the modern synthesis and any account of biology information arises ex nihilo. And the biggest problem throughout contemporary biology is the implicit assumption that information can arise consistently ex nihilo. Information, structure, complexity arise through random mutations and it is not an occasional occurrence, it is a systematic occurrence which leads to the organisms we are. It beggars the imagination. I mean it is said that monkeys, a team of monkeys typing for million years on typewriters would eventually compose a whole works of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare. That’s more or less what we are asked to believe. And this leads us to the second problem, which is the issue of complexity. Modern synthesis affirms that complexity is consistently generated through random association and complexity of a very high order of magnitude. As you know, the strand of DNA with the acid bases it contains encrypts, encodes in other words, the amino acids which will constitute proteins.
Now, this is a very high level of coding indeed and the transmission of this information is part and parcel of our heredity. What is being asserted is that this arises through chance. That in a big primeval soup containing carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, which is being sparked, in other words, basically the Earth’s atmosphere some four billion years ago, not only organic molecules arose, but from them amino acids. Then the four bases, adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine. Then somehow probably RNA arose, in other words one of the two strands, and then somehow a mechanism which encrypted the creation of proteins on that basis arose, all this through chance.
And then still through chance, a cell wall arose which encapsulated this, and life dawns as some biologists would say the difference of potential between the inside and the outside of the cell wall, balanced by the flow of potassium and sodium. It is possible, but it is far fetched and modern biologists do not like to dwell on it for that reason. Then the third issue, which actually confronts or confronted Charles Darwin himself, himself, is a prevalence of altruism in the animal world. Darwin was fully aware that bees, for instance, commit suicide to protect their hive. Bees attack those who try to enter the hive, to destroy their hive and by stinging him, they lose the lower part of their abdomen and die.
Now, such behavior is completely incompatible at first sight with any theory of evolution, because the bee who engages in this behavior by doing this has no descendants, unless there were offspring before, then we would exclude mating habits of bees. Any creature engaging in this type of suicidal behavior at first sight, and there are cases among mammals, seems completely at odds with classical Darwinism. And this is very widespread behavior, it is found among all the insects of the so called Hymenoptera category. We found among bees, among ants, among termites. Such altruistic behavior we have to use.
People speak of biological altruism because it’s so embarrassing. Such biological altruism is present in mammals as well, has been found among shrimp. It is a very big problem for the theory of evolution, because the theory of evolution rests on a vision of the animal reign as red in tooth and claw. This is a traditional Judeo-Christian view of the beast. The beast is red in tooth and claw and has no restraint.
This is still present in the background of the Western reading of nature in biology. And there have been powerful critiques of the modern synthesis by intellectual heavyweights, by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who is the founder of the modern theory of systems, and by Karl Popper, who is perhaps, was perhaps the foremost philosopher of science of the twentieth century. And the critiques as you will see are heavy handed. Popper says Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical program. This caused a furor when Popper said it in 1976, and he had to qualify his statement.
My solution was that the doctrine of natural selection is the most successful metaphysical research program. And he feels that in his later work, the theory of evolution is testable, because this was a great critique Popper addressed to the theory of evolution and to the modern synthesis. The criterion for a scientific theory according to Popper is what is known as falsifiability. Is the theory one which can be proven false? Can one envision a situation where it could be proven false?
If one can, it’s a scientific theory. If one can’t, it is not. For instance, if you take Darwinism, Popper’s critique would be that it is always possible after the fact, ad post hoc, to say, well, this strand of the species have this in this feature, because they presented an evolutionary advantage. But it is unfalsifiable, it cannot be proven false, because we have no way of going back in the past testing. For instance, many evolutionary biologists say that we are the naked ape, we have no hair, because this was an adaptation to running in the African Savannah in the heat.
For Popper this is not a scientific theory. It is a pure theory, which is unverifiable and it would beg the immediate rejoinder if it was such a beneficial adaptation. Why is it the case that none of the great apes in Africa is naked? Neither are the chimpanzees, nor the baboons, nor the gorillas. So, if it was an adaptation to the conditions of savannah, why do the apes in the savannah at present have hair?
So what we see, and that was I think Popper’s main thrust, is that Darwinism is one of those theories which can justify everything, but which is very difficult to test. And Ludwig von Bertalanffy goes much further and says, if selection is taken as an axiomatic a priori principle, it is always possible to make it work in any special case. I think that the fact that the theory is so vague, so insufficiently verifiable and so far from the criteria, otherwise applied in hard science has become a dogma, can only be explained on sociological grounds. Society and science have been so steeped in the ideas of mechanism, utilitarianism and the economic concept of free competition, that instead of God, selection was enthroned as ultimate reality. Keep in mind that this was one of the foremost Austrian biologists of his age.
Now what is not being said here is that evolution does not occur. Darwin himself acknowledged it and what is not being said either is that Darwinism’s limited position is unacceptable. But what is being criticized is the theory of evolution of the modern synthesis as a general account for all biological change without any exception. Criticized because in that capacity it is unverifiable. Now it is that foundation which is taken for granted in popular culture nowadays, and it is that which leads us to the topic of today’s talk, I’m sorry this was a very long introduction, which is sociobiology, the extension of the modern synthesis or Darwinism to behavior.
So, what is sociobiology? Sociobiology is the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior. But that is a bit of an under statement. Wilson’s project, which was initiated in 1975, in a book which caused a furor, a scandal, is much more far reaching than that.
Wilson’s project and the project of many sociobiologists is to provide an almost all encompassing account of basic human behavior in the light of evolutionarily acquired traits. Now lip service is paid to culture as a means of transmission of behavior, but it is just that it is lip service. And this has permeated popular culture. If you go on Yahoo, you go on BBC, you check whatever Internet site, you will have every day some snippet of news, biologists have established that. Recently there was this was a case.
Rape is a sociobiological adaptation to a certain environmental setting and presents advantages. Biologists have established that the anger fathers feel towards the offspring which their wives had from their first marriage, is actually a sociobiological adaptation, which is attested in lions, is a means of evacuating genetic code, which is not one’s own and which one would have to purvey for the maintenance of. Now this is presented as received truth and it permeates popular culture. It is not value neutral to put it mildly. Now we saw already with Darwinism that in Darwin’s own time Darwinism was invoked by the far right, I mean Spencer was definitely not a moderate, to justify what was known as the period of social Darwinism and to justify colonialism.
Darwinism was taken on board quite easily by the British Empire, because within Darwinism one could quite easily see a process of evolution which led from man all the way up to the British Victorian gentleman, which was the pinnacle of evolution. And then the British Victorian gentleman’s role was to transmit British Victorian values to the rest of the world. Now this was dismissed, but these ideas have lurked in the background and they were resurrected by Wilson, whose background is interesting. Wilson, unlike many who have criticized sociobiology, like Frans de Waal, specialized in insects, where indeed sociobiological behavior is quite striking. And then I would like to show you a quote from the last, the infamous last chapter of Wilson’s Sociobiology.
This is a chapter which led to what came to be known as the Darwin Wars. It became that bad. It’s a chapter in which Wilson suggested that all the humanities be rooted in biology, that ethics be seen purely as manifestation of behavior which has a biologically adaptive edge. Now, Wilson says scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologists. And Wilson proposes immutable ethics in function of the age of the participant. It should be a selective advantage to young children to be self centered.
Adolescents should be more than tightly bound by age peer bonds within their own sex. Finally, the moral standards of individuals during the early phases of colony growth should differ in many details from those of individuals at demographic equilibrium or during episodes of overpopulation. This sounds quite innocent. What is being said is that there are different moral standards for societies which are growing, stable and decaying. We all know the usage which was made of this type of theory in history.
So, sociobiology is intellectually very interesting, but it is morally very loaded, very loaded, and as we will see throughout this talk today, the data on which sociobiology is built is very flimsy. It is so flimsy that Stephen J. Gould, who was professor of zoology at Harvard, called sociobiology a pseudoscience. And he actually referred to sociobiological justifications of animal behavior as narratives, stories. He actually entitled his famous article in The New Yorker, which is in your bibliography, The Art of Storytelling.
So, this is something we have to be aware of precisely because so much of this is taken for granted by popular culture. And then with your agreement, I would propose that we take a fifteen minute tea break. I will reassure you that the second part of the conference, as usual, will be easier than the first part. Thank you very much.