Researching this portion of the dissertation acquainted me with the writings of Tim Lewens, philosophy professor at the HPS department in the University of Cambridge. He became my MPhil supervisor when I went there to further my graduate studies (2016-2017). One more main part to go before the conclusion.

4. Assessing the Levels of Certainty Required for Science

The literature on the broad topic of evolutionary ethics is vast. The debates concerning the legitimacy of the enterprise stretch back to assessing the levels of certainty required for the deliverances of the human sciences to be considered acceptable, and the overall legitimacy of the MES on which much of evolutionary ethics builds. Accordingly, before exploring evolutionary ethics in detail, this section will assess the nature of good science and the debates about the legitimacy of the MES. Concerning the first, it seeks to show that, because the standards of robustness in the evolutionary (and earth) sciences are necessarily lower than in the pure sciences due to their complexity, theology, as with public policy, need not be committed to assessing them with unrealistically high standards. Concerning the second, it seeks to show that while some of the early criticisms of the MES have been on point, especially facets of Lynn Margulis’ critique, much of it has since been incorporated into the paradigm and, as the next section will show, is well represented in the contemporary work on evolutionary ethics.

Kitcher, in his early critique of “pop-sociobiology”, writes that ‘when scientific claims bear on matters of social policy, the standards of evidence and of self-criticism must be extremely high’ (1985: 3). He qualifies his assertion by noting that popular criticisms of sociobiology from falsifiability criteria are red-herrings which obscure rather than illuminate the methodological issues at stake (1985: 59). This is because the demarcation principle is itself problematic and does not normally apply to the methodological canons of evolutionary theory either. However, Kitcher argues that the corresponding claim that sociobiology should have the right not to be judged any stricter than the rest of evolutionary science is mistaken because ‘equal rights presuppose equal duties. […Therefore,] failure to conform to inappropriate methodological standards is not an automatic guarantee of scientific legitimacy’ (1985: 121). He argues that the problems that beset evolutionary biologists are writ large with sociobiological inquiries – exponentially more so when humans are the target of study – and for these reasons does not think that the sociobiological work at the time could deliver anything more than “just so” stories (1985: 121-125). He writes that ‘we know too little about genetics, too little about development, and too little about the mechanisms of behaviour to elaborate a convincing set of rival evolutionary hypotheses’ (1985: 123). If, however, the general sociobiological project has been to trace adaptive behavioural changes in animal populational profiles, then attention to development and other relevant constraints will not feature in it. [49] This concern will be assessed in the next section.

More recently, however, some philosophers have suggested that concerning real-world application, including public policy, the deliverances of science, in general, do not require comparably high standards of certainty. Ken Binmore, in his book forwarding a theory of natural justice based on an integration of evolutionary game theory with John Rawls’ theories of justice, argues that ‘nobody complains when cosmologists speculate that most of the universe consists of dark energy and matter of which we have no direct evidence at all. So why should similar theorizing be forbidden when studying morality?’ (2005: 2) Further on, when engaging with kin selection and the problems that arise from the uneven relationship between haplodiploidy and eusociality, he writes that ‘critics seize on such admissions of ignorance as an excuse to accuse sociobiologists of telling just-so stories, but I think their criticisms simply reveal a failure to understand how science works’ (Binmore 2005: 108). For him, then, equal rights do not pre-suppose equal duties, and the human sciences in all of their messiness should not be held to a different standard simply because they may have policymaking implications.

Tim Lewens has also suggested that it is in the nature of science to make unrealistic idealisations ‘to help us understand more complex real-world events’ (2015a: 51). He agrees with Ulrich Beck that ‘an ethos of scientific purity can have disastrous consequences if carried over to the practical domain of policy’ (2015a: 166). For example, many scientists committed to the high standards that their discipline normally requires are unwilling to assert a link ‘between chemicals and health risks unless they are proven to a high degree of certainty’, which, instead of leading to positive outcomes, leads instead to prolonged contamination and pollution, much to the detriment of the general public (2015a: 166). He notes that ‘legitimate scientific concerns over evidential reliability must give way when scientific research is put to work in policy’. This is because ‘scientific policy committees […] are not primarily concerned with curating a slowly expanding body of reliable information. Instead, their own immediate concerns lie with the health and safety of their citizens’. Consequently, ‘the requirements of timely action demand that policy-makers sometimes act on the basis of poorly designed studies, and flawed pieces of research. Slipshod methods do not inevitably produce misleading results’ (Lewens 2015a: 167). [50] In this regard, Lewens’ views are the opposite of Kitcher’s. While Lewen’s arguments are not directed at the human evolutionary sciences, some researchers’ comments indicate that they should. Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown note that

in today’s world of international terrorism, when militant extremists are able to inspire ordinary people to go to war to sacrifice themselves, with a resultant loss of thousands of lives and heightened tension between communities, it has become imperative that researchers comprehend what it is that makes people behave in this manner’ (2002: 298).

The same can be said for the phenomena of modern slavery, child abuse, non-violent forms of religious extremisms which can nevertheless impose unnecessary suffering in the extreme, and a host of other human centred malaises.

Consequently, theology’s distinctly relevant location within the nexus of religious belief, an area with a deep evolutionary heritage in humans, should make it just as open to engaging with these (perpetually) ongoing inquiries to gain a deeper self-understanding for the benefit of its adherents, as governments are to ongoing health and safety research for the benefit of society, even if aspects of the scientific consensus are liable to shift. The next section will support the above thesis by showing that the cumulative work on evolutionary ethics is largely consistent and has likely reached a critical mass in which some of its deliverances about human nature will not be significantly altered, and will give a few preliminary examples of how these principles can be appropriated for theology. However, the rest of this section will first engage with objections directed at the MES and the explanatory commitments of evolutionary science.

The MES had a genesis when the newly created population genetics was used by R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and Seawall Wright to unite Mendelian genetics with natural selection in the first half of the 20th century (Rheinberger, Müller-Wille 2008: 6). This was further expanded in the 1940s with the work of Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, and Julian S. Huxley (2008: 12), such that by the 40s through the 70s, the re-establishment of Darwinian selectionist evolution placed adaptation as a central principle of change in many researchers’ minds (Grene, Depew 2004: 258-259). [51] This insight led to the formulation of certain methodologies in disciplines focused on animal and human behaviour, for example, optimality modelling in sociobiology, the gene’s eye perspective in Dawkins’ approach, the concept of adaptive lag in the Santa Barbara school of evolutionary psychology, and selectionist interpretations of cultural change in cultural evolutionary theory. Unsurprisingly, this hardening of the “adaptationist” programme dissatisfied some researchers. In a famous paper instigated by Wilson’s Sociobiology, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin set adaptation against pluralism and argued that researchers working in the “adaptationist” paradigm could not account for selection being ‘constrained by a range of developmental and architectural factors, [reflecting] accidents of history as much as ecological demands’ (Godfrey-Smith, Wilkins 2008: 186). [52] Gould also forwarded Punctuated Equilibria (PE) with Niles Eldredge as an alternative to what they perceived to be the problematic emphasis on gradualism in the MES (Bowler 1983: 336-337). [53] The extent to which their critique reflected a widespread deficit in the discipline of which its practitioners were ignorant is at the least controversial. [54] It may be most judicious to say that their criticisms brought to attention areas of concern that other evolutionary biologists already knew about and were able to find answers or reasonable solutions to within the confines of their methodological framework. [55]

For example, Dennett and Miller point out that the contrast between PE and the phyletic gradualism predicted by the MES dissolves when the time-scales are clarified (Miller 2007: 112-118; Dennett 1995: 282-298). In other words, ‘those fits and starts [in the morphological graph] that made punctuated equilibrium seem so radical were nothing more than the compression of Darwin’s sketch into the hard rock reality from which the fossil record is drawn’ (Miller 2007: 118). Dennett concludes by writing that ‘at some level of magnification, any evolutionary ramp must look like a staircase’ (1995: 284). Concerning adaptation in particular, the metaphor of the adaptive landscape similarly lends itself to varying degrees of adaptive significance at different grains of resolution:

At a fine grain of resolution, when there are few peaks in the adaptive landscape, most observed populations may be on or near these peaks. Adaptationism is appropriate at this resolution. If we “zoom out” […] the situation changes. At a very coarse grain of resolution, much of morphospace is empty and constraints often explain why certain regions remain unexplored by biological evolution. Adaptationism is inappropriate at this resolution (Orzack, Forber 2012). [56]

It seems therefore that paying attention to the grain of resolution at which local adaptive hypotheses can be reasonably judged to be true is almost enough to resolve Gould and Lewontin’s objections. This suggests that the population thinking characteristic of sociobiology and cultural evolutionary theory – but not evolutionary psychology – escapes these objections. Dennett furthers this case by arguing that setting up pluralist explanations in direct opposition to “adaptationist” explanations is an unhelpful simplification. Good “adaptationist” thinking already incorporates mitigating factors, like developmental constraints, in its analysis. In fact, methodological adaptationism may be the best way to figure out where random fixation of genes, developmental constraints, and multiple adaptive peaks in the fitness landscape is at play (Dennett 1995: 232, 249, 257, 268-271, 278). Consequently, the elevation of “spandrels” and “exaptations” as diametrically opposed to the “adaptationist” programme is problematic because they address concerns that ‘have been routinely shunned by Darwinians ever since Darwin himself’ (Dennett 1995: 281, 274, 279). He goes on to argue that both Gould and Eldredge display implicit support for “adaptationist” reasoning, in the former’s explanation of why some cicadas ‘have reproductive years that are a prime number of years long’ and in the latter’s approval of Dan Fisher’s comparative work between the modern horseshoe crab with their Jurassic counterpart which is shot through with optimality assumptions (1995: 240). [57]

Another significant critique of the MES can be found in the work of Lynn Margulis. While she remains in the materialist camp, her writings on biology eschews the mechanical image for the physiological, which, in combination with her immersion in the history and philosophy of science, enabled her to formulate her Serial Endosymbiotic Theory (SET) – at first strongly criticized because of its contravention of the mechanisms of gradual mutation and selection stipulated by the MES, but the broad contours of which have since become accepted as revealed truth. [58] Her support and expansion of other closely related theories, including autopoiesis, Vladimir Vernadsky and James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, a recognition of the role of bacteria and the microbiome to human life and the support for “Aristotelian” teleological language in biology, evinces the core idea that the entire biosphere is intimately and inextricably inter-connected and cannot be easily delineated into, for example, organism and environment, or units of selection to be modelled on a strictly mechanical research program that she argues characterizes the MES. [59] However, she notes that none of these hypotheses contravene any laws in physics and chemistry. [60] She provides an example of living beings as ‘fractally repeating structures of matter, energy, and information, with a very long history’ (Margulis, Sagan 1995: 236; Margulis 1999: 158). [61] In this regard, her views are not that far from Dennett’s when he argues that evolution is ‘accomplished by brute, mechanical, algorithmic climbing, from the base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing’ (1995: 75). Consequently, some of her criticisms of the mechanical excesses of the early MES paradigm have contributed to reforms (but not revolutions) in the discipline. And, as will be narrated in the next section, the emphasis on evolutionary dynamics, cooperation, multi-level selection, emergence, increasing respect for developmental processes, and most crucially, a revival of “Aristotelian” teleology in the literature – which helps to connect evolutionary ethics with the “Aristotelian” virtue ethical model proposed in this dissertation – are consonant with her work. [62]

Accordingly, the impact of these debates has led many contemporary philosophers of biology and scientific researchers to clarify that “laws” in evolutionary science, like the Hardy-Weinberg law, cannot offer the same level of predictive certainty and explanatory scope as laws in a solid science like physics (Grene, Depew 2004: 264). Many philosophers, therefore, support a “semantic view of theories” whereby models and the laws they rely on are not falsified when reality fails to conform to them but are ‘merely declared inappropriate to the case at hand’ while maintaining their general utility elsewhere (Grene, Depew 2004: 265). [63] They also affirm that new data are subject to various incompatible interpretations, such as a gene-selectionist interpretation of the discovery of conserved Hox genes in vertebrates in the 1970s and shared regulatory genes in all metazoa in the 1990s, which otherwise strongly indicate that developmental changes are of higher significance in ontogeny then genes, an insight that spawned the field of evolutionary developmental biology, or Evo-devo (Grene, Depew 2004: 285; Amundson 2008: 248). [64] With these, and many progressive complications to gene selectionism, leading to the observation that ‘the gene is no longer to be seen as the unit of evolution, but rather as its late product, the eventual result of a long process of genomic condensation’, K. C. Waters suggests that the successes of the gene-centred view came from its epistemological rather than ontological grounding (Rheinberger, Muller Wille 2008: 13, 15, 17-18). [65]

Segerstrale has similarly suggested that the controversies surrounding Sociobiology can be understood to stem from different conceptions of good science. She argues that while individuals like Gould, Lewontin, and Eldredge were ontological truth seekers who were looking for the true forces of evolution, others like Wilson and Dawkins sought heuristic principles and mechanisms that had explanatory success quite apart from ontological concerns (Segerstrale 2000: 42, 50-51, 130, 326). Similarly, Robert Brandon, echoing Karl Popper’s later views on the subject, suggests that ‘the theory of natural selection should not be viewed as a body of general laws, but as the prescription of a research program’ (Rosenberg, Bouchard 2010). [66] A similar analogy can be made when extending the inquiry into evolutionary ethics. Many of these methods employ heuristic models that offer explanatory value in certain restricted parameters and are not an attempt to provide a complete ontological description of all evolutionary phenomena related to morality and ethics. However, this does not automatically mean that the best work on evolutionary ethics is methodologically unproblematic (Segerstrale 2000: 326). Accordingly, the next section will explore these same concerns in certain prominent strands of the broad research program, endeavouring to show that while many of these approaches are contingent and limited in themselves, together they can make a case for the broad legitimacy of their heuristic value and application to theological thinking.

Endnotes

• 49 (Dennett 1995: 237)
• 50 See also (Clayton 2013: 352)
• 51 See (Williams 1966)
• 52 See (Gould, Lewontin 1979)
• 53 See (Eldredge, Gould 1972)
• 54 See (Godfrey-Smith, Wilkins 2008), (Amundson 2008) and (Segerstrale 2000)
• 55 See (Godfrey-Smith, Wilkins 2008: 189).
• 56 See also (Godfrey-Smith, Wilkins 2008: 196-198)
• 57 See (Gould 1977) and (Eldredge 1983)
• 58 See (Margulis, Sagan 1995: 114-115, 133), (Margulis, Sagan 1997: 37; 39-40, 42, 48-49, 93, 101, 103-104, 110, 192-93, 270-271, 298), (Margulis 1999: 2, 7-9, 11, 26, 41, 55, 108), (Cox, Cohen 2015: 108-110); Margulis critique of the MES can be encapsulated by Kuhn’s remarks in (Kuhn 1962: 137), for a better understanding of her materialism see also (Bowler 1983: 78), (Margulis Sagan, 1995: 217)
• 59 See (Margulis, Sagan 1995: 9, 14, 17-20, 23, 48-50, 97, 120, 164, 182, 238, 240), (Margulis, Sagan 1997: 61-62, 78, 80, 82, 92, 98-99, 102, 145-146, 269), (Margulis 1999: 150, 154)
• 60 For some misunderstandings of these theories, see (Binmore 2005: 50), (Harrison 1998: 272)
• 61 Her views echo Michael Polanyi’s. See (Pearcy, Thaxton 1994: 233-236)
• 62 See for example (Okasha 2008: 152)
• 63 See (Beatty 2006)
• 64 See also (Griffiths 2008: 408)
• 65 (Waters 2004), see also (Okasha 2008: 141, 143-144)
• 66 See (Brandon 1990)