The Descent of the Caveman Conservative

Natural selection presupposes violent competition for resources and reproductive access. But the final outcome of this war of all against all is the development of increasingly complex organisms with increasingly malleable behavior. We humans occupy the current zenith of this still upwardly mobile trend.

The moral: intense, cut-throat competition among individuals leads to all the best of what life has to offer.

By analogy, individuals competing against each other in a free market lead to the development and sustenance of a complex economy. Therefore, if we want to keep our complex economy healthy, we should cultivate selfishness and competitiveness in ourselves. Actually caring about anyone who has difficulty competing, for whatever reason, in this view, is horribly misguided.

At the same time, we have to forgo focusing on those who have one or another disadvantage because in attending to them, in trying to help them, we're actually inculcating in them a sense of entitlement. We're spoiling them. It's better for everyone if we agree to act only on our own behalves--as individuals. After all, that's how a complex, functioning economy evolves.

And cultivating selfishness in ourselves shouldn't be too difficult because looking after our own and our close relatives' interests is what made us the most advanced species on the planet. That's the argument anyway.

This brand of social darwinism relies on what's called the Naturalistic Fallacy, the conviction that we ought to behave in a certain way simply because doing so is natural. But, more importantly, it relies on a confusion of the process or mechanism of evolution with its products. It is possible for a species that at least in some circumstances does not behave selfishly or cruelly to emerge even from the most intense competition and natural selection. Selfish genes, in other words, don't always and necessarily mean selfish individuals.

The possibilities for the evolution of cooperation and altruism are only just coming to light, primarily through the work of David Sloan Wilson, Eliot Sober, and Robert Axelrod. "Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary." This quote from a paper written by D.S. Wilsion in collaboration with E.O. Wilson catches the gist of the new insights, and it is clear how intergroup competition is reflected in human tribalism.

One of the key mechanisms in the evolution of altruism is strong reciprocity, which means that we don't just track our own interactions with specific members of our group but also pay close attention to how those individuals treat other people they have dealings with. Humans get pissed not just when someone cheats them specifically, but when someone cheats anyone.

William Flesch sees in strong reciprocity the key to understanding human interest in fictional narrative. His work was my introduction to the game theory models of cooperation, but the most jaw-dropping evidence I've seen for strong reciprocity is from research with children. Karen Wynn has done studies showing that infants, long before they even learn to talk, show a fondness for stuffed animals who have been made to perform cooperative acts by researchers over those who have been made to act selfishly. Even when the helpful or hindering characters are wooden blocks with simple eyes, kids still prefer the helpers as toys. (Check out this video clip from PBS's show "The Human Spark.")

In a social environment where nearly everyone is born predisposed to favor others who demonstrate altruistic behavior, selfishness becomes nonadaptive. And that, contra the caveman conservatives who tout social darwinism, appears to be the course our evolution took. In consolation to those who trumpet selfishness and competition, this lesson in biology jives much better with Christianity, at least the part of it inspired by the actual teachings of Jesus, who was, after all, a long-haired liberal.

Pseudoscience, Inc.

Last week at a large family gathering I had a chance to talk politics with several of my aunts and uncles. A few of them work in the health care industry, and one of them is from Thailand, having met her husband, my dad’s brother, while he was working there for the State Department. That uncle, a humanist liberal, applied to his position after a stint with the Peace Corps. It was an interesting and knowledgeable and diverse group. But the most interesting exchanges I had that night were with my dad’s youngest brother, the guy who my brothers and I know as the “cool uncle.” Knowing that he’s a conservative—he once gave my grandma an Ann Coulter book for Christmas—I asked him if he was a republican or a libertarian. “I believe government should just stay out of people’s lives,” was his reply.

This uncle has a bachelor’s degree from IU, works in management at a shipping and receiving company, and substitute teaches. He once tutored me in algebra—very effectively. He’s intelligent and, his fondness for Coulter notwithstanding, well informed. At one point in our conversation, I said that I come across a lot of important ideas and arguments while reading libertarian blogs (like reason.com) but that they discredit themselves in my mind by buying into global warming denialism, so much so that it’s hard for me to take anything else they say or write seriously. I had high hopes at this point that he would reconcile the issue for me, but it turns out that he too is a denialist.

I recently had the intro comp students I teach read the first chapter of Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World, in which he uses an encounter with an intelligent and well-read cab driver, whom he calls Mr. Buckley, as a launch pad for his ruminations on the failure of our education system and media to hit the mark when it comes to science while far too often drifting off into the space of fantasy. “A bright and curious person who relies entirely on popular culture to be informed about something like Atlantis,” Sagan writes, “is hundreds or thousands of times more likely to come upon a fable treated uncritically than a sober and balanced assessment” (5).

When it comes to matters of more economic consequence than lost cities and healing crystals, the science is in for even more abuse. As Sagan reports in what may be the most important chapter of the most important book I’ve ever read, “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,”

“A 1971 internal report of the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation lists as a corporate objective ‘to set aside in the minds of millions the false conviction that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases; a conviction based on fanatical assumptions, fallacious rumors, unsupported claims and the unscientific statements and conjectures of publicity-seeking opportunists” (217).

Compare this to a memo written by PR guru Frank Luntz to Republican members of Congress: “The scientific debate is closing (against us) but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science…Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming in the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.” Wrapping up the memo, Luntz strikes an astoundingly cynical and ominous note: “The most important principle in any discussion of global warming is your commitment to sound science” (Reported in Elizabeth Kohlbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe, p. 165)

Paleontologist Tim Flannery, in his book The Weather Makers, reports on how fifty corporations whose bottom line depends on the continued use of fossil fuel pooled their money together in 1989 to form a lobbying group called the Global Climate Coalition. Their mission statement: “cast doubt on the theory of global warming” (242). The GCC spent $60 million dollars before disbanding after eleven years. But that was only the beginning of the denialists’ PR bonanza.

And this is déjà vu all over again. Here is Sagan again:
“When the first work was published in the scientific literature in 1953 showing that the substances in cigarette smoke when painted on the backs of rodents produce malignancies, the response of the six major tobacco companies was to initiate a public relations campaign to impugn the research, sponsored by the Sloan Kettering Foundation. This is similar to what the Du Pont Corporation did when the first research was published in 1974 showing that their Freon product attacks the protective ozone layer. There are many other examples” (217). BPA anyone?

By now it should be clear to everyone following the debate that the consensus Luntz was referring to has long since been reached. Not a single scientific organization refutes the reality or the seriousness of the threat of human-induced global warming. The debate is not among scientists—with a few exceptions; it is science after all—but between scientists and the message machine of the fossil fuel industry, who have the will and wherewithal to invest sums that dwarf the combined net worth of Al Gore and Maurice Strong. In America today, we’re dealing with a mediascape where money controls the message—and disturbingly often, our minds too.

As for the substance of my uncle’s argument—the points he made are disconcerting evidence of the power PR has to determine what we believe. Even this intelligent and well read man rolled out the standard denialist boilerplate. I won’t refute his arguments here, as they’ve been ably and amply refuted elsewhere, most accessibly by Peter Sinclair at Climate Denial Crock of the Week. (Concerned that Sinclair's own funding information is not detailed on his site, I emailed him about it. It turns out he gets no funding, from anyone.)

Climate change is caused by natural cycles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrKfz8NjEzU
and: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0HGFSUx2a8&feature=related

Climate scientists tried to scare us in the 70’s with the threat of global cooling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB3S0fnOr0M

CO2 doesn’t drive temperature:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWJeqgG3Tl8
(In response to my refutation of this point, that it’s a straw man, my uncle claimed that Al Gore makes that specific argument. I don’t know if he does or not, and don’t really care. Al Gore is not a climate scientist.)

As for the old canard that volcanoes release more CO2 that humans have in all of history: the best estimates are that volcanoes emit 145-255 million tons a year on average compared to 30 billion tons for human activities. So it's not even close.

Sagan's point is not, as many of my students thought, that we are all ignorant or scientifically illiterate, but rather that it's impossible to distinguish between real science and pseudoscience without researching the provenance of the facts and arguments. Unfortunately, fossil fuel corporations don't properly label their PR products. And who has the time to research all the claims?

Macaque on Crack

I remember growing up in the 80's as the youngest of three boys being raised by mom who was much in thrall to Ronald Reagan. To this day, she is given to making claims like, "A lot of homeless people live like that because they want to."

Another claim I frequently heard was that you couldn't help homeless people because if you gave them any money they would just spend it on booze. To her credit, though, my mom never ventured into the realm of dismissive arguments about racial inequality--mostly, I assume, because I was too ignorant as a kid to know it was a problem I should ask about.

Just today I signed onto my facebook page and saw that one of my friends had joined a group called Making Drug Tests Required to Get Welfare. I'm sure that a large percentage of people receiving welfare are in fact addicted to one drug or another, and so making them take a test would certainly mean less of our public treasure getting doled out to these supposedly "undeserving" people. But this very notion of deserving assumes a type of supernatural rising above material circumstances that simply, well, doesn't occur in nature. We have rather another manifestation of the tragically naive notion of free will that lies at the heart of conservative thinking.

According to this dualist view (spirit controls body), people choose to experiment with drugs or not, and the outcome of those experiments is purely a matter of personal responsibility. Moreover, if you're going to choose to get hooked on drugs, then you've forfeited any right you had to a helping hand.

If this view really were true, it would be a great comfort to those of us who are already comfortably well off. Because it's undeniable that poor people have a lot more problems with addiction than middle or upper class people do, if addiction were purely a matter of personal choice, then we could dismiss their plight as resulting from their own bad decisions. Indeed, this is the standard conservative thinking.

A 2002 study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience provides a much more realistic model for conceptualizing the relationship between social status and addiction. The researchers gave individually housed macaques access to cocaine and did PET scans of their brains to monitor the effects. They then released the monkeys into a common space, which prompted them to begin competing for status. What they found once a hierarchy had been established was that dominant monkeys showed an increase in the amount of dopamine receptors in their brains, while subordinate monkeys showed no change.

How this difference in dopamine receptors manifested itself in the animals' behavior is that the dominant monkeys ceased administering cocaine to themselves, while the subordinate ones were more likely to become addicted.

Insisting that welfare recipients take drug tests is simply further disadvantaging the already disadvantaged. A better idea is to favor policies that reduce income and wealth inequalities. Providing equal access to quality education and health care wouldn't hurt either.

Every Man for Himself: Nightmare or Wet Dream

"2011: Obama's Coup Fails" is an online video game purporting to represent the cataclysmic fallout from all the conspiracies the president is engaging our government in. The story begins when, in response to losing control of Congress, Obama discards the U.S. Constitution and with the help of Calderon and Harper establishes "The North American People's Union." The evil lord then outlaws gun ownership--and that's when the trouble starts.

You are now the only hope for freedom. So you take up your gun and fight back.

Now, there is a certain type of person for whom uttering the phrase "survival of the fittest" produces an erection. Civilization collapsing, bad guys to be shot--game fucking on!

I wonder as I read the setup for the game how much the people behind the game enjoy the thought that the scenario they're describing is actually possible (even though it's absurdly far-fetched). Seems to me like they would like nothing in the world better than to be proven right.

Yee-haw!