1. Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences Special Publication;RD Alexander,1977
2. For example, E. O. Wilson, in his massive and influential 1975 volume, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975) defines sociobiology as “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior.” But this is not a new kind of study in biology. Moreover, the adjective “biological” when applied to behavior by social scientists all too often means “genetic,” and it often is used explicitly to mean “other than social” in efforts to account for the ontogeny of behavior. Further, although Wilson says that “the organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA” and gives credit to W. D. Hamilton’s (1964) theory of inclusive-fitness-maximizing (kin selection) (i.e., that genetic reproduction can be enhanced by helping nondescendant as well as descendant relatives) in explaining altruism, in my opinion he muddles the question of group selection which is crucial to understanding altruism.
3. To make matters worse he refers to the seminal arguments of George C. Williams in Adaptation and Natural Selection (Princeton, N.J.:̇ Princeton University Press, 1966) that selection is highly unlikely to be effective above the level of the parent and its offspring (regarded by many as responsible for the entire revolution) as Williams’ “fallacy”! In effect, Wilson reintroduced genes into the formula, Genes plus Environment Yield Phenotype (including behavior), without clearly telling the reader why this can now be done satisfactorily; he persists in using the phrase “genetically determined” when referring to human behavior (even, sometimes, without specifying that he is referring to differences in behavior); and he gives the impression that the main change is simply a massive accumulation of very relevant data from field studies (later, in “Animal and Human Sociobiology,” in The Changing Scenes in the Natural Sciences 1776–1976, pp. 273–81, he actually says this). But it is not true: A massive refinement of theory reoriented the study of behavior. It may be difficult for outsiders to understand from accounts like Wilson’s what is really new in evolutionary biology, and why it is important. The revolution was caused by the arguments of Williams and Hamilton, italicized above.
4. Gunther Stent, in a critical review of Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) recently published in the Hastings Center Report, has missed the point, in his distinction between deliberate and nondeliberate altruism, that “intent” is a proximate mechanism; a paradoxical aspect of its molding to contribute to ultimate function is that not all goals are conscious. This is not to suggest that “intent” is a trivial aspect of behavior or that it is not important to distinguish intentional and unintentional altruism and selfishness or kindness and cruelty. After all, intent is a central aspect of the definition of such terms, demonstrating its importance. It is crucial to ask why intent is so important to us, when it would seem that consequences are what count. The reason, I believe, is that intent has consequences outside the immediate circumstances. I think we use intent to enable us to predict about events additional to the ones in which we are immediately involved, just as we use information about whether associates follow the rules or play fair in trivial circumstances, or in games, to determine whether we should interact with them in more serious matters. We actually believe that he who is cruel or kind to others—or to animals, children, and other vulnerable beings—is likely to be cruel or kind to us as well. We are positive toward someone who intends to be altruistic for the same reason that we are negative toward someone who intends to be cruel: He may do it to us. Stent also fails to grasp the all-important distinction, in evolutionary arguments, between incidental effects and evolved functions (well explained by Williams in Adaptation and Natural Selection). Stent’s contention that evolutionary theory is not predictive is serious, not because it is true, but because he echoes a misconception prevalent among those accustomed to determining the nature of scientific predictiveness from theories dealing with nonliving phenomena. Stent, like some others, regards “the concept of ‘fitness’ [as] the Achilles’ heel of Darwinism, for which a substitute has to be found if natural selection is to be upgraded from the status of a retrodictive historical theory to that of a predictive scientific theory.” He acknowledges that “fully predictive evolutionary analyses are available” for “bounded situations in which the context can be completely specified,” such as “the development of a drug-resistant bacterial strain from a drug-sensitive strain in a culture medium containing that drug.” But he does not regard such predictions as adequate to give evolution “full standing as a theory in the natural sciences.” He believes that what is needed is “some concept formally equivalent to fitness, but descriptive of an intrinsic quality.” He remarks that “Dawkins evidently hit upon selfishness as a substitute for fitness.” Maybe he did. But I would recommend to anyone interested in these questions (including both Dawkins and Stent) that they begin with Darwin, not Dawkins.
5. The following is only one of his several grand challenges to falsification (C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species. A Fascimile of the First Edition with an Introduction by Ernst Mayr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 201, 1st ed., 1859. If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species has been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection. Fitness is a relative concept, and it has no significance except in the environment of the organism. There is no such thing as absolute fitness, except in some trivial formulations of population genetics. Unlike nonliving materials, living organisms actively compete, and their phe-notypes, by definition, represent evolved capabilities to adjust in the face of particular kinds of competition. This does not mean that some kind of conceptual barrier to predictiveness is inherent in either an evolutionary theory based on fitness or the nature of living organisms. It only means that predictions about the evolution of life will be more difficult than predictions about nonliving phenomena, and that Stent’s notion of an intrinsic quality equivalent to fitness and independent of immediate circumstances is irrelevant. There are no surprises in this for anyone who has truly considered the relative complexities of the aspects of the living and nonliving universe so far available to us. One invariably predicts in what Stent calls “bounded situations.” There are no theories which predict in the absence of assumptions. The only question is whether or not the predictions are useful in analyzing the phenomena under study. Stent may have developed his notion that evolution is not predictive partly from remarks by prominent evolutionists like Ernst Mayr and George G. Simpson to that effect; I have heard their statements cited to support such arguments. But Mayr and Simpson meant to refer to macroevolution, or the long-term patterning of life forms across geological time, which is essentially nonpredictive because we cannot reconstruct extinct enviroments in sufficient detail to understand the precise nature of adaptive change by natural selection that occurred prehistorically. This does not mean, however, that we cannot predict very extensively and with great accuracy about life from the assumption that the traits of extant organisms are the cumulative results of the microevolutionary process, guided chiefly by natural selection. The philosopher who wishes to understand how this is done ought to go to the current literature of evolutionary biology and not run the risk of generalizing from what he gratuitously refers to as a ‘‘vulgar popularization” by a mere “thirty-six-year-old student of animal behavior, [who] teaches at Oxford, and... seems to have published only one sociobiological paper...”