Darwinism, Morality, and Evolutionary Thinking

The problem with Darwinist conceptions of morality and altruism

Back when I was at university and still firmly entrenched in materialist-Darwinist thinking, I was nevertheless very interested in morality and whether there might be anything positive to say about it. For example, I read Kenneth Binmore’s game-theoretical approach, which argues that we should turn morality into a science, studying it from a functionalist perspective, looking at stable evolutionary equilibria, and so on.¹

In hindsight, I can honestly say that this kind of materialist thinking about morality has seriously messed with my life. After all, if all you can say about morality is that it might create an arbitrary equilibrium for the survival of the species, tribe, or whatever, then why bother? Morality becomes relative.

Worse, this kind of thinking implies the idea that all life is about is survival, and gaining an advantage over others. This is so because in that picture, morality is merely a secondary effect of the drive to reproduce and survive as a society, or species. So why, then, as an individual, should I put in the hard work of growing as a moral being? These implications, despite all attempts to show otherwise, are irresistible, and eventually will sink in, with all that this entails.

The result is that you close yourself off from the realm of the sacred.

I know that some people dispute this. But my own experience shows otherwise. This kind of philosophy clearly had arrested my growth at the time and sent me on a downward spiral for years to come. From what I’ve read and heard, many others have had a similar experience.

Survival is Merely a Condition

The main error the proponents of a Darwinist, “scientific” explanation of morality seem to commit, is that they trace morality exclusively to the supposed struggle for survival and its history. However, I would argue it’s rather that our morality must obviously be compatible with the survival of the species. But this doesn’t mean it is driven or created by it.

If we didn’t love our children, for example, or promoted suicide as a virtue, we simply wouldn’t be here. Whatever our purpose is, whatever is going on, it couldn’t be fulfilled without our species surviving in one form or another. In other words, survival and reproduction are merely necessary conditions for everything else. But this doesn’t mean at all that this “everything else” doesn’t exist, and indeed might not be of much greater importance.

It’s like looking at a car and noticing that, obviously, one feature of it is that it doesn’t fall apart. Should we conclude, then, that this is its main feature, its very purpose, the thing that drove its development? Of course not. It’s merely a necessary condition, and a very obvious and uninteresting one at that, for the car’s real purpose: transportation.²

Similarly, the fact that morality needs to be compatible with the survival of the species doesn’t tell us anything about its real purpose, and not much about its content. Loving our children and neighbors, for example, might be much better understood as an opportunity and invitation to learn about love, to grow in love, and to intuit the deeper cosmic order than as a mere means to survive as a tribe. But even if this particular formulation should be wrong, the point is: we cannot look at survival and simply declare this to be the primary purpose of morality.

Another way of putting it is this: nobody in their right mind has ever denied that biological pressures are part of the human experience. We obviously have a sex drive and an instinct towards self-preservation, and we are often unconsciously driven by such biological features. In more archaic language: we are partly animal. You don’t need Darwinism at all to recognize that; it is common sense and always has been.

But we are not only animal creatures: we are also physical creatures, chemical creatures, conscious creatures, moral creatures. We live in the material, biological and higher, spiritual worlds simultaneously, as quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, inspired by Goethe, among many other thinkers, recognized.³

Which—again—means that our biological nature and our biological survival are just part of the picture, and we have no right to declare them to be the only, or even primary, driving force or reality.

Genuine Morality is Not (Only) About Survival

Going one step further, I think that from experience, we can safely say that morality is not about utilitarian ends, be it survival of the species, tribe, or whatever. (Although, again, it must be compatible with it.) Genuine moral acts involve a conscious struggle, an effort, and they have to do with doing the right thing in the face of resistance. Indeed, as countless thinkers (and common sense) had it, morality often involves going against utilitarian ends, and against biological programming.

Moral acts involve a leap of faith. They are about recognizing that even while they might seem dangerous, and we can never know, much less “calculate,” their consequences, they are still the right thing to do.

This means that not only are moral acts potentially life-threatening to the individual (which in itself is a huge problem for traditional evolutionary theory that produced a lot of smoke and mirrors to escape it), but that our conscious experience of genuinely acting morally hardly involves any deliberations about survival, be it individual or collective, at all.

Of course, you could counter that with the popular type of argument that at the end of the day, when it comes right down to it, moral acts are always about survival of the species, reproduction, gene copies, or whatever.

Well, this type of argument always works: it produces the famous “so-so stories” Darwinists are so in love with. You know the drill: a long time ago, in a place far away, back when we were all cavemen/tribes in deep-time, it was beneficial for the tribe to have heroes who self-sacrifice, and to delude themselves into thinking that there is genuine, sacred, non-utilitarian morality when in fact it was all about the tribe and the species, etc. pp. But not only are these stories mostly pulled out of thin air, but, again, they omit that everything in our history must be compatible with survival, not necessarily driven by survival. Given our experience of acting morally and of moral growth, it is much more logical to assume that people in the distant past experienced moral life similarly and simply felt certain actions are the right thing to do. To the degree that there is any objective morality, they had access to it in their own ways (or not).

The evolution of morality, in that picture, is about humanity’s attempt to get in touch with the moral realm, the realm of the sacred, under varying historical circumstances, engaging in the endless battle between good and evil that cuts right through the heart of the individual, society, and the species at large.

An Example from the Literature

To give an example of how poor some of the thinking about morality is in the Darwinian literature, consider the paper A mechanism for social selection and successful altruism by Herbert A. Simon (1990).⁴ He says:

In recent years there have been many attempts to derive theoretical answers to these questions from the first principles of natural selection (1). Most of the answers give a central, almost exclusive, role to self-interest, and, apart from altruism to close kin, leave little room for genuine, as distinct from reciprocal, altruism.

In other words, Darwinists have often denied the very existence of genuine altruism: human nature is essentially selfish, and what appears to be altruism is just motivated by self-interest. Please let the magnitude of that statement sink in. But fear not, because Herbert Simon gives us hope that maybe things are not so bad for genuine altruism after all:

… a mechanism can be described that selects for altruistic behavior well beyond altruism to close kin and beyond support from expected reciprocity or social enforcement. The mechanism will select for behavior that reduces the fitness of the altruist while increasing average fitness in the society.

Okay! And what is this mechanism?

Essentially, the theory accounts for altruism on the basis of the human tendency (here called docility) to learn from others (more accurately, the tendency to accept social influence) which is itself a product of natural selection. Because of the limits of human rationality, fitness can be enhanced by docility that induces individuals often to adopt culturally transmitted behaviors without independent evaluation of their contribution to personal fitness.

Oh my. Simon seems to suggest that altruism is basically drilled into individuals by society against their own interests and they are just too stupid to realize it—if they were more rational, they would see right through it and revert to their true, utterly selfish nature, happily maximizing their self-interest at all cost. Silly me: here I thought we’re talking about genuine altruism—altruistic behaviour caused not by stupidity, but by moral insight!

This idea of morality as something that is culturally imposed on the supposedly natural “savage state” is, of course, not new. David Stove, in his hilarious book Darwinian Fairytales, one glorious reductio-ad-absurdum of Darwinian thinking,⁵ calls it the “veneer theory”: under a thin guise of civilization, so the theory goes, lies the wild beast, our true nature. A notorious example of this kind of thinking is Freud’s theory of the id, the ego and the super-ego: the id contains our savage impulses, while the super-ego represents the father figure of civilization that keeps the id in check.

The problem with this “explanation” of altruism is that for this scenario to work, you need to explain where the “culture” or “society” or “father” comes from in the first place. After all, these are all just people (or groups of people) who would have to be altruistic themselves in order to impose altruistic cultural norms. In other words: why would anybody care to promote cultural norms for the benefit of the group instead of their own selfish interests? It doesn’t make sense in the Darwinian context.

Of course, you could cynically argue that some leaders in the past (or present) may have created cultural norms which promote altruism so that they can parasitically profit from the irrationality of the masses (“docility”). This essentially would make altruism the invention of sociopaths as an evolutionary strategy—a far-fetched theory utterly removed from human experience, that is, which probably would even make die-hard Darwinians uncomfortable. Because if altruism/morality is the invention of sociopaths, it follows that all it does is hurt us in our legitimate self-interest and we better abandon it altogether.

(And isn’t this precisely what happened in the wake of Freudianism and other veneer theories: considering morality as oppression, a mere tool in the hands of the patriarchy or bourgeoisie, that needs to be actively fought—with all the results we are seeing today? It seems to me some of these theorists simply project their own savage nature on the rest of humanity.)

Two Ideas of Altruism

In his paper, Simon defines “genuine altruism” as behaviour that hurts the reproductive success of individuals, while promoting that of groups or societies. He distinguishes this from “soft altruism” or “reciprocal altruism,” which means that an individual only hurts his or her reproductive success in the hope of some “return of investment.” Soft altruism, in other words, is motivated by selfish reasons, and as such not “genuine” altruism.

But Simon’s definition of “genuine” altruism is equally utilitarian: it’s just that society (or the group) is benefitting from the altruism of the individual and not the individual itself. But at the end of the day, it’s all about reproductive success. In other words, this kind of altruism is not good or bad; it’s not true or false; it certainly is not an act of love or noble sacrifice; it simply serves the purpose of advancing the individual (soft altruism) or the group (so-called genuine altruism).

David Stove had this to say about such arguments: according to him, “selfishness theorists” constantly oscillate between two contradictory statements depending on the criticism levelled at them.⁶ These are:

a) Altruism, in the final analysis, does not really exist: at the end of the day, we are all entirely motivated by selfishness of one form or another.

b) Altruism is caused by Darwinian processes/selfish genes.

These statements are, of course, mutually exclusive—altruism cannot be caused by something and simultaneously not exist.

The strategy here is this: if you criticise a), perhaps because denying the very existence of altruism is so completely out of touch with human experience, then the theorists revert to b): “Don’t worry, of course altruism exists, all we do is provide an explanation for it.”

But if you criticise b), maybe by pointing out that genuine altruism is inexplicable in Darwinian terms, they will switch to a), claiming that genuine altruism is an illusion—it doesn’t really exist; behind it always lie egoistic motives of the individual or the group or the gene pool. This would also explain why there is so much confusion about what these people actually mean by “altruism.”

At the end of the day, it seems to me that this sort of thinking is a good example of what Iain McGilchrist calls left-hemisphere thinking: an obsession with functionalism/utilitarianism, reductionism, a mechanistic worldview, ultra-rationalistic explanations, and so on. Indeed, the fact that Simon calls genuine altruism “docility” and explains it by a lack of rationality might be interpreted as the hatred left-hemisphere thinking often exhibits towards right-hemisphere modes of thought. It completely leaves out the bigger picture and our genuine experience of morality as something that points to the sacred, the holy, to higher truth, to our spiritual growth and calling.

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Now, I hope you can see that I don’t mean to say that all evolutionary thinking is nonsense. It’s just that it is only one perspective from which to look at biology and human life. The trouble begins when it becomes the only, or primary, angle.

Indeed, there are some forms of evolutionary thinking that seem productive and interesting to me. Iain McGilchrist believes in evolution, for instance, and he often closely follows Alfred North Whitehead, who equally did so, while also recognizing the need for a deity (although one very different from God the Watchmaker).

To recognize those, however, we must throw Neo-Darwinism out of the window, and be on guard about the deceptions of left-hemisphere, overly rationalistic thinking at the exclusion of real human experience.

But this is a discussion for another day.

1. Kenneth Binmore, Game Theory & the Social Contract Vol. 1 & Vol. 2, The MIT Press, 1995 & 1998

2. John Carter provides an excellent reductio-ad-absurdum of selfish-gene-thinking, which involves poo.

3. Heisenberg called the highest level of reality the layer of “creative forces” which “can only be expressed in parables”; see Werner Heisenberg, Ordnung der Wirklichkeit, Springer, 2019. See also Winston Smith’s post The Master Betrayed 7, in which, following McGilchrist, he refers to Scheler’s hierarchy of values.

4. Herbert A. Simon, A mechanism for social selection and successful altruism, Science, Vol 250, Issue 4988 pp. 1665-1668 (link)

5. David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution, Encounter Books, 2007

6. Ibid.