All you need is love?: Brain Sex and the Mating Game

All you need is love?: Brain Sex and the Mating Game ; Robert L. Nadeau; ; The World & I ; 03-01-1998 ;


The individual most responsible for legitimating the modern distinction between sex and gender was the anthropologist Margaret Mead. Based on studies of native people in Samoa, Mead argued that the enormous variability of male and female behavior suggests that innate, or biologically predetermined, behaviors are almost nonexistent in our species. She then concluded that the fundamental determinant of gender identity is not nature, or what we are as a result of biological inheritance, but nurture, or what we are as a result of the socialization process. "We may safely say," wrote Mead, "that many if not all of the personality traits which we call masculine and feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to sex."(1)

The Mead doctrine occasioned a revolution in our thinking about gender identity for the same reasons that the theories of Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein occasioned revolutions in thought. It was derived in accordance with research methodologies and rules of evidence designed to produce objective and value-free knowledge. Although a large body of research on sex-specific behavior that could not be explained by learning per se began to accumulate not long after the doctrine was formulated, this evidence appeared "soft" in the absence of biological explanations. We now know that the biological factors that contribute to these behaviors are differing levels of sex hormones and sex-specific differences in the human brain.

BRAIN CHEMISTRY AND EROS

Until recently, much of the knowledge about the sex-specific human brain was derived from postmortem dissections, and virtually nothing was known about the relationship between sex-specific anatomical differences and actual brain function. During the last two decades, however, studies in neuroscience have shown that these differences condition a wide range of human behavior. Brain science has also provided bold new insights into an aspect of our lives where the attempt to ignore or transcend gender differences occasions the most confusion and conflict--romantic love relationships.

There are chemicals in our brains, called neurotransmitters, that make the experience of eros far more universal than we previously imagined. Normally produced at various stages in love relationships, these chemicals occasion similar emotional and physical states in all human beings. Mind-or mood-altering drugs have molecular structures that resemble those of neurotransmitters. For example, cocaine resembles dopamine, acts on the dopamine receptors, and tricks the brain into operating as if enormously high levels of this neurotransmitter were present. Similarly, valium reduces anxiety by augmenting the effects of GABA, and Prozac alleviates depression by enhancing the action of serotonin.

Given the destructive influence of artificial substances that induce altered states, why did mutations that produce these states survive in the gene pool? The answer is that the powerful neurotransmitters associated with being in love enhanced the prospect of mating and of successfully rearing children. And as anyone who has been in love knows firsthand, these love potents propel us well out of the range of normative emotional responses.

Studies of the initial stages of "being in love" indicate that the love object typically becomes the center of the individual's universe, and that even the most mundane and trivial characteristics of the magical other are a source of utter fascination. A large number of respondents in one study said that their thoughts and feelings were fixated on the love object from 85 to almost 100 percent of the time. In the presence of the love object, both men and women said they trembled, felt flushed, stammered, and feared losing control over basic faculties and skills. There was also common agreement about the primary reward for this confusion--95 percent of the males and 91 percent of the females indicated that the best thing about being in love was sex.(2)

The principal neurotransmitter contributing to these behaviors is an excitant amine called phenylethylamine, or PEA. This endogenous amphetamine, or speed, saturates the brain when we fall in love, and generates feelings of elation and euphoria. When lovers are giddy, absent-minded, optimistic, gregarious, wonderfully alive, and full of extraordinary energy, they are riding a natural high that results from the action of PEA and possibly two other natural amphetamines--dopamine and norepinephrine. A brain flooded with PEA can override the impulse to sleep and allow lovers to dance the night away in both figurative and literal terms.

People with low levels of PEA are often romance junkies literally "addicted to love." But this is an abnormality.(3) The function of the PEA high in evolutionary terms is to promote mating and the transmission of genes to subsequent generations. After this is accomplished, it is not evolutionarily advantageous to remain in an altered state that could threaten survival. This explains why the brains of most people can sustain high levels of PEA for only about two to three years.(4)

However, it would not be evolutionarily advantageous for parents who must care for children well into the teenage years to terminate their relationship when the PEA high subsides. Therefore, as this high diminishes, the brain compensates by increasing the levels of morphinelike substances, endorphins, that create feelings of calmness, security, and well-being. This is the biological component in the transition from passionate love to companionate love, or from eros as illogical need and obsession to eros as mutual affirmation and acceptance. The discomfort and anxiety felt by those in long-term love relationships when separated from a partner could be due in part to the rapid decrease in endorphin levels.(5)

In a study of divorce statistics in various cultures, anthropologist Helen Fisher found a correlation between the two-to three-year period during which the human brain can sustain the PEA high and the years in a marriage when most couples divorce.(6) In societies as diverse as Finland, Russia, Egypt, South Africa, and Venezuela, divorces generally occur early in marriage, reach their peak during the fourth year of marriage, and gradually decline in later years. Although there are variations from the four-year peak in some of these cultures, Fisher believes this is due to the influence of cultural variables.

For example, Fisher believes that cultural variables account for variations in the four-year peak in the United States. During the period from 1960 to 1980, when the divorce rate doubled, the incidence of divorce peaked in and around the second year of marriage. Did this have anything to do with couples living together or being in some sense married before becoming legally married? Apparently not. Fisher found that while the number of American couples living together tripled in the 1970s, the peak year for divorce among married couples remained the same.

The cultural variables that explain this pattern could be the attitudes of Americans toward marriage. While people in traditional cultures typically marry for economic, social, or political reasons, Americans marry, says Fisher, "to accentuate, balance out, or mask parts of our private lives."(7) If Americans do not feel as pressured to remain married, it should follow that they are more likely to dissolve marital relationships at the point at which the PEA high subsides.

NEURONAL PATTERNS AND THINE OWN TRUE LOVE
Neuroscience has also provided some insights into a phenomenon that has long puzzled social scientists--love at first sight. Even though there are a myriad of potential mates, powerful attraction between prospective lovers is about as rare as it is spontaneous. From across the crowded room, or at the end of the checkout aisle, there suddenly emerges that special smile, face, body type that is like no other.This magical moment for males is accompanied by stiffening of the muscles, increase in heart rate, a flushed face, and dilated pupils. Signs of love at first sight for females are tingling palms, hardening nipples, quick and shallow breathing, and dilated pupils. Although we may sense in this situation that some cosmic matchmaker is at work, there is another, more prosaic explanation.

The organization of neuronal patterns in our brains from the time of infancy to adolescence is determined in no small part by environmental stimuli. The totality of our experience is encoded in those patterns, and their dynamic interplay constitutes our subjective realities. Within this maze are neuronal patterns associated with members of the opposite sex that constitute a kind of gestalt image that includes physical features, subtle behavioral clues, and powerful emotional inputs. When we encounter a member of the opposite sex toward whom we feel instant sexual attraction, our brains are constructing an image of femaleness or maleness that activates neuronal assemblages corresponding with this gestalt image, or with what are normally called search images.

The search images that most fundamentally condition sexual attraction develop in childhood and derive from interactions with those closest to us in physical and emotional terms. The boy or girl next door can be a source of these images. But the primary source is normally opposite-sex family members. When we consider that these people share half our genes, the well-known fact that we tend to marry people like ourselves begins to make scientific sense.

Efforts to assess resemblances in the physical appearance and behavior of married couples often involve an index called the correlation coefficient. Although this is a statistical measure, it can be described in simple numerical terms. Imagine putting a hundred couples in a room and lining up males and females according to one characteristic, such as age. If a married couple ends up at the same place in the line, say at No. 33, the correspondence is perfect and the correlation coefficient is plus 1. Minus 1 designates a perfect opposite match, as in youngest woman is married to oldest man. If the correlation is random, as in youngest women is just as likely to be married to a younger as older man, the coefficient is zero.

The highest correlations, typically around plus 0.9, are for age, race, ethnic background, religion, socioeconomic status, and political views. Measures of personality, such as extroversion or introversion, and IQ levels normally fall out at around plus 0.4. This much seems obvious. But what about physical characteristics? Statistically significant correlations have been found between a large number of physical traits that most of us would never imagine had anything to do with the sources of our sexual attraction.

Correlations of about plus 0.2 have been discovered between length of earlobes, lung volumes, circumferences of wrists and ankles, and distances between eyes in married couples from cultures as diverse as Chad and Poland. In some instances, such as the length of middle fingers, the correlation is plus 0.61.(8) The best explanation for these results is that the gestalt image that informs our attraction to members of the opposite sex is based upon the images of those who share half our genes--opposite-sex members of our family.

THE NONVERBAL LANGUAGE OF LOVE

The nonverbal language of love also attests to the legacy of mate selection among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Women in cultures as diverse as those in Amazonia, Japan, Africa, France, Samoa, and Papua flirt using virtually the same sequence of expressions. These women first display sexual interest by smiling at the potential love object with eyebrows lifted and eyes opened wide. They then drop the eyebrows, tilt their heads down and to the side, and look in another direction.(9)

Given the importance of eye contact for the mating game of hunter-gatherers, the fact that gazing is the most obvious and universal flirtation signal should come as no great surprise. Men and women in all cultures stare intently into the eyes of potential sexual partners for several seconds, and extreme attraction is signaled by dilated pupils. This is followed by an impulse to close the eyelids, drop the gaze, and look away. Looking back in the direction of the source of this attraction tends to be furtive and is typically accompanied by meaningless gestures that signal anxiety, like fondling objects, fidgeting, and touching hair.(10)

If the physiological responses associated with love at first sight do not prove too disabling and conversation ensues, another indicator that a sexual liaison may be in the offing comes into play. The gestures made by men and women tend to mirror one another, or to become more synchronous. When he lifts his drink and turns his head right, she lifts her drink and turns her head left. When she touches her hair, he touches his hair, and so on.

Increased physical proximity, like leaning forward and positioning arms and legs closer together, is another sign of increased sexual intimacy. The prospect of further intimacy is typically assessed by "casually" touching a wrist, a shoulder, or a forearm. If the party that is touched does not touch in return, or reacts to being touched by moving out of intimate space, this signals reluctance to become more sexually intimate. But if the potential lover mirrors this laying on of hands behavior, a major obstacle on the road to sexual intercourse may have been eliminated. While there are cultures where sexual mores forbid displays of mirroring behaviors, they exist in every society where men and women are free to choose one another as mates.(11)

If we can believe the results of studies of nonverbal sexual interaction, most American cultural narratives that celebrate male sexual prowess are in need of revision. Researchers have found that American women initiate nonverbal flirtation cues, including the critical first touch, over two-thirds of the time. And follow-up interviews with these women revealed that they were very aware that this was the case.(12) Studies of cross-cultural sexual practices confirm that women normally take the initiative in making sexual advances in virtually any society where they are allowed to do so.(13)

There are also transcultural patterns in wooing or courtship rituals. In all human societies males offer females food and gifts in the hope of winning sexual favors. The food offering might be a fish, beer, or sweets instead of dinner at an overpriced restaurant, and the gifts might be cloth, tobacco, and hand-carved figures instead of cards and flowers. But the nonverbal messages conveyed by these enticements are not terribly dissimilar.

Once men and women enter the mind-altered state of the PEA high, behavioral tendencies are translated into actual behaviors in accordance with the rites and rituals of love within particular cultural contexts. And the stories, myths, legends, and songs that script these behaviors are clearly not universal. In some cultures, like the Mangaians of Polynesia and the Bem-Bem of the New Guinea highlands, the construct of "being in love" does not even exist. And yet behaviors associated with this altered state, like suicide among males who are not allowed to marry girlfriends and elopement among star-crossed couples, are not uncommon in these cultures. Also, multiple aspects of romantic love as it is conceived in the West exist, according to one recent anthropological survey, in 87 percent of 168 very diverse cultures.(14)

LESSONS FROM THE SEX-SPECIFIC HUMAN BRAIN

American popular culture creates the impression that most of us are constantly preparing for, engaging in, or recovering from promiscuous sex. But the results of what may be the first truly scientific survey of American sexual behavior, The Social Organization of Sexuality, present a very different picture. Based on face-to-face interviews with a random sample of almost thirty-five hundred Americans, ages 18 to 59, researchers found that the average American male has six sexual partners over a lifetime and the average American female has two sexual partners.(15)

Equally significant, adultery appears to be much more the exception than the rule. Nearly 75 percent of married men and 85 percent of married women surveyed said they had never been unfaithful. As for frequency of sexual intercourse, almost 40 percent of married people indicated they had sex twice a week, and only 25 percent of single people had sex that often.(16)

Obviously, a host of cultural and personal variables contribute to these behaviors. The legacy of our evolutionary past does, however, condition these behaviors. This legacy lives on in selectively advantageous traits that encourage powerful emotional bonding between potential parents--face-to-face coitus, concealed ovulation, private sex, and female orgasm. Hence the mating game in our species is framed around biological regularities that favor interdependence, cooperation, and long-term involvement.

This does not mean, of course, that evolution is a moral philosopher that dictates the terms of successful love relationships. On the other hand, behavioral tendencies associated with the sex-specific human brain do have something to say about ways in which we might seek to sustain and improve these relationships. Since the human brain cannot sustain the PEA high for more than a few years, the idea that this altered state is a precondition for a healthy love relationship is not in accord with biological reality. And yet we are incessantly bombarded with messages in print and electronic media that the opposite is true.

That the vast majority of those who fall in love and enter long-term relationships elect to have children also makes sense from a biological perspective. The PEA high evolved in our species not merely because it facilitated frequent intercourse and impregnation. This biological mechanism also evolved because it encouraged the emotional bonding required to raise big-brained infants to the point at which they, too, could bear offspring.

The fact that the brain generates an increased level of morphinelike endorphins as the PEA high subsides is another lesson of evolution that we should take seriously. The transition from passionate love to companionate love, as previous generations seem to have known far better than our own, is not only natural and necessary but can also signal the beginning of a very satisfying phase in love relationships.

This does not mean that sex between marital partners ceases to play a central and vitally important role in sustaining relationships, or that the excitement of being in love is forever lost. But it does suggest that the feelings of peace, security, and well-being occasioned by higher levels of endorphins are probably more conducive to maintaining relationships between responsible adults who are raising children.

Evolution also has something to say about the fact that teenagers tend to be more victimized by sexual love. Since the biological clock of ancestral females ran more slowly due to dietary differences, these females reached puberty several years later on average than contemporary females. But since ancestral hunter-gatherers began to mate and reproduce shortly after reaching puberty, all of the mechanisms that facilitate this process are powerfully at work in the lives of teenagers.

Concern about sexually transmitted diseases, particularly AIDS, has resulted in numerous campaigns to promote the use of condoms. And many of these campaigns suggest that virtually all the dangers associated with adolescent sexual behavior can be eliminated by consistent use of condoms. From the perspective of evolution, however, sex is not a form of recreation or a game that can be played with no liabilities on the part of the players.

The biological mechanisms of human sex evolved under special conditions in accordance with the most fundamental compulsion of life--passing on genes to subsequent generations. And we have done untold violence to teenagers by failing to make them sufficiently aware of the terrible force of this compulsion--and the enormous difference between sex as a biological reality and sex in popular culture.

Knowing the codes of evolution in flirtation behavior and the dating game also has its advantages. Obviously, sexual attraction is powerful, and men and women will not keep scorecards to check out their progress. Given that the biological predispositions in the sex-specific human brain are quite malleable in the learning process, the scorecard approach could do more harm than good. On the other hand, familiarity with the biological codes does provide a larger awareness of the difference between a response that is merely warm or friendly and one that signals sexual attraction.

If women tend to initiate the first touch in flirtation behavior, men should be well aware of this fact. And if women tend to be the decision makers in the initial stages of dating behavior, then men should know this as well. The absence of mirroring behavior may or may not signal sexual responsiveness, and the presence of this behavior is not a green light for sexual intimacy. But by knowing that this behavior is usual, both men and women could check sexually inappropriate behavior. More important, much of the mythology in this culture about male sexual process is not in sync with biological reality.

For the past thirty years, we have lived with the assumption that the sexual personae of men and women is learned in particular cultural contexts in gender-neutral minds. In marriage counseling, in advice columns in newspapers, and on prime-time talk shows, the idea that the price for political correctness in male-female love relationships is gender sameness is either explicit or implied. And even when the differences between the sexual personae of men and women are recognized, the usual refrain is that they are entirely a consequence of learning.

Since what we are as men and women is primarily a product of learning, the assumption of gender sameness has served us well in the attempt to control and eliminate offensive sexist behaviors. It has been particularly useful in disclosing that the myths of male dominance that sanction sexual abuse and use of women are utterly indefensible and morally bankrupt. Obviously, we are a long way from achieving the goal of full sexual equality, and the struggle to eliminate learned sexist attitudes and behaviors must continue. But since there is a linkage between biological reality and gender identity, the idea that men and women in love relationships must behave as if this linkage does not exist is clearly in need of revision.n

Robert L. Nadeau is a professor at George Mason University. His article "Brain Sex and the Language of Love" was published in the November 1997 issue of The World & I. This article, like the last, is based on his book S/he Brain (Praeger, 1996).
Footnotes:
1.Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York: William Morrow, 1935), 280.

2.D. Tennov, Love and Limerance: The Experience of Being in Love (New York: Stein and Day, 1979).3

.M.R. Liebowitz, The Chemistry of Love (Boston: Little-Brown, 1983), 200.

4.J. Money, Love and Love Sickness: The Science of Sex, Gender Difference, and Pair-Bonding (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 6

5.5.Liebowitz, The Chemistry of Love.

6.H.E. Fisher, "The Four-Year Itch," Natural History (October 1989): 22--23.

7.Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 109--111.

8.Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 101--102.

9.Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology: The Biology of Behavior (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970).

10.E.H. Hess, The Tell-Tale Eye (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975).

11.D.B. Givens, Love Signals: How to Attract a Mate (New York: Crown, 1983), and Fisher, Anatomy of Love.

12.T. Perper, Sex Signals: The Biology of Love (Philadelphia: ISI Press, 1985).

13.C.S. Ford and F.A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951).

14.W.R. Jankowiak and E.F. Fisher, "A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love, Ethnology 31:2 (1992): 149--55.

15.John Gagnon, Robert Michael, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).16.Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality.


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Intelligent Design debate hits New York Times’ front page

Intelligent Design debate hits New York Times’ front page
By Erin Curry


NEW YORK CITY (BP)--The debate over whether students should be taught about the controversy surrounding evolution, which may include a discussion of the emerging Intelligent Design theory, was spurred on recently by President Bush’s endorsement of such teaching and by the Kansas State Board of Education’s decision to allow instructors to “teach the controversy.” Now the debate has made its way to the front page of The New York Times.In a series it called “A Debate over Darwin: Squaring God and Evolution,” which started Aug. 21, The Times examined the debate over the teaching of evolution and the “politically astute challenge led by the Discovery Institute.”

The first installment focused on the genesis of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank leading the national discussion about Intelligent Design, which contends that some features of the natural world are best explained as the products of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.“After toiling in obscurity for nearly a decade, the institute’s Center for Science and Culture has emerged in recent months as the ideological and strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school districts and state capitals across the country,” The Times said, adding that the Discovery Institute is making the debate over evolution more an issue of academic freedom than a confrontation between biology and religion.'

The Times noted that a “scattered group of scholars” are at the intellectual core of the institute and have propelled “a fringe academic movement onto the front pages.” President Bush even “embraced the institute’s talking points” during a roundtable discussion in early August by saying students should be exposed to different views regarding evolution.Discovery Institute scholars are intentional, though, about treading careful ground in their push to educate the public, The Times said, urging schools simply to include criticism of evolution rather than actually teaching Intelligent Design.Jay W. Richards, a philosopher and a vice president at the institute, told The Times the hits they have been taking from evolutionists in the public spotlight lately are expected.“All ideas go through three stages -- first they’re ignored, then they’re attacked, then they’re accepted,” he said. “We’re kind of beyond the ignored stage. We’re somewhere in the attack.”Discovery Institute was founded 15 years ago as a branch of the Hudson Institute and named after the H.M.S. Discovery, a vessel that explored the Puget Sound in 1792, The Times noted. Its president, Bruce Chapman, once served as director of the Census Bureau in the Reagan administration. Grants and gifts to the institute grew from $1.4 million in 1997 to $4.1 million in 2003 -- an example of its growing popularity.

Donors include conservative religious billionaires and also people like Bill and Melinda Gates, The Times said.The second story in The Times’ series carried the headline “In Explaining Life’s Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash” and featured commentary from representatives on each side of the controversy.Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and a leading Intelligent Design theorist, told The Times a biological marvel such as the cascade of proteins that cause blood to clot is indicative of a designer.If any one of the 20-plus proteins required for clotting is missing or deficient, he said, clots will not form properly. Such a complex system could not have developed through evolutionary change, Behe told The Times.But Russell F. Doolittle, a professor of molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego, said at some point a mistake in the copying of DNA in a more simple system resulted in the duplication of a gene that led to the more complex blood clotting system known today.Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, told The Times the design approach may be compared to the work of archaeologists investigating an ancient civilization.“Imagine you’re an archaeologist and you’re looking at an inscription, and you say, ‘Well, sorry, that looks like it’s intelligent but we can’t invoke an intelligent cause because, as a matter of method, we have to limit ourselves to materialistic processes,” he said. “That would be nuts.”“Call it miracle, call it some other pejorative term, but the fact remains that the materialistic view is a truncated view of reality,” Meyer added.The Times also quoted William A. Dembski, a mathematician who recently joined the faculty of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as the Carl F.H. Henry Professor of Science and Theology. He has worked on mathematical algorithms that purport to tell the difference between objects that were designed and those that occurred naturally, The Times said.Dembski told The Times that designed objects, like Mount Rushmore, show complex, purposeful patterns that point to the existence of intelligence.

Mathematical calculations like those he has developed could detect such patterns and distinguish Mount Rushmore from Mount St. Helens, for example.Discovery’s Chapman welcomed the exposure his institute received in the first two articles of The Times’ series but said they still didn’t get the story exactly right.“The New York Times’ successive two front page, above the fold articles on Discovery Institute and Intelligent Design were better than we feared, which means we moved from the 90 percent negative view long evident on the Times’ editorial page and the comments of executive editor Bill Keller to, oh, about 60 percent negative, 40 percent positive in these two unprecedented analytical news articles,” he said in a news release Aug. 22. “This is progress.”

The third article in The Times’ series, published Aug. 23, examined whether a person could “be a good scientist and believe in God.” It’s a typically held view that most scientists do not believe in God, but The Times said “disdain for religion is far from universal among scientists.”“And today, as religious groups challenge scientists in arenas as various as evolution in the classroom, AIDS prevention and stem cell research, scientists who embrace religion are beginning to speak out about their faith,” The Times reported.

The newspaper quoted Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who believes that religious beliefs and scientific theories can coexist. Until relatively recently, Collins said, most scientists believed in God.“Isaac Newton wrote a lot more about the Bible than the laws of nature,” Collins told The Times.

But Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, said “the experience of being a scientist makes religion seem fairly irrelevant. Most scientists I know simply don’t think about it very much. They don’t think about religion enough to qualify as practicing atheists.”

And those scientists who do believe in God, Weinberg posited, believe in “a God who is behind the laws of nature but who is not intervening.”Collins said he believes some scientists are reluctant to profess faith in public “because the assumption is if you are a scientist you don’t have any need of action of the supernatural sort,” The Times reported.

Other scientists are simply unwilling to confront the big questions religion has tried to answer.“You will never understand what it means to be a human being through naturalistic observation,” Collins told The Times. “You won’t understand why you are here and what the meaning is. Science has no power to address these questions -- and are they not the most important questions we ask ourselves?”--30--


Work Cited:
Intelligent Design
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So You Think You Are a Darwinian?

So You Think You Are a Darwinian?
By David Stowe

Most educated people nowadays, I believe, think of themselves as Darwinians. If they do, however, it can only be from ignorance: from not knowing enough about what Darwinism says. For Darwinism says many things, especially about our species, which are too obviously false to be believed by any educated person; or at least by an educated person who retains any capacity at all for critical thought on the subject of Darwinism.

Of course most educated people now are Darwinians, in the sense that they believe our species to have originated, not in a creative act of the Divine Will, but by evolution from other animals. But believing that proposition is not enough to make someone a Darwinian. It had been believed, as may be learnt from any history of biology, by very many people long before Darwinism, or Darwin, was born.

What is needed to make someone an adherent of a certain school of thought is belief in all or most of the propositions which are peculiar to that school, and are believed either by all of its adherents, or at least by the more thoroughgoing ones. In any large school of thought, there is always a minority who adhere more exclusively than most to the characteristic beliefs of the school: they are the ‘purists’ or ‘ultras’ of that school. What is needed and sufficient, then, to make a person a Darwinian, is belief in all or most of the propositions which are peculiar to Darwinians, and believed either by all of them, or at least by ultra-Darwinians.

I give below ten propositions which are all Darwinian beliefs in the sense just specified. Each of them is obviously false: either a direct falsity about our species or, where the proposition is a general one, obviously false in the case of our species, at least. Some of the ten propositions are quotations; all the others are paraphrases. The quotations are all from authors who are so well-known, at least in Darwinian circles, as spokesmen for Darwinism or ultra-Darwinism, that their names alone will be sufficient evidence that the proposition is a Darwinian one. Where the proposition is a paraphrase, I give quotations or other information which will, I think, suffice to establish its Darwinian credentials.

My ten propositions are nearly in reverse historical order. Thus, I start from the present day, and from the inferno-scene - like something by Hieronymus Bosch - which the 'selfish gene’ theory makes of all life. Then I go back a bit to some of the falsities which, beginning in the 1960s, were contributed to Darwinism by the theory of ‘inclusive fitness’. And finally I get back to some of the falsities, more pedestrian though no less obvious, of the Darwinism of the 19th or early-20th century.

1. The truth is, ‘the total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances’, genes.
This is a thumbnail-sketch, and an accurate one, of the contents of The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins. It was not written by Dawkins, but he quoted it with manifest enthusiasm in a defence of The Selfish Gene which he wrote in this journal in 1981. Dawkins’ status, as a widely admired spokesman for ultra-Darwinism, is too well-known to need evidence of it adduced here. His admirers even include some philosophers who have carried their airs and graces to the length of writing good books on such rarefied subjects as universals, or induction, or the mind. Dawkins can scarcely have gratified these admirers by telling them that, even when engaged in writing those books, they were ‘totally prostituted to the blind purposiveness of their genes Still, you ‘have to hand it’ to genes which can write, even if only through their slaves, a good book on subjects like universals or induction. Those genes must have brains all right, as well as purposes. At least, they must, if genes can have brains and purposes. But in fact, of course, DNA molecules no more have such things than H20 molecules do.

2 '…it is, after all, to [a mother’s] advantage that her child should be adopted’ by another woman.
This quotation is from Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, p. 110.
Obviously false though this proposition is, from the point of view of Darwinism it is well-founded, for the reason which Dawkins gives on the same page: that another woman’s adopting her baby ‘releases a rival female from the burden of child-rearing, and frees her to have another child more quickly.’ This, you will say, is a grotesque way of looking at human life; and so, of course, it is. But it is impossible to deny that it is the Darwinian way.

3. All communication is ‘manipulation of signal-receiver by signal-sender.’
This profound communication, though it might easily have come from any used-car salesman reflecting on life, was actually sent by Dawkins, (in The Extended Phenotype, (1982), p. 57), to the readers whom he was at that point engaged in manipulating. Much as the devil, in many medieval plays, advises the audience not to take his advice.

4. Homosexuality in social animals is a form of sibling-altruism: that is, your homosexuality is a way of helping your brothers and sisters to raise more children.

This very-believable proposition is maintained by Robert Trivers in his book Social Evolution, (1985), pp. 198-9. Professor Trivers is a leading light among ultra-Darwinians, (who are nowadays usually called ‘sociobiologists’). Whether he also believes that suicide, for example, and self-castration, are forms of sibling-altruism, I do not know; but I do not see what there is to stop him. What is there to stop anyone believing such propositions? Only common sense: a thing entirely out of the question among sociobiologists.

5. In all social mammals, the altruism (or apparent altruism) of siblings towards one another is about as strong and common as the altruism (or apparent altruism) of parents towards their offspring.

This proposition is an immediate consequence, and an admitted one, of the theory of inclusive fitness, which says that the degree of altruism depends on the proportion of genes shared. This theory was first put forward by W. D. Hamilton in The Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1964. Since then it has been accepted by Darwinians almost as one man and has revolutionized evolutionary theory. This acceptance has made Professor Hamilton the most influential Darwinian author of the last thirty years.

6. '…no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person, but everyone will sacrifice it for more than two brothers [or offspring], or four half-brothers, or eight first-cousins.'
This is a quotation from the epoch-making article by Professor Hamilton to which I referred a moment ago. The italics are not in the text. Nor are the two words which I have put in square brackets; but their insertion is certainly authorized by the theory of inclusive fitness.

7. Every organism has as many descendants as it can.
Compare Darwin, in The Origin of Species, p. 66: ‘every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers’; and again, pp. 78-9, ‘each organic being is striving to increase at a geometrical ratio’. These page references are to the first edition of the Origin, (1859), but both of the passages just quoted are repeated in all of the five later editions of the book which were published in Darwin’s lifetime. He also says the same thing in other places.

But it would not have mattered if he had not happened to say in print such things as I have just quoted. For it was always obvious, to everyone who understood his theory, that a universal striving-to-the-utmost-to-increase is an essential part of that theory: in fact it is the very ‘motor’ of evolution, according to the theory. It is the thing which, by creating pressure of population on the supply of food, is supposed to bring about the struggle for life among con-specifics, hence natural selection, and hence evolution. As is well known, and as Darwin himself stated, he had got the idea of population permanently pressing on food, because of the constant tendency to increase, from T. R. Malthus’s Essay on Population (1798).
Still, that every organism has as many descendants as it can, while it is or may be true of most species of organisms, is obviously not true of ours. Do you know of even one human being who ever had as many descendants as he or she could have had? And yet Darwinism says that every single one of us does. For there can clearly be no question of Darwinism making an exception of man, without openly contradicting itself. ‘Every single organic being’, or ‘each organic being’: this means you.

8. In every species, child-mortality - that is, the proportion of live births which die before reproductive age - is extremely high.
Compare Darwin in the Origin, p. 61: ‘of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive’; or p. 5, ‘many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive’. Again, these passages, from the first edition, are both repeated unchanged in all the later editions of the Origin.
Proposition 8 is not a peripheral or negotiable part of Darwinism. On the contrary it is, like proposition 7, a central part, and one which Darwinians are logically locked-into. For in order to explain evolution, Darwin had adopted (as I have said) Malthus’s principle of population: that population always presses on the supply of food, and tends to increase beyond it. And this principle does require child-mortality to be extremely high in all species.
Because of the strength and universality of the sexual impulse, animals in general have an exuberant tendency to increase in numbers. This much is obvious, but what Malthus’s principle says is something far more definite. It says that the tendency to increase is so strong that every population, of any species, is at all times already as large as its food-supply permits, or else is rapidly approaching that impassable limit. Which means of course that, (as Malthus once put it), the young are always born into ‘a world already possessed’. In any average year, (assuming that the food-supply does not increase), there is simply not enough food to support any greater number of the newborn than is needed to replace the adults which die. But such is the strength of the tendency to increase that, in any average year, the number of births will greatly exceed the number of adult deaths. Which is to say, the great majority of those born must soon die.
Consider a schematic example. Suppose there is a population, with a constant food-supply, of 1000 human beings. Suppose - a very realistic supposition, in fact a conservative one - that 700 of them are of reproductive age. Suppose that this population is already ‘at equilibrium’, (as Darwinians say): that is, is already as large as its food can support. According to Malthus’s principle, people (or flies or fish or whatever) will reproduce if they can. So, since there are 350 females of reproductive age, there will be 350 births this year. But there is no food to support more of these than are needed to replace the adults who die this year; while the highest adult death-rate which we can suppose with any approximation to realism is about 10%. So 100 adults will die this year, but to fill their places, there are 350 applicants. That is, there will this year be a child-mortality of 250 out of 350, or more than 70%.
It was undoubtedly reasoning of this kind from Malthus’s principle which led Darwin to believe that in every species ‘but a small number’ of those born can survive, or that ‘many more’ are born than can survive. What did Darwin mean by these phrases, in percentage, or at least minimum-percentage, terms? Well, we have just seen that Malthus’s principle, in a typical case, delivers a child-mortality of at least 70%. And no one, either in 1859 or now, would dream of calling 30 or more, surviving out of 100, 'but a small number’ surviving. It would be already stretching language violently, to call even 23 (say), surviving out of 100, ‘but a small number’ surviving. To use this phrase of 30-or-more surviving, would be absolutely out of the question. So Darwin must have meant, by the statements I quoted above, that child-mortality in all species is more than 70%.

Which is obviously false in the case of our species. No doubt human child-mortality has often enough been as high as 70%, and often enough higher still. But I do not think that, at any rate within historical times, this can ever have been usual. For under a child-mortality of 70%, a woman would have to give birth 10 times, on the average, to get 3 of her children to puberty, and 30 times to get 9 of them there. Yet a woman’s getting 9 of her children to puberty has never at any time been anything to write home about; whereas a woman who gives birth 30 times has always been a demographic prodigy. The absolute record is about 32 births. (I neglect multiple births, which make up only 1% of all births.) As for the last 100 years, in any advanced country, to suppose child-mortality 70% or anywhere near it, would be nothing but an outlandish joke.

It is important to remember that no one - not even Darwinians - knows anything at all about human demography, except what has been learnt in the last 350 years, principally concerning certain European countries or their colonies. A Darwinian may be tempted, indeed is sure to be tempted, to set all of this knowledge aside, as being of no ‘biological’ validity, because it concerns only an ‘exceptional’ time and place. But if we agreed to set all this knowledge aside, the only result would be that no one knew anything whatever about human demography. And Darwinians would then be no more entitled than anyone else to tell us what the ‘real’, or the ‘natural’, rate of human child-mortality is.

In any case, as I said earlier, Darwinians cannot without contradicting themselves make an exception of man, or of any particular part of human history. Their theory, like Malthus’s principle, is one which generalizes about all species, and all places and times, indifferently; while man is a species, the last 350 years are times, and European countries are places. And Darwin’s assertion, that child-mortality is extremely high, is quite explicitly universal. For he said (as we saw) that ‘of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive’, and that ‘many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive’. Again, this means us.

9. The more privileged people are the more prolific: if one class in a society is less exposed than another to the misery due to food-shortage, disease, and war, then the members of the more fortunate class will have (on the average) more children than the members of the other class.
That this proposition is false, or rather, is the exact reverse of the truth, is not just obvious. It is notorious, and even proverbial. Everyone knows that, as a popular song of the I 930s had it,
The rich get rich, andThe poor get children.

Not that the song is exactly right, because privilege does not quite always require superior wealth, and superior wealth does not quite always confer privilege. The rule should be stated, not in terms of wealth, but in terms of privilege, thus: that the more privileged class is the less prolific. To this rule, as far as I know, there is not a single exception.
And yet the exact inverse of it, proposition 9, is an inevitable consequence of Darwinism all right. Malthus had said that the main ‘checks’ to human population are misery - principally due to ‘famine, war, and pestilence’ - and vice: by which he meant contraception, foeticide, homosexuality, etc. But he also said that famine - that is, deficiency of food - usually outweighs all the other checks put together, and that population-size depends, near enough, only on the supply of food. Darwin agreed. He wrote (in The Descent of Man, second edition, 1874), that ‘the primary or fundamental check to the continued increase of man is the difficulty of gaining subsistence’, and that if food were doubled in Britain, for example, population would quickly be doubled. But now, a more-privileged class always suffers less from deficiency of food than a less-privileged class does. Therefore, if food-supply is indeed the fundamental determinant of population-size, a more-privileged class would always be a more prolific one; just as proposition 9 says.

William Godwin, as early as 1820, pointed out that Malthus had managed to get the relationship between privilege and fertility exactly upside-down. In the 1860s and ‘70s W. R. Greg, Alfred Russel Wallace, and others, pointed out that Darwin, by depending on Malthus for his explanation of evolution, had saddled himself with Malthus’s mistake about population and privilege. It is perfectly obvious that all these critics were right. But Darwin never took any notice of the criticism. Well, trying to get Darwin to respond to criticism was always exactly like punching a feather-mattress: ‘suddenly absolutely nothing happened’.
The eugenics movement, which was founded a little later by Darwin’s disciple and cousin Francis Galton, was an indirect admission that those critics were right. For what galvanized the eugenists into action was, of course, their realisation that the middle and upper classes in Britain were being out-reproduced by the lowest classes. Such a thing simply could not happen, obviously, if Darwin and Malthus, and proposition 9, had been right. But the eugenists never drew the obvious conclusion, that Darwin and Malthus were wrong, and consequently they never turned their indirect criticism into a direct one. Well, they were fervent Darwinians to the last man and woman, and could not bring themselves to say, or even think, that Darwinism is false.

A later Darwinian and eugenist, R. A. Fisher, discussed the relation between privilege and fertility at length, in his important book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, (1930). But he can hardly be said to have made the falsity of proposition 9 any less of an embarrassment for Darwinism. Fisher acknowledges the fact that there has always been, in all civilized countries an inversion (as he calls it) of fertility-rates: that is, that the more privileged have always and everywhere been the less fertile. His explanation of this fact is that civilized countries have always practised what he calls ‘the social promotion of infertility’. That is, people are enabled to succeed better in civilized life, the fewer children they have.

But this is evidently just a re-phrasing of the problem, rather than a solution of it. The question, for a Darwinian such as Fisher, is how there can be, consistently with Darwinism, such a thing as the social promotion of infertility? In every other species of organisms, after all, comparative infertility is a sure sign, or even the very criterion, of comparative failure. So how can there be if Darwinism is true, a species of organisms in which comparative infertility is a regular and nearly-necessary aid to success?

Fisher’s constant description of the fertility-rates in civilized countries as ‘inverted’, deserves a word to itself. It is a perfect example of an amazingly-arrogant habit of Darwinians, (of which I have collected many examples in my forthcoming book Darwinian Fairytales). This is the habit, when some biological fact inconsistent with Darwinism comes to light, of blaming the fact, instead of blaming their theory. Any such fact Darwinians call a ‘biological error' an ‘error of heredity’, a ‘misfire’, or some thing of that kind: as though the organism in question had gone wrong, when all that has actually happened, of course, is that Darwinism has gone wrong. When Fisher called the birth-rates in civilized countries ‘inverted’, all he meant was that, exactly contrary to Darwinian theory, the more privileged people are the less fertile. From this fact, of course, the only rational conclusion to be drawn is, that Darwinism has got things upside-down. But instead of that Fisher, with typical Darwinian effrontery, concludes that civilised people have got things upside-down!
Fisher, who died in 1962, is nowadays the idol of ultra-Darwinians, and he deserves to be so: he was in fact a sociobiologist ‘born out of due time’. And the old problem for Darwinism, to which he had at least given some publicity, even if he did nothing to solve it, remains to this day the central problem for sociobiologists. The problem (to put it vulgarly) of why ‘the rich and famous’ are such pitiful reproducers as they are.

Of course this ‘problem’ is no problem at all, for anyone except ultra-Darwinians. It is an entirely self-inflicted injury, and as such deserves no sympathy. Who, except an ultra-Darwinian, would expect the highly-privileged to be great breeders? No one; just as no one but an ultra-Darwinian would expect women to adopt-out their babies with maximum expedition. For ultra-Darwinians, on the other hand, the infertility of the privileged is a good deal more than a problem. It is a refutation.

But they react to it in accordance with a well-tried rule of present-day scientific research. The rule is: ‘When your theory meets with a refutation, call it instead "a problem", and demand additional money in order to enable you to solve it.’ Experience has shown that this rule is just the thing for keeping a ‘research program’ afloat, even if it leaks like a sieve. Indeed, the more of these challenging ‘problems’ you can mention, the more money you are plainly entitled to demand.

10. If variations which are useful to their possessors in the struggle for life ‘do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive), that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed.’

This is from The Origin of Species, pp. 80-81. Exactly the same words occur in all the editions.
Since this passage expresses the essential idea of natural selection, no further evidence is needed to show that proposition 10 is a Darwinian one. But is it true? In particular, may we really feel sure that every attribute in the least degree injurious to its possessors would be rigidly destroyed by natural selection?

On the contrary, the proposition is (saving Darwin’s reverence) ridiculous. Any educated person can easily think of a hundred characteristics, commonly occurring in our species, which are not only ‘in the least degree’ injurious to their possessors, but seriously or even extremely injurious to them, which have not been ‘rigidly destroyed’, and concerning which there is not the smallest evidence that they are in the process of being destroyed. Here are ten such characteristics, without even going past the first letter of the alphabet. Abortion; adoption; fondness for alcohol; altruism; anal intercourse; respect for ancestors; susceptibility to aneurism; the love of animals; the importance attached to art; asceticism, whether sexual, dietary, or whatever.
Each of these characteristics tends, more or less strongly, to shorten our lives, or to lessen the number of children we have, or both. All of them are of extreme antiquity. Some of them are probably older than our species itself. Adoption, for example is practised by some species of chimpanzees: another adult female taking over the care of a baby whose mother has died. Why has not this ancient and gross ‘biological error’ been rigidly destroyed?

‘There has not been enough time’, replies the Darwinian. Well, that could be so: perhaps there has not been enough time. And then again, perhaps there has been enough time: perhaps even twenty times over. How long does it take for natural selection to destroy an injurious attribute, such as adoption or fondness for alcohol? I have not the faintest idea, of course. I therefore have no positive ground whatever for believing either that there has been enough time for adoption to be destroyed, or that there has not. But then, on this matter, everyone else is in the same state of total ignorance as I am. So how come the Darwinian is so confident that there has not been enough time? What evidence can he point to, for thinking that there has not? Why, nothing but this, that adoption has not been destroyed, despite its being an injurious attribute! But this is palpably arguing in a circle, and taking for granted the very point which is in dispute. The Darwinian has no positive evidence whatever, that there has not been enough time.

Mercifully, Darwinians nowadays are much more reluctant than they formerly were, to rely heavily on the ‘not-enough-time’ defence of their theory against critics. They have benefited from the strictures of philosophers, who have pointed out that it is not good scientific method, to defend Darwinism by a tactic which would always be equally available whatever the state of the evidence, and which will still be equally available to Darwinians a million years hence, if adoption (for example) is still practised then.

The cream of the jest, concerning proposition 10, is that Darwinians themselves do not really believe it. Ask a Darwinian whether he actually believes that the fondness for alcoholic drinks is being destroyed now, or that abortion is, or adoption - and watch his face. Well, of course he does not believe it! Why would he? There is not a particle of evidence in its favour, and there is a great mountain of evidence against it. Absolutely the only thing it has in its favour is that Darwinism says it must be so. But (as Descartes said in another connection) ‘this reasoning cannot be presented to infidels, who might consider that it proceeded in a circle’.
What becomes, then, of the terrifying giant named Natural Selection, which can never sleep, can never fail to detect an attribute which is, even in the least degree, injurious to its possessors in the struggle for life, and can never fail to punish such an attribute with rigid destruction? Why, just that, like so much else in Darwinism, it is an obvious fairytale, at least as far as our species is concerned.

It would not be difficult to compile another list of ten obvious Darwinian falsities; or another one after that, either. But on that scale, the thing would be tiresome both to read and to write. Anyway it ought not to be necessary: ten obvious Darwinian falsities should be enough to make the point. The point, namely, that if most educated people now think they are Darwinians, it is only because they have no idea of the multiplied absurdities which belief in Darwinism requires.

David Stowe received his PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His primary research and teaching interests lie in 20th-century cultural history of the United States, particularly the study of vernacular musics. His most recent book is How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard, 2004). His previous book, Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America (Harvard, 1994), was published in Japanese translation by Hosei University Press in 1999. His article, "Jazz in the West: Cultural Frontier and Region During the Swing Era," received the Bert M. Fireman Prize from the Western History Association for the best article by a graduate student published in 1992.

Work Cited:
So You Think You Are a Darwinian?
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