TED 2012 talk on Religion, Evolution and Self-Transcendence
I spoke at TED 2012, on the reason why people have so many ways of achieving self-transcendence. My goal in the talk was to illustrate visually some of the most complex ideas in my book — chapters 9 and 10 on multi-level selection and hive psychology. If you read those chapters, the video will make even more sense. If you watch this first, those chapters will make even more sense.
The basic idea is that our ability to lose ourselves and become “simply a part of a whole” (as Durkheim put it) is an adaptation, not just a fluke of crossed neural wiring, and the New Atheists would have it. It’s a mental ability that is of little use for helping individuals beat their neighbors in competition, but boy is it useful for helping teams bond together to out-compete other teams.
In other words, I’m siding with Charles Darwin, E. O. Wilson, and David Sloan Wilson on this issue, and against the dominant (but fading) view in evolutionary biology that group selection never happened.
[Be sure to watch this video full-screen, for the video effects]
Is there a transcript?
not yet, but eventually there will be.
I watched your TED talk from the Appletv podcast page and thought it was fascinating. I will be picking up your book as I have recently gone thru what I can only call epiphanies and feel as thou I’m finding my own god at this moment. Thank you for your hard work!
I’m quite impressed by the case you make for humans having evolved predispositions to sacrifice for the good of their tribe, but not by your claim this is best explained as a product of group selection.
You point out that individual level selection operating within groups will act against altruistic traits absent some way to deter free-riders. Then you argue, that the emergence of anti-free-rider behavior in humans (which I agree exists) would have dramatically reduced (although presumably not to zero) the degree to which individual level selection acts against genes for group directed self-sacrifice. This you see as implying that the repeated victory of cooperative tribes over less cooperative tribes, can remove free-rider traits from the species more quickly than they tend to increase within tribes due to their very small within group advantage.
My argument is not that this is impossible, only that it is less likely than an alternative explanation you seem to dismiss without consideration. In reference to the ability of humans to lose themselves in a group, you say it is “a mental ability that is of little use for helping individuals beat their neighbors in competition”. Have you firmly established that this empirical claim is correct?
I suggest that in the presence of intense anti-free-rider sanctions, the intra-group selective value of self-sacrificial traits can shift from strongly negative to at least weakly positive. Or, conversely, the selective value of free-rider traits can shift from strongly positive to at least weakly negative.
As evidence for this possibility, I submit the following quote from your book “In a real army, which sacralizes honor, loyalty, and country, the coward is not the most likely to make it home and father children. He is the most likely to get beaten up, left behind, or shot in the back for committing sacrilege. And if he does make it home alive, his reputation will repel women and potential employers.”
Your ensuing claim that such circumstances “make individual level selection less important” simply ignores the possibility that they can, not just reduce, but even eliminate, the conflict between individual level and group level selection.
The persistence of the idea that group selection must have sculpted human social traits may be partly due the misleading assertion by GC Williams (and repeated by you) that group selection is needed to explain any adaptive trait that shows optimization for benefiting a group, as opposed to the individual organism.
The problem is that complex behavioral repertoires can have features that make them appear to be optimized for more than one goal. For instance, at one level of analysis, cleaner fish may appear to be pursuing the goal of cleaning fish of other species. In fact, for all we know this might accurately describe their “conscious” intentions. However, from another level of analysis, they are clearly pursuing individual reproductive fitness.
Similar dual functions can characterize much of human goal directed behavior. Because the human brain is designed to construct and pursue conscious goals, natural selection acts on human behavior by making particular classes of goals more or less attractive. And individual level selection could favor a fondness for the goal of serving a greater whole. All this requires is that individuals benefit from both their efforts to deter free-riders and from their efforts to avoid the sanctions that others impose on free-riders. In such circumstances, a useful heuristic (i.e. one that natural selection could favor) is “reward individuals who appear motivated to benefit, rather than exploit, others; and aspire to be the sort of person you would wish to reward”. This follows if the most effective way to establish a reputation as an altruist, is to actually be one. (On this point I strongly recommend Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, Randolph Nesse editor, or Passions Within Reason, by Robert H Frank.) Another adaptive heuristic might be “treat the tribe as a whole, as the embodiment of what it is your altruistic impulses wish to target”.
Another source of confusion is semantic. When biologists say “group selection never happened”, this is usually careless shorthand for the more modest claim that differential survival between groups is not a powerful enough selective force to sculpt complex adaptations. It is not meant to imply that groups never compete, with one group being replaced by another with different traits, or that competition between groups never matters. For instance, suppose giraffes and elephants (due to their great reach) out-competed, and thus replaced, several smaller species of acacia tree browsers in the African savanna. In this case, group selection would not explain how giraffes or elephants got to be their sizes, but it might still help explain the absence of small acacia browsers. If one was to further suppose that individuals of one or both species cooperated among conspecifics to drive members of smaller species away from prime groves, group selection might be needed to explain this cooperation, but only if it can be shown that little or no benefit from this cooperation goes to the genes (in either self or kin) of the cooperators. What Williams and Dawkins have argued, is that examples of cooperation meeting this criteria are vanishingly difficult to document.
I believe you have written a brilliant and important book, but I hope you will come to recognize that your larger argument does not hinge on the claim that group level selection has sculpted these cooperative human traits.
An admirably lucid explanation. I have a couple questions. What you quote from Prof. Haidt is that the capacity for transcendent experience is “a mental ability that is of little use for helping individuals beat their neighbors in competition.” I couldn’t tell if you really disagree. You suggest the effects on individual fitness are “at least weakly positive,” which is consistent with “of little use.”
Could you explain why the conflict between group and individual selection must be eliminated for group selection to be more important? If selection is weak at the individual level but strong at the group level, why isn’t that enough for it to be more important?
Thank you for your comment.
I took Haidt’s phrase “not much use” to be colloquial for “no use”. So, I do dispute the quote, as I understood it.
I’m arguing that when free-riders are punished, natural selection within the group can favor a self-sacrificial behavior aimed at group welfare; and I’m also arguing (along with almost all evolutionary biologists) that where individual level and group level selection pressures are opposed, individual level selection will prevail. I am not arguing that when selection pressures at the individual and group levels coincide, group level selection becomes more important. It is just that in such cases a trait favored by group selection can prevail because it is also being favored by individual level selection. A simple example is faster running speed in cheetahs, which can help the individual as well as the species.
I do want to repeat that except on this one issue, I strongly endorse Haidt’s pioneering and important research.
Robin and SanPete: Thanks so much for these comments. I’m so sorry I can’t weigh in on anything this week — the book launch has swamped me with email and obligations, but I’ll start responding in 2 weeks.
Robin, I see what you mean. Maybe Prof. Haidt will clear this up later. He may mean “of little use” literally, that what might be called group consciousness may sometimes be weakly adaptive at the individual level (and sometimes not) but strongly adaptive at the group level. His basic thesis is that selection for morality occurred simultaneously at both levels, which would require increased fitness at both levels, with group selection the main driver and shaper of the trait.
I’m not sure this is necessary to explain our groupish part, but it’s a plausible view to me. If the advantages of group consciousness to individual fitness depend to a great extent on its group advantages, the latter would likely be the main shapers of the trait (unlike speed among cheetahs). Courage in battle wouldn’t be so reinforced if it didn’t help the group.
Even if his broader argument doesn’t hinge on group selection, the idea might serve a purpose.
He speaks of a time when “All forms of apparent altruism, cooperation, and even simple fairness had to be explained, ultimately, as covert forms of self-interest.” He associates this with the view that morality, as a matter of group consciousness, isn’t central to human nature but is a byproduct of self-interest. The selfish gene theories he refers to aren’t really about self-interest, or any purposive interest; that’s all loose talk or metaphor. He seems to acknowledge that in endnotes, though it’s hard to tell how completely he’s worked it into the rest of the book.
Perhaps what’s driving the focus on this is that there’s a natural intuitive fit between individual selection and selfishness, and between group selection and group-oriented psychology. As you saw in the book, he believes we think mainly intuitively and emotionally, and that metaphors matter in that context. (He doesn’t except himself from that.) Group selection lends itself to intuitions and metaphors that are distinctly more encouraging, or less discouraging, to what we think of as our better nature, making it an attractive and useful idea.
On the other hand, the hive isn’t quite an inspiring metaphor, at least to me! (The staircase is attractive, though it’s not directly a group metaphor.)
The following is addressed to professor Haidt but also respond to Sanpete.
I wrote my anti-group selection posts just before reading the part of the book where you fully address this issue. I wish I had waited, and I need to make a few concessions. First, I obviously shouldn’t have implied that that you hadn’t given alternatives to group selection serious consideration. Yours may be the most well considered pro group selection argument I’ve encountered. Nor need I have told you that your larger thesis didn’t depend on your group selection ideas, since you make this point yourself; while also conceding the tentative nature of this aspect of your thesis. Finally, your case for how more cooperative early human tribes could have quickly replaced less cooperative tribes, made me realize (contra my previous reply to Sanpete) that an alignment of individual level and group level selection pressures, can indeed make group selection more important. On the other hand, I remain as convinced as ever that such levels of within group cooperation cannot arise (or be sustained) unless intra-group selection pressures favor the more cooperative individuals. That there may be no obvious current reproductive disadvantage to being a free-rider, or even a sociopath, does not refute this point. On the other hand, it does suggest that presently evolution could be slowly undermining the cognitive foundations of the long decline in human violence that Pinker has documented.
Thanks for this note, Robin.
Chapter 9 of my book is my attempt to really work through what’s going on with multi-level selection. That chapter has 90 footnotes, and will, i hope, show that I’m trying to be careful about the complexity and the many debates going on. I’m not trying to present it as establsihed fact, but wow how things have changed since 1976, there’s just so much new information that wasn’t around when Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene.
Just finished the book, and found it very interesting, revealing, and informative. Also reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, which certainly reinforces your first central metaphor.
My main question/suggestion for your next project is about the correlation of religion to the six moral foundations. I would assume that the more religious one is, the higher their authority, loyalty and sanctity scores are. Maybe a chicken and egg question – does religion cause the moral foundation leanings or vice versa? I was surprised to see the low percentage of people self-identifying as liberal (21%), but I guess that is consistent with the vast majority of Americans being at least somewhat religious. This raises questions about why more people are Democrats vs. Republicans, given more are at least somewhat religious and more view themselves as conservative? Demographically, we are headed toward fewer religious people, I believe, so it will be interesting to see if that translates to a more liberal population. While I agree with your observations about religion playing a positive role in our “groupishness”, I suspect we will have to find alternative groups to look to to keep society united as religion wanes. Not to say that religion will go away – it will always be here, and I suspect that the divide between the religious and non-religious will grow and become a bigger cause for violence and “us vs. them” than it already is, as religion’s hold on the majority of people is threatened.
I also wonder about the moral foundations involved with Republicans’ violent hatred of Obamacare? If you look to fairness/proportionality, making people buy health insurance seems more proportional than letting them get free care (albeit in emergency rooms) that the rest of us pay for anyway. I understand the Liberty (libertarian) aspect of no government interference, but one would think that care and fairness would help offset that. Maybe sanctity is involved, where so many people are “disgusted” by anything proposed by Obama?
One additional thought about our divisive politics – America has always been about winning vs. losing, and this feeling seems to be increasing, not decreasing. Maybe the increase is caused by denial given our recent relative slide in worldwide comparisons about education, healthcare, world perception, etc? Couple this with a political system that is peopled by a very large percentage of attorneys – whose education and probably innate personality characteristics places ultimate importance on winning and being able to argue for your side regardless of your underlying belief in it – and you have a formula for the mess we are in….
As you can see, your book was very thought-provoking for me!
thanks!
too many questions to answer here.
i’ll just say that, according to the story i tell in ch 12, some people are born with a predisposition to be more groupish, higher on authority, loyalty, sanctity. those people will “take” to religion better. Conversely, people raised in a religious community will have more of their moral matrix ‘built’ on those foundations, even if the foundations are weaker for them. So the causation goes both ways, i believe.
jon