50 New Scientist 17 October 1985

The evolution of ethicsIs our belief in morality merely an adaptation put in place to further our

Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilsonreproductive ends?

ATTEMPTS to link evolution andethics first sprang up in themiddle of the last century, as

people turned to alternative foundationsin response to what they perceived as thecollapse of Christianity. If God does notstand behind the Sermon on the Mount,then what does? Such attempts atevolutionary ethicising became knowncollectively as "social Darwinism",although they owed less to CharlesDarwin and more to that quin-tessentially Victorian man of ideas,Herbert Spencer. Finding worth in whathe perceived to be the upward progress

of evolution from amoeba to human, from savage to Homobritannicus. Spencer argued that right conduct lies in thecherishing of the evolutionary process, in order that the bestor fittest be able to survive and the inadequate be rigorouslyeliminated.

While Spencer's ideas attracted strong support in somequarters, for example the North American barons of industry,evolutionary ethics in this mode never really caught fire. Onthe one hand, social Darwinism seems so immoral! Rightconduct surely cannot entail stamping on widows and babies.And no amount of tinkering by revisionists, such as PrincePeter Kxoptkin in the last century and Sir Julian Huxley andC. H. Waddington in this, changes the fact. On the otherhand, the very basis of a Spencerian-type approach is shaky.There is no progress to evolution. In a purely Darwiniansense, an amoeba is as good as a person.

Most people, therefore, have happily agreed with the18th-centurv philosopher David Hume that there is an im-passible gulf between matters of fact (for example, evolution)and matters of morality (disinterested help of others). To usephrasing made popular in this century by the Cambridgephilosopher G. E. Moore, evolutionary ethics commits "thenaturalistic fallacy" by trying to translate is into ought.

It is true that past efforts to create an evolutionary ethicshave come to very little. Yet to revert to the opposite conclu-sion, that evolution and ethics have nothing to say to eachother, is altogether too quick. Recent advances inevolutionary theory' have cast a new light on the matter,giving substance to the dreams of the old theorisers. althoughnot in the way or for the reasons they thought.

Our starting point is with the science. Two propositionsappear to have been established beyond any reasonabledoubt. First, the social behaviour of animals is firmly underthe control of the genes, and has been shaped into forms thatgive reproductive advantages. Secondly, humans are animals.Darwin knew that the first claim was true, and a multitude ofrecent studies, from fruit flies to frogs, have affirmed it repeat-edly. Darwin knew also that the second claim is true, andpositive evidence continues to pour in from virtually everybiological discipline. Genetically, we are a sibling species tothe chimpanzee, having evolved with them for more than 34billion years, parting a mere 6 million or so years ago.

What do these facts have to do with morality? A chain ofreasoning leads us to a distinctly human but still biologicallybased ethical sense. First, note that we are not just talkingabout behaviour, but about social behaviour. Today'sstudents of this subject, sociobiologists, know that it is oftenin an individual's biological self-interest to cooperate with itsfellows, rather than (as traditional evolutionary ethiciststhought) to fight flat out. After all. a loaf shared is better than

a whole loaf, if the latter carries the risk of being killed orseriously hurt.

Secondly, and less obviously, there are ways in whichnature can bring about "altruism", in the sense of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. If those benefited are rela-tives, the altruist is still favouring genes identical to his own.even if he dies without leaving any direct offspring. Thus wesay that the individual is altruistic but his genes are "selfish".Note that such behaviour implies nothing about goodintentions or other ways of being "nice". To get altruism youcan go the way of the ants. They are genetically hardwired,performing their duties in perfect cooperative harmony. Theyhave no thoughts, at least of a human kind, only actions.Alternatively, you could go to the other extreme, and evolvesuper-brains, where every possible action is first weighed andassessed, and a policy of rationally assessed self-interest isalways followed.

Neither of these options has proved attractive to animals

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like humans, and we have avoided both. If we had becomehardwired in the course of evolution, we could never deviatefrom our course. Were something untoward to happen, wewould be stuck with maladaptive behaviour. Worker ants arerelatively cheap to produce, so this rigidity matters relativelylittle to their colonies. Humans require a great deal ofparental investment, and it would be stupid in the literal senseof the word if we were to go wrong at the slightest environ-mental quiver. Alternatively, if we possessed super-brains, wewould require even more resources than we do now; such asparental care stretched over many more years. Additionally,like those chess machines that survey every move, we wouldbe forever making up our minds. Crises would be upon us.and we would still be thinking.

Nature's moral imperativeHow then has nature made humans "altruistic"? The clue

lies in the chess machines we just mentioned. The new breed,those that can beat grandmasters, forgo omnipotence for util-ity. They follow certain strategies that have proved successful.So with humans. Our minds are not tabulae rasac, butmoulded according to certain innate dispositions. Thesedispositions, known technically as "epigenetic rules", inclineus to particular courses of action, such as learning rapidly tofear heights and snakes, although they certainly do not lock

us. ant-like, into undeyiating behaviour.The best studied epigenetic rules, such as those affecting

fears or the avoidance of incest, appear to have been put intoplace because of their biological virtues. Although altruism isless well documented (there is some evidence, for example,that varying degrees of its expression have a geneticcomponent), such behaviour is also adaptive-at least whendirected in appropriate measure toward kin and allies. Weneed to be altruistic. Thus, we have rules inclining us to suchcourses of behaviour. The key question is then: how are theserules expressed in our conscious awareness? We need some-thing to spur us against our usual selfish dispositions. Nature,therefore, has made us (via the rules) believe in a disinterestedmoral code, according to which we ought to help our fellows.Thus, we are inclined to go out and work with our fellows. Inshort, to make us altruistic in the adaptive, biological sense,our biology makes us altruistic in the more conventionallyunderstood sense of acting on deeply held beliefs about rightand wrong.

Such is the modern scientific account of morality, at leastthe one most consistent with biology. But, what has any ofthis to do with the concerns of the traditional evolutionaryethicist? Even if the explanation were proved to be entirelytrue, it does not reveal whether in some ultimate, absolutesense, evolution stands behind morality. Does the socio-

biological scenario justsketched justify the samemoral code that religionistsbelieve to be decreed byGod? Or that some philo-sophers believe to exist apartfrom humanity, like a mathe-matical theorem?

It used to be thought, in thebad old days of socialDarwinism when evolutionwas poorly understood, thatlife is an uninterruptedstruggle - "nature red intooth and claw". But this isonly one side of natural selec-tion. What we have just seenis that the same process alsoleads to altruism and reci-procity in highly socialgroups. Thus the humanspecies has evolved genuinesentiments of obligation, ofthe duty to be loving andkind. In no way does thismaterialist explanation implythat we arc hypocrites,consciously trying to furtherour biological ends andpaying lip-service to ethics.We function better becausewe believe. In this sense,evolution is consistent withconventional views of moral-ity.

On the other hand, thequestion of ultimate founda-tions requires a different andmore subtle answer. Asevolutionists, we see that nojustification of the traditionalkind is possible. Morality, ormore strictly our belief inmorality, is merely an adapta-tion put in place to further ourreproductive ends. Hence thebasis of ethics does not lie in

52 New Scientist 17 October 1985

God's will - or in the metaphorical roots of evolution or anyother part of the framework of the Universe. In an importantsense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off onus by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without externalgrounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but not justifiedby it, because, like Macbeth's dagger, it serves a powerfulpurpose without existing in substance.

In speaking thus of illusion, we are not saying that ethics isnothing, and should now be thought of as purely dreamlike.Unlike Macbeth's dagger, ethics is a shared illusion of thehuman race. If it were not so. it would not work. The moralones among us would be outbred by the immoral. For thisreason, since all human beings are dependent on the "ethicsgame", evolutionary reasoning emphatically does not lead tomoral relativism. Human minds develop according toepigenetic rules that distinguish between proper moral claimslike "Be kind to children" and crazy imperatives like "Treatcabbages with the respect you show your mother".

Ethical codes work because they drive us to go against ourselfish day-to-day impulses in favour of long-term groupsurvival and harmony and thus, over our lifetimes, the multi-plication of our genes many times. Furthermore, the way ourbiology enforces its ends is by making us think that there is anobjective higher code, to which we are all subject. If wethought ethics to be no more than a question of personaldesires, we would tend to ignore it. Why should we base ourlife's plan on your love of French cuisine? Because we thinkthat ethics is objectively based, we are inclined to obey moralrules. We help small children because it is right, even thoughit is personally inconvenient to us.

If this perception of human evolution is correct, it providesa new basis for moral reasoning. Ethics is seen to have a solidfoundation, not in divine guidance or pure moral imper-atives, but in the shared qualities of human nature and thedesperate need for reciprocity. The key is the deeper, more

objective study of human nature, and for this reason we needto turn ethical philosophy into an applied science.

Some philosophers have argued that even if ethics could beexplained wholly in such a materialist fashion, this alonewould not eliminate the possibility that moral imperativesexist, sitting apart like mathematical truths. Perhaps humanevolution is moving toward such celestial perfection, and theapprehension of such truths. There are biological reasons forseeing and hearing the moving train, but it still exists!

Unfortunately, the cases of mathematical principles,material objects and ethics arc not parallel. Natural selectionis above all opportunistic. Suppose that, instead of evolvingfrom savannah-dwelling primates, we had evolved in a verydifferent way. If, like the termites, we needed to dwell indarkness, eat each other's faeces and cannibalise the dead, ourepigenetic rules would be very different from what they arenow. Our minds would be strongly prone to extol such acts asbeautiful and moral. Arid we would find it morally disgustingto live in the open air, dispose of body waste and bury thedead. Termite ayatollahs would surely declare such things tobe against the will of God. Termite social theorists wouldsurely argue for a stricter caste system.

Ethics docs not have the objective foundation our biologyleads us to think it has. But this is no negative conclusion.Human beings face incredible social problems, primarilybecause their biology cannot cope with the effects of theirtechnology. A deeper understanding of this biology is surelya first step towards solving some of these pressing worries.Seeing morality for what it is, a legacy of evolution ratherthan a reflection of eternal, divinely inspired verities, is partof this understanding. •

Professor Michael Ruse works in the Department oi Philosophy at theUniversity of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Professor E. O. Wilson re-searches at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.