Two Types of Self-Interest

          Well, I haven't posted in a while, but that will change, as I've written a few essays for different classes that I will post soon. I recently was listening to Point of Inquiry and Richard Wiseman mentioned how people would come up to him and ask him how to write better, and he just asked them, "Have you written anything today?" To become a better writer...write! That was his message, and even if Gladwell was wrong about 10,000 hours, it still takes time doing something to become good at it. 

          Anyway onto the topic at hand, I was recently watching a presentation that first started talking about self-interest, and it threw the term around without ever really explaining what it meant, and in what sense he was using the term. More specifically, was talking about two different types of self-interest without ever distinguishing between the two different types.  There is a rational self-interest in an understanding of what would be the best for the individual in a given situation (if there was a plate of cookies it would be best for me to take them all and not share any) and a biological self-interest that isn’t a single calculation, but one ran over numerous generations (trimethylamine oxide being developed in the cells of the Greenland Shark due to it spending time in areas where those cells would normally freeze). The presentation talked about the self-interest of bee's and compared it to self-interest in people, but never took the time to explain the distinction made above.This led me to ask a question after the presentation, and I received a really strange response.

The question in question was, “There is a difference between biological self-interest that is calculated over thousands of generations and a rational self-interest in what you think would be best for yourself. People cannot make biologically self-interested choices, as they don’t have access to what would be successful in that way, so in what senses are what you talked about self-interested?”

The answer I received was a strange one, “First, I disagree with your premise that people don’t make biologically self-interested choices, and second I think that the poem on talks more about biological self-interest.”  Now this left me baffled, as it seemed apparent that this person thought that to make a moral decisions (it was a class is ethics) someone consciously weighted out all the evolutionary advantages to doing something, and acted on what was best, or they innately knew what was a good evolutionary decision and always acted on it.

The first way is easily shown to be flawed because, 1) even if someone made a calculation there is no way to be sure of what the future holds, so it necessarily has to be something that is determined over time and never at a single instance and 2) there is no way to way a person has access to all the information needed to make the decision in the first place, or even enough to consistently weigh a small portion of that information to make a quick decision.

The second way is also just as deeply flawed, as Dawkins shows when he talks about society and biology in The Selfish Gene when he points out the ‘unnaturalness’ of the desirable welfare state. He explains that, “What has happened in modern civilized man is that family sizes are no longer limited by the finite resources that the individual parents can provide. If a husband and wife have more children than they can feed, the state, which means the rest of the population, simply steps in and keeps the surplus children alive and healthy. There is, in fact, nothing to stop a couple with no material resources at all having and rearing precisely as many children as the woman can physically bear. But the welfare state is a very unnatural thing.”

This pretty much sums it up, if people innately knew what was naturally best for them then they would be acting in accordance with what Dawkins said and be completely abusing the welfare state, until it became a version of the tragedy of the commons.  There is a commonly understood ‘evolutionary lag’ where evolution is always a step behind changes to the environment, as it takes time to have the number of generations that adjust to it. Another phenomenon is that evolution is limited to what is available in positive genetic changes: evolution can’t take backward steps. This means that evolution can’t go in a different direction that would be better in the long run, if it would cause decreased fitness for an extended period. This means that even if evolution determined decision making existed with no evolutionary lag, the process of evolution still wouldn’t necessarily be able to make evolutionarily optimal decisions.   

All this reminds me of J. B. S. Haldane quote when asked if he would risk his life to save a drowning brother, he responded, “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.” I think this quote alone is enough to point out the point out the absurdity of evolution directly controlling moral decision making, as no one thinks in this way and that’s why it’s funny. It doesn't have to micromanage each individual decision, as it can instill general principles that are effective. This is different than making evolution the decider of morality, and instead makes it create a general framework.

  

       Anyway, people can make decisions that they view as in their self-interest and this may or may not be in line with peoples biological self-interest, but if you’re talking about what self-interest is, especially when jumping back and forth between people and animals, it would be important to note the distinction.

The Biological Spandrel

In 1979, Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin saw a growing problem in the field of biology. To combat and bring attention to the problem they saw they co-authored the paper entitled, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" which is now a classic and somewhat controversial paper in the field of biology.  Gould points out in I Have Landed that, that paper is his second most referenced paper behind only his paper with Eldredge on punctuated equilibrium.

The problem Gould and Lewontin saw was that every part of an animal's anatomy was being broken up and explained as having an evolutionary purpose. The tyrannosaur's small arms were to help it get up from sleeping and the female hyena's masculinized genitalia created aggressive/larger hyena. Those types of explanations typified the attitudes of much of the scientific community, which could be described as being extremely adaptationist. Each piece or feature of an animal was broken up and weighed; if something existed it existed for a Darwinian reason. The animal as a collective whole was never thought about.  Noses were created to hold glasses and ears to fit earplugs.

Yet, no matter how ideal the reconstruction of the purpose is, it remains a narrative created to explain something that doesn't always have such a simple, fitting, or, most importantly, purposeful explanation. There are numerous reasons why a feature of an animal might be the way it currently is and being a positive adaptation for increased fitness is only one of those reasons.

Lewontin and Gould point this out by way of the dome in St. Marks Cathedral in Venice, and by picking out this non-biological example they have created a platonic form for what a  perfect spandrel is, more perfect and clean than any biological example could be.  It is perfect because the dome was created, as many other domes were, with the four arches holding it up and the spandrels existing between those arches. Only years after construction did the spandrels get put to use and thus become meaningful/functional in themselves.

The architectural spandrel, in this instance, is a space created only because it was necessary as part of the gap between the arch and the dome. More generally they refer to an architectural constraint that is not part of the design, but instead a by-product of what is necessary from the design. Gould and Lewontin give the example also of a set of stairs with the bi-product or spandrel being space between the steps.

The example works beautifully with the biological idea, because something that can start out as a by-product of something else can still later develop an important function as happened in San Marco. This makes it clear that an adaptive narrative isn't the only way to explain how something came to be, even something that now has an important function.

A good example of this happening is the famous domestication of the Silver Fox in Russia. The only feature that was selected for in those foxes was tameness. This made tameness the adaptive feature being selected for and all other traits that changed with it would be spandrels, or features that just happened to be by-products of the result of one thing being selected for. These changes included the fox's becoming spotted, coming into heat every 6 months and becoming more 'dog-like.'

This seems to show the existence of spandrels as pretty clear-cut, but the most interesting part of spandrels may be hidden in an article written later by Gould, "The Exaptive Excellence of Spandrels as a Term and Prototype." Near the end of that article, Gould makes the open-ended statement that,


"The human brain may have reached its current size by ordinary adaptive processes keyed to specific benefits of more complex mentalities for our hunter-gatherer ancestors on the African savannahs. But the implicit spandrels in an organ of such complexity must exceed the overt functional reasons for its origin. (Just consider the obvious analogy to much less powerful computers. I may buy my home computer only for word processing and keeping the family spread sheet, but the machine, by virtue of its requisite internal complexity, can also perform computational tasks exceeding by orders of magnitude the items of my original intentions—the primary adaptations, if you will—in purchasing the device)."               

It seems that as a brain becomes more powerful, it does a more than just what is required for base evolutionary fitness. The examples of those types of spandrels have been argued to include everything from music or even language. I think an interesting area to apply the idea of a spandrel to ethics; the things people feel passionately are right and wrong, but for what reason? It could also fill in a lot of gaps in what is ethical, but can't be evolutionarily accounted for and that is what my thesis is on, so you can look forward to quite a few more posts on this topic in the future.

Thanks for reading,
-themoralskeptic

Speciesism: Everyone is a Speciesist

Happy holidays to all the Speciesist's out there, which refers to everyone as we are all Speciesists. Yet, the term speciesist isn't often used, even though it applies universally to everyone and it's really a poorly understood and underused concept. Speciesism can be defined simply as the different treatment of between ranging species of animals.

I'll start with some common examples of speciesism, and factors that lead people to be speciesist's and talk about the problems it creates in my next post.

1. I was volunteering with an organization and they brought in people from prison to talk about some of the pitfalls that led them to be incarcerated and what it was like to live in prison. Now three prisoners were brought in and one really impressed the students and people I volunteered with. He had be 'turned around' by the book The Secret, which creates a false understanding of the power of positive thinking, but that's worthy of its own post and I'll just talk about one little thing from the book's website that he brought up. 

The guy had printed the Optimist's Creed and given a copy to everyone and said that he read it each morning and lived by it through the day. While, it isn't realistic to live up to that creed for a number of reasons, there is a speciesist reason that really amused me. One of the creeds is, "To wear a cheerful expression at all times and give a smile to every living creature I meet." 

This can't be realistically done unless one either greatly changes the definition of creature or meeting. If creature means animal than the smile would never leave your face, as anyone who took a microscope to pond water would know. Our world is absolutely filled with living creatures, and they are absolutely everywhere, in fact within the mouth that would be doing the smiling over 80 different species live.

Yet, many people have this misunderstanding and when people think of smiling at creatures they are thinking about bunnies, birds and other people...then maybe further down the line they start to think about smiling at insects and ugly creatures and possibly smiling at fish, but micro-organisms and small creatures like lice or fleas nearly never come to mind.

This shows a speciesist error, even in the definition of what an animal is.  Size is a determining factor in what makes up an animal to many people, with many people not considering about anything smaller than a mouse. This definition of animal is far far to narrow, and needs to be rectified before any issue of morality towards animals can be talked about. 

2. I was watching TV with a girl and she says something to the effect of, 'Ahhh, that's so sad when a dog is being mistreated like that (referencing the television show she was watching)', which is a totally normal and appropriate response. Probing the issue and asking what is wrong, and it was clear to her that animals shouldn't be treated like that, but then I ask her if she swats the mosquito that lands on her arm, and I got another totally normal an appropriate response. It is swatted. She than realized at that moment and perhaps for the first time, she, like the rest of us are Speciesists. 

Different animals are valued at different levels based on familiarity with the species, perceived cuteness, perceived threat, cultural/religious value, and natural fear. 

A death of a family pet is viewed as a much greater loss than the snake that is killed because it is near your house for all 5 of the reasons stated above. The typical American family knows and loves dogs and cats, they are found to be attractive to us, protect the home, and are valued culturally. While there is less natural fear for species like small cats.

Where as snakes are really on the opposite end of the spectrum in all five factors. The majority of people don't have any experience with snakes, they don't look attractive, and are potentially very dangerous. While there is also an ingrained cultural acceptance for not liking snakes.  It was also the snake that tricked Eve into eating the apple, and being called a snake is rarely taken as a compliment. Yet, the biggest reason may be a natural fear.

Psychology, eight edition, by David G. Myers, points this out on page 534, when he sates that, "We may be biologically prepared to learn some fears more quickly than others. Monkeys learn to fear snakes even by watching videotapes of monkeys reacting fearfully to a snake; but they don't learn to fear flowers when video spicing transposes the seemingly feared stimulus to a flower (Cook & Mineka, 1991). We humans quickly learn to fear snakes, spiders, and cliffs--fears that probably helped our ancestors survive. (Ohman & Mineka, 2003). But our Stone Age fears leave us unprepared for high-tech dangers-cars, electricity, bombs, and global warming--all of which are now far more dangerous (Lumsden & Wilson, 1983, McNally 1987)."

People are naturally speciesists and it's a good thing we are. There is such thing as a healthy fear of snakes and other dangerous animals, and is appropriate, yet it can also go to far. Some people might kill every snake that they see, even when they are far away or pose no threat to them. When speciesism goes to far, and some of its other problems/solutions will be the subject of my next post.

Goodbye fellow speciesists,

-the moral skeptic

The Chicken Or the Egg? Part Deux! (A history and example)

Hi again,  I got some interesting and well thought out responses and general interest on my Chicken or the Egg post and thought it was worthy of a follow up. I really appreciate those who took the time to read the whole post, and thank those who commented on it. I changed around my colour scheme due do to the after images it was causing, although for my next post on optical illusions and seeing not being believing I may change it back. Anyway, I did some further research on the topic in light of the comments I got and have to say I generally agree with my first post.  That being said I do have some more information, including the historical background of the question and some responses to a couple of criticisms to post here. (Anyone who doesn't care for the history, feel free to skip the next three paragraphs.)

The question first goes back much further than  I thought it would, and I guess everything really is a footnote to Plato, because that's the era that the question first Arises. I found the quote about it from Aristotle who says that, "If there has been a first man he must have been born without father or mother -- which is repugnant to nature. For there could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg." The article goes on to say that, "The same he held good for all species, believing, with Plato, that everything before it appeared on earth had first its being in spirit. (Isis Unveiled I, 428.)" That article can be found here  if your interested.

This is an important pre-evolution understanding. The bird and the egg seem co-dependent, so there can be no first, so everything must be eternal. Then creationism came and in Genesis 1:20 God said that, "'Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.' ²¹ So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good."

So the answer historically changed from there being no first chicken or egg, to there being birds created before the egg. God created the bird first, and I assume the chicken is one of the birds that flies above the earth and a bird according to its kind.

Then with the Origin of Species Darwin worked out (with a contribution from pigeons and finches) that animals can adapt to there surroundings; Watson and Crick found DNA and the chicken and the egg took a decidedly different look The look that I described in my first post, that had some contentions.

 I have been criticized by some posts saying that of course that is the answer, but it isn't a sexy answer to the question. While it may be boring, there are many people who, wrongly I think, postulate the egg as the answer, and in doing so really belittle the process. They elevate the individual egg over the steps that create the distinction between things.

For instance states that "MatheMagic- I think you're reasoning it out wrong: any step of rearranging the DNA takes place at the 'egg' stage. It is difficult to define the moment at which species occur, fine, but like any taxonomist you must set some arbitrary criteria (lets say the primordial "chicken" would share 99.00000000% of the DNA seen in chickens today)."

My response to this while the egg is the place of change this question isn't like a court of law that must make a sentence upon a guilty verdict (Any court sentence is an arbitrary but necessary decision). This is a question that can be fairly answered without having to put an arbitrary stick in the mud. The question as given is a false dichotomy, the answer isn't in the choice of possibilities and I think that I can make my point with the a news article.

The article is on how people in England having bird feeders (along with warm winters) has created a separate breeding population for Blackcap's. It is a pretty short and interesting article and I will try to summarize it, but you can find it here if you are interested.   Anyway, there are two populations of blackcaps have a different wintering area and the ones that go to England are able to get back earlier than the other population. This ability lets them breed earlier and has created two separate breeding populations. That is all it really takes to create a split in the species. It is noted that, "The team also observed differences in the birds' beaks, wings and plumage.", but don't get any hopes up on a new chicken coming soon as, "Dr Schaefer pointed out that the evolution of a new bird species, 'could take 100,000 to a million years'."

There are changes that take place, but no single great change is the defining thing that separates one thing from another. Darwin showed this in the Origin of Species when he himself pointed out the problems and folly's with trying to define the differences between a species and a variety and those terms may be highly contested.

What the Blackcap really shows is that no one egg can even be arbitrarily shown to be 'the first chicken.' It may take 100 000 years for there to be a chicken from the egg, that is one of the reasons why people who deny evolution are able to say that well species can change, but no new species have ever come into appearance. (Please don't make this a topic, I know that species can evolve at different rates and the populations may be some and the changes could come quickly in an evolutionary sense).

I could site literally hundreds of people, who like MatheMagic, that state that the egg is the correct answer, but all those people are really putting the individual ahead of the process. It comes up in the philosophy of mind often when trying to define where consciousness is what it is. Many people have given different answers, but the answer that I think fits best is that consciousness, like evolution, is a process of that involves different things and trying to encapsulate those things in any one term really fails to show the beauty in the inner-workings that are going on.

Thanks for reading,

The Moral Skeptic

Volvox Carterii and Death of 'Selfish' Altruism

Recently there was a study done on the Volvox Carterii (pictured to the right), that managed to isolate a gene responsible for altruism in that bacteria. I will do my best to summerize the information that will be relevant for this post, but the news article and be found HERE, and the real article can be found at Molecular Biology and Evolution 2006 23(8):1460-1464.

The Volvox has a gene called RegA that, when active, suppresses cell growth. Volvox cells need to be a larger size to reproduce, so that suppression of growth creates the situation where that cell can no longer reproduce. This can be described as that cell making an altruistic decision for the team, it sacrifices its own genetic well being for that of the other cells around it. 


What I find interesting about this and that didn't really hit me until now is the effect this might have on the psychological reasons for Altruism in people. There is a faction of people who believe that the only reason people are altruistic in situations is for there own rational personal benefit, and I think the evolutionary beginnings of altruism shows that this isn't the case. An example of the idea of selfish altruism would be someone saving a person who is drowning, because their conscious wouldn't let them sleep if they didn't. Thus the persons motivation for saving the other person is of a selfish nature, they did it for themselves rather than to save the other person.

This is generally characterized as an unfalsifiable thesis, any persons act can be rejustified as self to some degree, even when that selfishness is just feeling bad about not doing anything. This changes with the volvox. Isn't capable of foreseeing or rationalizing any actions it takes, it is simply listening to the genes tell it what to do. It can't be argued that the volvox cells are not growing because it would feel bad if the other cells weren't able to function correctly. This isn't to say there is no benefit to what those cells are doing, if there wasn't they would be selected agianst and no exist for very long, it is saying that there is no possible way that the volvox is acting altruistically with a knowingly selfish motivation.

Now the counter-argument that I know this will meet is that, the volvox is much different than a person, it is a simple bacteria, and humans are much more complex and can rationalize every action they take. Not only that there may not be a single gene for altruism in people, it is probably a plethora of different factors that leads to altruism in people.

This is alright, if the bird that fakes an injured wing to distract predators from its nest, and the volvox cells gives up its opportunity to reproduce, with no rational basis for their decisions. Even infants have been found to have an altruistic nature. If all other animals and pre-rational humans all can act altruistically without it being a selfish altruism, then why is it as soon as someone becomes rational all their altruistic actions become selfishly motivated. It is glaringly obvious that altruism can exist without rationality, so why is altruism all of the sudden dependent on rationality in humans. Just because something can have a selfish motivation doesn't entail that is has to and to characterize it that way without reason is simply naive.  

Thanks for reading,

The Moral Skeptic

Which Came First the Chicken or the Egg?

From former classmates to Ian McShane's character in "Kings" a declaration of the answer to the age-old question of the chicken and the egg has been presented as proof of the answerer's intelligence. The answer is presented as if it was glaringly obvious since the time of Darwin. The egg came first!

Within a few seconds, a complete explanation is given that animals are changed through chance mutation of DNA during the conception part of the formation of the animal.  Also to their point is that animals aren't changed in any lasting way by the environment except through their being less able to reproduce through a lack of fitness to their surroundings. For that reason, the egg that clearly came before the chicken.

While this may look like a totally convincing answer that contains all the fundamental  understandings of Darwinism, there does remain a problem unforeseen by the person giving this type of answer. This problem can be brought to light through asking a few specific questions about the chicken and egg dilemma.

The telling question is if the egg is the answer then what is giving birth to the egg? The egg must come from some creature that is a non-chicken that gives birth to a chicken, but this is not how the process works. Changes from parent to a child produce gradual changes and it takes many generations to cause any great amount of change, even in the state of a punctuated equilibrium.

Verities of chickens could be made from the egg, but the egg is never able to be distinct enough to be called a new species. This is where the chicken or the egg question breaks down into an understanding of how new species are defined.

The problem should now be easy to see. The question of 'What came first the chicken or the egg?' is a false dichotomy. The answer is that it is a process that creates the differences between the parent and offspring where there is no sudden appearance of a new 'thing' being created. The young who are different have to out-compete the other young where those changes did not occur. This may cause the extinction of the unchanged and if that happened, along with enough other changes then possibly there would be the creation of a new species. This new species is then something that could be defined as a 'chicken'.

The question of 'What came first the chicken or the egg?' fails to understand how biology works and anyone who attempts to answer by saying chicken or egg has committed an error even before they state their reasoning. The creation of a new animal doesn't happen overnight, or in one generation, it happens over time.

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic