On the Road to Extinction: Gaza, Stupidity, and Violence

To paraphrase an old quip: Groups come and groups go; stupidity remains.

Before their culture was contaminated by the Masters of Violence (that's us), the Gebusi tribe of Papua New Guinea had settled into an interesting cultural routine. The tribe was small, consisting of only about 400 people. Whenever someone died of a sickness, the Gebusi were convinced it had to be a consequence of witchcraft, an action by a single sorcerer who had cast a spell that killed the victim with an illness. So who was the witch? Sooner or later an accuser came forward, the tribal elders met, evidence was presented, arguments followed, and without fail someone was condemned as the sorcerer who had caused the death of the last victim of sickness. The guaranteed sentence was death of the sorcerer, and within a short time he was ambushed and killed. No objections were raised by the community at large and only rarely by the accused sorcerer's family. After the killing of the alleged sorcerer, the men, women, and children of the tribe returned to the routine of their daily life.

I'm a great fan of cultural diversity and pluralism, but we do need some accounting here. It's obvious that the Gebusi, at least as they were before contact with the West, had perfected a fail-safe method of doubling their death rate, and it raises some interesting questions about how and why individuals and groups behave.

Some scientists (I am not one of them) believe that a set of rules found useful in describing the behavior of simple social animals (such as ants and hamsters) can be applied to human groups as well. They argue with almost religious fervor that their ideas derive from Charles Darwin, and that any attempt to refute their ideas is an heretical anti-evolution attack on Darwinism and the idea of natural selection. But an application of Darwinism is not Darwinism itself, and a critique of an application is not a critique of the theory from which the application derives. To close off attacks on applications of theory by accusations of heresy is a good way to destroy science.

So what about the Gebusi? Well, for one thing we have this little problem of fitness. If the behavior of the Gebusi can be explained by simple natural selection, how does the effective doubling of the death rate improve fitness? By reducing the drain on scarce resources? Not tenable, since both resources and land were plentiful. The problem of a fitness explanation remains. The general idea these days is that when we talk of "fitness" we are talking of the fitness of a particular group of genes, with any individual constituting a Dawkins "gene-carrier". Can we explain the behavior of Gebusi gene-carriers? Some people try. We're presented with the idea of "inclusive fitness" and in this case maybe a prediction that in the Gebusi tribe accusers will tend to accuse of sorcery distant relatives rather than close relatives and thus improve the replication chances for their own and closely related gene-sets. Unfortunately, the idea does not work, since careful field analysis shows that the Gebusi accusers were more likely to accuse close relatives rather than distant relatives -- thus increasing the extinction rate of their own gene-set compared to other gene-sets.

What about group selection rather than individual gene-set selection? It seems like a blind alley to explore the idea that doubling the group death rate increases the fitness of the group. But maybe someone can find an argument at the group selection level. I'm dubious, but I'm willing to listen.

Are the Gebusi (or any words that you read here) a refutation of Darwinism? Absolutely not. If anything is refuted, it's the application of simple Darwinism to the Gebusi. I say "simple" Darwinism because where is it written that the idea and applications of natural selection are to remain intact as proposed by Darwin or anyone alive today for the next -- let us say -- ten thousand years? Science is not religious dogma, and the notion that any ideas that we have today will remain unmodified in the far future seems to me to be ridiculous.

And this is particularly true of any ideas that we have about human behavior. We are complex organisms, and the ideas that we find useful to explain and predict our behavior will likely also be complex. Classical Darwinism appears to be too simple to explain and predict the behavior of real human groups. The biological nature of humanity (particularly the plasticity of the human brain in response to experience) may require some new rules added to classical natural selection.

In any case, aside from the Gebusi being an apparently difficult call for classical Darwinism, they present us with a cautionary tale. At this moment, people in the Middle East are killing each other with great zest. Mortars, rockets, suicide bombers, kill, kill, kill, all of it increasing the death rate of the human species. We can apply Darwinism and maybe analyze it as a question of group survival. But in the backs of our minds lurks the question: Is death necessary? Me, I'm thinking about the Gebusi. In their language, they had no word for any number greater than three. They were not exactly an advanced civilization, which is maybe one reason they could not figure out they were engaged in gradual suicide. As for us, we like to think of ourselves as an advanced civilization. Are you certain of that? As I look at Gaza, I do think that in the far future they will collect our skulls and call us Early Man.

Comments

[Bookman99]

Interesting column. To comment on your suppostition that our era being called "early man", perhaps so. For all the earnest groping by scientists, we don't really, truly understand ourselves.

Perhaps if we did, the Human Race would achieve maturity. For now, people do odd things for fuzzy reasons on a daily basis, and societies muddle along. The same technology that places a large amount of human knowledge at one's fingertips also allows that same knowledge to be clouded with beliefs. 9/11 conspiracy theories will do as an example. I once met a person who believed that, since a bomber colliding with the Empire State Building did not bring it down, a 757 coudn't possibly have brought down one of the WTC buildings.

What is this in aid of? Simply this: for the violence in and around Isreal to end, the rest of the players must guarantee Isreal's right to exist at the end of the negotiations. Every orther point of debate pales in comparison. Absent that, Israel would be well-advised to remember how the Soviets used to negotiate: "What's mine is mine, but what is yours is negotiable", or some other form of death by inches.

In that area of the world, nobody's hands are clean, so fixing the blame isn't particularly useful, but until people accept this, fixing the problem won't be possible. As with the Gebusi, it's much easier to select a scapegoat to kill than to find a solution that is related to reality.

[Lon]

Not to beat a dead horse, but with some googling I found the quote you gave here http://psych.mcmaster.ca/dalywilson/commentary_gebusi.pdf.

This is an exchange of ideas that does not fit with the picture you paint. Daly and Wilson do not treat Knauft as a heretic who does not deserve to be engaged with. They are, in fact, engaged with a back and forth with him. And their objection to him, as I suggested based on no direct evidence was that his "refutation" of socio-biology is a refutation of a straw man version of socio-biology. While they disagree with some of his details they clearly consider the kind of work he is doing to be well within the bounds of the kind of socio-biology that they approve of. They only object to this idea that he is doing something else.

So it turns out philosophy is not so different from anthropology/social biology after all.

[Dan Agin - Huffpost Blogger]

I think if you read further on and read Knauft's reply to their criticism you will see you are wrong. Also, disconfirm is not the same as refute. Anyway, the arguments against sociobiology by cultural anthropologists are an old story and go back 30 years. They have not yet been rebutted by sociobiologists. Much thanks for your discussion.

[Lon]

You seem to think that in understanding what Daly and Wilson are saying, Knaufft's usage of terms should be taken as more important than Daly and Wilson's and that seems pretty odd. That Knaufft denies that he is engaged in a straw man attack is not exactly surprising, I have never seen anyone own up to that charge.

But even in Knaufft's response it is clear that he is criticizing them for saying that socio-biology should be understood broadly. His exact comment is odd. (I can't copy and paste from the copy I have so am stuck paraphrasing) but he acknowledges that they are objecting to the equation of socio-biology with inclusive fitness. He acknowledges that they are not strictly equivalent and that socio-biology has been diversifying, but then seems to be justifying his equation of the two on the basis that many if not most theories of socio-biology are based on inclusive fitness. This seems an odd justification of much of anything.

So, again it appears that Daly and Wilson are not in fact calling Knaufft's work heretical. They are doing something which might irritate him more, they are calling it socio-biology. They have other criticisms of his work, and he has responses, and I have no basis whatsoever for judging who has the better of that debate.

[Lon]

There is a conspiracy theory aspect to this otherwise interesting post that is somewhat offputting. Who is accusing anyone who can't give a simple Darwinian explanation to the Gebusi tribe of heresy, or anything like it?

The issue of why certain self-defeating behaviors would emerge in a Darwinian world is an interesting one, although I am not sure why the answers should be thought to be simple ones.

This case does not seem all that unique. Sacrificing virgins to the volcano gods would seem to be of the same type. Basically people are being killed in order for the society to feel they are in control of forces that are actually out of their control. This feeling of control may be more important than the loss of people that results. Although one still wonders why a less damaging method of feeling in control couldn't have developed.

In the case where there is plenty to go around, the loss of life may not be as significant a fact as in a society that is operating as subsistence level, so while natural selection may not call for such practices, it might not weed them out under those conditions either.

I am suspicious that this example calls for any changes in the theory of evolution. Whether it is a challenge to theories of socio-biology emerging from the theory of evolution would depend more on the details of those theories.

[Dan Agin - Huffpost Blogger]

Thanks for your comment. When the anthropologist Bruce Knauft presented his Gebusi data more than 20 years ago, and suggested the data "disconfirmed" sociobiological analysis in terms of inclusive fitness, he was promptly criticized by sociobiologists (Martin Daly and Margo Wilson) with the following words: "The attributes of people and other animals have been shaped by a history of selection so as to promote fitness in the environments of evolutionary adaptation. There is no serious controversy about this proposition; the only alternatives to Darwinian explanations of the adaptive properties of organisms are religiously motivated created myths."

I found that "offputting" when I first read it, and I still find it offputting. Too many sociobiological "Darwinian" explanations have an apparent aversion to the impact of cultural variables as also shaping human behavior, and the aversion makes little sense to me. Gebusi culture developed over time, and at each stage the proximal antecedents were cultural. Is a focus on those antecedents outlawed? Do we outlaw proximal analysis of American culture?

Yes, the Gebusi are not unique. The human sacrifices of civilizations like the Aztecs are also a problem. And yes, human sacrifice as a mechanism of political control is one possibility. But there are other possibilities. And as we examine possibilities, we find ourselves immersed in cultural variables and not biological variables.

As for the Gebusi calling for any change in the theory of evolution, who said it did?

[Lon]

I have a feeling that our disagreement is more in style than content. I am deeply suspicious of our ability to provide socio-biological explanations for the way the world developed, although that is a far cry from saying that the way the world developed violates inclusive fitness (which in your post you refer to as "simple natural selection". Later you take "simple evolution" to mean evolution as it exists today.

It is far from clear that Daly and Wilson, from the quote provided, would equate these things.

The biggest problem with these sociobiological explanations is that they tend to be vacuous. And it is in that sense that the quote may be right that there is nothing else. You are quoting them as objecting to a "refutation" of their view. I would want to see evidence that the "refutation" actually refutes their view rather than an oversimplification of their view.

I agree with you that the explanation of why the world developed as it did will often give its clearest explanation at the level of social phenomenon. But at the same time that social phenomenon will have to have the result of leading to the survival of some genes over others.

[Lon]

If their view is that such explanations are illegitimate, then I agree they are rather full of themselves. But the onus is on the people doing the refuting to show that they really are refuting. My background is in philosophy, so it may be more true than anywhere else, but too often refutations involve making a cartoon version of ones opponents view and refuting that. Your equating of inclusive fitness with simple natural selection (when it appears it is actually a move from an even simpler idea of natural selection) and the idea that this is inconsitent with explaining the Gebusi in terms of social stability without support that makes me worry.

I can see on rereading that I was mistaken to think that you were arguing for a change in the theory of evolution. Your seventh paragraph seems to be an argument for changing, but not denying evolutionary theory. But the way the theory and the applications are mixed in there is a confusing way to not be calling for a change.