The Richard Dawkins Delusion

Life is short, nasty, brutish, and tough. Naturally, in any environment and in any age, you have to use your wits to survive, and the language you use to describe all this self serving striving for self preservation (can you say that rapidly five times?) is invariably a metaphorical sign of your times. So, looked at unadorned by philosophy, the act of living is not a sentimental, moral, or enlightening thing, but rather is a royal pain where might makes right, and only the fittest survive. Thus, in spite of the common Disneyfication of the facts of life, we pretty much know that times are tough all over and that the world is not a nice place. It is therefore not a great stretch to expand this metaphor of meanness to presumably the life and times of homo-sapiens and indeed of all life. So it is no surprise that the metaphors we use to describe life and its vicissitudes are about the same that Darwin used to describe the whole record of life.

As social creatures who are gifted with large cerebral noggins who uniquely reflect on their reflections and are painfully self-conscious about it, there is however a trick or two to ameliorate all this mean spiritedness. Since we are buggered by the fact that we have consciousness, and don't know how the darn thing survives, evolves, or just moves about after we die, a whole new set of metaphors has 'evolved' that answers these timeless questions and as a bonus keep us in line. Thus the metaphors of natural selection are supplemented by the metaphors of super-natural selection. These metaphors are called religion. So if you want to survive not only in this world but the next, and not devolve into an insect (bad karma) or be perpetually squashed like one (such as in the 8th circle of hell), it pays to be kind to kittens and little old ladies.

So we embrace religion, but end up acting like selfish assholes in any event. In fact, religion can easily be used to rationalize all sorts of awful behavior. The problem arises when some armchair pundit believes this deception, and assumed that religion is not used as a general rationalization for bad behavior, but is the actual reason for that behavior. In his latest book, 'The God Delusion', the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins rants and rages about the endless stupidities and cruelties of religion, but forgets that if you're acting stupid and cruel, it ain't God who is behind your behavior, but rather your selfish genes. After all, if you are a Crusader, business tycoon, or just an everyday guy who instinctively loves to rape and pillage, what better way to rationalize the whole thing than by saying that God made me do it? Overall, the philosopher Nietzsche was closest to the mark when he said the last Christian died on the cross. For Dawkins, Christianity just makes him cross. Perhaps there is some poetic justice in this.

Richard Dawkins gets Dissected

Saddam Hussein is dead, and Richard Dawkins is not pleased. The distinguished evolutionary biologist, atheist, and grinch thinks that the world has lost a tyrant, and psychology has lost a specimen. How much better it would have been, he thinks, for psychology to study this monster, and gleen more knowledge of the workings of evil. But what's evil? History has shown that it is something matter of fact, having to do with practical matters like survival and such. Attila the Hun, Caesar, and Napoleon performed their peculiar evils because people at the time did such things to get by, survival of the fittest you know. Indeed, it was this metaphor, banally simplified but rising to the level of scientific cant, that was responsible for the very real evils of social darwinism, national socialism, and communism, all pivoting on the false premise that evolution surely proves that man can be perfected beast, but only if the tree of man is pruned by cutting a few million every now and then. An evil meme you might say.

Hannah Arendt thought evil was banality. Its easy to be evil. It doesn't require much smarts or independence, and thus one can follow the crowd, obey orders, and as a bonus, survive. The more pressing question is what causes true poets of science and religion to get into all that trouble. Whether it is Galileo or Christ, these are the true specimens that need to be studied. I would surmise, in contrast to the syndrome that infects the grinches among us, that they have hearts three times too big.

The Self-less Gene: Mentalism, Memetics, and Biobehavioral Psychology

How do individuals make decisions, and why do they make the decisions they do? The metaphorical conventions of common language are generally thought of as suitable to describe behavior, and to provide the rules whereby we can navigate our worlds. According to common sense, decision making follows symbolic rules that manipulate discrete mental objects or mental faculties. The actual molecular or neural processes that are responsible for behavior are generally ignored, since their logic is generally isomorphic to these larger scale symbolic rules. Thus on large and small scales, the human mind is a simple information processor, and like a computer program follows the same logical rules irrespective of the perspective you take. Recently, evolutionary psychology has added a nativistic element to this basic model. Thus natural selection shapes our sensitivity to certain information, and our behavior is subtly guided towards ends that maximize our individual genetic ‘fittedness’.

The well-established belief that decision-making is entirely dependent upon the manipulation of symbolic mental objects that may or may not be influenced by inborn tendencies is integral to philosophical beliefs that permeate both common sense and academic views of behavior. It also has entailed philosophical problems that have consumed the attention of thoughtful and thought-less people since the beginning of recorded history. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that arguments regarding materialism, moral justification, virtue, etc. basically derive from implicit and incorrect assumptions as to how elementary decision making is made. I will begin with an analysis of the logic of so called mentalistic and memetic models of decision making, and the logical and methodological rules that support them. In addition to these ‘molar’ explanations, ‘molecular’ or bio-behavioral explanations for decision making will be provided. These explanations will be demonstrated to detail the elemental processes that instigate and sustain behavior. These processes explain behavior with greater economy and strong empirical rigor, and ironically justify as reasonable and correct the many human values that are normally attributed to unreasoning sentiment.

Mentalism: The Rule of Common Sense

Common sense, or the rules of behavior we commonly internalize through language, attributes behavior to the conscious or nonconscious manipulation of ordinary events. A multitude of stimuli impinge upon our senses, and are encoded in our minds as physical objects that embody a four dimensional space. Thus we compose a gallery of physical and abstract objects such as cars and houses, time and distance that make up our mental space. We cognitively manipulate these ideas, and this information feeds forward and results in overt behavior. The sensory information from overt behavior then feeds back to the mind, which acts again according to the new information, and the mind-behavior loop continues on. However, common sense does not tell us how we behave, or why our behavior does not match what our common sense tells us we should do. Thus we all know that success follows hard work, perseverance, and the ability to follow reason, but often reason is not enough. So we hypothesize obscure mental processes or ‘faculties’ such as courage, willpower, feeling, virtue, etc. to fill in the explanatory gaps in our understanding and prediction of behavior. These faculties may be aroused and summoned, controlled and channeled through an appeal to reason. Motivational speeches, pop psychology books, and inspirational creeds all claim to change behavior through such reasonable appeals to the summoning and reordering of these mental events. Thus changing behavior is just a matter of summoning courage, building willpower, deciding to forgive, expressing love, etc.

Because mental goods are understood as discrete and disembodied mental or physical events, happiness is thus defined as attaining those goods, and not through the process that they are attained. Thus, humans seek a steady or ‘homeostatic’ state that represents ‘having it all’. Of course, humans never do ‘have it all’, and thus our behavior is composed of a series of fits and starts between needing and having.

Mentalistic versus Memetic Thinking

The common sense attribution of behavior to the ordering of mental events, or mentalism, has been traditionally bound with the assumption that our thoughts are ordered according to the diverse agendas of culture. Thus in some cultures monogamy and communal sharing may be important, and in other cultures polygamy and private property may be valued. Value in another words is entirely malleable, and there are for the most part few if any standards whereby cultural values may be judged.

In recent years, this belief has been challenged by the discovery of many behavioral traits or tendencies in humans that occur across cultures, and persist often in spite of cultural proscriptions. These tendencies are not learned, but innate, and are the products of processes of natural selection that have operated over millions of years. These tendencies form the subject matter of evolutionary psychology. The fundamental theorem upon which evolutionary psychology is based is "that behavior is in large part inherited and that every organism acts (consciously or not) to enhance its inclusive fitness – to increase the frequency and distribution of its selfish genes in future generations." (Miele, 1996) Men and women have different biological agendas that result in behavioral tendencies towards promiscuity, competitiveness, nurturing, etc. The values that we conceive in language are in turn ultimately derived from innate predispositions to interpret and respond to information in certain ways. Although values and the behavior they engender are ultimately a function of neural processes, the relative inaccessibility of these processes to observation and their sheer complexity forces a reliance on molar decision making processes that are denoted by a metaphorical language. This language borrows metaphors from biology, and in particular genetic and disease metaphors. According to this ‘memetic’ language, ideas or memes occur and are fashioned in ways not dissimilar from how a virus replicates and spreads, and are selected, mutate, and are discarded because of selectionist processes that form an analogue to Darwinian natural selection. Coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins (1976), memes are a different type of replicator that exists in minds.

Like their mentalistic counterpart of an idea, a meme is chosen according to a molar selectionistic principle, but is guided instead by nativistic (i.e. inborn) tendencies that have been chosen over the eons by natural selection. In other words, memetics is nothing more than mentalism couched in the metaphors of biology, but with a provision for hereditary constraints on how behavior may be exhibited. Memetics adds to mentalism by postulating a nativistic or evolutionary as well as cultural origin for behavior. However, it shares with mentalism the idea that behavior occurs because of the manipulation of disembodied intellectual objects, and the goal of behavior is in acquiring the intellectual and physical artifacts that once possessed promote happiness, and in the long view, provide biological fittedness.

Mentalistic and memetic descriptions of behavior involve metaphorical languages that are built on similar philosophical assumptions. These are that behavior is goal directed (homeostatic), disembodied (somatic or emotional influences are relatively unimportant or extraneous determinants of behavior), and molar (discrete mental objects or faculties motivate). Memetics of course adds a distinctive metaphorical language based on disease and genetic metaphors, and recognizes the constraining influence of nativistic or inborn tendencies that have been selected by evolution. However, a problem that arises is that a belief in these assumptions implicitly undermines the perceived usefulness of the experimental methods that may be used to disprove them. Just as the belief that the sun rotated the earth made it seem to be a fruitless affair to turn a telescope to the skies, so too do memetic and mentalistic belief systems preclude the use of the procedures that may effectively prove them ungrounded, and thus groundless.

Mentalism and memetic explanations are products of the ways in which we commonly question our own behavior, but those explanations in turn determine the ways that we will frame those questions, and in turn the questions themselves. This forms a vicious circle that excludes entire classes of questions from consideration. Thus, because behavior is disembodied, there is no need to ask how behavior may be anchored to neural or somatic events that could influence or bias decision-making. Secondly, because discrete large scale or molar events determine behavior, a general determinant for behavior becomes equivalent in predictive power to specific determinants of behavior. Therefore there is little or no need to delineate the specific causes that drive individual behavior. An understanding of the limitations of mentalistic or memetic thinking thus must derive from an understanding of the limitations and possibilities of the methods that guide and frame our questions.

Mentalism, Memetics, and Method

The best way to find out how your mind works is to map your overt (walking, talking) and covert (perceptions, emotions) behavior to actual neural processes, or failing in that to discover indirect ways that can give you some general knowledge of those same neural processes. A second approach is to hypothesize intervening mental forces or faculties that create or modulate behavior. These faculties may act as placeholders or ciphers until the true intervening processes are discovered, but more often than not are treated as real rather than metaphorical events. Thus, ego strength, self-actualization, psychic energy etc. can become more than metaphors for processes we don’t know about or can scarcely describe, and become real entities. Moreover, the creation of inferred processes can become unrestrained if they are not validated by a reference to the empirical facts of behavior. For mentalistic or memetic thinking this is commonly the case. Mentalistic or memetic interactions are not claimed to map with any precision to the neuro-psychological (arousal, alertness) or covert (muscular tension, relaxation) processes that actually produce and influence overt behavior. Because they are not even loosely constrained by or tied to actual neural or somatic processes, the variables or variable weights of each metaphorical element in an argument may be changed to fit the problem. Hence if Johnny does not practice piano despite the threats of a parent or the prospect of a piano competition, then the explanation of his behavior is saved by the introduction of a laziness variable that provides a post hoc explanation of his behavior. Likewise, if Johnny is a fervent Christian, a memetic explanation would attribute his behavior to the ‘infectiousness’ or ‘fittedness’ of the set of ideas or memes that constitute his thoughts. This trend takes its most complex iteration in modern cognitive theories that attempt to map the computational basis of thought. The development of such ‘neural-net’ models is "constrained by the knowledge of the behavioral output of the organism and by logico-mathematical considerations, and not by direct information about the internal processes and structures mediating that output." "Internal events are merely inferred from their external behavioral effects…. which is akin to attempting to understand the internal workings of a computer by looking only at its outputs and inputs." Moreover, "inferred internal events that are solely the product of inferences from behavior invite circular reasoning. That is, behavioral observations provide the basis for the inferences, but then the validity of the inferences is judged by their consistency with the behavior that led to the inferences in the first place." (Donahoe, 1997)

In addition to the pitfall of relying on inferred processes that are not grounded to neural or behavioral events, the determination of generalized sets of causes and effects is commonly held as an adequate substitute for rather than a complement to the isolation of specific agents of cause and effect. Although mentalistic and memetic interactions are not mapped to the actual processes that instantiate behavior, a common perception held by layman and academic alike is that the averaged behavior of groups of people provides for a more adequately controlled and more generalizable substitute for individual data that map to actual processes. In this way, at least the general determinants of behavior may be isolated, even though those determinants are largely inferred. Indeed, the larger the population sample, the more reliable the prediction. Thus, it would be a very reliable prediction to say that Americans would weather an economic downturn because of their emotional resilience and courage, or that a people may go communist because they have been infected with the ideas or memes of Marxism.

The comparison of averaged groups of responses of similar subjects under different conditions represents a ‘between group’ experimental design. Between group designs are predominantly employed by social and experimental psychologists to trace the behavioral significance of stimulus or environmental conditions that cannot be easily traced through their influence on individual subjects. For example, crime rates may be correlated between separate groups of people who differ because of race, gender, age, socio-economic status etc., or with groups that embody different combinations of traits. The cross correlation or ‘factor-analysis’ of sets of variables between groups of subjects often includes as measurable variables the inferred mind states of individuals. Thus reports of self-esteem, personal control, or emotional well being (e.g. stress, ‘flow’) are often cross-correlated with work and leisure conditions, family and social structure, etc. As compared to within group designs that trace causes and effects among individual subjects, between group designs aggregate the behavior of groups of individuals, and ultimately blur the distinction between cause and effect (Sidman, 1960). Moreover, with the unrestrained employment of inferred processes as the dependent or independent measures in such designs, the distinction between cause and effect may be even further confounded. Thus, between group designs can only at discover general truths at best, obscure the truth at worst, and cannot derive the specific truths that may only come from the analysis of individual behavior.

In the physical and biological sciences, between group studies generally complement and inform ‘within group’ experiments that isolate the causes and effects of individual variables in individual subjects. Thus the finding that populations of individuals that exercise live longer than populations that do not informs research in fields such as exercise physiology, cardiology, endocrinology, etc. that trace how exercise modifies the human body. However, in the social sciences, this is generally not the case. Whether the causes of the behavior of individual groups are discussed and compared as conceptual objects (e.g. intrinsic motivation, self esteem, etc.) or are formally contrasted through statistical means, rarely if ever are these findings used to inform research that traces individual behavioral or neural processes across time. Indeed, an historical antipathy has existed between advocates of these respective historical designs. This has resulted in an unproductive tendency among those camps that champion within group (behaviorism) and between group (social and experimental psychology) designs to ignore the experimental literature of each other (Krantz, 1971).

The general acceptance of the notion that behavior is caused by discrete and disembodied conceptual objects has been accompanied by near exclusive reliance on experimental methodologies that can only confirm that notion. The copious journalistic literature of psychology reveals an endless train of articles that reshuffle inferred causal variables in statistical or logical matrices of ever evolving complexity, but without ever questioning the mentalistic philosophy that is at their root. And so the question remains, is that philosophy correct from the standpoint of how the human mind actually works? The short answer is no.

Biobehaviorism

Ultimately, a true science of behavior is no more capable of perfectly predicting behavior any more than the science of biology can tell us when we may catch the flu. But prediction is not the point. Rather, a science of behavior provides explanations, simple and uniform metaphorical schemes that we use to understand our world. And it is from this basic metaphorical language that simple procedures may be developed that can allow for greater self control and provide general insight and guidance into how we construct and choose our values. However, even in its latest incarnation as evolutionary psychology, motivational psychology still relies on root explanations for behavior that are scarcely removed from the mentalistic mechanisms that informed both common and wise men since civilization began. However, if these root explanations are demonstrated to be false, then all that we know of psychology must be reinterpreted from an entirely new perspective.

In psychology, the sheer complexity and obtuseness of the human mind has always been used to justify the predominant use of between group methodologies and the postulation of inferred mental processes. Within group designs were simply not capable of describing how information is actually processed in the brain, or of providing simple metaphorical explanations for the interaction of mind and behavior. Thus, whereas the disease model in biology was a simple explanatory model that derived from the complex processes of contagion, no similar models were available in psychology because brain processes remained ill understood.

There were of course attempts to provide such models despite these limitations. In order to avoid the muddled and labyrinthine thinking that mentalism entailed, behaviorism, and in particular the operant conditioning movement meticulously documented how overt or operant behavior could be mapped in time to changing patterns of reward. However, the limitations of behaviorism became quickly apparent when it could not account for all of the behavior it purported to explain. Behavior was much more than responses to simple schedules or contingencies of reinforcement, and so behaviorism was roundly dismissed, forgotten, and frequently labeled as dead or dying (Pinker, 1997, Casti, 1989). The claims of behaviorism were discounted and thrown out, but out with the bathwater came also the baby, namely its experimental methodology. Ironically, within group methodology has never been discredited. Rather, it has been merely limited by the capability and precision of the procedures and tools that could map neural processes to environmental information derived from the senses, and the resulting inability to lead to an accessible metaphorical language that could account for those processes.

In recent years, new and better procedures and tools have been developed that have allowed psychologists to map neural processes with unparalleled precision. This has permitted psychologists for the first time to map ‘molecular’ neural processes to the large scale or ‘molar’ behavior that changes with environmental contingencies. This has enabled a new breed of behaviorists to expand what is called ‘behavior’ to include the entire organism’s behavior, from its neural underpinnings to the overt and covert behavior that such neural events manifest. This new form of behaviorism, also called theoretical (Staddon, 1998) or bio-behaviorism (Donahoe, 1993), has developed a conceptual framework that provides an accessible metaphorical model of the human mind that is implicitly grounded to real neural events. Like genetic and disease models, this metaphorical model is molecular because it can map to the moment to moment changes in overt and covert behavior that represent in aggregate an ‘experience’. For example, a ride on a roller coaster can be described as a thrilling experience. But a ‘thrilling experience’ represents but a class of covert (activating events such as emotion and alertness) and overt (holding on to the rail bars, waving ones hands) that vary with each twist and turn of the ride. Indeed, a roller coaster designer would not be interested in whether the ride as a whole was enjoyable or not, but rather in the small scale or molecular facets of the experience that were elicited by moment to moment changes in the position, incline, and velocity of the coaster. By knowing the fine grain elements that accentuate the positive experience of a roller coaster ride, the designer would be able to maximize them in future designs. Similarly, an understanding of the fine grain or molecular events that maximize the attractiveness or reinforcing nature of behavior permits a psychologist to understand how behavior is shaped, why it persists, and what small changes may be implemented that may alter behavior.

However, by focusing on incremental perceptual changes within small time scales and the brief neural events that underlie those changes, this molecular focus entails a radical shift in how behavior is conceptualized. The molecular perceptual events that change behavior are guided by equally small-scale somatic and neural events that mark the importance or salience of moment to moment changes in behavior. Changes in environment-behavior relationships that mark moment to moment shifts in attention are defined as reinforcement, which on a neural level "causes the neurotransmitter dopamine to be liberated in synaptic clefts between coactive and post synaptic neurons" (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993). Dopamine ‘fixes’ attention, makes thinking more efficient, and also and mediates feelings of elation and pleasure (Ashby, Isen, and Turken, 1999). Dopamine production is scaled to the salience of individual perceptual events (Montague et al. 1994), and can be sustained if attention must continually shift between a cascade of salient events. This fact is indirectly confirmed by the frequent self-reports of feelings of ecstasy and pleasure in situations that require an individual to shift attention between multiple salient precepts. Creative or otherwise demanding behavior (e.g. climbing mountains, performing surgery, etc.) are commonly associated with such ecstatic of flow response (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).

Molecular shifts in attention are also modulated by somatic activation variables that can occur within these short time frames, and are products of prior learning. These ‘somatic markers’ form the basis of emotion (Damasio, 1994), and represent pleasurable or painful somatic states (muscle relaxation, tension) that mark the salience of individual response options, and enable one to decide more effectively between those options. Somatic markers provide the ‘gut feelings’ which allow an individual to make effective decisions prior to a conscious contemplation of all alternatives. Providing a function similar to dopaminergic reinforcement processes, somatic markers "also provide a booster for continued working memory and attention", and influence nearly all behavior (Damasio, 1994).

If reinforcement is defined as molecular shifts in attention that are mediated by neural and somatic activation variables, the salience of individual perceptions must still be guided by elemental characteristics of the environment that have value. These elements are not arbitrary, but are entirely dependent upon the genetic endowment of the individual. Thus, an individual is ‘prepared’ to attend to precepts that increase personal control over food, mates and the discriminative events (money, prestige, property, etc.) that lead to that control.). However, the level and duration of neural and somatic activation or arousal is not constant across choices, and varies with changes in the salience of events, the contingency between events, and the correlation between events. For example, an individual becomes more aroused when very hungry because food is more salient, or if his safety becomes at risk. Similarly, one’s arousal may be sustained due to behavioral contingencies that demand a continuous change in perceptual set. Thus a gambler, mountain climber, or artist may become continuously aroused due to a need to continuously shift attention to different cognitive precepts. Finally an individual may become aroused by events that have a mere historical correlation of salient event with neutral events. That is, the mere association of activation variables with other concurrent environmental events adds value to these events, even though those events are not the proximal cause of those variables. For example, an individual who experiences a painful emotion trauma (e.g. a car wreck) or a blissful flow experience (e.g. climbing a mountain) will attribute his pain or pleasure to heretofore ‘neutral’ elements of the environment that framed those emotions. Thus the car wreck victim will avoid the scene of the accident or perhaps even the town in which it occurred, and the poet will attribute his ecstasy to the act of mountain climbing itself.

Although behavior is selected by an instinctive consideration of abstract elements of a situation that bestow evolutionary value, this value is continually biased or skewed by the modulation of the very activating processes that enable and enhance the ability to choose. Because value is determined by nativistic sensitivities and activating (attentive arousal, emotion) neural and somatic events that change on a moment to moment basis, reinforcement becomes a continuous and not a discrete event, and therefore cannot be homeostatic or disembodied. Since reinforcement is determined by the aspects of moment to moment somatic and neural stimulation, it is inherently heterostatic and embodied. In other words, reinforcement is not disassociated from affect, it is affect. Secondly, metaphorical models of molecular reinforcement processes bestow greater predictive power than molar models of reinforcement that engage metaphorical ‘faculties’ such as will power, courage, etc., and permit a more parsimonious and comprehensive account of the facts of behavior. Third, the identification of reinforcement with changes in perceptual set that may represent actual or virtual (as-if) environmental changes is contrary to well established economic and popular opinion that identifies value with the possession of individual objects. Thus popular conceptions of materialism are wrong.

The Selfless Gene

Ultimately, the problem with mentalistic or memetic explanations for behavior is that they are misconstrued to be accurate and precise models of behavior, when they are merely heuristic models that generally summarize cause and effect. We do not question these explanations because they generally serve us well in our day to day lives, where speed rather than accuracy in thinking is important. However, the ability to switch to more accurate modes of thinking is still critical when prediction is important. A baseball player for example can summarize the activity of throwing a ball by saying he threw the ball hard, but immediately switch to more precise explanations that involve throwing angle, stance, and grip. Similarly, we can switch from mentalistic and memetic accounts of behavior that engage mental faculties (will power, courage, contagious ideas, etc.) to explanations that involve the individual causal events that are the product of learning and present experience.

Throughout the history of philosophy and psychology, the limited predictive power of molar explanations has always been ‘enhanced’ by the addition of ad hoc inferred processes that in hindsight provide perfect post hoc predictions, but add little or nothing to their predictive power. The fact that molar reinforcement principles have limited predictive power underscores the fact that the values they engender (e.g. materialism) can only erratically sustain personal satisfaction or happiness. Moreover, since molar reinforcers are not ubiquitous, and generally have to be rationed, many philosophers spend entire careers examining and justifying how they are to be divided up. Thus ‘having it all’ also means someone else cannot have it all, with accompanying problems of moral justification that justify the existence of theologians, philosophers, politicians, and of course psychologists.

In contrast, molecular reinforcement principles do not have this difficulty. Because molecular reinforcement derives from as-if relationships that are modeled virtually, and need effect no imminent or even future change in the material world, reinforcement becomes not a scarce commodity, but a potentially unlimited one. If happiness is equated with the maximization of the reinforcing events we encounter daily, then an identification of reinforcement with heterostatic events can not only create worlds of limitless value, but sharply enhance an inclination towards behaviors that reflect a moral temperament.

Human beings are all instinctively drawn to actions that maximize their self-interest, or in an evolutionary sense, their genetic fittedness. However, the fact that the human brain was engineered to pursue heterostatic rather than homeostatic ends defines value not in a search for things, but rather in the stimulating implications of those things as mediated by their informative context. Furthermore, since stimulation itself biases behavior, and directs it away from aims that strictly maximize genetic fittedness, fittedness alone cannot reflect the single standard by which behavior must be judged. These standards contrast with those objective values that logically serve our self-interest, and result in behavior that is frequently called ‘self-less’. Hence an individual who is able to model the behaviors of other people will be emotionally reinforced by an estimate of how they will positively respond to his actions, but will also be emotionally restrained if that estimate is less salutary. Furthermore, he will compromise the choices that maximize his real interest to those that maximize his virtual interest. Thus, an individual can give up his life for God and country, be faithful to his wife, and neither cheat nor steal, and give up his real interests for rewards that reflect only conceptual value.

The fact that value is virtual, and involves abstract changes in environmental relationships creates new criteria for social values, and ultimately for the design of cultures. Heterostatic value favors more complex conceptual objects, since complexity forces rapid perceptual set changes that mediate neural arousal and feelings of pleasure. Heterostatic value also favors empathy, since empathy allows the continuous modeling of complex objects. Finally, heterostatic value favors ease in communications, since effective communication reduces the cost for information transfer. In other words, maximally reinforcing environments are comprised of complex conceptual objects that we can model in our minds and share easily with others.

So what would this brave new world look like? Ironically, it is precisely the same world we idealize through our cultural traditions. In spite of an onslaught of materialistic values that reduce value to collections of physical objects that merely maximize our physical survivability, we long for worlds that entice, enhance, and enable our imaginations. These worlds take form in the idealized cultures of Ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and Renaissance Italy. Intelligent and urbane populations who have broad, intricate and competitive interests, share information widely and easily (after all, Athens, London, and Florence were small cities or city states, and in an internet-less world, were perfectly fashioned for ‘sneaker-net’ communications) and know each other’s minds. Historical tradition assigns the genius of cultures to accidents of geography, economic competition, military threat, or perhaps some innate racial characteristic. Yet when genius is considered, the supporting environment is often forgotten or disparaged, as if Plato, Shakespeare and Michelangelo rose above their times when they were merely products of their times. The creativity of scientists, saints, and sages is sustained by a multiple set of challenges that are mediated by culture to beget universal interest that may frequently end in the highly creative accomplishment marked by a few. In other words, when cultures provide the mechanisms to maximize stimulation through the multi-faceted and universally applied reinforcement of the effort to create, and when entire populations aspire to genius, individual genius inevitably follows.

Evolutionary Humanism

The defining principles of humanism, a belief in the primacy of man’s creation, and empathy for its creators, have traditionally been defined as super-ordinate, or imposed from above. Human virtue and creativity did not emerge from simpler, more primitive processes, but rather were sparked by extra-biological or vitalistic forces such as consciousness, free will, or the grace of God. Ultimately however, an appeal to vitalistic causes begs or obscures the question of causation. Yet, vitalistic reasons for behavior remain enduringly attractive because they provide simple reasons and a needed justification for general tendencies of behavior that we implicitly feel are necessary and true. Hence, if we cannot justify human virtue through reason, an appeal to extra-human causes is enough to justify our love of our fellow man. However, if complex forms of behavior can derive from simple biological principles, can human virtue be far behind? Does human goodness ultimately flow from reasoning based in knowledge of the simplest things?

Arguably, the principles first espoused by Charles Darwin arguably provide us with the deepest and most general insights into how we may understand complex phenomena (Donahoe, 1997). Darwin’s two major conceptual contributions were that structure and function were inter-linked, and that structure or morphology was the cumulative effect of natural selection. His second major contribution was that complex structure/function arose as the emergent product of lower level processes acting over time. No appeal to higher level principles was required to understand the origins of complex structure and function. "Instead, complexity emerged as a byproduct of fundamental biological processes whose effects were largely captured by the principle of natural selection" (Donahoe, 1997).

However, these general principles were not fully accepted until the molecular processes behind genetics and the flow of genes across generations was fully understood. The resulting synthetic theory of evolution provided broader principles of selection thus could span from molar and molecular principles, and could explain how man evolved and how cells mutate. Likewise, to be persuasive, selectionistic principles in psychology must also derive from an understanding of the molecular processes that produce learning. Presently, evolutionary psychology is not totally persuasive since it still lacks an accounting of the actual neural processes that underlie choice. This has helped perpetuate arguments revolving about contentions whether this behavior or that behavior is the result of nature, nurture, or some tangled combination of both.

The application of large scale or molar evolutionary principles to the molecular processes that determine individual choice is based on the erroneous idea that these higher level principles may adequately describe lower level cognitive processes. There was thus no need to understand molecular processes since those processes were generally isomorphic to higher level processes. That is, the symbol manipulation in common language is in some way equivalent to smaller scale but equally algorithmic computational processes in the brain.

The assumption that nativistic or inborn sensitivities are the basis of value precludes ‘humanistic’ considerations of moral sentiment and religious value. Indeed, these considerations could only be viewed as a cultural artifact that do not directly emerge from selectionistic principles, but were a societal imposition that masked our true genetic impulses. However, this position is only half right, since the brain was designed to crave means, not just ends. Decision-making is enabled by heterostatic and embodied mechanisms that add value to the modeled implications of behavior. It thus provides a neurological explanation and justification for empathy. Therefore, the moral rules that derive from empathy are not imposed, and they need not even be articulated in common law or religious commandments. Rather, morality simply emerges from basic processes of socialization, and is progressively heightened as we begin to know more of our worlds, and the mental worlds of other people. Socialization, or the totality of education and experience that gains us the ability to experience and model the world, enfolds and embraces our reinforcers and our morals. The humanistic values that exalt cultural complexity and moral virtue are a natural byproduct of the rudimentary neural processes that in concert make us human. In the best sense, to be understand and accept evolutionary principles is to recognize that humanistic values are the culmination of evolution.

References

Ashby, F. G., Isen, Alice M., and Turken U. (1999) A Neuropsychological Theory of Positive Affect and Its Influence on Cognition, Psychological Review, 106, (3), 529-550

Casti, John L. (1989) Paradigms Lost. Tackling the Unanswered Mysteries of Modern Science, Avon p.237

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990) Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Collins

Damasio, Antonio R. (1994) Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Avon

Dawkins, Richard (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Donahoe, J.W. and D. C. Palmer (1993) Learning and Complex Behavior, Allyn and Bacon

Donahoe, John (1997) Neural-networks Models of Cognition, Elsevier Science, B.V. pp. 351-352

Krantz, D. L. (1971) The separate worlds of operant and non-operant psychology. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 4, 61-70

Miehle, Frank (1996) The (Im)moral Animal. A quick and dirty guid to evolutionary psychology and the nature of human nature. Skeptic, vol 4, no. 1, 1006, pp. 42-49

Montague, P.R., Dayan P. Sejnowski, T.J. (1994) Foraging in an uncertain environment using predictive Hebbian learning. In: J.D. Dowan, G. Tesauro and J. Alspector (eds.) Neural Information Processing Systems, 6, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, pp. 598-605

Pinker, Steven (1997) How the mind works. Norton p. 57-58

Sidman, M. (1960) Tactics of Scientific Research: Evaluating experimental data in psychology. New York: Basic Books 249-250

Staddon, John (1993) Behaviorism. Duckworth

Richard Dawkins Bad Idea: Meme's Genes and the Metaphors of Psychology

In times past, if the devil didn’t get you, the vapors would, and if they didn’t, humours, poisons, bile or any number of fanciful entities would do you in. With Pasteur and 19^th century biology, these agents of illness were replaced with microscopic organisms, and the invention of the disease model made it easy to attribute your aches and pains to malicious bacteria, viruses, or other little microscopic buggers. Of course, then as now, few people understand the actual biological processes that are responsible for disease, but the metaphors for disease do just fine, and have been duly incorporated into the common vernacular. Some may say that these metaphors have worked a bit too well, since they have made a Procrustean stretch to cover all sorts of behaviors, from alcoholism to gambling. Nonetheless, the incorporation of metaphors from the syntax of science does provide a correcting influence to common sense, which earlier had only recourse to metaphors that engaged evil spirits and deadly vapors to help explain the world.

Nowadays, man has access to a wealth of metaphors from modern science. Cancers, black holes, laser beams, and computer viruses have replaced the vitalistic metaphors that assigned causes to ethereal spirits, evil demons, or invisible ethers. Of course, the incorporation of the metaphors of the biological and physical sciences into common language does not entail the ability to map actual processes, but only suggest those processes. The metaphorical description of a cold and its viral causes does not equate with a biochemical or biological description that requires a strict syntax and data language all its own. Thus when we mix our metaphors by talking about rampaging viruses spreading like wildfire from person to person, we know that our description only suggests what viruses are doing in the large, not the actual processes that cause them to propagate and harm.

The mixing of metaphors from different data languages can be poetic insofar as it suggests the juxtaposition or correlation of causes and events, or it can be interpreted as literal insofar as it presumed to denote actual processes. But how do we know if ‘rampaging viruses’ are a literal or a figurative representation of the truth? The ability in science to distinguish the literal from the alliterative is the mark of good science, and good science writing. A physicist may talk about matter using the metaphors of billiard balls, time warps, and cosmic string, but the literalness of those concepts is intentionally undermined by a continuous restatement of the mathematical metaphors that belie their literal reality. So why does a physicist engage two sets of metaphors when he can participate in his science quite well without the need to postulate billiard ball atoms and the like? It is simply because ‘understanding’ requires it. On the one hand, common sense metaphors are easily understood through their appeal to conceptual domains that we readily perceive (e.g. up, down, fast, slow, hot, cold), but mathematical metaphors (e.g. E=mc2) correct for the tendency to make their existence literal. Well-written books that popularize ‘hard’ physical science all recognize the necessity to utilize two different sets of metaphors that correct the deficiencies of the other. Thus an understanding of the physical world can engage metaphors that are derived from our native experience and those that are derived from the abstract language of mathematics. Understanding consists in our ability to move from once set of conceptual metaphors (e.g. green grass, hot suns, expanding universes) to another (e.g. the calculus, non-Euclidean geometry). It is no less than our ability to shift between different languages that enables us to envision the world.

Sometimes however, two entirely different sets of conceptual metaphors may be quite similar in terms of the processes they describe, and proceed to confirm rather than contrast with one another. Newtonian ideas of acceleration, mass, gravity, force, etc. have long been assimilated into our popular lexicon because a Newtonian view of the universe coheres with our own naïve experience. The mechanical universe of Newton corresponds with common sense theories of the physics of cars, boats, apples, and other physical objects, and is much easier to understand and accept than other more accurate physical theories that are reflected in the conceptual metaphors of Einsteinian relativity and Quantum theory. However, the conceptual metaphors associated with relativity and the invisible quantum correct for the literal interpretation of Newtonian mechanics as a representation of reality, and have entailments (e.g. time travel, multiple universes, quantum indeterminacy) that are dramatically at odds with the Newtonian conception of a clockwork universe.

In the biological sciences, the Darwinian principles of natural selection have an import comparable to Newton, and the conceptual metaphors of evolution find an equal correspondence with common sense theories of human psychology. Common sense or ‘folk’ theories of psychology tell us that we are motivated by ordinary objects (e.g. cars, jewelry, money, sex) whose value we determine consciously, and either impel (as in eliciting drives and reflexes) or compel (as in rewards, reinforcers, or punishers) behavior. In a Newtonian sense, our lives revolve around the collection of ordinary objects that push and pull us to them from a distance, and populate but scarcely our psychological universe.

This common sense explanation of how behavior is selected bridges quite easily to conceptual metaphors that describe how biological entities are selected, and by implication to the behavior that is instantiated by those entities. Thus patterns of behavior that are elicited by instinctive events can be ultimately attributed to individual genetic influences that are objectified in the metaphors of the activities of individual genes. Similarly, the common sense notion that ideas are selected by some obscure competition between objective alternatives also finds an equal bridge to selectionist principles that are derived from biology. Thus, just as Newtonian physics and common sense physics seem to confirm each other, common sense psychology and Darwinian biology share similar metaphorical principles that explain respectively how behavioral and biological selections are made.

As with the blending of metaphors that saw the adoption of Newtonian terms into common sense physics, metaphors from biology and ‘folk’ psychology have also become commingled, and thus form a new explanatory framework for behavior that explains behavior as a Darwinian process. Thus genes become ‘selfish’, and ideas or memes become ‘contagious’. But these are only two different levels of thinking, and do not implicate the metaphorical schemes that explain the actual neurological processes that underlie behavior.

Darwinian or sociobiological explanations strongly imply that the molar processes of cumulative selection that led to bumblebees and human beings are isomorphic with neural or ‘molecular’ processes of the mind that lead to the selection of behavior. But an implication is not a demonstration, as a sociobiological explanation merely establishes a similarity between the metaphors of common sense and natural selection. The overriding question is not whether genes and memes represent a good metaphorical bridge between common sense and biological explanations for behavior, but whether they provide an equally good metaphorical representation of the biobehavioral processes that instigate behavior. The question is analogous to that posed by Quantum physicists to the common sense and academic views that extended the metaphors of Newtonian physics to the molecular world of the atom. The answer to that question was not a reaffirmation of the perspective of atoms as mere baby solar systems, but of the creation of an entirely new science that was equally rooted in the empirical tradition of science. That science was quantum physics.

A biobehavioral explanation of behavior represents the mapping of the actual neurological processes that comprise behavior to the patterns of information or environmental contingencies that parallel and elicit them (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993). This information is in turn mediated by somatic events that are perceived as emotion (Damasio, 1996), activating neurological events that comprise attentional processes (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993), and nativistic (i.e.inborn or genetic) sensitivities to certain abstract patterns of information (Bolles, 1976). Whereas a biobehavioral explanation is neurally realistic because it ties behavior to actual neural and informative events, a sociobiological explanation is neurally unrealistic, and merely substitutes neurological processes with Darwinian metaphors.

Biobehavioral science, which is also known as 2^nd generation cognitive science (Lakoff, 1999), or theoretical behaviorism (Staddon, 1990), is like evolutionary psychology entirely informed by evolutionary principles. However, it is more rigorously empirical because of its insistence on ultimately observing or reliably inferring the neural processes that intervene between information and behavior. Biobehavioral and evolutionary psychology are represented by entirely different sets of conceptual metaphors that are respectively entailed by molecular (small scale processes and time frames) and molar (large scale processes and time frames) processes. The polarity of these metaphors is remarkable, and can be reduced to the following contrasting principles.

Evolutionary psychology and folk psychology share the implicit presumption that decision making is generally based on the conscious and disembodied appraisal of ordinary objects that lead to the maximization of our self interest. In contrast, biobehavioral psychology has demonstrated that most reasoning is not conscious but nonconscious (Lewicki, 1992; Greenwald, 1992), and is guided by embodied non-verbalized somatic (Damasio, 1994) and neural activation events (Donahoe and Palmer, 1997) that are ‘just as cognitive as any other perceptual image’ (Damasio, 1994). Because nonconscious embodied reasoning is computable but not directly accessible by conscious reasoning, we often find that our conscious reasoning about what is a ‘best outcome’ conflicts with our nonconscious determination of ‘best outcome’. Thus there is no univocal or self-consistent locus of value (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). (Remember this next time you reluctantly try to get up in the morning.) Values are due to the binding of many information streams that are mediated by disparate neural and somatic processes, and motivate behavior in real time as they are perceived, and not when the physical or objective entity that denotes such information is attained. (In other words, it’s the thought that counts) Thus value is not found in some conceptual object like a meme, but in separate threads of information that are mediated by the mind and body that individually have salience to an individual and are perceived presently, independently, virtually, and for the most part nonconsciously. In other words, the concept of ideas as compartmentalized memes leads us to find value in the obvious topographical or ‘surface’ aspects of an idea, whereas it is the non-obvious abstract properties that are actually selected. Because value resides in information that is often incognizant to us, it cannot be subject to the economic models that are based on the rationing of value according to some single utilitarian measure, or the mathematical decision models such as game theory that conceptualize value simplistically as being no more than material wealth.

The definition of a meme as an independent conceptual object is ultimately not simple, but simplistic, since it does not denote the web of informative relationships between behavior and and the environment that is denoted by consciously and nonconsciously by the mind and body proper. For example, the concept of the sport of football is a well traveled meme to be sure. Football represents a rather involved information pattern that has infected the minds of young men nationwide, and football games, commentary, and assorted chatter has parasitized not only the minds of people, but the network airwaves, the written media, and many unwilling housewives. But is a football game an indivisible meme like entity, or is it somewhat different than the sum of its parts? Actually, the ‘meme’ of football is not a singular information pattern that replicates like a strand of DNA, but rather emerges from a web of separate patterns of information that are mediated not only by consciously perceived information but by neural and somatic activating processes that we otherwise call emotion. The meme of football is not just a compendium of rules, but comprises the memory of the somatic responses that occur while watching (excitement, depression), the natural feeling of elation that occurs with a high state of alertness, the virtual extension of control over all those partisans of the losing team, the constantly changing and stimulating prediction error that occurs as one play after another unfolds, the smell and taste of hot dogs and beer, the camaraderie of friends, and so on. The meme of football is in other words a web of perceptual relationships that is volatile and constantly changing. Moreover, different aspects of the meme football may be present in one circumstance, and not present in another. Watching your team lose at a hostile stadium on a rainy day is a whole lot less rewarding than if you were watching your team at home while among friends.

The most important distinction contrast between evolutionary psychology and bio-behavioral psychology is that bio-behavioral psychology denotes value not in the assimilation of ideas or memes, but in changes in the relationships between memes, or behavioral discrepancies (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993). To explain this, we must understand first how a meme does not reproduce.

Although a meme represents a self replicating packet of information, unlike a virus it possesses no internal instructions that secure its influence on behavior, let alone its retention in memory. Memes or ideas take root in memory because they are rehearsed, and they are rehearsed because of their contingent relationship to a myriad other ideas that comprise the stimulus context of a behavior. This idea of contingency is critical to the methodology of modern behaviorism, and underlines the fact that it is not ideas alone that motivate, but the dependencies between ideas. The meme of a fishhook for example hardly comes to mind until it is perceived as part of a means-end (memes-end?) expectancy. We think of fish hooks because of the fish it can catch, but to even think about fishing one must also think about the time, place, and equipment that allows one to fish. If any of these events fail to take place, there is hardly a need to think about fishing, or for that matter the meme of fishhooks. An atomized universe of memes does not implicate the contingent relationship between ideas that secures the rehearsal and retention of a ‘good idea’. Behavior is elicited not by individual memes but by global maps of means-end expectancies that are constantly changing, and are in general non-consciously perceived. However, what causes us to think about fishhooks, fishing trips or other ideas is the fact the relationships they denote are selected and are mentally rehearsed. We constantly think about a fishhook as it winds its way from our tackle box to the end of our fishing line because in every moment the relationship between the fishhook and the line changes, and it is the change that gains our attention. Thus, we select not only memes, but also the abstract relationships between memes as they are moderated by our thoughts and overt behavior. Ultimately, as Alexander the Great found out when he wept upon having no more new worlds to conquer, what motivates is not the end, but in the traveling.

Unfortunately, Darwinian and common sense models can no more describe the molecular ‘environment-behavior’ relationships that comprise human motivation than a weatherman’s description of an impending cold front describes how a snow storm forms over your head. We would err in using a molar analysis (cold fronts) to describe molecular process (the formation of clouds) because the inherent processes implied by storm systems and storm clouds are different. Likewise, the human brain is a massively parallel biological computer, and metaphors from information processing are far more apt than biological metaphors that liken ideas to viruses and their spread to contagion, let alone the metaphors from common sense that posit a disembodied objectified reasoning. The lack of ‘fit’ of Darwinian and common sense metaphors to bio-behavioral science does not invalidate the selectionist principles that inform all of the sciences. But it does point out the level confusion that occurs when a set of principles from one level of understanding (biology) are invoked not just to explain another (an in the juxtaposition of the metaphors of cosmic string and mathematics) but to embody another. In other words, because the uses of memes and genes is not corrected by an understanding of how the brain as a neural system actually works, the metaphorical conception of memes and genes can easily be seen as not just figuratively real, but literally real.

The ultimate danger in assigning a literal reality to the means-end rationality imposed by utilitarian memes and genes is that it implies that we implicitly know what is in our best interest. Furthermore the convergence of the metaphors of common sense and Darwinism reinforce the idea that value is objectified and is a limited commodity, and must be allocated to those who are most fit to achieve it. In this way, a meme world becomes ‘mean’ world, wherein our memetic impulses robotically drive us forward to achieve our goals, with the long term survival of our genes and memes being the only necessary outcome.

In contrast to this cold and sterile vision, bio-behavioral psychology defines value not as a scarce commodity, but in the creation of information that is consumed virtually. That is, if value is denoted in abstract informative relationships between ideas, then it is prospectively unlimited, and is constrained not by our inability to manufacture physical things, but by our ability to create and perceive information. But perception requires the skills that enable us to mentally model the world, from the implications of the cheers of a crowd in a football game to the thoughts of a proud parent. To experience the world is to model it, and that is nothing more than empathy. Universal empathy allows us to expand and enhance the rewards we perceive, but it also constrains our behavior due to the virtual penalties (e.g. shame, embarrassment) we perceive. Cultures that understand that value derives from the development of empathy will take an entirely different course than the materialistic societies that posit value as the accumulation of objects. Indeed, information is more economically produced by a societal exaltation of sports, art, literature and music than by the manufacture of a new prestige automobile. Ironically, the lasting legacy of a psychology that is informed by evolutionary principles is not the amoral world driven by the erroneous metaphors of selfish genes and infectious memes, but by the evolutionary mandate of an expanding empathy, and our innate interest in the cultivation of beauty.

Bolles, Robert C. (1976) Theory of Motivation. 2nd ed. New York: Harper and Row

Damasio, Antonio R. (1994) Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Avon

Greenwald, A.G. (1992) Unconscious Cognition Reclaimed, American Psychologist, 766-775

Lewicki, P., Hill, T., & Czyewska, M. (1992) Nonconscious acquisition of information, American Psychologist, 47, 796-801

Donahoe, J. W. and D. C. Palmer (1993) Learning and Complex Behavior, Allyn and Bacon

Donahoe, J. W., D. C. Palmer, and Jose E. Burgos (1997) The Unit of Selection: What do reinforcers reinforce?, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 67, 259-273

Donahoe, J. W. (1997) Neural-Networks Models of Cognition, J. W. Donahoe and V. Packard Dorsel (Eds.)

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books

Staddon, John (1993) Behaviorism , Duckworth

(the best introduction to bio-behaviorism comes from Shull’s article on the website of the Journal for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, and the scholarly commentary also at the JEAB website that discussed this new school of behaviorism. An understanding of metaphor and how it heavily influences ideas in evolutionary psychology can be found on the many web sites that discuss the work of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, and in particular his new book: Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its challenge to Western Thought)

Gene and Mimi

Once upon a time, when the earth was new, there was this inorganic chemical. Let’s call him Gene. Now Gene was rather simple as chemicals go, as we was made up of only a few simple strands of molecules. Existing as he did in an antediluvian broth, life was, or rather non-life was tough for entities like Gene. Unpleasant things like sunshine, lightning bolts, and temperature extremes always shook up his solution, resulting in unfortunate fractures in his molecular chain. Without thinking, Gene soon came up with an answer to his predicament. He would simply evolve a molecular shell to protect himself from all those nasty events, a survival machine of sorts to provide him a way to inertly repose and from time to time replicate. It came natural to Gene that he would make something out of himself. In his case, it was more of himself, although when he went about this process he was quite divided. Pretty soon Gene was all over the place, as he continued to divide and divide. This Gene pool soon became very crowded, and it was impossible to replicate further without the necessary raw materials. So Gene evolved a new version of his molecular shell that enabled him to cannibalize all his other duplicates that weren’t so well equipped. Having done so, Gene again began to divide and divide. The other Genes however weren’t going to take this lying dormant, and soon they evolved their own molecular add-ons that provided them with a tougher shell, higher mobility, or cannibalizing capabilities of their own. To meet this growing competition, Genes began to cooperate by linking up with one another, with each Gene assigned a specific job. Naturally, certain Genes would do their jobs better than others, and a way was need to select for those genes that could best contribute to the Gene team. Soon, Gene chains were meeting regularly to exchange genetic material. This allowed each chain to test out new combinations of gene talent in the ever more competitive game of life. The evolution of the periodic genetic exchange, which is also known as sex, caused a veritable explosion in the complexity and type of survival machines. More and more genes came together in ever lengthening communities, and soon the world was well populated with a growing assortment of lumbering and colliding molecular robots. Now Gene was a naturally passive and inert sort, and each robot, when constructed and wound up, would only follow the preset instructions that it was originally given. Gene couldn’t modify these instructions when situations rapidly changed, as they surely would; and he needed some apparatus to provide a kind of automatic pilot for his aimlessly cavorting robot. So Gene naturally selected an array of sensors to be attached to the outside shell. These sensors were reactive to a variety of changing stimuli such as water pressure, sound and light, and were hooked up by a series of molecular strings which wound about the machine. This ‘nervous system’ gave Gene the means to automatically coordinate the increasingly complexity of his survival machine.

Yet, even when equipped with a wide range of reflexes, the Gene machine could only react when it confronted a new situation, and not before. To react before a situation occurs demands that the probabilities of certain events be calculated before a certain movement was made. To do this, an internal simulation of the outside environment has to be performed that would give the machine the foresight to react to impending events. A computational device was obviously needed. In short, Gene need his own PC, or personal cerebrum. Since Gene needed to model external events internally, that means that his PC had to categorize and classify all of the information that he received from his sensors. Larger PC’s and sensory modems gave Gene increasing capabilities to process and receive ever greater amounts of information, and soon Gene’s centralized nervous system became very specialized. Marvelous optical, acoustical, and olfactory devices were evolved as attachments to the PC. These knob like devices, also called the eyes, ears, and nose, were hooked up in close proximity to the PC, which was by then encased in a bone colored shell that was able to swivel about on its vertebrate stand. Soon the PC was able to make extremely detailed models of the outside world in three dimensions, and in living color. These models were stored in memory, and the PC was able to call up former memories at will and project out all sorts of what-if situations. As the PC’s memory grew, it became able to perform an every increasing array of mental tricks, such as controlling many thousands of operations at once (multitasking), and making models of the models of the models it created. The PC itself was able to perceive itself perceiving, and soon it became quite conscious of this fact. The PC thought, therefore it was, and it became oblivious to the fact that it was after all just a machine built to serve Gene. Some gratitude!

The latest version of the PC, called the homo-sapiens, was hampered by this pesky self consciousness, yet it nonetheless followed Gene’s programmed imperative and shortly became the PC standard. Soon other non-human PC’s were destroyed to make room for the new model, or else they were consigned to PC museums (zoos) for the instruction of young homo-sapiens.

The current model of the homo-sapiens PC most commonly in use is the PC-XT, or short for Xtra threatening. This PC is equipped with external memory storage devices (books) which allow it to access more information than ever before. With such information available, homo-sapiens is able to construct for itself a near infinite array of devices to improve its mobility (the car), hallucinatory powers (TV), and competitive capabilities (guns and nuclear missiles).

In spite of the PC’s unpredictable hijinks, Gene still retained control over the important PC programs that were crucial to his continued duplication. The most important was the automatic orientation and duplication mechanism, or in other words, the sex drive. Sex was obviously a more complicated trick for Gene than in the good old, old days, when all that was needed was a cup of nutrient broth and a willing cell or two. For the homo sapiens gene machine, special input and output ports had to be designed for the easy transfer of genetic material, and triggering mechanisms had to be in place to signal when the gene machines were to hook up. Random coupling was undesirable given the homo-sapiens PC’s ability to visually sort our prime reproductive candidates. To do this, the PC was programmed with special pattern recognition subroutines which were directly hooked up to the sex drive. Upon recognition of a suitable form, the PC would orient towards the object, input port at the ready, in preparation for a possible interface leading to coupling. For the male of the species, this form takes an hour glass shape, with special attention drawn to two round bulges located in the front anterior. For the female, a more blockish shape is preferred, with special emphasis on rippling striated musculature. For both sexes however, Gene was quite unadventurous regarding facial features, preferring t link up with those males and females who had rather regular and bland facial designs. Gene had always had his best success by staying with tried and true designs, and these extended to a uniformity in those optical acoustical, and olfactory knobs, which when set to an oval face, made something rather ordinary looking. However, to the homo-sapiens, it was beautiful.

The homo-sapiens is complex, and takes about nine months to construct. The female homo-sapiens is provided with an internal factory which builds to order new gene machines from the DNA blueprints, half of which are kindly ported over by the male. The internal duplication factory takes up most of the resources of the female, whereas the male can continue to hop from female to female making genetic deliveries. If he’s good, he’d soon become a captain or should we say father of industry, and have many factories humming along merrily and at little cost to himself. Naturally, the female can’t go hopping about like the male, as she needs a full time male to help take delivery of her bundle of joy. If the gene machine was male, then Gene could theoretically leverage out his genetic blueprints to make literally hundreds of baby gene machines in his image. Not so for the female gene machine, which can only make a few machines in her lifetime, and raise them only with the help of the male. Depending upon whether he dwelled in a male or female machine, Gene would be at an advantage or disadvantage relative to his peers. To help solve this problem, Gene became sexist. The male gene continued to impart operating instructions which spelled no limit to acquisition and merger activity. All that was needed for a ‘go’ signal was the right visual signal, of hourglass shape of course, that denoted the reproductive potential of the female. For the female, the visual image of a male didn’t so obviously denote the characteristics which were crucial to her and her offspring’s survival. She could ill afford to respond so reflexively to the male form, so she took her time in examining the male, and favored traits that demonstrated the male’s reliability, power, and devotion to her. Now all this demanded time and deliberation by the female PC, yet Gene quite reasonably couldn’t wait forever. So he gave the PC a little shove which turned ambivalence into action. He did this by making the PC into a drug addict.

Now Gene was a quite sensible drug pusher, wanting only that the PC opt to fantasize about devotion and coupling before he would give it a pleasurable high. Even the male gene got into the act, and to make the male PC compromise its own worldly ways, drugged it from time to time as well. This drub induced stupor was called ‘falling in love’, and it served Gene by putting an abrupt halt to the sexual dilly dallying that could make male and female gene machines circle each other endlessly in fruitless negotiation. It was quite an underhanded tactic of course, but Gene would do anything to survive; it came of course quite naturally.

The Selfish Gene

Our tale of Gene touches originality only with humor, and owes itself to ideas first expressed by Richard Dawkins in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’. Dawkins ingeniously traces the true evolutionary course or purpose of nature to forces and currents which are seemingly at cross purposes to those personal and cultural agendas that e normally think symbolized our place in the cultural order of things. The natural processes that have over the eons culminated in life and the living phenomenon of man were essentially mindless as well as formless. This abstract imperative for matter to evolve finds its easiest representation in that traveling wave of rapid physical change which transformed a single cell into that marvelous machine we call man. That man cold descend from a primitive n celled organism is not difficult to understand if we not that for us, nature has shortened the trick to only nine months. We are but the culminating product of a little chromosomal mechanism that assembled us bit by bit according to a genetic code.

Dawkins maintains that biological organisms can be viewed as relatively huge molecular robots or ‘survival machines’ that but mirrored the evolving instructional code that comprised a molecule called a chromosome. That is, it’s not whether the chicken or the egg came first, since neither really counts; only the instructional code counts. Chickens, eggs, and human beings are only outward representatives of the code in action, much like a building is an outward manifestation of a blueprint. And a chromosome, non-descript entity that it is, evolved its code to survive, and its molecular shell or machine was indubitably just a mindless and toddling robot, until of course, it was given a mind.

To Dawkins, a mind evolved because of the need to coordinate the many complex functions of the molecular machine, and also to simulate the countless alternatives for action that presented themselves in each succeeding instant. How this simulating capability evolved into consciousness is another story, yet the imprint of society and culture upon the mind in the form of thought forms an entirely new set of commands that places man often at cross purposes with the instinctive dictates of the ‘selfish gene’.

In the next chapter, we will continue with the adventures of Gene, and show how the seductive wiles of culture can sway humans away from Gene’s usually irresistible dictates. But before we do so, we need to sort out those ‘instinctive’ behaviors that are unique by-products of this genetic dictate.

Sociobiology

The most obvious attribute of an instinctive behavior is its resistance to any strong correlation with any identifiable pattern of experience. In other words, it doesn’t necessarily follow that this situation or that situation correlates with and thus predicts a certain behavior. That behavior simply occurs, as if it popped out of nowhere.

The best example of an instinctive behavior is the sex drive. In general, men and women possess sexual sensitivities and tendencies that are gender specific. Although both sexes are very sexual by nature, men and women use their sexuality in markedly different ways. Indeed, one of the root causes for much of the confusion and animosity between the sexes is the misunderstanding by both sexes of each other’s very different sexual agendas.

One way to illustrate and understand these unique instinctual traits is through the correlation of these traits with the environmental pressures of ages long past that tin effect ‘selected’ the behavioral tendencies we note today. The discipline that establishes such correlations is called sociobiology, and represents an extension of evolutionary biology to the instinctual behaviors of men and animals. A sociobiological interpretation of sexuality maintains that male and female sexual agendas differ not because of some individual sexual perversity of men and women, but because the survival of the species depends at least historically upon it. Only those who developed these instincts survived, and they are our ancestors.

The value of sociobiology is not that it suggests better ways for us to behave; we don’t need an understanding of evolution to know that men and women are different. Its real value lies in its ability to absolve us of some of the guilt we have accumulated for having very natural inclinations. Morality can overrule, but it can never reshape our instincts. Sociobiology allows us to acknowledge these instincts, and to quell our often puritanical urges to be something we can never be.

The Evolution of Sexuality

In the animal kingdom, there is also a weaker of the two sexes that suffers through many of the subordinate roles that the human female has long been subjected to. This sex is effeminate, passive, vain, fickle, and even apathetic about staying at home to raise the offspring. Moreover, this sex is often kicked around, abandoned, and can even be eaten by its mate if it doesn’t mind its place. A sad state of affairs certainly, yet no less ironic, since this sex is the male.

It seems strange that except for us humans and a few other species, the subordinate role in the animal world is assumed by the male. The male is the weak link, the expendable partner that is good for its periodic contribution to reproduction, and little else. The key to this topsy-turvy role play is one simple fact: namely the capability of the female to bear and provide for its offspring. If the male can’t contribute in any significant manner to this task, he simply gets in the way, and is promptly booted out of the way if he persists as an obstruction. Of course, the male does have an important albeit passive role of sorts to play. He simply looks and acts pretty. Males are instinctively vain because their most significant contribution to the viability of their species is their genetic role as parents, and what better way to advertise your fitness as a papa than by flaunting your stuff? Because females determine the best reproductive candidate by noting his relative health and robustness, males naturally display and evolution naturally selects those attributes that advertise best these qualities. And as with all advertising, what you see is not necessarily what you get. Because advertising’s the thing, nature then selects for advertising, and males develop a host of physical attributes that exaggerate and even caricature the practical functions these attributes were originally meant to provide.

Much like the way human males react to human females whose attributes are, to put it mildly, rather inflated, so too do many females in many animal species react with wide-eyed abandon towards those males who are similarly distended. If say, you’re a female cock-a-too, a large bill and wide breast may be a sign that your prospective mate is in good health and is a prime reproductive candidate. If that bill is twice as large and that breast twice as wide, it may make the male look awkward and ridiculous, but a lady bird killer is born. And so it goes with bright feathers, thick manes, gangly antlers, large teeth, and any number of useless appendages drawn from nature’s vanity case.

Much of the color and variety of the animal kingdom is owing to the fact that animals think with their glands, and we humans are hardly any different. Yet why is it that in contrast to the animal kingdom, it is the human female which is case in the vain and trivial role? The answer ironically may be due to the physical evolution of our most notable attribute, the human brain. As several evolutionary biologists have noted,. The evolutionary pressures leading to larger and larger brain sizes has run smack into the human female’s physical limitations in bearing such offspring. The female’s pelvis simply could not adapt to such progressively larger babies without causing her to structurally collapse. The solution to this problem was for the female to bear her child in a state of greater and greater prematurity. The physical maturation of the human infant took place after birth, and the gradually lengthening time span between birth and maturity put unprecedented demands on the female's physical resources. She just couldn’t kick her offspring out of her next a few months after birth as was the fashion of all other animals. Quite the contrary, she had to stay by her child for long period of time, and further, she was faced with the very real need to select male companions who were a lot more than mere pretty faces. She demanded a male who was reliable, physically strong, and capable of providing for her needs and for her offspring. So how does a nice homo-sapiens girl evolve the lures to catch such a male. Simple, she just employs an old male trick: she becomes pretty, and to insure the male’s constant presence, she becomes very, very sexual. The gradual domesticity imposed on the human female by the slower maturation of the human infant moved the badge of physical advertising from the male to the female. Whereas the female required a broad array of physical and psychological characteristics from her mate, the male’s choice shifted to those physical attributes that correlated most reliably with fertility. Moreover, since the male stood to lose nothing and gain many offspring through random copulation, an eager promiscuity became the genetically favored trait. Since this same trait would obviously prove disastrous to the female, she became much more cautionary prior to engaging in sexual relations. These very different sexual preferences find their greatest contrast in the materials each sex uses to indulge and stimulate their fantasies. Since men put first priority on finding a female who is sexually available and fertile, the visual impact of a female achieves first priority in his selection of a mate. In contrast, a female is responsive to the visual and psychological characteristics of a male combined, and this response takes greater time to develop. Thus mal fantasies are most stimulated by the visual pornography that depicts women as servile and fertile, while female fantasies are encouraged by romance novels which set the emotional stage for a sexual encounter.

The irony of all this is that as the human female’s cautionary instincts increased, so did her sexual availability. This is because if you want a male to stick around for a long period of time, you can dangle the sexual lure, but you’d be foolish to withdraw it. Indeed, almost all female mammals do the latter, and turn on their sexual availability for only certain limited times, only to withdraw it abruptly to the male’s endless frustration. The period of sexual availability, often displayed as a reddening of the female’s genitalia, is called estrus. This estrus state combines with specific sexual posturing and special female scents to drive the males into a state of sexual frenzy. For human females, this estrus state has disappeared in favor of a year round sexual availability that require no special signaling, or does it? The popularity of perfume and rouged cheeks has been suggested as a reflection of an instinctive nostalgia for those good old days when a really alluring female had the color and aroma of a golden delicious apple.

The Sublime Addiction

Although the sexual drive suffices quite well to bring people into sexual contact, the mind sets even higher rewards for fantasizing about, of all things, monogamous and committed relationships. To do this, it simply makes one into for all practical purposes, a drug addict. The brain has often been likened to a biochemical computer, and it stirs our mind to motion, and often very selective motion, by its manufacture of chemicals that stimulate and depress.

Our state of mind is shaped by how we feel, and specific feelings are tailored to some very generalizable goals. For example, the ‘flight or fight’ response is marked by the physiological preparedness of a human to take some extreme action, and this preparedness is signaled by the release of the chemical adrenaline. In addition, the state of mind of an individual is also shaped by the association of his behavior with those feelings. Not only does adrenaline shape the immediate behavior of an individual, it also molds the future shape of his behavior through the mere association of certain behaviors with a physiologically altered state. For example, a person who has stage fright not only fears a crows, he fears fear itself. The state of fear becomes intertwined with the perception of the conditions that evoked it, hence these conditions seem even more distasteful.

The same associations apply when a person falls in love. The emotion of love is not so much stimulating as it is intoxicating. The brain is inherently disposed to in effect sedate itself when an individual fantasizes about another person’s physical and person characteristics that are appealing. This pleasurable effect is associated with these fantasies, and acts to enhance and thereby distort his or her appraisal of a loved one. Love is not blind, it just causes fuzzy vision; yet this misperception of another person’s worth will fad if that person doesn’t stay in the distance. Since love depends on idealized fantasy, nothing is more devastating to that fantasy, and that emotion, than having its object for your very own. It is then that reason takes over, and the realization soon comes that the brain conned you into rushing into a relationship in order to secure a very natural high.

The Instinct That Never Was

Ironically, of all human drives, sex is by far the weakest, yet is nonetheless a powerful spur to much of our behavior. Our sexuality obsesses us because we attach it to so many other non-sexual goals that complement sex, such as companionship and family. Sex is a key to the fulfillment of a host of non-sexual needs, hence it becomes a source of our endless preoccupation. Sex is habit forming, as we well know, and is usually formed by habit in ways that we don’t know. Habit represents all undeliberative acts that don’t require our conscious attention. It reflects our disposition to move in both conscious and unconscious ways according to subtle environmental cues. Alter the cues and you alter the habit. All human motivations are effected by habit, whether they represent when we get hungry and what we get hungry for, how we drive a car, or even who we fall in love with.

We often confuse the effects of habit with the specific strengths or characteristics of our instincts themselves. This confusion is most apparent in a habit that is so prevalent and persistent, it has found a way into our moral code. That habit is known as the incest taboo. Our abhorrence of sexual relations between closely related kin is but a very small aspect of a far more pervasive habit that influences us almost every day. It is the habit of sexual fantasy.

Before we engage in many behaviors, we cognitively simulate what will happen if we behave in certain ways. Such preplanning usually saves us a lot of grief, as simulation predicts the future outcome of a behavior. For example, courtship behavior is marked by a preoccupation with strategizing or stimulating the best approaches that will lead to maximum romantic success. Will bringing flowers helps somewhat, or what of the type of restaurant for a dinner date, the appropriateness and timing of sexual advances, and so forth? We constantly rehears these details in our head, and compare them to our mental model of the behavior of our date. Eventually, we will determine the best ‘fit’ between our prospective behavior and the likelihood of the response we seek to elicit from the other person. This leads us to a better decision as to what behavior is most appropriate given the nature of our date and the nature of our desires.

Patterns of experience can also influence how we unconsciously simulate behavior. When we drive a car over the same route every day to work, we unconsciously learn to cease any conscious deliberation over the possibility of other more convenient routes. Because we form the habit of not thinking about alternatives, we may not discover them even if they are available given just a little thought. Our inclination too sexually fantasize can be shaped in just this way. In many situations, whether it be in a college dormitory, at work, or even in one’s neighborhood, the very act of seeing people in one context influences the future ways we think about them. For example, it has been found that college student living in coed dormitories will tend to date other students in direct proportion to their actual physical distance in the dormitory. Thus, students will be rarely inclined to date a next door neighbor, more inclined to date a neighbor on the next floor, and much more inclined to date someone who didn’t live in the building at all. It was discovered that this reluctance to date close neighbors was not due to the desire among students to maintain their privacy or for any other practical reason, but rather because next door neighbors were habitually viewed as friends, and not as potential lovers. The everyday non-sexual contact between a student and his neighbor apparently created an unconscious habit that precluded thinking about sexual alternatives because none had been thought of before. Because a student was in the habit of not fantasizing sexually about a neighbor, he didn’t, and what is more, he had no inclination to begin doing so.

In a family, the close proximity between siblings creates the same sort of unconscious habits, and a societal abhorrence against incest only serves to confirm the almost universal prevalence of this habit. What incestual habits do demonstrate is that the roots of the sexual drive may not be found in some irresistible triggering mechanism such as sexual deprivation, sexual stimuli, and the like; but rather in the realm of our own thoughts and fantasies. Its all in the mind.

Sex and Culture

When we left Gene, we had seen how he had developed a marvelous personal cerebrum, or PC, to attend to his large and ever growing information processing needs. But what was behind this trend towards greater personal computing? Obviously, there was very little the homo-sapiens could do with his onboard equipment except swing his arms about and wiggle his pinkies. Yet by being equipped with flexible hands, stereoscopic vision, and a PC with rudimentary memory, Gene gave the early homo-sapiens the ability to manipulate all sorts of devices which extended many fold the functionality of the homo-sapiens. These devices were called tools, and even the most primitive of them, like a sharp stone, could be put to a multitude of uses. These varied and often complex functions were infinitely numerous, and each function was useful only in very specific and changeable circumstances. Gene placed the instructions of programming for them in RAM (readily absent memory). Thus, functions like home building weren’t pre-wired into the PC’s memory like say, a bird’s, but had to be programmed into memory through the use of programming languages like English, French, or any number of others. With the advent of programming languages and external storage devices (books), an extensive library of software was soon developed for the PC. With the right programming, the homo-sapiens was able to accomplish all sorts of specialized and complicated roles. He could be a homo-sapiens mechanic (doctor), PC repairman (neurosurgeon), systems analyst (psychologist), or he could specialize in developing procedural languages of meaningless complexity (lawyer).

The most popular programs are utility programs. These programs assist the homo-sapiens in forming social networks, and establish a standardized set of response patterns for everyday situations. These local area networks are collectively known as ‘society’, and allow the homo-sapiens to work in harmony for the greater good of the entire PC network. Sometimes a PC receives programming which places it at odds with society, hence forcing the latter to disconnect the PC from the network and place it in a reprogramming center (prison). Usually, just the threat of partial disconnection (embarrassment) is enough to bring an errant homo-sapiens in line, since as we shall soon see, reprogramming can be a difficult task indeed.

The wide range of software available to the PC inevitably led to the popularization of many software packages that either were superb in handling their desired functions, or else were the first on the market and were able to become a de facto standard. Many of these programs were copied down from generation to generation, and are know collectively as ‘culture’. A curious thing about cultural programming is that it to represents chains of information that exist, replicate, and grow ever more complex. But unlike Gene, these entities don’t dwell in the real world, but achieve a different sort of reality in minds. So, how would Gene confront this new sort of reality if imagination permits a friendly introduction?

Gene Meets Mimi

Mimi was just a good idea waiting to happen, and when man began to think, Mimi felt right at home. Now Gene was a modest, relaxed, and undemanding sort who rarely called attention to himself. He built the mind that Mimi moved into, and scarcely complained when Mimi started to arrange his mental space in her image. Mimi was flexible, changeable, and rather flighty, and she could move about from one mind to another with breathtaking speed. Often, Mimi would move against Gene’s better instincts, and sometimes Mimi would prevail, sometimes not. This was indeed a strange pairing. Whereas Gene loved to tinker about, and make over the eons Gene machines of wondrous diversity, Mimi was the very embodiment of philosophy, literature, and the fine arts. Gene loved hardware, whereas Mimi was always out shopping for the latest in software. Soon, as education opened up a vast Bloomingdale’s full of ideas, Mimi began decorating the PC with dozens of ideas of every shape and hue. She lived for such things, and indeed wouldn’t be without them. Soon her influence was overwhelming, and she made sure that any baby homo-sapiens would have the benefit of all her mental decorative ideas. Many of these ideas Mimi was quite fond of, as they encouraged the homo-sapiens to behave better, entertain itself better, and even to think about life without Gene and Mimi.

So the homo-sapiens now only lived to eat and reproduce, but to revered modesty, truth, and other humanly virtues, enjoy the music of Mozart, and wonder about the possibilities of existence without a physical body and mind. Gene became more and more a forgotten influence, as the purpose of man was merged into a symphony of ideas. Soon the whole world marked nothing less than this cultural legacy. The world was indeed made in his image, the image of his mind.

Dawkins Revisited

As we recall Dawkins’ postulation of a ‘selfish gene’, we should not that his thesis reflects perfectly what is essentially a reductionist perspective on human life and human motivation. That is, all living organisms represent the full flower of a seed of information that is the very essence of a single molecule, the chromosome. Understand this molecule and you understand everything, and you can trace out the forms of every living thing. The guiding spirit of this type of thinking is nothing more than the logic of mathematics. Just as the curving line of a parabola may be views as unfolding from a simple mathematical formula, so too does the curve of organic development stem from the much more complex formula embedded in the chromosomal molecule. Dawkins’ analysis is unique in his assignment of the purposive aspect to evolution, and in particular, the evolution of the gene. This perspective turns askew our own notions of man being at the center of everything, and replaces it with the concept that man’s abstraction, represented in a chromosomal formula, is at the center of being. It is, in other words, the idea of man which is important, and this idea is encoded in his genes, and in his thoughts, or memes.

Mimi, or meme (pr.: meem) as Dawkins would have it, represents a new sort of replicator that dwells formlessly in minds. The meme is the software that is human culture, or the sum of human ideas, and it is the ‘good idea’ that survives and multiplies its presence across a score of minds. It is because of ideas that man can countermand and overcome his instincts, seek death gladly, avoid the pleasure of sex, and embrace unselfish goals that deny his immediate needs. The fine arts, philosophy, and religion are but three classes of memes that set new directions or purposes for man quite beyond the simple fulfillment of his immediate physical needs. Indeed, these new purposes, whether they represent the love of beauty, the love of truth, or the love of God, represent nothing more than other sets of memes that are validated through personal action. Man is unique in that his behavior is purchased with a currency of ideas. Concepts such as personal power, security, or self-fulfillment represent nothing more than perceived relations between a man’s ideas and the corresponding ideas of his fellow. Just the potential for action can suffice to motivate behavior.

The Game of Human Behavior

If motivation can be attributed to software concepts under the moderating influence of instinct, then much of human behavior can be understood through tracing the means whereby these ideas can be programmed. This means of course is the constantly changing face of human culture. Human culture is the sum of human ideas, and reflects the dynamic ways ideas influence the behavior of individuals and groups. To understand culture, one must have a broad sympathy towards the multitude of ways that our behavior rides on ever shifting waves of ideas. The interplay of these ideas is as apparent as the intersection of ripples in a pond. With a little observation of these ripples of ideas, we can make fascinating and reliable predictions of behavior. It we attempt to guess what is underneath the waters, our sight becomes murkier, and we try to make out larger and less subtle causes like needs, drives, complexes, etc. Of course, you can never see these hidden causes as they swim about under the surface, so all the guessing inevitably turns in a sort of parlor game, and the resulting theories for behavior into something akin to fish stores.

Psychological analysis is probably the social parlor game of the second half of the twentieth century, and the theories it creates are the biggest of fish stores. If most popular works on psychology are to be believed, human beings are possessed with more hidden motivations and instincts than would be found in any Sherlock Holmes novel. And because they have so many little foibles, it is just as necessary to construct any number of classification schemes which act like egg trays to conveniently sort out al the various nuts and bolt that make up our little minds. Many psychologists have done one better on Freud, who started much of this nonsense, and have created all sorts of new psychological problems for us to suffer from. Men and women now have Peter Pan and Cinderella complexes to complement their normal Oedipal strivings, oral fixations, and so forth. Confusing and meaningless? Of course! But never fear, for much of this clutter has been neatly arranged by yet other psychologists into broad formats that fit neatly, like pairs of shoes, into a theoretical closet that summarizes human growth stages, personality types, need hierarchies, etc.

Well, irrespective of the validity of any of these approaches, these schemes are long on analysis but very short on anything of practical value. The hidden implication is that just the act of understanding is the first step to effecting personal change. The problem is what degree of understanding is necessary to begin with to effect change, or to suggest the tools whereby change may be accomplished. This can be very difficult indeed, for practical hints are often buried under an overwhelming load of analysis, and more analysis.

The major reason why most popular works on psychology are fixated on analyzing and reanalyzing people is that they are based on the implicit premise that humans are semi-independent from the environments that product their behavior. Of course, the environment is often given a nod or two, particularly if it represents some long gone event in one’s personal history, but the overwhelming emphasis is on the psychology of the individual, and not on social or environmental psychology. These latter psychology’s account for human behavior by looking at the physical account for human behavior by looking at the physical circumstances and individuals that surround us, and how our behavior can be viewed as an integral part and reaction to our physical and social environment.

These psychological approaches don’t find much representation on the popular bookshelf because they invariably suggest that individual behavior change is a function of broad based societal and institutional changes that can only be wrought by groups of people. These psychology’s disperse the responsibility for our individual problems and personal characteristics to our environment, and in doing so they reduce our need to always be apologizing for our own behavior. This is important, for the whole psychotherapy industry is built on the idea that we should be apologizing for ourselves, and there is a vested interest in the perpetuation of the notion that our personal problems are caused by our individual decisions. Although, it is an easy and quite marketable solution to have the finger pointed at ourselves as individuals; it is nonetheless a misguided and wrong solution. To really understand why we behave the way we do, we must broaden our perspective to observe how people respond to their social and physical environments, and look to the environmental changes that must be made if our behavior, and our society’s behavior, is to be set right.

The Love Crisis

The most fertile field for self blame is, of course, sex. Never in American history have we been more dissatisfied, confused, and downright unhappy about our social and sexual relationships with the opposite sex. So we naturally feel very guilty about it, and we try to soothe our bad feelings by sprucing ourselves up through diet and exercise, losing ourselves in work or a hobby, or consuming a self help book or two like a verbal tonic. In the meantime, we’re still out there in a very mean and uncaring social environment that is full of people that we just can’t bring ourselves to care about as we know we should.

The sad truth about our culture in comparison to times past is that we seem to have lost the motivation to entertain each other. Indeed, the past sixty years has seen entertainment shift from a participant to a spectator activity. Electronic diversions have become ever more seductive, and this has paralleled a decline in those social institutions and social skills that placed our intellects and imaginations on stage as it were for the entertainment and education of others. We lose the means and the ability to be entertaining when entertainment becomes a passive exercise involving staring and listening to TV’s, stereos, and computer screens. In other words, we become very, very boring. When boredom prevails, we accept our condition as perversely natural, and return to our place in the front of the tube to watch all those interesting people who just don’t seem to be around in the real world.

Of course, contemporary boredom is an infinitely preferable choice to the more difficult stresses our ancestors had to face. They had not the leisure to be bores, and often their only comfort was each other. But that’s a poor comparison. A better measure of our prevalent boredom is our own quixotic quest for interesting and socially adept friends, and more acutely, lovers. We’re terribly concerned with finding them, but far less so about those social institutions that make them. Popular opinion in the media has harped ad nauseum about the ‘love crisis’, and a high divorce rate only supports the notion that people are very particular about who whey prefer to share their lives with. The great irony is that just as we are becoming every more particular about the type of person whose attentions we desire, it is more difficult that ever before to develop our individual social skills. Thus, not only are people proving to be less interesting, they are proving to be less mannered. As we will note, these manners are shaped less by our individual intelligences or values, but rather by the type of containers we literally find ourselves encased in.

The Containerization of America

One of the greatest contributions of American culture is, of all things, great packaging. Whether it be burgers of light bulbs, thumbtacks or eggs, Americans have always shown a particular genius in sorting and wrapping just about everything they could find into neat and attractive little packages. This mania however has not stopped with mere things, but has found its ultimate target in that seemingly unwrappable ‘commodity’, you and I. Although we don’t think about it, it is human packaging that shapes our social values and agendas, and we have been conditioned to crave a semi-solitary existence in containers, both stationary (houses, offices) or moving (autos, airplanes). To appreciate this seemingly eccentric conclusion, we must understand how our ancestors enjoyed life without the benefit of packaging, and how life was in many ways a lot better without it.

In the center of many of our great cities, we find a core of Victorian neighborhoods that evoke memories of times past. Rows of homes delight the eye with graceful porticoes, open air porches, lattice ironwork, and lofty spires. We consider these homes to be a quaint remnant of a simpler time, yet the full import of these neighborhoods goes far beyond a feature layout in Better Homes and Gardens. These neighborhoods were constructed just to be quaint subdivisions, but to meet the then pressing needs of society.

In the 1890’s a close and easy access to other people was necessary for work and play, and to top it off, everyone was regularly flushed out of their homes by the lack of air-conditioning. Transportation then was rudimentary and uncomfortable, so a great premium was placed on being near one’s place of work or some suitable means of transport, such as a streetcar. Because desirable uptown space was scarce, houses were built on smaller plots of land, and were often multistoried. Without air-conditioning, ventilation was all important, and rooms and higher ceilings to accommodate larger windows. Porches were built not for mere decoration, but to provide an outdoor refuge from an often stifling indoor climate
.

A lack of suitable transportation made people relatively immobile, the absence of home electronics made them bored, and the lack of air-conditioning made them reluctant to stay indoors. The result was that people depended upon the vitality of their local neighborhood for their entertainment, comfort, and often livelihood. This intimate interdependence demanded a level of interpersonal conduct that met group needs, hence these communities fostered an exacting code of manners that gave a new meaning to the word Victorian.

Today, interpersonal dependence has evolved into impersonal dependence. We are still dependent upon our neighbors, but these neighbors are at long distance cubicles of their own, and their only connection to you is by a telephone line. Thus, in such a way social manners have been replaced by phone manners. Hardly a fair trade.

The Good Old Days

As society evolved in the twentieth century, perhaps the greatest benefactor and victim of the cultural changes was the American woman. Before the turn of the century, human labor was far less specialized than it is today, as the nation was populated for the most part by a society of do it yourselfers. Most households then were farms, and the main labor saving device besides the plow was a nifty little item that could slice, that could dice, and that could milk the cow. That was called a woman. Although a woman’s status was appreciably lower in those days, her value was appreciably higher. If she wasn’t the breadwinner, she at least made the bread, and provided for all those little necessities that made hearth and home a nice and warm place to be. She also produced children who not only helped provide an additional source of labor, but also for the later social security of their parents. Necessity was the mother of invention, and necessity invented mothers first; and a rare breed they were. The rigors of a frontier society and of childbirth took their toll on the feminine population, and men usually far outnumbered women. Because women were as important as they were rare, romance, although desirable, seemed comparatively trivial. Marriages were conceived upon practical impulses, and they were held together by practical necessity. If love and romance tagged along, that was just a delightful bonus. So what happened to replace this ‘delightful’ picture with the ‘delightful’ social milieu of today? Simple, man just did the unthinkable, he replaced our need for mom; and he did it with something, well, mechanical.

It started with little things: a toaster, a telephone, a vacuum cleaner, and as these labor saving gadgets multiplied, mom just wasn’t needed as much. Pretty soon, more and more of the most basic functions of the household were replaced by automation and manufacturing economies of scale. It became more economical and efficient to buy your clothes than to make them, and to buy pre-prepared food than to make or grow it yourself. Mom has progressively less and less to do, and even children began to be view as mere indulgences to our instincts or loneliness. Although this trend began in the early years of the century, it was interrupted by the privations of the Depression and the Second World War. During this time much of the mystique of the family was restored. The baby boom of the forties and fifties was sparked by a mindset caused by the memories of these times, and the general perception that that era was less of an exception than a rule. So, accustomed to a continued threat of poverty, young families stocked up on those delightful little assets that they cold always count on: kids. Of course, after the was the sky didn’t fall, but the cost of living did, and with it came a rain of labor saving gadgetry, as the U. S. entered into what we call today the service economy.

The Return of Mom

With the onset of the service economy, the services once provided as a matter of course by wives began to quickly become the province, of course, of women. The big difference was that marriage wasn’t necessary for men to serve a woman’s fulfillment of this latter role. When the service economy was in its infancy, service jobs were filled by men. However, as these positions mushroomed in number and importance, more and more women were called up to take over these low paying and lower status pink collar jobs. This was necessary to pay for all those conveniences that ‘free’ women to begin with from the drudgery of their everyday lives. In actuality, the service economy only provided an exchange of drudgeries.

In today’s society, despite the emancipation of women, it is men who continue to proverbially hunt for the big game, while the women sit at home knitting. The big game of course is now the gamesmanship of career and personal power; whereas for women, the knitting of socks has been replaced with the processing of words. The difference from the past is essentially found in the modern lack of interpersonal dependency between men and women. Men and women are generally dependent nowadays in impersonal ways that are dictated by economics. Mom has been splintered into a hundred faceless women who cook your Big Mac for you, nurse you in the hospital, and do your typing. She is still there all right, but she has been overcome by a division of labor.

Now all of this wouldn’t be half bad if men and women retained and enhanced those personal characteristics which no machine can copy, yet. The demand for these characteristics is certainly there, but alas, the supply is wanting. The rise of our modern preoccupation with romance is due to our desire for the company of an individual who rises above the ordinary, for it takes an extra-ordinary individual to remove the often numbing sameness of life. We desire to be around stylish, personable, intelligent, and attractive people, and hope to win on of them as our mate. The problem though is that these personal desires cannot be translated into economic choices, hence supply and demand won’t work in its usually fashion to meet these demands.

There is unfortunately no quick and easy solution to this problem. The family of course is not near extinction, and most of us still end up partaking in the joys of marriage and children; yet most of us also feel that our personal lives could be a whole lot better. The nagging feeling is that something very special but very subtle is missing, and that even if we knew what it was, obtaining that special something would be very difficult. However, dissatisfaction has only spurred an increase in the population of psychotherapists, thus assuring a treatment of the symptoms of unhappiness, and not its cause. Nonetheless, there is much that we can do as individuals about our social environments. The first step is to appraise our social situations accurately, which will allow us to unload some of the guilt we may be feeling about having created our own problems. Secondly, we must understand what to expect in the behavior of other people when they are in various social situations, how we should respond to that behavior, and ultimately how we may alter that situation itself to indirectly engineer desirable behavior in others. We will pursue these answers in the remainder of this book.


written by me (1984)