Rise of the Planet of the Moralists 4: Predicting traits

Rise of the Planet of the Moralists Series
1: Introduction
2: Chains and Trees
3: Clades and grades
4: Predicting traits
5: Social dominance and power

Species have typical traits, anatomically. There is, however, a bit of a myth that before Darwin people thought species had essences which were invariant for all organisms within them. Since this myth was first put forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it has become the orthodox view that species do not have essences, and therefore do not have natures.

We can understand why: the Holocaust left everybody reeling at the implications of the human species being thought to have innate natures; each race or ethnic group or class could be evaluated against others and some considered to be worth more or less morally. But this is not a new problem. It goes back at least to Plato, who in the Republic argued that some types of people are just the best (philosopher kings, who have gold souls), some are good but not the best (the auxiliary warriors, with silver souls) and some are the least (the majority, who have iron or bronze souls). Another example is the latter Hindu Varna system in which one’s tribal origins determine one’s divinely ordained role (ironically, this was originally not based just on ethnicity but on merit, a bit like the Confucian ideal).

It is true that assertions of innate natures often lead to discrimination and even genocide. Scientists became very concerned and effectively put a ban on the notion. But recently many scientists are making claims that race and therefore innate natures are real, and they point out the obvious geographical variation between populations. Medical personnel need to know the ancestry of African descendants to know how to treat some diseases, for example.

And some insist on immediately transferring this to behaviours: some groups (or genders, or sexual orientations) have typical behaviours (usually lacking in value compared to the “best” kinds). Everything from IQ to promiscuity have been asserted to be “natures”, justifying all kinds of power relations between groups.

No wonder scientists and theoreticians object to “natures” talk. It can be seriously dangerous. But is it false?

The idea that whole species have natures is equally scary. It suggests determinism, that each of us is forced to behave in a certain fashion because of our genes or something. So if we are to criticise and check the claim that reason forces us to be moral, or that Caesar would not be so prosocial as a human, we need first to clear up the notion of a species (especially a human) nature. And simply because it has unpleasant or unwanted consequences does  not mean the notion is, in fact, false. That is a logical fallacy, one of the oldest.

What having a nature does not mean, if we are informed by biology, is that we must act in a single determined fashion. We hear loose talk by journalists and occasionally by public intellectuals of the “gene for” this or that (homosexuality, religious belief, violence, rape, etc.); no geneticist would ever make such a claim. Instead they would carefully qualify the claim: this gene has some role in modulating that behaviour. Think of it like the claim that a certain player in a team sport had a role in winning the game.The team wins the game; the player is crucial but not the only reason they did. Moreover, even if that player is consistent, the team can lose the game next week. Having a certain gene changes overall likelihoods, not makes certain outcomes necessary.

Behaviours, like everything else biological, are distributed over a curve in a population. If most organisms do something, like running, at a certain amount, some will do it less and some do it more, and this will form a statistical curve (not necessarily with a single peak, or mode, nor need it be symmetrical). This distributional property of populations means that any statements about the nature of a species has to allow for variations from the mean and the mode.

So, if we say that chimpanzees show a certain behaviour, we must expect there will be some number who vary from the “norm”. It was once pointed out to me that if roughly 5% of people are “developmentally delayed”, then if the distribution is normal about the same number of “gifted”, and that degree of difference from the mode occasions just as many disadvantages. So it follows that a single Caesar is possible, but that it is unlikely he would do well in a population of ordinary chimps, however smart they were.

We cannot predict individuals’ behaviours, and yet we can say with some degree of certainty how “typical” members of a species behave. This is as true of human beings as it is of chimps: the keepers at the ape facility in the film are shown as selfish, aggressive status seeking primates, in contrast to Caesar, who is shown as prosocial and moral. That there can be humans like that is indubitable; that they would likely be that way is at best a scriptwriter’s conceit. In fact those primatologists I have met and discussed things with tend to empathise closely with their charges, and treat them as well as they can (which might be a response to animal rights activism of the past decades). The dramatic impact is in the mismatch with our expectations.

The issue here is what we can predict about a species by observing behaviours and whether these behaviours are somehow natural. It’s as much a problem with humans as with other organisms. It is not even entirely clear that behaviours can be traits. Are they inherited? Are they cultural or even convergent between species? What, exactly, does it mean for a behaviour to be “natural”?

Rather than say that behaving in X fashion is inherited by ordinary members of a species or population, it is far more consistent with our knowledge of genetics, developmental biology, and evolution to say instead that the disposition to behave in X fashion in inherited. Dispositions are philosophy-speak for some cause that will generate an effect in the right conditions. Our genes don’t form human beings in hard vacuums, nor in the absence of the right nutrients. This is also true for behaviours.

Consider so-called “feral” children, who do not learn to speak by the age of five. They never learn to speak in grammatically complicated sentences thereafter, no matter how much they are taught. We know that the developing nervous system needs the right stimuli before a “normal” behaviour can develop like speech. Many experiments on poor monkeys and rats have shown that a lack of maternal care will lead down the track to profound disorders and behavioural extremes. Still, we can say of rats, monkeys and humans that they have species-typical behaviours that ordinary members will develop if they are given the right rearing.

So the question of a division between nature and nurture so beloved of popular writers and journalists is ruled out of court from the start: it has to be and can only be both biological and environmental inheritances that cause organisms to behave in certain ways. And if the environmental and social resources are there, the disposition to behave in X fashion will develop (over some distribution curve).

We can therefore predict to a greater or lesser degree how a species will typically behave, if we know they are reared in the right conditions. An example is, again, chimps and their observed behaviours sometimes termed “warfare”. Chimps in the famous Gombe forest in Tanzania were observed killing interlopers into their ranges from other chimp troops. There were even cases where the males of one troop would raid and attack other troops. This led rather quickly to claims that warfare in innate among primates.

Then some researchers went into a part of the Congo where humans did not live and found human-naive troops of chimps. Observations suggested they had a very different way of responding to other troops, much more like what happens when nomadic herders meet other tribes: they sat down together and bonded, and the end result was some interbreeding. Why the difference?

The Gombe chimps live in an increasingly stressed national park, which is encroached upon by local humans, and which is already very small, too small to sustain large numbers of chimps. They lack the resources they need, and so competition is very fierce. They have adapted their behaviours, culturally and through experience, out of necessity. At the very most we can say that a disposition to war under the right conditions is an ape trait. This borders on empty, because competition for resources is more or less everywhere in the living world; those organisms that couldn’t compete for scarce and necessary resources aren’t here any more.

To get back to prediction: we should predict that intelligent chimps will act like their less-intelligent chimps depending on circumstances. Caesar also had another arrow in his quiver apart from intelligence, though. He was scaffolded in his moral development by being reared in a family (unlike Nim Chimpsky, who was treated poorly and eventually abandoned, and raised in a fashion guaranteed to produce a psychotic).

Human scaffolding of each other in development is crucial, as in language learning, to normal development, but humans also scaffold other animals such as dogs, and in this case Caesar. [The term “scaffold” to refer to cultural learning and mental development is due to the philosopher Kim Sterelny, who notes that it makes learning more stable and effective.] Would Caesar have been so moral if not raised in that way?

The film is ambivalent about this. In one sense Caesar is shown learning morality from his “family”, which he then applies his intelligence to in what philosophers call “a wide reflective equilibrium” – an attempt to make all the principles and values he holds consistent. He asks Will Rodman (played by James Franco) if he is a pet, because he has a collar and a chain. Rodman recoils from the idea, and yet he has been treating Caesar that way. Together Will and Caesar work through the moral issues. They scaffold each other’s moral development.

So we cannot say that Caesar would have been moral as a chimp without this scaffolding. But then consider the gorilla Buck, who learns immediately from Caesar’s example and ultimately sacrifices himself for all the apes once he, too, has been made intelligent. Buck was not scaffolded by years of enculturation, yet as a rational agent he immediately adopts the Categorial Imperative and defends the weaker apes from being killed.

Well, there is no convincing answer to be gained from the film. Perhaps the next film in the reboot will resolve this (and perhaps they will appeal to the religious teachings that made the 1968 film so interesting to a philosopher). In the next post, I will try to predict, or rather retrodict, what we should expect from intelligent chimps and other apes.