ANARCHIST THEORY:

KROPOTKIN AND SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN:

Molly is a subscriber to Scientific American, probably the premier popular science magazine in the world. Imagine the pleasant surprise that I experienced when I read the latest (February, 2009) edition to find the theories of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin discussed in Michael Shermer's 'Skeptic' column. The title of the essay was 'Darwin Misunderstood'. the first part of Shirmer's screed was devoted to the term "natural selection" and how this can be misunderstood as implying either a conscious 'selector' or the idea that there is some sort of "progressive arrow" to evolution that adapts organisms to future conditions rather than the conditions in which they survive and reproduce. The second misconception discussed is that 'fitness' means simplistically individual competition rather than the capacity to cooperate. This is where Kropotkin's ideas come in. Organisms that cooperate often increase their fitness by such cooperation and thus contribute genes to their progeny that incline them to cooperation because this is the optimum strategy for both survival and reproduction.

Molly knows that the genetics that Kropotkin held to were outdated, being as he was a life-long Lamarkist. Still, Kropotkin's work pretty well has to be acknowledged as a precursor of the present research programs in the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. If you are inclined look up the article and send a little thank you note to Shirmer and Scientific American. The email for SA's letters is editors@SciAm.com

ANARCHIST THEORY:

HOWARD ZINN AND ZIGA VODOVNIK SPEAK ABOUT ANARCHISM:

Howard Zinn (see photo) has to be the all reigning figure in anarchist academia now that Paul Avrich has passed on. He's 86 and still going strong, publishing ,lecturing and agitating. May we all be that alive when we reach his age. Here's a recent conversation where he and Ziga Vodovnik discuss the basis of the anarchist idea. A well thought-out presentation by a moderate and thoughtful exponent of the idea.

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On Anarchism
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By Howard Zinn and Ziga Vodovnik
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"History shows that whenever people have been living under tyranny,
people would rebel against that."
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Howard Zinn, 85, is a Professor Emeritus of political science at Boston University. He was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1922 to a poor immigrant family. He realized early in his youth that the promise of the "American Dream", that will come true to all hard-working and diligent people, is just that - a promise and a dream. During World War II he joined US Air Force and served as a bombardier in the "European Theatre". This proved to be a formative experience that only strengthened his convictions that there is no such thing as a just war. It also revealed, once again, the real face of the socio-economic order, where the suffering and sacrifice of the ordinary people is always used only to higher the profits of the privileged few. Although he spent his youthful years helping his parents support the family by working in the shipyards, he started with studies at Columbia University after WWII, where he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation in 1958. Later he was appointed as a chairman of the department of history and social sciences at Spelman College, an all-black women's college in Atlanta, GA, where he actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement. From the onset of the Vietnam War he was active within the emerging anti-war movement, and in the following years only stepped up his involvement in movements aspiring towards another, better world. Zinn is the author of more than 20 books, including A People's History of the United States that is "a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories..." (Library Journal) His most recent book is entitled A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, and is a fascinating collection of essays that Zinn wrote in the last couple of years. Beloved radical historian is still lecturing across the US and around the world, and is, with active participation and support of various progressive social movements continuing his struggle for free and just society.
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Ziga Vodovnik is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, where his teaching and research is focused on anarchist theory/praxis and social movements in the Americas. His new book Anarchy of Everyday Life - Notes on anarchism and its Forgotten Confluences will be released in late 2008.�
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Ziga Vodovnik: From the 1980s onwards we are witnessing the process of economic globalization getting stronger day after day. Many on the Left are now caught between a "dilemma" - either to work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global capital; or to strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of globalization and that is equally global. What's your opinion about this?
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Howard Zinn: I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization. In a certain sense the movement towards globalization where capitalists are trying to leap over nation state barriers, creates a kind of opportunity for movement to ignore national barriers, and to bring people together globally, across national lines in opposition to globalization of capital, to create globalization of people, opposed to traditional notion of globalization. In other words to use globalization - it is nothing wrong with idea of globalization - in a way that bypasses national boundaries and of course that there is not involved corporate control of the economic decisions that are made about people all over the world.
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ZV: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once wrote that: "Freedom is the mother, not the daughter of order." Where do you see life after or beyond (nation) states?
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HZ: Beyond the nation states? (laughter) I think what lies beyond the nation states is a world without national boundaries, but also with people organized. But not organized as nations, but people organized as groups, as collectives, without national and any kind of boundaries. Without any kind of borders, passports, visas. None of that! Of collectives of different sizes, depending on the function of the collective, having contacts with one another. You cannot have self-sufficient little collectives, because these collectives have different resources available to them. This is something anarchist theory has not worked out and maybe cannot possibly work out in advance, because it would have to work itself out in practice.
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ZV: Do you think that a change can be achieved through institutionalized party politics, or only through alternative means - with disobedience, building parallel frameworks, establishing alternative media, etc.
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HZ: If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even now in the US, where people on the "Left" are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals. So I think a way to behave is to think not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of electoral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become strong enough to eventually take over - first to become strong enough to resist what has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to actually take over the institutions.
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ZV: One personal question. Do you go to the polls? Do you vote?
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HZ: I do. Sometimes, not always. It depends. But I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. Sometimes the difference between two candidates is an important one in the immediate sense, and then I believe trying to get somebody into office, who is a little better, who is less dangerous, is understandable. But never forgetting that no matter who gets into office, the crucial question is not who is in office, but what kind of social movement do you have. Because we have seen historically that if you have a powerful social movement, it doesn't matter who is in office. Whoever is in office, they could be Republican or Democrat, if you have a powerful social movement, the person in office will have to yield, will have to in some ways respect the power of social movements.�
We saw this in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing.�
When some people ask me about voting, they would say will you support this candidate or that candidate? I say: ‘I will support this candidate for one minute that I am in the voting booth. At that moment I will support A versus B, but before I am going to the voting booth, and after I leave the voting booth, I am going to concentrate on organizing people and not organizing electoral campaign.'
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ZV: Anarchism is in this respect rightly opposing representative democracy since it is still form of tyranny - tyranny of majority. They object to the notion of majority vote, noting that the views of the majority do not always coincide with the morally right one. Thoreau once wrote that we have an obligation to act according to the dictates of our conscience, even if the latter goes against the majority opinion or the laws of the society. Do you agree with this?
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HZ: Absolutely. Rousseau once said, if I am part of a group of 100 people, do 99 people have the right to sentence me to death, just because they are majority? No, majorities can be wrong, majorities can overrule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled, we could still have slavery. 80% of the population once enslaved 20% of the population. While run by majority rule that is ok. That is very flawed notion of what democracy is. Democracy has to take into account several things - proportionate requirements of people, not just needs of the majority, but also needs of the minority. And also has to take into account that majority, especially in societies where the media manipulates public opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. So yes, people have to act according to conscience and not by majority vote.
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ZV: Where do you see the historical origins of anarchism in the United States?
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HZ: One of the problems with dealing with anarchism is that there are many people whose ideas are anarchist, but who do not necessarily call themselves anarchists. The word was first used by Proudhon in the middle of the 19th century, but actually there were anarchist ideas that proceeded Proudhon, those in Europe and also in the United States. For instance, there are some ideas of Thomas Paine, who was not an anarchist, who would not call himself an anarchist, but he was suspicious of government. Also Henry David Thoreau. He does not know the word anarchism, and does not use the word anarchism, but Thoreau's ideas are very close to anarchism. He is very hostile to all forms of government. If we trace origins of anarchism in the United States, then probably Thoreau is the closest you can come to an early American anarchist. You do not really encounter anarchism until after the Civil War, when you have European anarchists, especially German anarchists, coming to the United States. They actually begin to organize. The first time that anarchism has an organized force and becomes publicly known in the United States is in Chicago at the time of Haymarket Affair.
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ZV: Where do you see the main inspiration of contemporary anarchism in the United States? What is your opinion about the Transcendentalism - i.e., Henry D. Thoreau, Ralph W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller, et al. - as an inspiration in this perspective?
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HZ: Well, the Transcendentalism is, we might say, an early form of anarchism. The Transcendentalists also did not call themselves anarchists, but there are anarchist ideas in their thinking and in their literature. In many ways Herman Melville shows some of those anarchist ideas. They were all suspicious of authority. We might say that the Transcendentalism played a role in creating an atmosphere of skepticism towards authority, towards government.
Unfortunately, today there is no real organized anarchist movement in the United States. There are many important groups or collectives that call themselves anarchist, but they are small. I remember that in 1960s there was an anarchist collective here in Boston that consisted of fifteen (sic!) people, but then they split. But in 1960s the idea of anarchism became more important in connection with the movements of 1960s.
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ZV: Most of the creative energy for radical politics is nowadays coming from anarchism, but only few of the people involved in the movement actually call themselves "anarchists". Where do you see the main reason for this? Are activists ashamed to identify themselves with this intellectual tradition, or rather they are true to the commitment that real emancipation needs emancipation from any label?
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HZ: The term anarchism has become associated with two phenomena with which real anarchist don't want to associate themselves with. One is violence, and the other is disorder or chaos. The popular conception of anarchism is on the one hand bomb-throwing and terrorism, and on the other hand no rules, no regulations, no discipline, everybody does what they want, confusion, etc. That is why there is a reluctance to use the term anarchism. But actually the ideas of anarchism are incorporated in the way the movements of the 1960s began to think.�
I think that probably the best manifestation of that was in the civil rights movement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee - SNCC. SNCC without knowing about anarchism as philosophy embodied the characteristics of anarchism. They were decentralized. Other civil rights organizations, for example Seven Christian Leadership Conference, were centralized organizations with a leader - Martin Luther King. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were based in New York, and also had some kind of centralized organization. SNCC, on the other hand, was totally decentralized. It had what they called field secretaries, who worked in little towns all over the South, with great deal of autonomy. They had an office in Atlanta, Georgia, but the office was not a strong centralized authority. The people who were working out in the field - in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi - they were very much on their own. They were working together with local people, with grassroots people. And so there is no one leader for SNCC, and also great suspicion of government, because of experience of SNCC. They could not depend on government to help them, to support them, even though the government of the time, in the early 1960s, was considered to be progressive, liberal. John F. Kennedy especially. But they looked at John F. Kennedy, they saw how he behaved. John F. Kennedy was not supporting the Southern movement for equal rights for Black people. He was appointing the segregationists judges in the South, he was allowing southern segregationists to do whatever they wanted to do. So SNCC was decentralized, anti-government, without leadership, but they did not have a vision of a future society like the anarchists. They were not thinking long term, they were not asking what kind of society shall we have in the future. They were really concentrated on immediate problem of racial segregation. But their attitude, the way they worked, the way they were organized, was along, you might say, anarchist lines.
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ZV: Do you thing that pejorative (mis)usage of the word anarchism is direct consequence of the fact that the ideas that people can be free, was and is very frightening to those in power?
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HZ: No doubt! No doubt that anarchist ideas are frightening to those in power. People in power can tolerate liberal ideas. They can tolerate ideas that call for reforms, but they cannot tolerate the idea that there will be no state, no central authority. So it is very important for them to ridicule the idea of anarchism to create this impression of anarchism as violent and chaotic. It is useful for them, yes.
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ZV: In theoretical political science we can analytically identify two main conceptions of anarchism - a so-called collectivist anarchism limited to Europe, and on another hand individualist anarchism limited to US. Do you agree with this analytical separation?
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HZ: To me this is an artificial separation. As so often happens analysts can make things easier for themselves, like to create categories and fit movements into categories, but I don't think you can do that. Here in the United States, sure there have been people who believed in individualist anarchism, but in the United States have also been organized anarchists of Chicago in 1880s or SNCC. I guess in both instances, in Europe and in the United States, you find both manifestations, except that maybe in Europe the idea of anarcho-syndicalism become stronger in Europe than in the US. While in the US you have the IWW, which is an anarcho-syndicalist organization and certainly not in keeping with individualist anarchism.
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ZV: What is your opinion about the "dilemma" of means - revolution versus social and cultural evolution?
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HZ: I think here are several different questions. One of them is the issue of violence, and I think here anarchists have disagreed. Here in the US you find a disagreement, and you can find this disagreement within one person. Emma Goldman, you might say she brought anarchism, after she was dead, to the forefront in the US in the 1960s, when she suddenly became an important figure. But Emma Goldman was in favor of the assassination of Henry Clay Frick, but then she decided that this is not the way. Her friend and comrade, Alexander Berkman, he did not give up totally the idea of violence. On the other hand, you have people who were anarchistic in way like Tolstoy and also Gandhi, who believed in nonviolence.�
There is one central characteristic of anarchism on the matter of means, and that central principle is a principle of direct action - of not going through the forms that the society offers you, of representative government, of voting, of legislation, but directly taking power. In case of trade unions, in case of anarcho-syndicalism, it means workers going on strike, and not just that, but actually also taking hold of industries in which they work and managing them. What is direct action? In the South when black people were organizing against racial segregation, they did not wait for the government to give them a signal, or to go through the courts, to file lawsuits, wait for Congress to pass the legislation. They took direct action; they went into restaurants, were sitting down there and wouldn't move. They got on those buses and acted out the situation that they wanted to exist.�
Of course, strike is always a form of direct action. With the strike, too, you are not asking government to make things easier for you by passing legislation, you are taking a direct action against the employer. I would say, as far as means go, the idea of direct action against the evil that you want to overcome is a kind of common denominator for anarchist ideas, anarchist movements. I still think one of the most important principles of anarchism is that you cannot separate means and ends. And that is, if your end is egalitarian society you have to use egalitarian means, if your end is non-violent society without war, you cannot use war to achieve your end. I think anarchism requires means and ends to be in line with one another. I think this is in fact one of the distinguishing characteristics of anarchism.
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ZV: On one occasion Noam Chomsky has been asked about his specific vision of anarchist society and about his very detailed plan to get there. He answered that "we cannot figure out what problems are going to arise unless you experiment with them." Do you also have a feeling that many left intellectuals are losing too much energy with their theoretical disputes about the proper means and ends, to even start "experimenting" in practice?
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HZ: I think it is worth presenting ideas, like Michael Albert did with Parecon for instance, even though if you maintain flexibility. We cannot create blueprint for future society now, but I think it is good to think about that. I think it is good to have in mind a goal. It is constructive, it is helpful, it is healthy, to think about what future society might be like, because then it guides you somewhat what you are doing today, but only so long as this discussions about future society don't become obstacles to working towards this future society. Otherwise you can spend discussing this utopian possibility versus that utopian possibility, and in the mean time you are not acting in a way that would bring you closer to that.
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ZV: In your A People's History of the United States you show us that our freedom, rights, environmental standards, etc., have never been given to us from the wealthy and influential few, but have always been fought out by ordinary people - with civil disobedience. What should be in this respect our first steps toward another, better world?
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HZ: I think our first step is to organize ourselves and protest against existing order - against war, against economic and sexual exploitation, against racism, etc. But to organize ourselves in such a way that means correspond to the ends, and to organize ourselves in such a way as to create kind of human relationship that should exist in future society. That would mean to organize ourselves without centralize authority, without charismatic leader, in a way that represents in miniature the ideal of the future egalitarian society. So that even if you don't win some victory tomorrow or next year in the meantime you have created a model. You have acted out how future society should be and you created immediate satisfaction, even if you have not achieved your ultimate goal.
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ZV: What is your opinion about different attempts to scientifically prove Bakunin's ontological assumption that human beings have "instinct for freedom", not just will but also biological need?
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HZ: Actually I believe in this idea, but I think that you cannot have biological evidence for this. You would have to find a gene for freedom? No. I think the other possible way is to go by history of human behavior. History of human behavior shows this desire for freedom, shows that whenever people have been living under tyranny, people would rebel against that.

Molly Note- As to the last statement I think that Zinn is misstating the question, ie that he hasn't properly formulated how to go about finding "whether there is a biological instinct for freedom". In actual fact a lot of the work has already been done, as a byproduct of evolutionary psychological investigations of cooperation. As a matter of fact, at this very instant there is an article up on Science Express, the online component of Science Magazine, the journal of the AAAS. The title is 'The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency'.

One has to hand full kudos to the small number of anarchist academics who kept the idea of a genetic human nature alive despite the opposition of triumpant managerialism of both the left and right. Their ideas were largely based on faith and a critical perspective towards the then-dominant "blank slate" view of human nature. In other words no firm evidence for their ideas but lots against the opposite view. With the disintegration of marxism worldwide we have entered a time when the most rabid managerial opponents of a realistic view of human nature have lost pretty well all of their power to terrorize.

But here's the project. One doesn't go looking for a "gene for freedom" as the start of an enterprise to find a genetic basis for "freedom", or even a multigene system. That's well down the road. First of all one defines exactly what the term "freedom" means. to say the least tjis is rather slippery, given both the many meanings of the noun and also how ideologically bound it is. Then.... go looking for the data. Compile them. Then... formulate hypotheses about the evolutionary function of such a tendency. Test these hypotheses against reality. Refine them. In the end you will find that a biologically based desire for freedom actually consists of several different behaviors. Test these subsets of new definitions against both the empirical and evolutionary evidence. Then, and only then, begin the search for neural bases of such behaviors, and, both concurrently and afterwards, look for genes that contribute to such behaviors. Not A gene but multiple genes.

THAT is the course that evolutionary biology/sociobiology has followed in the past few decades in its studies of cooperation. The result, tens of thousands of peer reviewed articles later, is that nobody, aside from Stalinists and the declining adherants of post modernism, doubts that there is a genetic basis to cooperation. Opponents of such a view are as rare amongst biologists as Biblical literalists are.What is being debated now is not the existence of such athing but rather its fine details. Zinn is not a biologist, and one can easily forgive his unfamiliarity with the way that questions are posed and answered in biology. The important point to be taken away, however, is that YES the scientific evidence for a "freedom instinct" is being laid today. As the field advances one will find that the overly abstract concept of "freedom" will devolve into a plethora of "freedom instincts".

FROM THE HARPER INDEX:

HOW TO COUNTER LIES:

This may be more or less repeating the obvious, but the Harper Index has a very interesting article in its most recent post. This is part of their project to show how the Harper government manages the news, and the strategy behind it. The basics of the post are fairly simple. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. Goebbels said it much better many years ago. What is unique and what should give pause to us all is the assertion that attempts to refute a lie are often rather fruitless because they merely repeat a meme(not the sort of thing that the authors would call it) and reinforce it in the audiences mind. The Harper Index calls upon a study by University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwartz for their article. He has found that hearing an opinion multiple times from the same source is almost as influential as hearing it multiple times from multiple sources. In other words the attempts to debunk a falsehood often rebound on the debunkers and reinforce the original falsehood.

As I said, this may be something like stating the obvious, and it is hardly the "cutting edge" of present day psychology which is neurological and evolutionary. Still...the obvious often has to be restated over and over (as these findings make plain) for people to take them to heart. It certainly gives Molly pause for thought about how she often frames posts here on this blog. Only a little pause, by the way.

To read the full article go to http://www.harperindex.ca/ViewArticle.cfm?Ref=0098

MORE ON KROPOTKIN AND EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY:

Molly refers the reader to the original post on July 4th and Werner's reply to it and also Molly's reply to that reply. To deal with Werner's points, first Darwin wrote his books long before Mendelian genetics became known. Mendel's results were orginally read to the natural History Society in Brno in 1865. The results were basically ignored until 1900 when they were "rediscovered" by Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak. Darwin himself was something of a "Lamarkian" in that his theory of "pangenesis" assumed a transmission of acquired traits from somatic cells to germ cells. What Kropotkin can be faulted for is a "conservative" adherance to Lamarckism long after the contrary had accumulated enough evidence to prove it true. Mutual Aid was published in 1902 from a series of articles in 'The Nineteenth Century'. From my reading of Kropotkin's publications thereafter he continued to defend the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics long after it was not a matter of debate but rather a "proved" fact. Some of this may be attributed to K's "francophilism" as the acceptance of Darwinism in France was very much long delayed, unlike in other countries. K's francophilism led him, of course, to the ridiculous position of supporting the Allies in WW1, unlike the majority of the anarchist movement. His love for France was a constant theme in his life. Kropotkin was basically no better no no worse than his time, and his only fault was conservativism.

Molly has little doubt that somewhere out there in the never, never land of the political science departments of various North America universities there are tiny little minds who look back to their Maoist youth and, like everything else they touch upon, they will want to say that the field of "epigenetics" gives proof to their crude ideologies. Tiny minds, who are incapable of understanding anything that actually takes intellectual work ! I think that they are few and far between, and I have seen little evidence of them in recent years.

The "dons" of Stalinist biology are more than slightly aged now. Lewontin is 78 years of age. Steven Rose is 69. They have no heirs in our modern world where evolutionary psychology is a growing and vibrant field of research. Science for the (new ruling class directed,exploited and controlled) People is long dead, buried with the turn of China to a more productive economy. Time moves on.

The idea of environmental determinism may still linger on in a declining number of social science departments, but its relevance in real research is long over.

What disturbs Molly most is not the idea of Lamarkism. Lamarkism is the sort of silliness held by ideologues. What disturbs her is the question of "levels of selection". Darwin focused his ideas of selection on the level of the organism. This is not the only level that one can view selection on. Dawkins, for instance, views the level of selection as that of the "gene". Kropotkin, in contrast, was an extreme "group selectionist" who viewed selection operating not just on the level of the breeding group but on the level of the species as a whole. This is something quite different from Gould's idea of "species selection" which basically ties into the idea of "evolvability" rather than selection. The general consensus in modern evolutionary biology is that "group selection" either doesn't exist or plays a very minor role in evolution. If, however, it plays a larger role as many believe in terms of human evolution then it leaves some very large questions for anarchists to answer.

The whole question revolves around the idea of "xenophobia" and how deeply based it is in humans. If you look at the writings of Alfred Russell, the codiscoverer of the idea of natural selection, a man often favoured by leftist readings of evolution (he was a socialist but also a complete crank) you will see very plainly how a group selectionist view leads to a rather nasty racism. NOW, just because an idea is unpalatible doesn't mean that it is wrong. It may indeed be true that group selection has played a major role in human evolution, and because of this the idea of an anarchist society must take account of human tendencies that anarchists don't want to admit. Some of these are fairly obvious. The malignant fascistic fantasies of the primitivists are obviously false without invoking "human nature". War until the most powerful "primitive community" conquers the others. From a less fascistic viewpoint, however, the ideas of "localism" held by most anarchists have to be modified by connections between communities that go over and above localism. Thus it is incumbant upon anarchists to modify their ideas of the "ideal society" to take into account the realities of human psychobiology.

So... that's what Molly is concerned about. More on this later.

KROPOTKIN'S CONCEPT OF "JUSTICE":

In a previous post on the article 'Egalitarian Motives in Humans' Molly made reference to Kropotkin's idea of "justice" as being intimately bound up with egalitarian "instincts" in humans. To give the reader a flavour of what Kropotkin was saying I quote the following passage from pages 30 and 31 of 'Ethics: Origin and Development'. This was Kropotkin's last book, actually left in unfinished condition when he died on Feb. 8th, 1921. Kropotkin's editor Nicolas Lebedev brought out a Russian edition in 1922 under the imprint of the anarchist newspaper Golos Truda which was still hanging on in a precarious state under Bolsevik persecution. The first English translation was published in New York in 1924 by which time pretty well all opposition, not just the anarchists, to the growing Communist tyranny had become to all intents impossible within Russia. The copy that Molly uses is the Black Rose Books reprint of 1992 (Montreal).

Kropotkin says,

"The elements for such a new conception of morality are already at hand. The importance of sociality, of mutual aid, in the evolution of the animal world and human history may be taken, I believe, as a positively established scientific truth, free of any hypothetical assumptions. We may also take next, as granted that in proportion as mutual aid becomes an established custom in a human community, and so to say instinctive, it leads to a parallel development of the sense of justice, with its necessary accompaniment of the sense of equity and egalitarian self restraint. The idea that the personal rights of every individual are as unassailable as the same rights of every other individual, grows in proporation as class distinctions fade away; and this thought becomes a current conception when the institutions of a given community have been altered permanently in this sense. A certain degree of identification of the individual with the interests of the group to which it belongs has necessarily existed since the very beginning of social life, and it manifests itself even among the lowest animals. But in proportion as relations of equity and justice are solidly established in the human community the ground is prepared for the further and more general development of more refined relations , under which man understands and feels so well the bearing of his actions on the whole of society that he refrains from offending others , even though he may have to renounce on that account the gratification of some of his own desires, and when he so identifies his feelings with those of others that he is ready to sacrifice his powers for their benefit without expecting anything in return. These unselfish feelings and habits, usually called by the somewhat inaccurate names of "altruism" and "self-sacrifice" , alone deserve, in my opinion, the name of morality, properly speaking, although most writers confound them, under the name of altruism, with the mere sense of justice.

Mutual Aid-Justice-Morality are thus the consecutive steps of an ascending series, revealed to us by the study of the animal world and man. They constitute an organic necessity which carries in iyself its own justification, confirmed by the whole of the evolution of the animal kingdom, beginning in its earliest stages (in the form of colonies of the most primitive organisms) and gradually rising to our civilized human communities. Figuratively speaking, it is a universal law of organic evolution, and this is why the sense of Mutual Aid, Justice and Morality are rooted in man's mind with all the force of an inbuilt instinct- the first instinct, that of Mutual Aid, being evidently the strongest, while the third, developed later than the others, is an unstable feeling and the least apparent of the three. "

Kropotkin wrote 'Ethics' as the vise of Bolshevik amoralism had almost completely its strangulation of the creative forces of the Russian Revolution. He saw the need for an ethical system of action that would guide revolutionaries as opposed to the "ends justify the means" opportunism of the Bolsheiks. Bolshevik amoralism was perhaps best expressed by Leon Trotsky in 'Their Morals and Ours'. As to which one was right, Kropotkin or Trotsky and Lenin, the judgement of history has been given in unequivocal form. The slave empires of Stalinism and their death camps is precisely what the Leninist idea of "realism" leads to. He also wrote it with the idea that it would vastly expand the ideas presented in his earlier work, Mutual Aid. It probably would have if he had had time to complete it.

The passage cited above should show that Kropotkin held that there was an instinctual sense of justice in humans, one that he counted on to act in driving social evolution. A few other things are apparent as well. Kropotkin uses the term "instinct" is a way very different from modern usuage. Habits do not become instincts by sheer force of repetition. They become more likely in a population because the results of them leads to the relatively successful reproduction of the organisms who have underlaying genetic predispositions that lead to such habits. How this happens in terms of the "rewards" for anarchism is complex, far more so than Kropotkin could ever have imagined. The "level of selection" is not the group(usually), nor especially the species (a view Kropotkin often trended towards). It is the gene and the individual. Kropotkin writes as he does above because, unlike modern evolutionists, he was a lifelong Lamarkian. He could easily believe that the three layers of sociality/morality could grow from the "primitive" mutual aid "instinct" because he believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Habit thus grows into instinct in this view.

Three forms of sociality, each more "developed" than the prior one. Kropotkin was not alone in advancing the importance of mutual aid as an aid to survival and thus reproduction. He was part of a whole school of Russian naturalists ,and ironically enough American ones as well, who saw that their studies of nature gave evidence that cooperation was an imprtant tool in adaption. This contrasted with English and Continental scientists who seemed to find more evidence of intraspecific competition than cooperation. Some have speculated that the differences were because of the different ecosystems that the two groups of scientists studied. In relatively clement climates such as those of western Europe or the tropics, where some studied, resources were quite abundant, and population "booms" led to increased competition for resources. In climates such as Siberia or America's Great Plains weather resources were in short supply and much harder to obtain and a harsher climate put a natural check on population growth before excessive populations could develop. The observations of both sets of naturalists were equally true. In Siberia or the Great Plains, however, cooperation was much more visible because it was much more necessary to obtain resources in a natural state of scarcity.

One last observation. Kropotkin was a convinced "progressivist". He believed that evolution had a direction even though he rejected the academic fantasies of teleology spun by those under the influence of Hegelianism. The echoes of a "great chain of being" sound throughout not just the above passage but through all of Kropotkin's work. This metaphor, borrowed from Christianity, was actually a spur to the pre-Darwinian development of the idea of evolution. Darwin's idea of "natural selection" as the mechanism of evolution (he hardly conceived the idea of evolution) should have put finis to this concept, but it lingered on to inform many evolutionists, Kropotkin included, and still has at least a popular following in the modern world. It doesn't accord with scientific details. Take thee the tales of the tapeworm and the appendix to heart. Under certain conditions ecosystems can indeed change (not evolve in a Darwinian sense) to states of greater complexity, and there is much argument about whether such complex systems are inherantly "better" in the sense of more stable. Under other conditions, however, external conditions favour systems of lesser complexity, and one community can change "backward" into a less complex one.

The whole idea of "progress" is a complex subject, and hardly one to be dealt with at anything less than extensive detail. Just take it for now that Kropotkin's politics meshed with his scientific views in this aspect as well.

SOURCES IN EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY :

Molly realizes that many readers will probably be unfamiliar with the discipline of 'evolutionary psychology', something that Molly referred to in her last post and in several previous posts. I've added an excellent reference to what is a wealth of sources under the Scientific Links section. Evolutionary Psychology Sources is part of the Open Source Directory that hopes to compile useful and informative references to a wide number to different subjects. The latter has also been added to Molly's links under the 'Other Interesting Links' section. As a source of information the OSD outperforms the Wikipedia in giving access to more "original" sources that the Wikipedia usually does. Have a look at these references if you are either interested in evolutionary psychology or in many other matters.

EGALITARIAN MOTIVES IN HUMANS:

By Christopher T. Dawes, James H. Fowler, Richard McElraeth and Oleg Smirnov. Nature: 446, April 12,2007, Issue 7137, pp 794-796.

The authors of this paper begin by introducing the question they wish to answer ie,

"Participants in laboratory games are often willing to alter others incomes at a cost to themselves, and this behavior has the effect of promoting cooperation. What motivates this action is unclear; punishment and reward aimed at promoting cooperation cannot be seperated from attempts to produce equality. To understand costly taking and costly giving, we created an experimental game that isolates egalitarian motives. The results show that subjects reduce and augment others' incomes at a personal cost, even when there is no cooperative behavior to be reinforced. Furthermore, the size and frequency of income alterations are strong;y influenced by inequality. Emotions towards top earners become increasingly negative as inequality increases, and those who express these emotions spend more to reduce above-average earners' incomes and to increase below-average earners' incomes. The results suggest that egalitarian motives affect income-altering behaviors, and may therefore be an important factor underlying the evolution of strong reciprocity, and , hence, cooperation in humans."

Strong reciprocity is the tendency of social organisms to not just cooperate between kin, where it can be explained by relatively simple calculations of genetic similarity or beween unrelated individuals where there is expectation of reciprocity- mutual altruismirect reciprocity - the effect of "reputation" amongst the group. It is the tendency to cooperate/reward and to punish non-cooperators even when there is no expectation of reciprocity and when both the reward and the punishment are costly. Groups that evolve a tendency towards strong reciprocity enhance cooperation within the group by this mechanism. Not only is cooperation rewarded, but defection, the "free riders" are punished. Both mechanisms are prior to any laws or even customs amongst those animals which have culture, but they influence the direction that customs evolve towards.

The authors of this paper criticize other experiments in the "public goods" set of experimental economics "games" as being unable to differentiate " cooperative norm enforcement" from the "egalitarian motive". The experimental design that they have set up supposedly eliminates any "cooperative norm". The subjects were randomly divided into experimental groups of 4 people and just as randomly assigned a computer generated "income". They were allowed to see the results for the three other anonymous people in their group and were given the opportinity to give either "positve" tokens increasing another person's income or "negative" tokens decreasing them. Giving positive tokens increased the recipient's income by three tokens and decreased the giver's by one. Similarily, giving a negative token decreased the punished person's income by three tokens but decreased that of the punisher by only one. After each round, for a total of five rounds per session,participants were randomized into new groups of four in each round of a session None would be in the same group again and this was made plain to the participants. Evolution of cooperation was impossible.

Yet, income alteration was common in the experiment even though self interest would say that the best strategy is to never do it. 68% of participants reduced another player's income at least once, 28% did it at least 5 times and 6% did it ten times or more. Similarily, 74% of subjects increased other players' incomes at least once, 33% did it five times or more and 10% did it 10 times or more. The results of the game clustered around a tendency of subjects to attempt to bring the random incomes towards an arithmetic mean. The tendency to engage in this behavior did not decline over time as subjects would supposedly learn that it decreased their individual income- something that they were informed about in the beginning but might take some time to "sink in". Neither was the tendency to give negative or positive tokens influenced by the actions of other players towards a subject in previous rounds of the game.

Further details of the experiment can be seen in the apper cited above. The authors conclude that they have demonstrated an "egalitarian tendency" seperate from other mechanisms of reciprocity that "cause individuals to engage in costly acts that promote equitable resource distribution", the Kropkonian idea of "Justice" (see Ethics by Peter Kropotkin). They admit that "concerns for equality are clearly not the only motivation for human behavior" in the context of "public goods games"that attempt to model human social behavior.

Now, Molly would not be displeased at all if the authors' contention were true, but she is of the opinion that they have failed to prove their point. The first thing is that such an experiment should be repeated across various cultures as other experiments concerning cooperation in public goods gams have been. Those experiments have shown a wide variation between cultures in terms of the two "arms" of strong reciprocity, that of reward and that of punishment. The differences do not correlate to any "mode of production" and the two arms may vary randomly between cultures. Strong rewarders may be either strong or weak punishers and vive versa. Like any other aspect of human sociobiology the tendency to engage in what some have called "the evolution of spite" is "permissive" rather than "proscriptive". The "phenotype" will exhibit varying degrees of "penetrance" of the "genotype". Does the frequency of "spiteful" and "emphatic" acts vary significantly across different cultures ? Still an open question.

Second, and connected with the first caveat, the students that the experimenters recruited as their "experimental animals" came from a rather homogenous social group- undergraduate students at the University of Davis, California. They came to the experiment with a rather narrow spread of social attitudes towards equality, empathy and spite already fully packed into their mental baggage compartment. Even though the experimenters think that they have isolated a "pure" egalitarian motive the reader is invited to imagine how much different the results would have been if these students came from a culture that strongly disapproved of spite or one that considered the "gifts" to be degrading to the recipent.

So, in Molly's mind the results are suggestive but not yet definitive. It would be very pleasing to think that there is an internal "hard-wired" propensity for people to automatically disaprove of and try to reduce inequality. Certainly experiments in Communist dictatorship where inequality was in fact retained while being denied by a massive effort of propaganda show that people can pick up on the obvious fact despite being lied to by the best liars human history has ever seen. It also shows that this inequality was generally resented,particularily as it hardened into caste differences that reduced social mobility. This is also evidence for the sort of thing that the authors suggest, but ,like their work, it is not yet proof. Molly looks forward to the replication of this experiment (the authors' not the Communists') under different conditions.

DARWINISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS:

By Michael Ruse

Michael Ruse (June 21, 1940- present) is an eminent philosopher of science, particularly the philosophy of biology. He is particularly noted for his work on the disagreements between creationism and evolution. He was born in England, did his undergraduate work at the University of Bristol, his master's degree at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, and his PhD at the University of Bristol. For 35 years he taught at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and since his retirement he has taught at Florida State University where he is, since 2000, the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy. He was a witness for the plaintiff in the 1981 test case (McLean vs Arkansa) of the state law permitting the teaching of "creation science" in Arkansas. The federal judge in that case ruled that this was unconstitutional as it violated the separation of church and state. Ruse believes that it is possible to reconcile Christian religion with the facts of evolutionary biology. His academic output is tremendous. See his home page at http://www.fsu.edu/~philo/new%20site/staff/ruse.htm . Some of his books include

The Philosophy of Biology (1973)

Sociobiology:Sense or Nonsense (1979)

The Darwinian Revolution:Science Red in Tooth and Claw (1979)

Is Science Sexist ? And Other Problems in the Biomedical Sciences (1981)

Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies (1982)

Nature Animated (1980)

Taking Darwin Seriously:A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy (1986)

Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry (1988)

The Philosophy of Biology (2nd edition, 1989)

But is it Science? The Philosophical Question in the Evolution/Creation Controversy (1988)

Philosophy of Biology Today (1988)

What the Philosophy of Biology Is (1989)

The Darwinian Padadigm (1989)

Evolutionary Naturalism (1994)

Monad to Man:The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (1996)

Biology and Ethics (1998)

Mystery of Mysteries:Is Evolution a Social Construction? (1999)

Can a Darwinian be a Christian ? The Relationship between Science and Religion (2001)

Readings in the Philosophy of Biology (1998)

The Evolution Wars:A Guide to the Controversies (2001)

Cloning (2001)

Of the Plurality of Worlds:An Essay by William Whewell (2001)

Genetically Modified Foods (2002)

Stem Cell Research (2003)

Debating design:Darwin to DNA (2004)

Darwin and Design:Does Evolution have a Purpose ? (2003)

Darwinian Heresies (2004)

A Darwinian Evolutionist's Philosophy (2004)

The Evolution/Creation Struggle (2005)

Darwinism and its Discontents (2006)

Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology (2007)

Harvard Companion to Evolution (2007)

Palaeontology at the High Table (2007)

Charles Darwin (2007)

Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species (2008-upcoming)

Reflexions on the Origin of Species (2008-upcoming)

Some of the above are collections that Ruse is an editor of. Molly has just finished reading 'Darwinism and its Discontents' , an exploration of the rationale behind the Darwinian view of evolution as both a way of seeing the origin of species and the mechanism, natural selection, behind the changes that are embodied in evolution. ruse begins his book with a reply to both the religious critics of Darwinism and the pseudo-left of post-modernism. He extends his challenge to what is nowadays almost a dead letter, the evolutionary biologists such as Lewontin or Rose who, under the influence of Stalinism, tried to fight a rearguard action against the application of Darwinian ideas to humans. With the fall of the Soviet Empire and the conversion of China to capitalism with an inhuman face the proponents of this sort of obscurantism are pretty well restricted to the denizens of the American social science academy that are rapidly approaching retirement while clinging to the childish idea that Mao had some good in him. ruse closes his introduction with a preview of how he thinks Darwinism is important today.

More Later.

To be continued....Mollymew

PATHOLOGIES OF HOPE:

Barbara Ehrenreich has long been one of Molly's favourite left wing writers. She's had a long and distinguished career on the left, and her feminist books such as 'Witches, Midwives and Nurses:A History of Women Healers', Complaints and Disorders:The Sexual Politics of Sickness', 'For Her Own Good:100 Years of the Experts' Advise to Women' amongst others have become classics. Ehrenreich began her adult life as a scientist, beginning with physics and later obtaining a PhD in cell biology from Rockefeller University. her interest in social change, however, drew her away from pursuing a career in science and she embarked on a life in journalism. She is presently co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Ehrenreich is one of that small breed of writers whom Molly terms as "Marxists with a mind". Even though she had a youthful flirtation with Maoism, as most of her generation of American radicals did she rapidly recovered from the foolishness. She later came into contact with two ideas that would pretty well seal her exit from both the world of the sects and the claustrophobic world of acceptable American academic leftism. In 1977, long before the "discovery" of the 'professional-managerial class' by what is now Parecon, she wrote an essay for the journal Radical America called 'The Professional-Managerial Class'. She was hardly original in identifying this class which Marxists generally make heroic efforts in ignoring. Anarchists such as Bakunin formulated a crude description of what it meant many decades before it came to power for the first time. The idea was fleshed out by other people to the left of Marxism such as Machaijski and his admirer Max Nomad decades before Ehrenreich was born. The most grandiose description of this new ruling class was made by James Burnham in 'The Managerial Revolution' as he was making his supersonic transition from Trotskyism to conservativism. The phenomenon was extensively described before Burnham by the non-radical economists Berle and Means.

The main point about this is that once you come in contact with this idea-even if you don't know its full historical pedigree- and begin to take it seriously you can no longer remain a "revolutionary Marxist" in any sense, and you will also be provided with a tool that allows you scepticism about the fads that pass as "theory" amongst the American academic left. Where you go from there is anybody's guess. Some may follow the well trodden road of "repentant leftist" and make a career of attacking their own ex-comrades for the entertainment of conservatives. Burnham certainly did this. But the prospect of becoming a court jester doesn't appeal to everybody. Many others such as Ehrenreich, Michael Albert, Christopher Lasch, etc. may draw different conclusions from seeing this reality. They may become social democrats like Ehrenreich, may become anarchists or may try and formulate a new way to avoid the dangers of traditional leftism, as Albert has done. The whole thing is a "door jamb" that keeps the mind of the Marxist open and allows the fresh air to blow in from outside. The fresh air that cleans out the odors of rhetorical thinking, whether it be traditional Leninism or the "issue du jour" of activist and academic leftism.

The second thing that Ehrenreich came into contact with that helped open her to reality was the ideas of evolutionary psychology. This is hardly as much of a "clincher" as realizing that left wing movements often (usually ?) disguise the efforts of a would be new ruling class to come to power or to shift resources to others of their class within the present society. Knowing that there is a large component of genetics in modern human behavior will perhaps help you to decipher the agonistic behavior of leftist groups. It may give you the tools to see how dominance is achieved even in those groups that eschew the whole idea of dominance as "the work of the devil". What it won't do is allow you to see how leftist social campaigns that end in providing little more than jobs for those who wish to manipulate others come about. It will, however, bring a large amount of fury and denunciation on you if your are "indiscreet" or if your leftist opponents are swift enough to see what you are doing. In the end the ability of leftists who are statist, Leninist or otherwise, depends on the belief in a "blank slate" that well intentioned individuals can write upon by legislation and coercion. Challenging this misconception, however, is hardly as direct a challenge as saying that there are others than "capitalists" who can rule, sometimes much more brutally than the capitalists ever could. Exposing the existence of would be rulers is far more offensive to them than arguing about their ideological justifications.

Ehrenreich took on the ideas of evolutionary psychology seriously in 'Blood Rites:Origin and History of the Passions of War' (1991), and her use of them is extended in her latest book 'Dancing in the Streets' (2007). The good and the bad of humanity if you will. Molly has recently finished reading 'Dancing in the Streets', and I hope to have time to review it here.

Ehrenreich's engagement with ideas such as this have certainly moved her further into the "libertarian camp" as her 1997 essay for The Nation 'When Government Gets Mean:Confessions of a Recovering Statist' where she challenged the left's reliance on government initiatives and put forward an agenda of small scale, grass roots actions such as cooperatives, squats, union action, mutual aid centres that would hardly be disagreed with by anarchists, especially mutualists. Since then Ehrenreich has held to this orientation, even while, as the social democrat that she is now, giving a despairing nod to electoral politics.

Hope and despair!!! the essay that Molly has recently read, 'Pathologies of Hope', not only takes on the ugly and trendy multi-billion dollar ($5.62 billion in 2005 according to the essay but probably much higher) "self-help" industry in the USA but also makes a direct attack on the whole cultural underpinnings of this hucksterism. From "positive thinking", through the academic fad of "happiness studies", the "prosperity preachers" to the supposed scientific evidence for optimism as a benefit to health, Ehrenreich takes a swipe at it all. She also lays out the downside of this cultural belief, something universally ignored by its believers. Go on over to the link above to see what she has to say. You may not agree with it all, but at least you will be intellectually stimulated.

MOLLY NOTE:

How can one recognize "Marxists with a mind" ? It's hardly as simple as looking for quotes in their writings where they say "Marx was wrong". The sort of situation where intelligent Marxists deviate from the orthodoxy in their own field of expertise while retaining a belief in the correctness of the ideology is fairly widespread. The ideology of Marxism bears no close scrutiny anywhere. Its methods and conclusions have been recognized as false for over 100 years. The quasi religious nature of Marxism, however, as a total world view allows intelligent people to say that Marxism is wrong about things they know more than a little about while still believing in it as an act of faith in other matters. The denial of Marxist conclusions in one aspect hardly qualifies a writer as a "Marxist with a mind". It merely says that they are knowledgeable and intelligent. It doesn't mean that they have learned to think at all.

The whole idea of 'Marxists with a mind' is necessarily imprecise, as it is undoubtedly quantitative rather than qualitative. Go far enough down the road and you are obviously no longer a Marxist in an sensible definition. So how can you recognize a 'Marxist with a mind' as opposed to what could be styled 'an invertebrate Marxist' ? Here's a few Molly pointers:

1)Language. The writer should preferably restrict the use of nouns ending in the suffix "ism" to

nothing but political ideologies. If they use other shorthand terms they should restrict their use to the minimum necessary and preferably make at least one attempt to say that these shorthand terms do not equal coherent ideologies. The writer should at least make an effort to find other words to describe things in everyday culture rather than relying on borrowed terminology that hides as much as it illuminates.

2)Language. The writer should never use the words "dialectic" or "dialectical" in any manner other than an obvious reference to one of their many non-Marxist meanings. This is a dead give-away that the author is incapable of thinking, at least on one subject at one time and that he or she is falling back on words that mean nothing but "look good and intellectual".

3)Political History: The writer must have at least one skeleton in their closet where they are in obvious disagreement with a prevailing opinion in the left wing culture of their place and time. Intellectual courage is a prime requirement for having a mind.

4)Language. No quotomania from long dead Marxists. This may be excused in the case where the author is writing something about history, but quotes from Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc usually mean that the author is more than slightly confused about the concept of "proof" ie that he or she has no mind.

I could go on and on, but lets leave it at that for now.

Molly

OTHERNESS: WHEN KILLING IS EASY:
The above is the title of a recent review in Science magazine (Science 315, pp601-602, February 2, 2007) by reviewer Caroline Ash. This a review of two books. One of them 'The Altruism Equation:Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness', was the subject of the review that Molly discussed back on Feb. 11th under the heading 'A Review of a Review'. The other is the book 'Conflict', edited by Martin Jones and A.C. Fabien. Both of these books are collections of previous writings, but the approach couldn't be any more different. The first book features writers puzzling over the evolution of altruism while the second discusses the equally strong biological tendencies that lead to intraspecific conflict. The two together make an interesting study in contrast.





Caroline Ash is much more enthusiastic about 'The Altruism Equation' than the reviewer for Nature was. She finds it "exhilarating", and her "irritation" is reserved for the author Dugatkin's "unfairly bemoaning the lack of insight into economic modelling by all of Hamilton's predecessors, including Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Walter Clyde Allee."





The lack of mathematical base or simple mistakes are also bemoaned in the likes of Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and Sewell Wright. The reviewer could easily have included Kropotkin amongst this number as he is discussed extensively in 'The Altruism Equation'. Kropotkin was no mathematical illiterate; he trained in the artillery after all, and his criticisms of Marx's theories of value show that he understood at least a complex situation to be so...quite unlike Marx did. I will, however, defer to the reviewer's irritation here. I've read about where Haldane expressed the "bare bones" of the theory of kin selection, but I am not well read enough to tell anybody where he went wrong. From a simple historical perspective, however, the theories of altruism could simply not be expressed at the time of Kropotkin, Huxley and the others because the mathematical tools of game theory were as yet unknown.





Molly has yet to acquire a copy of 'The Altruism Equation', but this review definitely whets my appetite more. Ash brings up the question of George Price, one of the most fascinating characters in the development of evolutionary psychology. Price turned Hamilton's theories of the evolution of kin selection on their head and laid out a theoretical explanation for "the evolution of spite" whereby a spiteful act could still be selected for if the cost to the actor was less than the damage done to a rival.





Price is one of the more interesting characters I have ever heard of. Born in 1922, he was originally a physical chemist, later a science journalist and a computer consultant. He came to population genetics and evolutionary biology late in life when he devised the Price Equation after having read Hamilton's 1964 paper on kin selection. This is a covariance equation (1)that explained the frequency of allele variation in a population where the frequency of one allele depends on the frequency of another. This had previously been derived by C.C. Li, but price's formulation allowed it to be applied to all levels of selection, including inclusive fitness and group selection.





On June 6th, 1970 Price underwent a "conversion experience" and turned from atheism to a devote Christianity. He devoted the rest of his life to helping the homeless, taking to sleeping in his office at the Galton Laboratory so that homeless people could sleep in his rented house. This house was eventually demolished as part of a construction project. Having given away all his possessions Price went on to live at various squats in north London until he eventually committed suicide at Christmas, 1974 with a pair of "nail scissors".





This character definitely deserves a further look, and Molly will do same in the future.





Caroline Ash uses Price's work on the evolution of "spite" to lead into the second part of her review on the book 'Conflict'. This is part of the Darwin College lectures, Cambridge, a series held each year. This is apparently from the 1995 series on conflict that covers a wide spectrum of topics, from Labour and Conflict, to sex differences in intergroup conflict, to the Middle East and the evolution of state sponsored war...along with much more. The reviewer obviously can't do justice to such a wide range of topics in a few paragraphs and so she concentrates on two essays in the volume, one on parallels between aggression in humans, the regular chimpanzee (Pan trogodytes), and the bonobos (Pan paniscus), and the possible ecological pressures that led to different rates of inter-group aggression in these different species, the second on sex differences in intergroup aggression in humans. This hardly does justice to the volume on the lectures, but little more can be expected from a two page review devoted to two books.





Molly is not surprised at how two different reviewers can have such different views of a book like 'The Altruism Equation'. Each focuses on things that the other ignores because each brings their previous tastes to the reading. This doesn't mean, ala a pseudo intellectual post modernist "explanation", that they "create the meaning by manipulating the text". It merely means that they notice and emphasize different things that actually exist in the books reviewed.
Molly

A REVIEW OF A REVIEW:
Molly has recently read 'One Good Deed' (Nature: vol 444/7, December 7, 2006), a review of the book 'The Altruism Equation:Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness'. The book, of course, is another item in the continuing exposition of the rise of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, fields that were called into being by the necessity to explain "altruism" in a Darwinian fashion. I haven't read the book, but I can immediately detect some matters of "unfairness" in the review by Oliver Curry, apparently a philosopher rather than a practicing scientist. The first is a confusion in regards to the "level of selection". Curry assumes that the proposition that "genes" are the unit of selection is a fundamental paradigm shift that somehow demands that explanations be directed in a totally different manner. In actual fact the "unit of selection" is irrelevant for the explanation of altruism. The mathematics remain the same whether the unit be the gene, the organism, the group, the species or the clade. See 'The Structure of Evolutionary Theory' by the late Stephan J. Gould for a further exposition of this matter, even though I disagree with Gould in that I believe that the individual organism is the primary object of selection.
The author of the review in Nature gives little indication of what exactly the authors of the compilation said. He whines and complains that "kin selection", the most obvious manner in which altruism evolved, and the source of a majority of empirical research to this day, is given an excessive play. Well...it is also the most successful in terms of predictions verified in the real world. Put that in your pipe! He also devotes an excess of complaining to the level of "biographical detail" of the Kropotkin versus Huxley debates and -strangely enough given his first complaint- that W.C. Allee's theories of altruism as divorced from kinship is given excessive play. Had the author of the review been a little more knowledgeable he would have realized that the Russian Darwinists, of whom Kropotkin was one, had posed this question long before Allee did.
It seems to Molly like a bad review of a good book, and I hope to read in in the future.
Molly

THE PUZZLE OF HUMAN SOCIALITY:
The December 8th edition of Science Magazine (Vol. 314, Issue 5805), the journal of the AAAS, has three very interesting articles on the evolution of cooperation. Two are specifically related to human sociability and one is a general theoretical piece on the evolution of cooperation. This blog explores the first article of the eponymous title in the 'Perspectives' section of the magazine (pp1555-1556). Further entries will explore the other articles.
Robert Boyd has written an overview of an article by S. Bowles in this issue of Science. The subject is the "evolutionary puzzle" of the wide range of human cooperation as compared to other animal species. As the author says,
"Division of labour, trade and large-scale conflict are common. The sick, hungry and disabled are cared for, and social life is regulated by commonly held moral systems that are enforced, albeit imperfectly, by third party sanctions. In contrast, in other primate species, cooperation is limited to relatives and small groups of reciprocaters. There is little division of labour or trade, and no large scale conflict. No one cares for the sick or feeds the hungry or disabled. The strong take from the weak without fear of sanctions by third parties".
(Molly note: This introduction overstates the case greatly !!!. Of all the presumably human-only attributes cited above only "trade" is absent in other social species. This is not just confined to the primates. Other social species exhibit ALL the behaviors cited, though with specific items in each species. Third party sanctions, as the author calls them, are actually a fertile field of research in primatology and other fields. There they are called "altruistic punishment" , and anyone familiar with the behavior of domestic animals sees these agonistic actions on a routine basis. Ah, well it's a review, and the author is allowed to overstate his case.)
The author goes on to explain the disproportionate levels of cooperation between humans and other primates by proposing that the small size of primate societies means that kin selection provides a reasonable explanation of the behavior. The reviewer then goes on to point out that Bowles proposes that competition between genetically differentiated groups of proto-humans led to evolutionary selective pressure that favoured prosociality genes. He says,
"Limited migration between groups can lead to the buildup of genetic relatedness...among group members. This means that group membership can also be a clue that allows assortative interaction-genes that cause you to help members of your group can be favoured because other group members are disproportionately likely to carry the same genes, even though you do not share a recent common ancestor."
The author does point out that this idea, originally found in Darwin's 'The Descent of Man' has never been very popular. It's called "group selection". It was a theory held by Kropotkin amongst others (and Kropotkin took it to the extreme of species level selection). The reviewer points out that Bowles meets the standard objections to group selection with both data and theoretical considerations. First of all, data are presented about the level of genetic differentiation between hunter gatherer groups that present a different picture from the standard view. Hunter gatherer groups are much more different genetically than has usually been assumed and, therefore, intragroup cooperation has a basis of genetic similarity greater than what is usually assumed.
(Molly Note: watch out, there's a "weasel word" contained in Boyd's summary. He states that the level of differentiation between groups is the same as "the level of relatedness within such groups". That is not necessarily true. The two are NOT synonyms. It is easily conceivable that another human group can be widely different in a genetic sense while a competitive group can have all sorts of different levels of similarity)
The level of costs and benefits according to these articles is that cooperation will be favoured if the benefits are about 10 times the cost. The ability of cooperative groups to colonize the territories of competitors means that competition amongst relatives does not attenuate the benefit of cooperation. It is finally pointed out that intergroup competition is common in hunter gatherer societies (Molly Note: unlike the fantasies entertained by primitivists) so that benefits from cooperation are substantial.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, according to Boyd, Bowles notes that foraging groups have culturally transmitted norms such as food sharing and imposed monogamy that "reduce fitness differences within groups. he makes the original and interesting argument that such 'levelling mechanisms' act like redistributive taxes to reduce the disadvantage of engaging in costly prosocial behavior".
(Molly Note: These behaviors are themselves genetically influenced in humans and are not pure examples of cultural transmission. They also vary between groups, but, in general, they hover about a norm that is a clue to our evolutionary sociobiology)
The reviewer goes on to argue that the article by Bowles is not a group selection hypothesis because it merely presents an alternative mathematical framework that works out to the same sums as viewing the matter within kin selection lenses. This may or may not be true. Boyd then poses the questions of whether the levels of genetic variability observed in today's foragers are the same as those in Pleistocene hominids, whether the benefits were the same then as now (Molly Note: a questionable assumption given a much ! lower population density) and whether the "leveling mechanisms" were the same in ancestral populations.
The reviewer opines that "there is little dominance among human foragers" in contrast to other social species, an opinion that is not a settled matter. He goes on to suggest that, "It is certainly fair to invoke reproductive levelling to explain the stability of extended altruism among humans, but whether it is sufficient to explain its origin is not yet clear."(Molly Note: I am of the opinion that they are NOT for many reasons, not the least because research on altruistic punishment suggests that this mechanism which appears in other social species has a broader effect than 'reproductive levelling'. This is the old "proximate cause" and "ultimate cause" argument. Altruistic punishment can evolve via mechanisms in a social species that are very much removed from "reproductive levelling" and still be perpetuated in the species because they happen to serve the "ultimate cause" of reproductive levelling. Concentrating on one cause may lead to an ignoring of more fruitful areas of research.)
The author concludes with speculations on what he sees as the "competing explanations" for human sociality ie "the theory of mind, spoken language and other cognitive mechanisms" As he notes all these explanations are not mutually exclusive. Molly feels that the explanation of human cooperation will be a multi-faceted "complex" one rather than a "chaotic" one of one evolutionary pressure reaching some sort of "tipping point". Genes will interact with each other in a full "genetic environment" that is, in turn, influenced by the "memetic environment"-itself complex- of a learning animal. At its best this is what anarchism posits as an explanation for social evolution in contrast to the unidimensional theories of traditional Marxism and present day primitivism.
The other two articles in this issue of Science will be reviewed later.
Til then,
Molly