Moral Origins

This is Issue 2 — only the second post to this blog in the entire recorded history of mankind. Last week, in the inaugural post, I introduced what has become a rather conventional two-dimensional portrayal of political views, ranging from economic liberals to economic conservatives on one dimension, and from social liberals to social conservatives on the other dimension. The economic liberal/conservative scale was described briefly, with suggested connections to its evolutionary origins.

This week I will expand further on the evolutionary origins of economic liberalism, to the extent that it manifests a moral/political value, and is not just a selfish preference for policies that favor oneself as a potential beneficiary of those policies. I will also expand on my opinion, shared by others, that the emotion of compassion, which I believe is at the core of economic liberalism, derives from the parental love that became evolutionarily necessary when it became advantageous to bear offspring before they are prepared to fend for themselves, and therefore require parental care and nurturing. That’s quite a mouthful, so I’ll step through it at a more measured pace. Let me begin by telling you a story.

In the Beginning …

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, maybe where the sea is boiling hot near a fumarole, there lived a proto-life form. Now Proto’s body consisted of but one cell, and a rocket scientist she was not. In fact, she didn’t know that she existed. But she did exist, nevertheless, the result of random churning of primordial soup. In any case, Proto enjoyed — if you can call it that — a very short life, dying almost as soon as she was born. End of story.

But fortunately over the weeks, months, years, and millennia to follow, there were many more such stories and in some cases, due to random variation, the little beasties were better at surviving. Some of them also began to absorb nutrients from their environment and to grow. At some point, they would sometimes grow too large and burst, being absorbed back into the environment. But a few of them divided cleanly into two daughters. The daughters were generally nearly-perfect copies of the mother, who had given her all for their life.

Over time, as we now know, those individuals who were best able to survive and to reproduce accurate copies of themselves thrived and dominated in the population. Those less suited tended to die without offspring. At some point the gene was invented and one of its advantages was that it contributed to the accuracy with which the daughters could retain the characteristics of their increasingly complicated mothers.

But in those olden days before sex was invented and our ancestors reproduced by cloning — simply dividing into two identical individuals — they had to rely on a very slow process for genetic improvement and for adapting to changed environments. They had to wait what must have seemed a very long time, probably a great many generations, for a stray cosmic particle or other rare and random occurrence to cause a mutation in one of their genes. And then, in the very unlikely event that the mutation was beneficial, they might survive and reproduce (by cloning, of course) more readily than their friends and neighbors. In most cases, however, the effect of the mutation would be disastrous, and the mutated individual would die.

Sometimes the mutation produced neither a major benefit nor a major handicap, and the modified individual continued to live alongside the unmodified mass of ordinary folks. Over time, a variety of freakish individuals with differing peculiarities began to circulate within the population, but there was no effective way for them to combine their unique features to test the effectiveness of particular combinations.

Lust To The Rescue

Then came sex. We have no records on exactly how it got started because Margaret Mead wasn’t around then, but it transformed a population of basically standoffish individuals into a magnificent laboratory for genetic experimentation through sexual intercourse. And besides, it was fun. Well, at least it became fun pretty quickly as a stimulus for pursuing the practice. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; we’ll delve later into the bio-psychology of pleasure and how it promotes adaptive behaviors, and sometimes maladaptive behaviors.

The advantage of sexual reproduction over asexual cloning is its ability to combine favorable genetic traits from different successful individuals instead of waiting for a single cloned lineage to acquire them all independently by mutation. The greater speed of genetic adaptation allowed for more rapid migration to new and somewhat different environments and provided a competitive advantage where resources were limited.

Now, when we first discovered sex and began the dating scene, we probably didn’t buy into that commitment thing very seriously. “What’s your sign?” was probably followed pretty quickly with “Thank you, ma’am. See you around.”

But we had babies, or at least those among us who had drawn the short straws and been assigned the female role did. At first, these ladies may have dropped them as eggs as many fish do now and left them to fend for themselves. The guys in that case probably never got to know their dates in a biblical sense, but found it pretty exciting to swim over the eggs and do what excited guys do.

Just Doin’ What’s Right

Now life may have been tough back in those days, but at least it was simple. The code of ethical behavior was straightforward - look out for number one, and have sex if it feels good. We were all totally and completely selfish, and that was OK with everyone.

Skipping ahead a few chapters, these little beasties eventually evolved into more sophisticated organisms that would think about such things as shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, and would conjure up fanciful tales about their own origins.

But the lessons we learned in those early days still have a profound impact on our society, in that the will to survive — i.e., to look out for number one — and the lust for sex are two of the most basic instincts in human beings and all other animals. The survival instinct is so fundamental to our being that we seldom even question why, for example, we feel pain when touching a hot stove and instinctively withdraw our hand even before we think about it. We similarly don’t wonder why we feel fear when threatened and why that fear translates into a fight or flight reaction. Or why we feel pleasure from so many situations and actions that are conducive to comfort, survival, and reproduction.

The pursuit of self-interest is not usually thought of as a moral rule, but it is the first and usually strongest guide to behavior for every living animal (or plant, for that matter). To survive and reproduce is the sine qua non of success as a living host of genes. Unless one is genetically predisposed to protect and advance one’s own interests in survival and reproduction, one’s genes don’t make it into the next generation. And those who are most strongly impelled toward survival and reproduction are generally the most consistent contributors to the gene pool of the next generation.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that these most fundamental of instincts are strongly evident in the behavior of human beings and other species today. We are the children of thousands of generations of evolution in which the genes that strongly supported survival and reproduction steadily replaced those that didn’t.
It should be pointed out that it is not usually the end result of survival and reproduction that we consciously seek, nor are we just driven mechanically by instinct to specific behaviors. At least in the case of the more complex instincts, such as eating, what is instinctive is a feeling of discomfort that accompanies a deficiency of nourishment, and a sense of pleasure from putting food into our mouths, or even from the anticipation doing so. We then act rationally to replace the discomfort with pleasure.

Similarly, in the case of sexual reproduction, it is the experience or anticipation of pleasure that drives sexual behavior, more than any conscious desire to reproduce or any purely mechanical response to stimuli. Both of the latter may contribute to the sexual behavior, but the primary driver is the desire for pleasure, and what is instinctive is the connection of stimulus to pleasure and pleasure to the act. Through various kinds of instinctive pleasure and pain responses, we were encouraged to act in our own best interests, or more correctly the best interests of our genes, with the end result, though not our intent, that the genes that contributed the most to the survival and reproduction of their hosts became dominant in the gene pool. It was the genes, of course, that did the wiring that connected a stimulus to pleasure or pain, and thence to action. Well, OK, they’re not electricians, but they wrote the work orders that were carried out through the magic of chemistry.

But there were two evolutionary developments along the way that imposed very different — seemingly unselfish — requirements on some animals. One was giving birth to children who are not sufficiently developed to fend for themselves immediately upon birth, and the other was the association into tribes and other groups of individuals who are not closely related as members of the same family. Lets begin with the former.

Premature Birth, Love, and Compassion

Unlike sea turtles, which bury their eggs on the beach and then abandon them to hatch into young turtles that can make their own way to the sea and hopefully survive, humans and most higher animals nurture our young for an extended period before they are capable of surviving and prospering on their own. Evolutionary biologists don’t agree entirely on how such “premature birth” conveys an evolutionary advantage, but it must, or it wouldn’t have happened. One theory is that as the brain grew larger in proportion to the body, the passage of a head with a mature brain through the birth canal would require a redesign of the female pelvis that would unacceptably interfere with mobility, so the child had to be born with an only partially-formed brain. A more plausible theory, in my opinion, is that the most significant improvement in intelligence, which clearly conferred evolutionary advantages, was the development of increased flexibility in thinking, reasoning, and adapting to the environment, in place of hard-wired responses, and that this flexibility required that the child experience the world while the brain was still forming its neural connections. Particularly in the case of a social species, it’s important for children to observe and learn the social customs while the brain is still actively forming. It’s hard to teach an old brain new tricks. So the offspring must enter the world with a half-baked brain, still making essential connections.

But for a life form that had spent its first kazillion years pursuing nothing but survival, sexual pleasure, and total selfishness to decide to sacrifice a major portion of its time, energy, food, and safety in feeding, nurturing, and protecting a totally useless individual who will never even repay the favor — this is a profound change in motivation. How could this happen? Why would any rational individual, whose only previous motivation had been selfish, consent to make such a unilateral sacrifice on behalf of another individual that happens to have been its offspring?

The simple answer, of course, is that we love our children. But that isn’t really much of an explanation; it just says that we experience an emotion we call love that impels us to make such a sacrifice. Where does that emotion come from? It comes, of course, from our genes, or actually from the particular kind of work order some genes know how to write. Just as our earliest ancestors acquired, through natural selection, the instinct to survive and reproduce, a later set of ancestors acquired an instinct to nurture and protect their young. The “love gene” was born and flourished. Those parents who didn’t feel what we call parental love strongly enough didn’t contribute to the gene pool of the next generation. They aren’t our ancestors, because their kids died.

It’s the love that’s instinctual, not the behavior itself. The set of behaviors necessary to protect and nurture our children is far too complex to be prescribed as a sequence of muscle contractions that is triggered automatically, as when we inadvertently place our hand on a hot surface. With love, we hurt when our children hurt and we feel joy when our children feel joy. We feel fear when they are threatened and comfort when they are safe. Just as we acquired, through natural selection, the ability to feel pain or fear in a threatening environment and comfort or happiness in a good environment, we have also acquired the ability to experience such feelings by proxy when our children feel, or should feel, them. It is this empathy that motivates us to protect and nurture our children. Call it parental love. Natural selection produced it in all species in which the offspring require continued protection and/or nurturing after the young are born or the eggs are laid.

It all makes good sense for the genes, of course, which only “want” to increase the presence of their own kind in the population, but it required a radical change in the behavior and motivations of their host organisms. The pre-human and other host organisms neither knew nor cared about their genes. They engaged in sex, for example, for the pleasure of it, not to produce children, and certainly not to influence the gene pool of the next generation. So what would have motivated the prehistoric Mom to buy into this nurturing business? Why should she lift a finger for a worthless organism she had expelled from her body?

Pleasure and the avoidance of pain, that’s what. Through natural selection, when it became advantageous to give birth to offspring “prematurely,” the “love gene” (there may have been more than one) arose to provide pleasure and pain by proxy. When the object of love — the child — is hurt or threatened, the parent feels an emotional pain similar to the anticipation of injury to herself, and when the child is comfortable and happy, so is the parent. How the genes pulled that little trick off for their own benefit is a topic for next week. (Hint: they drugged us with oxytosin, a neurotransmitter that’s a love potion.)

In one sense, then, parental love may be interpreted as self-interested behavior in that the motivation, at an unconscious mechanical level, is presumably to relieve pain felt by the parent and replace it with pleasure. What is different is that the pleasure and pain arise by proxy, through empathy. It’s the empathy that is new and radically different. There was never a need for it until premature birth became advantageous, and in fact, a “love gene” would previously have been selected out as a disability.

The emotion of love, once established as necessary to the survival of offspring, could then be broadened to encompass other individuals such as the mate, close relatives (who also share some of the same genes) and eventually even unrelated individuals in the same tribe or group. With this broader application the intensity of the emotion generally wanes, and we may more appropriately refer to it as compassion. Some people today (we usually call them liberals) extend an umbrella of compassion to include all human beings and even some non-human species.

Next Week — How Our Genes Manipulate Us

Next week I’ll go more deeply into the mechanisms by which our crafty little genes influence our behavior, including not just the love potion oxytosin, but other neurotransmitters, as well. I’ll also introduce the idea of differentiating economic liberals and conservatives by the size of their “circles.” Keep in touch.