Nature and Conservatism

In the Times Richard Friedman, M.D. questions the widely debated evolutionary origins and/or advantages of depression. While happiness may not have been selected for survival advantage over the eons (emotional hypersensitivity, paranoia, and compulsivity have their uses in certain environments), he reminds us of the naturalistic fallacy, that is, we shalt not derive an ought from an is. We do not hesitate to decry genocide, bacterial infection, or "nature red in tooth and claw" even though such phenomena are eminently natural.

Theoretically there is nothing, not even cheesecake or Youtube, outside of nature (there is only one reality after all), but practically human beings have always distinguished between realms of culture (that which we believe we have some power to modify) and nature (about which, like the weather, we can only ultimately talk and not do anything). And one doesn't have to be a tree-hugger to acknowledge some sublimity of nature as the realm from which we came and which remains ultimately beyond us. Insofar as nature has accomodated the evolution of human beings over a million years (and of life in general over several billion years), it constitutes a kind of metaphysical cradle that we do well to rock only gently. It is a comfort to know that countless galaxies are beyond the capacity of humanity to despoil. Confronted with nature's nearly infinite array of figurative knobs and levers, we eagerly push this or switch that, but it still remains quite possible that human civilization will drive life on earth into an ecological ditch over the next millenium. The birth of consciousness may turn out to have been a tragedy for the biosphere--or not.

And yet one does commit the naturalistic fallacy every day, every moment, as life itself is the fundamental is from which we derive the ought. Nietzsche's ideal of the "eternal recurrence," the willingness to live one's life over again, in every inevitable detail and infinitely many times, is the absolute expression of the naturalistic fallacy. Some fallacy. If the ought has no connection to the is, where else could it come from?

Explanation and Intervention

"Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime, not because she is a trickster."

Albert Einstein

In considering causation in his conclusion to The Evolution of Childhood, Melvin Konner writes:

When asked why a teenage boy punches another, we can say that he does so because of:

• the secretion of a neurotransmitter in the amygdala


• in a neural circuit primed by testosterone,


• in response to a verbal insult,


• after a lifetime of frustration and observation of violence,


• given a fetal brain hurt by alcohol,


• and shaped by prenatal androgenization,


• against a background of maleness and individual aggressiveness,


• caused by natural selection favoring male status and self-defense,


• on a phylogenetic foundation of reproductive competition.

None of these explanations contradicts any of the others; in fact, we do not have an explanation until we have all nine levels.

This is an impressive illustration of over-determination, and an integrative understanding of a seemingly simple act. There is the full spectrum from molecular biology to cultural narrative; if a discrete behavior is this complex, how can we hope to answer the question, "Doctor, why am I depressed?" However, because we must be pragmatic creatures, we can't just throw up our hands; we must decide which cause(s) will be most significant for us in terms of possible intervention. However, we may not have sufficient information for such decisions for a few lifetimes yet. Discussing the biochemistry of development, Konner goes on to write:

Now all we have to do is spend a couple of centuries working out the cascade. We will need a very big piece of paper--it won't fit on a laptop screen--but we will eventually draw it, and it will explain everything. Up to a point. Beyond that, there is chance, chaos, and countless outside influences, especially in the flexible realm of behavior. These may make our elegant diagram look like a Jackson Pollock painting. Still, these outside influences are partly lawful, just as Pollock's drips and splatters, a mess to the untrained eye, are strangely ordered and intentional in their provenance. These external forces, like the cascade itself, are powerful, and understanding them better will give us a certain measure of control.

Nevertheless, we now know that it is foremost the cascade that builds brain and behavior, not just in the embryo but throughout development and life; the cascade proposes, the environment disposes. The cascade is the key creative element in the story. So we behavioral scientists might now show our respect for it--and break decisively with a century of disdain--by enunciating a law of psychogenetic inertia: developmental plans in motion will stay in motion according to predetermined guidance unless diverted by outside forces. It is perhaps just another way of saying canalization, and it is hardly as elegant as Newton's first law, but it may serve to remind us that all creatures, children included, come into the world with a plan.

A new human being is like a cupful of water dipped from the Amazon--we may straighten its course here and there, or dredge its bottom, or purify its waters but there is no need for chlorine or a canal.

Evolve

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

T. Dobzhansky

Yes, that quote is overexposed, but some things cannot be given too much honor. I am making my way through Melvin Konner's massive The Evolution of Childhood, which is wondrous as a compendium of biological and anthropological research, but not really recommended except for fans of evolution or psychobiology. For beach reading look elsewhere.

With the exception of the very real possibility of God's non-existence, which finally got through to me around age 17, I would say that no single idea has struck me with so much force as Darwin's theory. Once its awesomely simple explanatory power made itself felt, so many other seemingly unrelated phenomena clicked into place. And evolution endows humanity with the dignity of deep time and deep history. To learn that creationism is true would be like learning that the universe was switched on five minutes ago, containing the illusion of a 13.7 billion year past. As Darwin noted in wrapping up The Origin of Species, "there is grandeur in this view of life," the notion that the living world has boot-strapped its way to its current dizzying variety over 4 billion years on this planet. Each new organism, whether virus or human, is a biological hypothesis unwittingly put forth by the universe.

Perhaps I fell in love with evolution, as it were, through the writings of the archaeologist and poet Loren Eiseley, for whom the barely fathomable past of Homo sapiens held the haunting sublimity of the ocean or of deep space. For him evolution, far from answering all our questions, poses profound metaphysical and moral mysteries. If there is anything that evolution teaches, it is that our species was never inevitable, and represents no culmination. The contingency goes all the way down, and we too shall pass. There is comfort in that. This reassurance removes us (as Plato might put it) from rooms of smoke and mirrors into open sunlight, where we all find ourselves on the same endless plain.

What does evolution mean for psychiatry? Much in theory, perhaps little in practice. A few thoughts as I understand them:

1. Evolution, unlike God, does not care about our happiness. Reproductive fitness is not inconsistent with suffering, which is not to say that suffering is our normative condition.

2. Evolution, unlike God, is not perfect; it merely makes do with the conditions at hand, which leads to very imperfect designs, such as the human lower back, and perhaps, schizophrenia, mental retardation, etc.

3. Evolution operates at the level of the gene, so certain psychological conditions (of anxiety, depression, or mania) may be adaptive at lower intensities but maladaptive when (more rarely) large numbers of predisposing genes congregate in individuals. Much distress results from bad luck.

4. Evolution is always context-dependent, so certain genes (for obesity, ADHD, or substance abuse) only became problematic in environments of high caloric density, literate technocracy, or the easy availability of intoxicants, respectively.

5. Evolution helps with understanding and acceptance, but by virtue of the naturalistic fallacy (the effective is not necessarily the good) it tells us nothing about what we should value for the future. Henceforth we guide our own evolution, however hapazardly. This may be why evolution can seem to mean either everything or nothing: it has the potential to explain all, but in the form of a consciousness that could theoretically turn its back on all that (or so it seems). As a recent review of what the "post-humanists" are up to suggests, this may reflect our brilliance or our ultimate folly. Is accelerated change a threat to human nature, or the truest embodiment of human nature? Beyond a certain point self-transformation is logically and formally tantamount to suicide, is it not? Even the humble bacterium has the wisdom not to reject its own nature. Consciousness is about the always precarious integrity of identity. Would I still know you on the other side of the Singularity? Would I know myself?

Pleistocene Pleasures

"My business is to sing."

Emily Dickinson

I recommend Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct, a concise, accessible, and compelling overview of evolutionary psychology as it applies to the origins of the arts (the NYT review is here). The basic argument is that artistic interests and pursuits are universal to human experience (although with obvious temporal and geographic diversity) and are grounded in dispositions formed over a million years of hominid evolution.

Dutton's approach is nuanced and respectful of the gaps in our knowledge (theories of evolutionary psychology are far harder to demonstrate than are general evolutionary theories because, for one thing, brains don't fossilize). We do not, obviously, explicitly approach the arts in evolutionary ways any more than we consciously seek out a high-fat diet because it protected our ancestors from famine; the motivations in each case are quite literally unconscious.

In addition to general theories he handles the major arts individually. He maintains that all else being equal, people prefer depictions of landscapes that have basic features--a slightly elevated view of juxtapositions of open space and vegetation, signs of water, and small groups of animals and figures--of the African savanna in which humanity evolved. Narratives of all kinds (from Shakespeare to soap operas), Dutton claims, are natural ways of navigating the extreme complexities of human social life in a way that doesn't risk real-life consequences. Linguistic aptitude also can attract potential mates, although less so perhaps than impressive upper body strength (not all of us were blessed with both).

Music is clearly important to Dutton personally, and he acknowledges that it poses the greatest challenge to evolutionary theory inasmuch as such an abstract art does not, compared to other arts, seem as relevant to past survival advantage over evolutionary time. He ends up concluding that even more than the other arts, music is much like the peacock's tail, that is, a very contingent concoction designed to woo potential mates (witness the predominance of love as a perennial musical theme).

He also points out that compared to other arts, we tolerate and even invite an astonishing amount of repetition (albeit with variation), both of tonal ideas within musical works and of musical works themselves (over a period of years one might listen to a favorite album a hundred times, which we're not likely to do even with a poem). Let's see, what other human behavior involves the appreciation of extreme repetition with variation? Well, nothing comes to mind here, I'll think of it later.

Dutton takes clear aim at modernism in the arts (particularly atonal music and some avant-garde follies of the visual arts) as a misguided notion that taste can be culturally contorted to an infinite degree; rather, evolution suggests that our interests, while quite manifold, are finally finite. Indeed, avant-gardism over the past century has arguably been a massive expression of cultural hipsterism, in which mere exclusivity (manifested in the sheer cost of works of art as well as the smug satisfaction of being counted among the cognoscenti) has carried some sectors of the arts well into the realm of sophisticated kitsch.

The most hilarious example of this is best captured in Dutton's words:

The imitations reached rock bottom in 1961 with Merda d'artista, a series of works produced, in every sense of the word, by the Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni. In fact, in 2002 the Tate Gallery paid $61,000 to add to its collection Can 004 from Manzoni's series of ninety cans of his own feces...In Manzoni's case the only humor to be found is in the messy fate of many who acquired works in the Merda d'artista series: quietly, but knowing exactly what he was up to, Manzoni had improperly autoclaved the cans. At least half of those bought by museums and collectors eventually exploded.

In the closing pages of his book Dutton argues that great art relies on authentic individuality against a cultural background of stable values and the sense that some things do ultimately matter. This may be why the ironic age has found contemporary masterpieces to be hard to come by.

I find these kinds of evolutionary accounts to be fascinating and, really, deeply spiritual inasmuch as the fact of consciousness (and the necessary supposition of free will that comes with it) shields us from reductionism. Sure, one can say that Beethoven manipulates merely primitive urges just as one can say that tones are merely compression waves conveyed through air, but to do so is to miss the point. So much is both given and contingent, but the question in the arts, as in life, is: where do we go from here?