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This is a very bald summary of Aristotelian ethics, but it does help to provide a framework for my exploration on the evolution of evil. If “good” can be defined as that which encourages the integrity of the whole, then “evil” becomes anything which disturbs or disrupts such completeness. Anything unruly or over the top. Anything, in short, that is bad for the ecology. 9
I base this assessment on a set of common suppositions which ecologists make, but seldom put into words. First of these is that all plants and animals have a place of origin, a locus. This is where they “belong,” they fit. Such fitness is generally seen as an ability to become part of an ecological web. They coevolve with other species in that place and assume a position of least resistance, not consuming too much nor laying themselves open to undue consumption. They become “just right.”
When a species wanders beyond its original bounds, it most often does so slowly. It migrates or is displaced by some natural event such as a flood or a storm, swimming, flying or rafting to a new place, “putting down roots” there, competing with native species for available resources. Most such invasions fail because local species are better adapted to their locus, but sometimes invaders have an unfair advantage. They break the rules of coexistence and get away with it because they have gone beyond their usual jurisdiction. They are no longer subject to the fine constraints of home. They step out of line and find that there are no penalties for doing so. Nobody eats them. 28
I choose to revive and use pathic and pathics here in a more general, direct and active sense, to identify the study of that in nature which represents a loss of character and community, leading way from rather than towards natural cohesion. 30
There seems to me to be three major areas of actions involved and I am calling my formulation of these the Three Principles of Pathics. There are, in effect, a description of “How Good Things Get Bad.” And if ethics deals with rules of conducts, then pathics is concerned with misconduct and ought to have rules of its own. There are not just the opposite of “good,” but involves a series of subtractions from order and stability, and the first of these may be phrased very simply in this way: ORDER IS DISTRIBUTED BY LOSS OF PLACE.
In other words, stability suffers when something is removed from, detached from or distanced from the locus where it works best and set down somewhere else, where it is no longer part of a larger system of mutual advantages and constraints. 30
Which brings me to the Second Principle of Pathics. Where the first principle was qualitative and addressed ecological concerns about distribution, introducing the idea of right and wrong places, the second is largely quantitative and concerned with the matter of right and wrong numbers. This principle deals with the ecological problem of abundance and what it means to have too much, or too little, of anything. It has to do with resources and with population and may be phrased in this way: ORDER IS DISRUPTED BY LOSS OF BALANCE. 33
The second Principle of Pathics draws attention to the disruptive effect of such imbalance and it is significant that in lemmings at least, the cure for disorder happens to be a dramatic increase in behavior such as assault, battery, child abuse, murder, infanticide and finally suicide. 35
You can have too little of a good thing and the Second Principle of Pathics must be seen as predicting the disruption of order by a loss of balance in either direction. Abundance is not a description of plenty, it is a measure of quantity equally applicable to “a lot” or “a little.” Underpopulation is as bad as overpopulation, too many resources as harmful as too few, and stinginess as great a sin as greed. 36
Aristotle was right. Bad desire consists of wanting, not just too much, but also too little. And anything which isn’t “just enough” or just the right number for an individual, a population, a species, a community or an ecosystem is bad for the whole and evidently evil. And if limits, both high and low, apply to all living populations, then humans cannot be exempt. 37
We differ from most other organisms in being able to exercise our own controls rather than relying on natural mechanisms. Advances in health care, housing and nutrition have all contributed to a changes in lifestyle for enough of us to produce a population growth spiral for the whole species, with increase of up to four or even five percent per annum. But unfortunately these go largely unchecked. We have reduced the death rate without an equal reduction in the birth rate, and the sheer weight of our number is threatening not just our survival, but the order and ecology of the entire planet. 37
The worst of these is perhaps the domestic goats, altered by selective breeding from its wild ancestors to a ruthless eating-machine that became a major factor in the destruction of its own ancient habitat in the Mediterranean. 37
It is probable no accident that the devil is so often and so widely seen as shaggy and horned, taking on the form of a black goat; portrayed with cloven caprine feet as Pan or Dionysos; or identified as the apocalyptic goat-beast of Christianity and the hariy-beared se’irim of Hebrew iconography. 38
There may well be evolutionary checks and balances in a system, but to identify them we are going to have to uncover far more elaborate and interconnected, far more interesting, models of control.
Among the first of these were a set of equations developed in the 1930s by Vito Volterra, who had a strong influence on the physics of calculus. Volterra was a professor of mathematical physics at Rome and a senator of the kingdom of Italy, but with the rise of Fascism and the end of the monarchy, he traveled abroad and turned his interest to living systems, trying to establish patterns which allowed tyrants and people, wolves and sheep, to coexist. What he produced was an abstract predator-prey model that was fascinating and counterintuitive.
The Volterrana principle predicts, for instance, that if the populations of predators and their prey are more or less in balance with one another, and something happens to disturb their joint environment, then there will be a disproportionate decline in the number of predators. Surprisingly, this is precisely what happens. If herbivorous insect pests in a crop field are being eaten by other predatory insects and the farmer sprays the entire area with a broad-spectrum pesticide, a similar proportion of each population will die. But the crop-eating prey, whose death rate has been reduced by a shortage of predators, recovers more quickly than the predators, who can no longer find sufficient prey. So the farmer’s even-handed assault on the system seems only to make his pest problem worse. This is not what he intended or what we might expect, but it happens all too often, both with pesticides and to our ideas of how we think things ought to work. 39
Recent studies have produced a more surprising Volterran suggestions. The snowshoe hare, it seems, is another species that reacts badly to overcrowding. It goes into a form of shock that the researchers diagnose as “hormone-mediated idiopathic hypo-glycemia.” What that means is that hares suffer from stress which even if they are removed from the situation. They have an endocrinal response which controls their own population size. And, as it happens, those snowshoe hares which are most resistant to such stress, and therefore form a larger proportion of the surviving hare pool, also carry a virus that may produce a debilitating lynx disease. This predator-prey relationship is nothing like we imagined. It is actually the hares that assault the lynx.” 39,40
And I am happy to swallow my purist pride where kelp and otters, baobabs and elephants are concerned. Even biologists have their favorites.
Kelps are the sequoias of the sea. Submarine giants who have succeeded in colonizing some of the most dangerous and inhospitable regions of the ocean. 40
Swimming through such algal glades is a profound, almost religious experience. The stalks rise like cathedral columns in the gloom and welcome one in with their gentle undulation. But there is, of course, a serpent in this Eden. 40
This is happening now off the coasts of Japan, the Kuril Islands and Kamchatka, with disastrous consequences for near-shore fish and fisheries. All for one good reason: the removal of another key stone species. In this case a significant predator, a sea otter best known for its endearing habit of lying amongst the kelp on its back, cracking an occasional calm on its stomach, but which, more importantly, loves to eat sea urchins. By contrasts, off the coasts of Alaska and California, where the otter is strictly protected from fur trappers and therefore more numerous, kelp flourishes and provides an essential nursery area and vital habitat for local marine life. 41
This rule has to do with the ecology of association, with right and wrong relations, and I rank it as the most important of the three pathic principles. The first and second dealt with influences which just “disturb” or “disrupt” natural order. The third principle goes further by suggesting that ORDER IS DESTROYED BY LOSS OF DIVERSITY.
The first and second principles recognize that natural order is disturbed by loss of place and disrupted by loss of balance. Good things get bad if they are not in the right place in the necessary quantity. Every businessman knows that. These are the ground rules of economics and ecology – proper distribution and supply. If either or both fail, there are problems of control which led to dysfunction. The third principle is more general in its scope. It predates the first two principles or presumes that their requirements have already been met. The law of association examines the nature of relations and recognizes that order can be not just upset, but totally destroyed, if connections are impoverished. It matters who you know and how you manage your affairs. And more than that, it matters desperately how rich these associations are allowed to be. 42
Arguments about management strategies continue, but it seems clear that one of the major functions of elephants in Africa, their “job” if you like, has been to convert woodland to grassland, forest to more open savannah. This is disadvantageous to the elephants themselves who, like otters in kelp, have to work harder for a living. But what they are doing is to create new possibilities for other species. The cycles we see in this are characteristic to the African ecosystem and have only been modified in part by recent human activity. 44
Lose too much and, like the passenger pigeon, you lose the lot. That would be bad for everyone. Manifestly evil. So pathic that it would make the whole distinction between right and wrong completely meaningless, because both values would disappear altogether.
Diversity is the key to success. It is the peculiar strength of our biosphere that its interconnections – the food webs, symbiotic associations, ecological guilds and kinship groups – are so rich and so complex. Nobody knows quite why things need to be this way, or how such diversity began. It remains mysterious, for instance, that there should be so many more species in the tropics than the temperate zones. It is not immediately obvious how dozens of large tree species, all doing essentially the same job in rainforest canopy, serve the system better than just one species expert at dealing with abundant light, warmth and moisture. But no biologist who has worked in the tropics really doubts that the diversity is both necessary and good. 45
I can tell from hundreds of yards away whether a patch of woodland on a river will produce a variety of birds, a “party” moving through with mutually enhanced enthusiasm, or nothing at all. I know which stones to turn in search of scorpions and which are most likely to yield a sleeping snake. I can decide, before dropping anchor, which section of a reef, which coral outcrop, supports the greatest variety of fish. There is a completeness, a “glow” to such systems in their prime that banishes doubt. There is health in them, and it shows. Just as systems out of kilter, in which something is not quite right, send out warning signs. These factors, as much as anything, inform my judgment of what in biology constitutes right and wrong, good and evil.
I am concerned about completeness, or the lack of it, in nature. And I am anxious to know if we can learn enough about it to make sense of the part we play. I feel a kind of kinship with otters and elephants and share every thinking person’s horror at their thoughtless destruction. The loss of each such asset leaves me feeling distinctively uneasy, somehow less prepared. But I believe that we can make a difference in such matters, perhaps even understand what it is that lest ecocide and genocide take place, if we go back to basics.
The lessons seem to me be these….
Life is elaborately interconnected, largely for the common good. The web, however, is so intrinsic that some of the links are fragile, which means that things happen, often unexpectedly, some of them good, some bad. Sometimes it is hard, in the short term perhaps impossible, to tell the two apart. But in the long term, and in general, it looks like as though “good” is what is right for the whole; and “bad” is what is wrong for the whole. “Evil” is far more difficult to define, but could perhaps best be described as that which is consistently or deliberately bad.
There is clearly a sliding scale between “good” and “bad,” but there appear to be three principal ways in which benign things most often deteriorate and become malign:
1. Good things get to be bad if they are displaced, taken out of context or removed from their locus.
2. Good things get very bad if there are too few or too many of them.
3. And good things get really rotten if they cannot relate to each other properly and their degree of association is impoverished.
With these principles in hand, I believe that we have a simple biological framework with which to reexplore the old mysteries of right and wrong. 46,7
This is one of the reasons for morning sickness and high blood pressure during human pregnancy. There are the signs of an early disagreement between mother and fetus, a fight in the womb between the parent and an outsider who shares only half of her genes. 48
One written instead by a calculating gene that sets the survival of the display. Bird-watchers around the world have been charmed and distracted for ages by plovers, ducks, divers, owls, nightjars and other groundnesters that feign injury or illness to attract attention away from vulnerable eggs and chicks. It is hard not to admire such selflessness, which must, when faced with agile cats and foxes, quite often prove fatal. But it is even harder to understand how such behavior can have evolved within an evolutionary system that require first of all that an individual act in ways that best enhance its own survival. Lying down in front of a predator is not likely to do that. It is suicidal, an altruistic act that seems only to benefit others. And altruism apparently has no place in Darwinian theory, or at least it did not until 1963 when William Hamilton, a young British biology student, rushed a paper into print. 51,2
Animals are systems which struggle to find a balance between energy output and input, and the chimp must choose the course of action which produces the largest net benefit, if not to herself, then to the genes she carries. 53
But what happens as a result of the choice she made is that the gene pool of which she is a part becomes just a little more likely to be filled with genes which influence bodies in such a way that these behave as if they had made such calculations. Genes work through us to help each other, and since Hamilton’s insight, it has become necessary to look at everything we do with this in mind.
Haldane was right. The only time it makes biological sense to risk losing your life for another is when the person drowning is your identical twin. And even then it is a split decision. 53
What is more unusual and therefore praise-worthy is putting yourself at risk to help a stranger. There is no genetic dividend in that. Genes seem to draw the line of their concern somewhere around third cousins, with whom we share only 1/128th of our heredity. Anyone beyond that is beyond the genetic pale, and not available for what has come to be called kin selection. This exclusion is real and vital to the discussion of evil. Genes are essentially selfish except as far as close relative are concerned. 54
There are several genetic instructions which seem to be common to, and appropriate to, all life. And Rule Number One among these is : BE NASTY TO OUTSIDERS. 54
We frequently find ourselves in situations where it seems most prudent to let someone else take the lead, admiring their courage in doing so, admonishing such heroics only when they involve close kin, someone with a significant fraction of our genes in their brave bodies. Then the behavior seems suddenly reckless and foolhardy, enough so to make us angry, and then to wonder why anger should be an appropriate response.
For the genes it is. Kindness to strangers is not part of their plan. Such behavior, on their balance sheets, means wasted energy and unnecessary risk. So we find ourselves torn between courage and fear, hate and love, and end up feeling guilty. And that is the next stage in behavioral analysis – a recognition that genes are not impartial. In addition to being generally nasty to outsiders, genes have a supplementary tendency which could be described as Rule Number Two: BE NICE TO INSIDERS. 56
Dawkins and Hamilton and Wilson all recognize “the gene” as a biochemical entity, a collection of DNA molecules arranged in a particular fashion and housed along ribbons inside the cell nucleus of mot higher organisms. This is fine, as far as it goes, but it is worth bearing in mind that some influences which direct our evolution and development might well lie outside the cell nucleus, or even outside the cells themselves. And that, while I join with the three wise men of sociobiology in a sort of general genetic determinism, I am more often using “the gene” simply as a convenient metaphor for all the forces which govern instinct and the inheritance of both from and function in any individual. 57
There seems to me to be more necessary preconditions for becoming wicked – and these are the ones still recognized in every court of law. There must be both means and motive.
The Principles of Pathics provide the means. Good things, as we have seen, become bad as a result of loss of place, loss of balance and loss of diversity. But for such disarray to persist in any meaningful way, there needs also to be an influence which gives the process momentum. There needs to be a motive, which is not necessarily conscious or creative, but has to have survival value. And this is provided in full by genetic “selfishness,” by the effect the first two Genetic Rules have of creating and essential divide between Us and Them. A schism which has nothing to do with “the good of the species.” All genes are concerned with is becoming better represented in the gene pool, and in this endeavor they can be ruthless. 58
After all, he saya: “the ruthless behavior of a baby cuckoo is only an extreme case of what must go on in any family. Full brothers are more closely related to each other than a baby cuckoo is to tis foster brothers, but the difference is only a matter of degree.” 62
When it comes right down to it, there is a little of the hyena in each of us. 63
Ornithologists have long been familiar with brood reduction in a variety of species and have generally assumed that this was under simple parental control. That when food was short, they would feed the nestlings selectively and allow one to starve – usually the last one to hatch. Sometimes this is exactly what happens. 63
As far as the genes are concerned, suicide can make sense. 64
There is even a case to be made for such selfishness in the womb. ….. A study of female prison inmates in the United States produced the surprising finding that, despite their history of prostitution, drug addiction and other life-threatening lifestyles, they were seven times less likely to give birth to children with defects. This counterintuitive statistic is however balanced and possibly explained by the fact that they were also three times as likely as those mother outside prison to have had at least one stillbirth or natural abortion. 65
In addition to being generally nasty to strangers, and nice to relatives and friends, genes are congenital crooks. They hedge their bets by a loophole law which may be described as Rule Number Three: CHEAT WHENEVER POSSIBLE.
Cheating comes naturally. The genes demand it and children soon learn that it pays. Hence the battle of the generations. No chick, no pup, no baby ever passes up an opportunity to deceive. They pretend to be younger, hungrier and more at risk than they really are, in the hope of getting more time, more food or more attention. 65
Hamilton has helped enormously with his concept of inclusive fitness – the sum of an individual’s own fitness, plus the sum of all the effects such fitness has on his relatives. …. For instance, if I give up food or shelter or even a mate for my brother’s sake, I diminish my own fitness. This is altruism, a sacrifice that seems to lead only to genetic loss. But it can also put him into a position where he is able to reproduce successfully and pass more of the genes we both share, including perhaps a tendency to be altruistic, on to the next generation. On the other hand, if I refuse to make sacrifices for the sake for the family and turn down my brother when he comes to me for a loan, I diminish his fitness. This is selfishness, and does him no good, but it may however pay off in the long run if it increases my fitness to a point where I can have more, possibly equally selfish, offspring. Genes find both strategies effective and make no moral judgments between them, using either to their advantage, depending on the situation. We must expect to find unthinking generosity and greed, altruism and selfishness, in the behavior of every species. 67
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but this pronking (from the Afrikaans for “showing off”) is not just a dramatic display of high spirits and tight sinews. It is an altruistic act. The law of successful preydom is “Don’t’ make yourself conspicuous,” and yet here was an animal in territory frequented by lion, leopard, cheetah, hyena and hunting dog making an exhibition of itself, inviting attack. 68
In sardines, anchovies and other “bait fish,” the opposite situation appears to prevail. These species gather in groups, they school, for completely selfish reasons. 68
This association at least may not be the product of finely tuned ecological checks and balances, but the unavoidable outcome of purely mechanical forces that sometimes may turn out to be bad for the species.
The genes, however, don’t care. They never have, concentrating single-mindedly on their own agendas, lying, cheating and even killing where it serves their purpose.
In addition to altruism and selfishness, there is another permutation possible for genes interested in improving their profit-loss ratio. Going back to the simple relationship between a pair of brothers, it is possible for me to help my brother indirectly by harming an unrelated competitor. I gain nothing myself. In fact, I might even lose, but go ahead anyway, perhaps in the hope of increasing the fitness of my brother. This strange pattern of behavior is called spite. 69
When choosing a behavioral strategy, an animal can increase its inclusive fitness by being nice to close relatives, indifferent to distant relatives, and antagonistic to strangers. If such antagonism takes little time or effort, if it costs the animal nothing, we can expect it to do a lot of it. But if the behavior is difficult or expensive, we can also expect him to e less quick to act, more deliberately and indiscriminately spiteful. 69
And I can think of no system better designed to provide such information than the genes themselves, those canny strategies whose being can be as subtle as the code carried in a virus that flits from body to body spreading news like gossip at a cocktail party.
How else can one account for communication not just across species lines, but even between kingdoms? 72
Lying is merely the most obvious way of cheating in a societal situation, and so common that it must be seen as universal. A part of our environment as natural as win and water. Yet it only exists because “honesty“ already forms part of the same system. Deception cannot work unless it is a rare variant of an honest response, unless it mimics a preexisting pattern of appearance or behavior and exploits the tendency of most individuals to accept that at face value. 74
Social intelligence is given far too little value in societies which measure worth by standards of technical prowess. Even our attempts to rate the relative intelligence of other species have been hampered by experiments which assess their ability to deal with physical gadgetry, rather than with each other. 74
At the heart of all these lies one necessary assumption, a basic one that unites all three genetic rules. And the gist of this is that genes will do whatever it takes to protect themselves, even if it means sacrifice some of their own. 75
Females fight back against the murder of their young, but in the end their bodies betray them, coming back into estrus again within days of the loss of their infants. And the frenzy of infanticide ends only after seven months, when females who have become pregnant by the usurper begin to produce young that carry his own genes instead of those of his predecessor.
The genetic imperative here is obvious and brutal, but it is not simple. The langur female’s reproductive success is affected by the murders and her genes encourage countermeasures which include cooperative resistance to the killings; leaving the group to follow the old male who fathered her young; or even living dangerously on her own. But most impressive of these strategies is one which involves a pregnant female “pretending” to be in estrus, even to the extent of appropriate hormonal changes likely convince the new male of her readiness, and copulating with him often enough to allay his suspicious when her infant is born long before the normal period of pregnancy has elapsed. It usually works, persuading the despot to accept the defeated male’s infant as his own. 76
Individuals tend to behave more thoughtfully, more sensitive to the common good, in small communities than larger ones. 81
He chose sixty-two entrants as finalists, running their programs randomly against each other, and discovered to his surprise that the one which own was the simplest strategy of all.
The program was called “Tit For Tat.” It had only two rules. “On the first move, cooperate. And on each succeeding move do what your opponent did on the previous move.” In practice what this means is a strategy in which you are never the first to defect; but in which you retaliate after your opponent has defected; and that you forgive that opponent after one act of retaliation. In short, it is an optimistic program which takes an altruistic act towards you as an open invitation to be altruistic back. It requires trust, which seems unrealistic, but the astonishing thing about Tit For Tat is that it not only invites reciprocity, but also provides the ideal mechanism for ensuring that you get it. Tit For Tat is a robust program which, once running, is almost impossible to stop. And because it is so simple in its instruction, it provides the perfect vehicle for genetic inheritance. Even bacteria are capable of direct responses to their environment and can certainly respond to orders which say, in effect: “First do unto others as you wish them to do unto you, but then do unto them as they have just done to you.”
Tit For Tat is altruism with teeth. A program that works because it carries a big stick. And it goes on working because it also forgives, recognizing and rewarding acts of remorse. All of which sounds impossibly high-principled, but the very beauty and strength of the program is that it carries the seeds of its own success. It is self-realizing. An automatic process that leads inexorably to a distinct goal, creating good out of evil; just as selfish fish, each interested only in its own survival, accumulative inevitably into a school with very different characteristics. 82
There are still those who present such ideas as a valid political platform, and get voted into power on it. But what Tit For Tat shows is that we don’t have to deal only with the three rules of genetic selfishness. There are strategies which, without genetic involvement, can allow cooperation to evolve. It is possible for individuals or species, each intent on pressing their own selfish interests, to gravitate towards reciprocity and mutual advantage. 83
It looks as though cooperation can being in small ways and that it can thrive on simple instruction that car essentially “nice,” yet capable of being provoked, while also being somewhat forgiving. And that systems which start in this way ten to grow; they contain a “ratchet” which ensures that levels of cooperation remain the same or increase, but never go down. 83
Cooperation flourished best in continuing relationships where the participants can anticipate mutually rewarding transactions in the future. And such anticipation is by no means exclusively human. All that may be necessary is a basic awareness of a simple and sobering social reality. “We may meet again.” 83
When faced with altruism, it is very hard not to reciprocate and to play good Tit For Tat. It is a pattern of behavior with definite survival value.
It may be in the nature of life to be selfish. That which survives, survives – and goes on to fill the world with its own ruthless qualities. That is how Darwinian evolution works, building up ever more complex and more self-serving societies. But there is a ratchet in the works, a mechanism which allows something more generous to grow out of indifference, something “good” rather than “bad,” something working towards the Goldilocks solution. Something very like the live-and-let-live reciprocity that arose between opposing troops on the Western Front during the First World War. 85
It is clear that genes are selfish; but that organism need not be. We may be cowardly creature, born selfish and subject to the ruthless interest of genes that encourage cheating and lying; but we are also part of kinship systems that put a premium on being nice to close relatives. Genes are primarily concerned with inclusive fitness, with the big picture; but parental and social behavior require a certain amount of selflessness which gives us, as individuals, the experience of generosity and sympathy. There are distinct advantages to be gained by deception; but the very existence of such wile produces the need for awareness of them that has made us calculating and intelligent beings with a sense of justice and fair play. Self-interest may be guaranteed; but kinship, individual recognition and extended contact all provide the conditions necessary for altruism to appear in contradiction to the three rules of the genes, and once it does, there are simple mathematic principles, rules of the universe, in paly to ensure that they increase and encourage cooperation instead of conflict. 87