The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [115]
Showing that human affairs are thoroughly Darwinian is easier than it looks, however. Just for starters, remember the moral of Chapter 6. Back in the Pleistocene, Darwinian processes shaped us to be mostly nice. Ten thousand years of culture is too short a time to beat it out of us. Moreover, Darwinism doesn’t require treating culture as “red in tooth and claw.” It’s not always a Darwinian competition in which the weak go to the wall and devil take the hindmost. There is also no need to view everything human as genetically hardwired. Darwinian processes can work perfectly well without being hardwired. Whenever and wherever, in nature or culture, we find the appearance of purpose Darwin assures us that the reality has to be blind variation and natural selection. Now, human affairs show the appearance of purpose all over the place. Since most aspects of human affairs look like they have been designed and have functions, they have to be Darwinian adaptations.
There is a simple argument for this conclusion, whose premises scientism is already committed to. It shows that Darwinian processes rule culture as thoroughly as they do biology:
First, almost all significant features of human affairs—historical actions, events, processes, norms, organizations, institutions—have functions and therefore are adaptations.
Second, the only source of functions or adaptations in nature—including human affairs—is the Darwinian process of blind variation and environmental filtration.
Science and scientism are committed to the second premise. As we’ll see, most historians and social scientists are committed to the first premise, no matter how dubious it sounds at first blush.
How could almost everything in human affairs be an adaptation? That sounds like an idea worthy of Pollyanna or Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, who thought everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Even in biology, not everything turns out to be an adaptation. Much of evolution is a matter of drift—the play of chance on small and sometimes even large populations. Why do African elephants have large ears when Indian elephants have small ones? Why do African rhinoceroses have two horns when Indian rhinos have only one? The answer may be that it’s just a matter of chance—drift. At some point or other in the evolution of elephants and rhinos, separate herds almost certainly went through some extinction-threatening bottlenecks. If all that was left of a previous mixed herd of each were small-eared male elephants and double-horned rhinos and they were permanently cut off from the other sort of elephant and rhino by, say, the rising Red Sea, that would produce the difference between elephants and rhinos in Africa and India today—by drift alone and without any adaptation. Recall from Chapter 4 that there was a similar situation for the original populations of Homo sapiens.
Almost nothing of real interest in human affairs is the result of random drift alone. Even more than in biology, the significant features of social life are largely or even wholly adaptations for someone or some group or some human practice. Human social life consists largely of adaptations constructed by individuals and groups to cope with their environments. These environments consist mostly of the behavior of other individuals and groups—the effects of their adaptations. We are all parts of many environments constantly filtering adaptation variations blindly produced by each of us.
Some adaptations are ones that people think they designed—institutions like the U.S. Constitution or artifacts like the Eiffel Tower. Of course, as Chapter 9 revealed, people are wrong about whether anything is consciously designed. The process in the brains of innovators, inventors, members