The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [120]
Alas, none of this is in the cards. When it comes to foresight, unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences (including economics) can’t help being myopic. They can never see far enough ahead to provide even much local progress in human affairs. Supposing otherwise is just not taking scientism seriously. It is not difficult to see why this is so.
The empirical, experimental, data-collecting social and behavioral sciences are all in the business of discovering patterns in behavior—social and individual. Then they aim to explain these patterns by constructing models and theories that will also enable us to predict new instances of them, and to do so with increasing precision and reliability. So far so good. This is taking scientism seriously. We should applaud it and encourage it.
The trouble is, we already know from Darwinian biology that all the patterns to be discovered about human affairs are temporary. They are “local equilibria,” periods of calm or stasis between arms races, when competing strategies exactly balance each other. Some equilibria last longer than others, but all are destined to be overtaken by events.
What is a local equilibrium, and why must it always be unraveled? As we have already seen, biology provides clear examples. Here’s another one: For millions of years, there has been a pattern of cuckoos parasitizing finches—laying their eggs in finch nests and leaving the work of hatching and feeding their offspring to the finches. This is a local equilibrium in cuckoo/finch relations. The cuckoos lay just enough eggs in finch nests to survive as a species, but not so many as to threaten finch extinction or finch countermeasures. It can’t last forever. Either finch genes will hit upon a fortuitous variation that enables them to escape from this parasitism, or they will go extinct. That will threaten the cuckoos, of course. Given enough time, finch populations will produce a random genetic variation that enables finches to distinguish cuckoo eggs or cuckoo young and kick them out of the nests. Or maybe some finch gene will mutate into one that produces a cuckoo toxin that will eventually rid finches of this parasite. A gene for anticuckoo toxin will spread in finch populations. The more serious the parasitism of cuckoos, the faster it will spread. Once it has spread widely enough, it will start an arms race, in which cuckoo genes will be selected for making an antidote to the new toxin, if such a move is available in the design space of cuckoos. As a result, cuckoos and finches will struggle until they find some new temporary modus vivendi, a different pattern, a new local equilibrium in cuckoo/finch relations. Or it will result in the eventual disappearance of one or both species.
Now, speed up the arms races and the weaponry from the slow pace of the genes and their limited gene products to the ever-accelerating pace of cultural evolution. The local equilibrium between Homo and lions may have lasted a million years. But the local equilibrium between lord, vassal, and serf in European feudalism (a label invented long after the period’s end) lasted less than 1,000 years. The regularities to be discovered operating in contemporary human life will be far more fleeting than any of these. But without long enough lasting regularities, there is not much hope for a science that can uncover them, much less enable us to exploit them.
Here is the problem facing any human science we might settle on for designing our futures: Anything like a law uncovered by a social or behavioral science will be a temporary equilibrium among adaptations (or their direct results). Every one of these local equilibria will eventually be broken up by arms races. Some sooner, some later.
Consider an example. It’s the most robust “law” in international relations, perhaps even in the whole of political science: Democracies do not war with one another.