Subject: 
        [evol-psych] Re: Richard Dawkins: Our big brains can overcome our selfish
        genes
   Date: 
        Wed, 13 Feb 2002 09:32:04 -0000
   From: 
        "John Stewart" 
     To: 
        [email protected]




In his lecture to the Royal Institution, Dawkins suggests that the 
future survival of humanity depends on humans being able to transcend 
the values and motivations inherited from our biological past.
 
Surely the strength of this part of his argument is not undermined by 
whether this inheritance makes us cooperative, ambivalently 
cooperative, self-interested, moral or something else? The chances 
that our inheritance will match our future needs seem negligible.  
The motivations and volitions (moral or otherwise) that were favoured 
by Darwinian selection in our evolutionary past are highly unlikely 
to be optimal for our successful survival throughout the next million 
years. The values and motivations that are optimal are likely to 
change many, many times into the future as circumstances change.
 
But where his lecture is wrong is its suggestion that "the brain - 
especially the human brain - is well able to over-ride its ultimate 
programming; well able to dispense with the ultimate value of gene 
survival and substitute other values." To the contrary, humans 
obviously do not yet have a comprehensive capacity to transcend our 
biological past. We cannot, at will, change our likes and dislikes, 
our emotional reactions, our motivations, what it is that gives us 
pleasure or displeasure, out habits, our personality traits (eg 
change from an introvert or extrovert at will) etc. "Christians" have 
generally found it impossible to 'turn the other cheek' in the 
fullest sense of that metaphor.
 
And it is not only their biological past that humans would need to 
transcend if they are to be able to survive successfully into the 
distant future. We would also have to be able to transcend our 
cultural past and up-bringing. We would have to become self-evolving 
organisms in the fullest sense, able to adapt in whatever ways are 
needed to guarantee a successful future, relatively unfettered by our 
history, and able to move at right angles to our biological and 
social past.
 
Science has not yet discovered much about how humans could develop 
such a comprehensive capacity. Psychology is not yet able to say a 
lot about our potential for further psychological 
development.  "Evolutionary psychology" is really a Darwinian 
evolutionary psychology, and does not yet include a cultural 
component. Whether evolutionary psychology continues to be limited in 
this way will determine its future relevance�as Larry Arnhart 
suggests in his post, the intellectual power of Darwinian theory will 
be radically narrowed if humans develop a comprehensive capacity to 
transcend our biological past.

However, this deficiency of current science should prove to be 
temporary.  There is an extensive body of knowledge that is currently 
outside mainstream science that includes techniques for the 
development of the comprehensive capacity I have referred to. This 
knowledge has apparently existed for thousands of years and is often 
associated with religious systems such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and 
esoteric Christianity. A key challenge for science is to systematise 
this knowledge and integrate it into mainstream science, as it has 
done successfully for many other bodies of pre-scientific knowledge.

My attempts to integrate some of this knowledge about our 
psychological potential into a evolutionary framework can be found in 
Chapters 1, 11, 12, and 19 of my book `Evolution's Arrow'
(online at 
http://www4.tpgi.com.au/users/jes999/ ) and in my paper `Future 
Psychological Evolution' published in the journal Dynamical 
Psychology (online at http://goertzel.org/dynapsyc/ )

Regards,

John Stewart