Mewing and Facial Structure: A Critical Appraisal

About a month ago, I watched an entire, almost 2 hr-long video of a discussion on "evolutionary dentistry" and the effect of "oral posture" and jaw exercise on dental alignment and facial structure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYpPu-NrYSI). I'm not saying you shouldn't judge me negatively for this use of time - in fact, I recommend that you don't also use your time in this way- although the conversation was fairly engaging, and I have long been interested in evolutionary dentistry and facial morphology generally. The participants were one Bret Weinstein, perhaps the most 'lefty' member of the "Intellectual Dark Web", a former biology professor and a man I would describe as very grandiose, self-important, overconfident, articulate and largely thoughtful; and Mike Mew, another self-assured internet celebrity who has risen to prominence as a result of his promotion of a branch of medicine called "Orthotropics" and the set of exercises recommended by this fledgling science, known popularly as "mewing" (because Mew himself was the main populariser). Orthotropics seems to be intellectually founded upon an evolutionary-cum-physiological theory consisting of the following core propositions:

(1) The human jaw grows in response to chewing especially in early infancy (but also afterwards);

(2) A wider jaw means less tooth-crowding and typically ends up generating a correct bite;

(3) One's bite and facial structure are (also) affected by tongue and mouth posture, and may be nontrivially altered by changing one's posture even in adolescence or adulthood;

(4) The vast majority (?) of people could have entirely avoided malocclusion and related dental problems if they had been forced to chew more often in early life, and if they had maintained optimal oral posture throughout their life. (I translate this as follows: malocclusion may have a genetic underpinning similar to height - variation within populations is largely genetic (some people may be more susceptible to malocclusion than others) but the environment plays a very large role overall.)

There's also a more speculative outer belt to Orthotropics, or at least Mike Mew's personal version of it. Some of Mew's other proposals (evidenced in the interview) are as follows:

(5) Oral posture has a flow-on effect on general posture, and vice versa (the two form an influence circle);

(6) Chronic mouth-breathing has terrible effects on general health, including e.g. cognitive health, heart health and possibly even leading to acne;

(7) Maintaining optimal oral posture and frequently exercising one's jaw can also affect the shape of one's face more generally, making one's mid-face wider and flatter, and increasing the distance between the eyes;

(8) Traditional orthodontics would be (almost ?) completely unnecessary if everyone could maintain the optimal habits of oral posture from a young age. 

I shall now review each of these claims in turn.

Proposition (1) is supported mostly by evidence from archaeology comparing hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies, and by evidence from hunter-gatherer societies. There are two parts to the justification:  

(1.1) In hunter-gatherer societies, individuals are forced to exercise their jaw significantly more than in agricultural societies, and especially more than in modern industrial societies; 

(1.2) Hunter-gatherer peoples therefore tend to have wider and larger jaws, and overwhelmingly less malocclusion, than in these other populations. 

(1.1) breaks into two further sub-parts. 

(1.1.1) The 'norm' in hunter-gatherer societies, now and in the past, is that infants start chewing fibrous and otherwise chewy foods from a much earlier age than infants in modern societies. 

(1.1.2) Foods harvested by hunter-gatherers tend to be much chewier in general than most foods in the industrialised diet. 

The way Mew puts this idea in the interview with Weinstein is to say that we get our calories "too easily", whereas hunter-gatherers typically have to chew for a long time on raw, fibrous roots and undercooked or raw meats. Certainly, there are no ready-made "baby foods" for hunter-gatherers to feed their teething infants, and it seems intuitive that there would be less availability than we have of soft, high-calorie foods (soft breads, dairy products, sugary drinks and ice creams all result from complex industrial processes, and industrialised people probably also have better access to tender meat). 

In the interview, Mew claims at one point that searching for contemporary hunter-gatherers on Google Images will quickly demonstrate that the vast majority of hunter-gatherers have strong, wide jaws and good bites. I think that this is clearly wrong, as I tried it and saw plenty of images of people with small, narrow jaws and significant overbites. Consider, for example, the man in the first image on this website: https://www.crooked-compass.com/blog/hunter-gatherers-of-tanzania/. Try it for yourself. 

 I'm not saying this necessarily falsifies (1), because arguably the strongest evidence for (1) comes from archaeology: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117301. There's also some palaeo-anthropologists and geneticists who think humans have undergone a kind of "self-domestication" in the last 10,000 years or so, leading to more neotenous faces (characterised by shorter face length, narrower faces, smaller skulls and bigger eyes) (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5646786/, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677209?seq=1). This, if true, would likely be both genetic and environmental in causation and manifestation, so the implication for (1) is not straightforward. Regardless, it's important to bear in mind that, even if (1) is true, any jaw growth that is stimulated by chewing will be constrained by nutritional quality and health, as all growth is. If an infant is in a calorie-deficit, or lacks important nutrients, it seems unlikely that they will develop a powerful jaw, especially if they lack nutrients that are essential in bone-development. In a lot of his rhetoric, Mew seems to avoid this fact, or perhaps doesn't recognise it at all.

(2) is, I think, more or less conventional wisdom in dentistry and orthodontics generally. I think experts may disagree on the extent to which it is true - e.g. what "typically" actually means, statistically, which would be a complex problem - but I don't really think it's a position unique to Orthotropics. So that's a plus for Orthotropics. With this said, things can go wrong with teeth whether you have a narrow jaw or wide jaw. For example, the tooth roots can be disrupted via trauma, causing teeth to grow at wonky angles. I think I have this issue to some extent with one of my front two teeth (it is positioned slightly askew and sticks further forward than my other front tooth), possibly as a result of the fact that I lost my front two baby teeth violently when I was 7 (tripping and falling on a tree root).

(3) is the key to the explosion of Orthotropics on the internet. Again, I think that this is very close to conventional wisdom in orthodontics, except taken up a notch. Certainly, orthodontists all recognise that the growth of teeth is influenced by the various forces at work within the mouth, and that teeth respond, especially in early life, to physical feedback by moving and shifting. That's why braces are a thing! Similarly, all orthodontists agree with some of the stuff that Mew says about the benefits of nose-breathing and lip-sealing, e.g. that chronic mouth-breathers are much more prone to buck teeth.

The questionable part of this proposition is the second part: what I've described as the idea that adult facial structure - dental alignment, and palate and jaw width - "may be nontrivially altered by changing one's posture". To be clear, this is not a quote from Mew but an inference. Whilst I haven't quoted him, I feel that I actually have phrased the doctrine in a way that is actually quite understated, given what I've seen. (Obviously, this is a very vague and ill-defined proposition, with two weasel words in combination - "may" and "nontrivially" - but I don't think he himself has any kind of precise statistical model.) For example, he sometimes seems to say quite extreme things: if you watch 30 seconds of this video from the timestamp in the link (https://youtu.be/ZNocCJNicrc?t=211), you will see him describe his belief that one day while driving he managed to expand his "upper dental arch" after literally 45 minutes of exercise. Similarly, though he equivocates a little, he ends up endorsing to Bret Weinstein that his older teenage can be weaned off the retainer he is about to get from his orthodonist if he (the son) manages to implement the correct mewing techniques. (Mew also endorses that Weinstein's younger teenage son need not get braces at all if he can implement mewing). In general, the tenor and rhetoric of Mew's Youtube videos seems to encourage the idea that adults, too, can achieve significant results that will improve their quality of life. I've learned from here (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/20/magazine/teeth-mewing-incels.html) that the Mews' Orthotropics movement did start out focussed on children and that the push to claim that it could work for adults came largely from internet acolytes. But it certainly appears that Mike Mew has come to endorse the idea that his therapy is very much worth pursuing for adults. 

(4) is, arguably, just a corollary of (1) and (2), and similarly rests on evidence from hunter-gatherer societies and archaeological remains of pre-agricultural people. It also might be defended using evidence from other mammals, and at one point during the interview Mew or Weinstein (can't remember which) raises this idea. Again, we are forced to resort to vague language in describing it: what exactly does "the vast majority" mean, and how different would people's habits have to be? The translation I have made in brackets probably brings the idea closer to being falsifiable and helps specify the counterfactual in a more nuanced way (allowing for the Orthotropics theory to survive the existence of a society where everyone followed the correct practices for maximising jaw growth and yet a lot of people had underdeveloped jaws, because of, say, very poor nutrition). But even including that translation may err on the side of "steelmanning" too strongly, as Mew doesn't ever seem to talk about genetic variation in innate jaw size, which may indicate that he hasn't thought about this much. (He also never seems to explicitly reckon with the idea that some people are born with jaws so small - for genetic or other reasons (such as Foetal Alcohol Syndrome) - that it's likely impossible to avoid malocclusion, even under perfect conditions. Incidentally, lots of things can go wrong in the womb, affecting facial structure - for example, I have identified certain asymmetries in various parts of my own head that lead me to believe that the right side of my skull was squashed slightly either in the womb or during the process of birth. This, I believe, is extremely common.) Depending on how we do interpret this proposition, it's potentially undermined by the fact that lots of things can cause malocclusion, such as disease and (again) poor nutrition. And contra some speculations made in the interview, wild animals can definitely suffer malocclusion: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjRuYP07LDrAhVFbSsKHet1A24QFjAMegQIARAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbioone.org%2Fjournals%2FJournal-of-Wildlife-Diseases%2Fvolume-40%2Fissue-2%2F0090-3558-40.2.185%2FORAL-DISEASE-IN-FREE-LIVING-RED-SQUIRRELS-SCIURUS-VULGARIS-IN%2F10.7589%2F0090-3558-40.2.185.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1F41WeqE0vkn8nTrFyLBy5). So, certainly, there's a reasonable interpretation of this proposition under which it is wrong.

Now onto Mew's speculations.

(5) seems to me reasonable enough, but probably overstated (at least the way Mew states the "flow-on effect"). Although the main aspects of mewing are just tongue posture and lip sealing, another facet seems to be holding your head up straight, which is I think because it subtly engages one's masseter muscle (apparently good) and puts a little more pressure on one's front teeth. Holding your head up straight is certainly a way to mitigate bad posture, but, then again, there are some people - for example, my grandma - who probably always hold their head up in a normal way but succumb to kyphosis due to muscle weakness and whatever else. Posture is complicated.

(6) Not going to comment much on this because I don't really know. I do at least know that Mew is not the only person who thinks that chronic mouth-breathing is very bad for one's health generally. The acne hypothesis that he throws out to Weinstein is pretty odd - for what it's worth, my pet theory on acne is that it's made worse by constantly washing one's face with soaps, similar to how scalp oil production seems to respond somewhat to the frequency of shampooing - but at least he makes clear that it's just rank speculation.

(7) I'm very sceptical of this one. Again, I am more disposed to believe that activity in infancy may cause your adult face to look very different, but I'm very sceptical that adults can change their facial structure so dramatically (and, again, I'm not sure Mew is wholly consistent on this in any case).

(8) is very similar to (4) - almost a corollary. The reason this isn't a mere corollary of (4), however, is that I've left out the chewing-in-early-life part in the phrasing of (8). As I've made clear, Mew's rhetoric wavers, and at points during the conversation (and I think in some of his other videos), the importance of chewing in early infancy gets de-emphasised. This proposition is also significant for directly motivating a recurring theme of the discussion with Weinstein: the hypothesised influence of institutional and professional incentives on the poor reception of Orthotropics and Mike Mew among orthodonists. 

My personal experience with "mewing"

A month or two before I watched the video with Mew and Weinstein, I started changing my own oral posture according to what I understood the practice of "mewing" to be. I had first learned of "mewing" a long time before that, via a Youtube recommendation, and had also tried implementing the same practices at that time. I gave up quite early on the first time because the change in my tongue position was causing me to salivate a lot and it didn't seem to make a noticeable difference to my masseter engagement or the balance of pressures on my teeth. Even though I made exactly the same changes for my second attempt, and experienced the same initial problem with saliva production, I pushed through this and began to successfully engrain this new tongue position as a habit. After a while of doing this, I looked in the mirror at my bite one day and perceived that it looked straighter than I remember it being. Also, my front two teeth seemed slightly less forward-leaning than I remembered. I wasn't 100% sure - in fact, not even really sure at all (I try consciously to be a good Bayesian) - but it seemed evidence of a positive benefit. I also felt like my nose-breathing was possibly slightly better than usual.

But then I discovered that what I had been doing wasn't even "mewing"! In fact, it turned out that my natural oral posture was closer, if not already the "optimal" posture! (I'll get to what this says about the effect of "mewing" in a minute.) This confusion had come about because my initial resource was (I think) some video by Mew where he had described mewing as holding your tongue against "the roof of your mouth", and I figured that I was supposed to raise the tip of my tongue back and higher, behind the upper alveolar ridge and onto the slope at the beginning of the hard palate. In fact, the concept is more about holding your tongue high in your mouth generally. The tip can just sit anywhere behind the front teeth, ahead of or on the upper alveolar ridge (this is where the tip of my tongue was *naturally* positioned, and so it probably is for most people). I found this out from another Youtube video debunking "common myths", and this person's debunking was then confirmed by looking at another of Mike Mew's own videos in light of this understanding. After I realised my mistake, I also came across an old video where John Mew (Mike's dad and seemingly the progenitor of the movement) describes the ideal posture simply as the position of the tongue when one says "nnnnnnn". As far as I can tell, this is a 0-effort oral posture for me - I can't sense any movement of my tongue from its default position when I do utter this sound. So, if this is still Mewing orthodoxy, my oral posture was already optimal before I started doing the slightly more unnatural thing that I thought I was supposed to be doing.

Now, I'm not sure that Mike Mew (his son, and the main guru of the movement) would agree that the optimal posture can be encapsulated by this description. He seems to emphasise the idea that the "posterior third" of your tongue should also be against the rough of your mouth, which doesn't seem to be the case for me when I say "nnnnn". The problem with this idea is that I don't really have much control over the posterior third of my tongue. I can feel that my masseter muscles contract a little when I try to push my whole tongue up as high as I can in my mouth (I think this is "hard mewing") but, even supposing I tried to do this for many minutes or hours every day, it doesn't seem likely that this would cause a re-structuring of my face. (You could say my guess that it doesn't "seem likely" is not very good grounds for dismissing the idea, except that the effect on my masseter engagement is small, and for a small difference in masseter engagement to cause, over time, a change in bone structure significant enough to restructure my jaw would be pretty damn shocking to me!)

In summary, I think I already had close to optimal oral posture before I learned about mewing - and I certainly was always making an effort to keep my lips sealed and breathe through my nose (the most basic aspects of "mewing"). I think I probably even was swallowing the 'correct' way most of the time (i.e. relying only on the buccinator muscles) before I learned about "mewing". So whilst I guess that's good for me, it also suggests that mewing is essentially common-sense. More importantly, this further suggests that the practice can't really be that efficacious, given that there must be millions of people like me, with narrower-than-average palates and natural overbites, who have these conditions despite decent oral posture! To be fair, Mew does also recommend that people chew a lot of gum and regularly practise a tongue exercise called "tongue chewing" while doing so. But the main thing he emphasises is posture.

After I discovered that I had been confused, I decided, for obvious reasons, to put my tongue back to where it was before. So, in all, this whole experiment was a waste of time! 

 

Concluding Thoughts

 

A final word on Orthotropics. Some parts of the underlying theory behind Orthotropics seem to me reasonable, as I've made clear. However, Mew's statements often lack nuance, and he is not always fully consistent and precise. I think he is sometimes vague deliberately. In particular, he seems to employ a "Motte and Bailey"-style rhetorical strategy: he makes quite bold statements and promises - which lures in people hopeful that they can make themselves more beautiful and healthy - but at other times falls back on the idea that he's just promoting good old-fashioned "common-sense" (he actually says just this near the start of the conversation with Weinstein). Of course, Mew should not necessarily define this movement in general - that's why I made an effort to separate the core theoretical ideas from his personal speculations - but he is clearly the main driver. It's also worth bearing in mind that, just as traditional orthodontists are potentially financially incentivised to disparage Orthotropics and insult Mew, Mew is financially incentivised to over-promise on the benefits of "mewing" and disparage traditional orthodontics, because, as he says to Weinstein, this movement has become his entire career!

Personally, I don't think traditional orthodontics ought to go the way of the Dodo. Or at least, I certainly am not at all convinced. With that said, I do think there's intriguing evidence for the idea that aspects of our modern environment cause reduced jaw development, and that jaw growth can be stimulated by chewing, especially in infancy. I am sufficiently disposed to believe this that I have decided that if I have kids of my own, I will try to get them chewing things as early as possible (I am aware that raising children is very challenging and that for various reasons it can be hard to shape them as you might want, so it may be that I later renege on this.) But since I discovered that my personal tongue posture is pretty much 'correct' already (which also suggested to me that most people's tongue posture is probably correct), and when you recognise that most people already swallow in the way advocated by John and Mike Mew, mewing seems far less interesting. 

 

Overall, I suspect that, even if it keeps growing in popularity on the internet, mewing will probably not change the world. I suspect its ultimate impact on the world will be relatively neutral. It's possible Orthotropics will have a net positive effect on the world; I think this is most likely if the infantile-chewing part gains popular currency. But I believe it's equally possible it could have a negative effect on the world also, if those people who really need orthodontic treatment get suckered by Mike Mew's more radical claims. 

In short, the picture is nuanced, as many things are.

A Strong Case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6czRFLs5JQo

Not sure that I want to endorse the characterisation of Alice Dreger contained in this video, whose book is clearly written in good-faith by a person totally without the kind of mindset that leads one to want to "trigger PC cucks", but in this video, 'Contra'/Natalie makes a convincing case that: a) Ray Blanchard's typology for transwomen is off the mark (she argues this in recognition of the purpose of a reductive typology, which can be diagnostically powerful even if they misfire); and b) there is a perfectly legitimate possibility for a conceptualisation of the psychology of gender-transitioning that neither involves a mystical gender essentialism nor Blanchard's typology. She contends, in superficial agreement with Blanchard, that there are two recognisable fuzzy categories of trans women, in terms of sexuality and life history, but that Blanchard's second category does not really map onto "Cluster B" (in her terminology) at all. (It appears that she does believe that a lot of transwomen ("Cluster A") fit the description of being, in their former lives, very effeminate homosexual men, although she suggests that thinking of their motivations for transitioning as almost entirely sexual is way off the mark.) As I interpret her video, the nutshell of her opposition is this: even if sexuality is involved in motivations, as it always is with adults (and yes, probably most transwomen have a strong preference for being a female-presenting person in a sexual context), nobody is going to make the very drastic, daunting and life-changing decision to transition - it's an extremely scary thing to do - without a high degree of dysphoria. And nobody experiences debilitating dysphoria just because of sexual dissatisfaction, even if extreme.

(Note that I have read Michael Bailey's book (years ago, via a PDF online) and Dreger's book (which I spent money on (I thought it was ok and definitely broadly agreed with the thesis that justice activism does not require one to abandon the scientific mindset and a reverent attitude towards the Truth (I mean, in a sense, this idea is just Deweyan)). Note also that I think that Contra, like her fellow self-identified Youtube "SJW" "Shaun" (Shaun and Jen), tends to steelman 'leftists' way too much (put clever and nuanced beliefs in the mouths of ordinary folks without the intellectual sophistication they have). I cannot get on board intellectually or emotionally with their "SJW"/"leftist" tribalism. For example, I hate the fact that Contra in this video identifies as a "Postmodernist" when, as she soon clarifies, she still believes in striving for objective truth and the epistemic authority of bona fide science and simply thinks that Bailey does not practise good science. It is so bizarre to me to signal identification with the tribe of "Postmodernists" if this is what you believe, because non-reactionary people who rail against Postmodernism and Postmodernists (like me or Chomsky: http://bactra.org/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html or Nussbaum: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Nussbaum-Butler-Critique-NR-2-99.pdf) are not talking about people like this at all! This kind of tribal signalling is pernicious! It is also sad to me that those two seem to be happily tribally affiliated with the PhilosophyTube guy, whom I find to be embarrassingly incompetent and irrational, and also that they are part of the gang of people who like to call everything bad in the world "Capitalism" for some reason (this is another pernicious tribal thing).)

The Problem of Individuals and Species in Biology, and Ontic Structural Realism

To start off this document, here is a very slightly extended version of my uni essay on problem of biological individuality, wherein I rhapsodise over Peter Godfrey-Smith (first ever sub-80 philosophy essay mark but only because I didn't have enough words to actually make my case properly (fucking stupid Neoliberal bureaucratic system where even in a very poorly subscribed unit you have extremely stringent, oppressive word limits)). (Also I think that just adding the sentences I added in this version would have pushed my mark significantly higher (the original was insufficiently explicit about the shortcomings of Clarke's account)).

3.      What is the problem of biological individuality? Compare and contrast two theories of biological individuality, and explain whether they are successful or not.

The “problem of biological individuality” is the problem of how to give a general account of what defines a ‘biological individual’ across all species to which evolutionary theory applies, given the incredible diversity of life. Ellen Clarke [2010] holds that this is a serious issue because of how crucial the notion of an organism is to our understanding of biological evolution, the very concept of “fitness”, and more. In this essay, I will compare Peter Godfrey Smith’s elaborate, continuous account of biological individuality with Ellen Clarke’s own, much simpler functional (and also continuous) account of biological individuality. I will suggest that they are both very impressive taxonomical efforts, but that Godfrey-Smith’s has the greater balance of virtues, on account of (what I believe to be) its greater comprehensiveness and greater potential to defuse controversies.

In her well-cited 2010 paper “The Problem of Biological Individuality”, Ellen Clarke concisely and effectively explains the titular problem, and why one should care. She begins the paper by explicating the centrality of this idea of ‘the organism’ to the biological sciences. This notion of the biological individual is perhaps most important for its starring role in our understanding of evolution: Darwin formulated his theory of evolution in terms of biological individuals, the “received view of biological evolution takes the organism as “the basic unit of selection””, and, as Dawkins admits, even the ‘gene-centrist’ cannot hope to dispense with the biological individual in evolutionary theorising (even in the mathematics) [Dawkins, 1982: 251]. As Clarke puts it: “It is hard to overemphasize the importance of individuals within the Modern Synthesis. They are central to the inner logic of evolution by natural selection, according to which evolution occurs because of the differential survival and reproduction of individuals” [2010: 313]. The organism also plays a massive role, albeit slightly more hidden, in various other sub-fields of the biological sciences “such as medicine, developmental biology, immunology, ecology, and the reductionist sciences such as molecular or cell biology” [313]. Finally, organisms are what population biologists count!

The trouble, of course, is that, despite the immense scientific utility of this concept, philosophers of biology as of 2010 only had a long list of competing criteria for describing biological individuality, all of which individually seem to admit of counterexamples and define strongly “non-overlapping classes” – and this vagueness allows for scientific conflict as well. Clarke discusses, in particular, 13 different candidates for criteria (all biological “properties” in some very wide sense) which could do the work of “differentiating individuals from parts and groups”. [1] Although some are more promising than others, the case studies Clarke introduces demonstrate (I think) that there is not a clear mix-and-match solution.  In her follow-up 2013 paper “The Multiple Realizability of Biological Individuals”, Clarke also shows that the problem has practical import by pointing to some of the scientific controversies that could have been avoided if biologists had agreed on what counts as an individual. The first controversy she cites is the “long-standing debate amongst plant scientists about whether vegetatively produced plants […] ought to add to the parent plant’s fitness or not” [414]. Another, more general one she describes is the long-running controversy in evolutionary theory over ‘levels of selection’: in particular, over propositions like “selection always acts at the level of the individual”. She suggests – rightly, I think – that these debates would dissipate a lot of heat if the interlocutors acceded to a common account of biological individuality (especially to deal with what Godfrey-Smith calls the “problem cases” of collective entities like “ant and bee colonies, and lichens” [Godfrey-Smith, 2012: 3]).

In the same 2013 paper, however, Clarke goes on to propose a solution to her own problem. Her big idea is to ‘compress’ several of the competing properties she highlighted in “The Problem of Biological Individuality” (sex, bottlenecks, germ-soma separation, policing mechanisms, spatial boundaries, and immune response) into a simpler and more economical ‘functional’ definition. The first component of Ellen Clarke’s functional definition is the “policing mechanism”, which she claims is a robust enough functional property to constitute a necessary condition for biological individuality. She defines a policing mechanism as “any mechanism that inhibits the capacity of an object to undergo within-object selection” [2013: 421]. Clarke thinks that as well as helping to end debates over the priority of this or that specific policing mechanism, this kind of functional definition can put us in a better position “to recognize real-life structures that play the desired role” [422]. She justifies this claim by giving a number examples of such real-life structures, including “Resource exchange, synchronized/vertical transmission (especially “co-dispersal”), spatial contiguity or engulfment, the immune system, maternal control of early development, and worker policing” [423].

Of course, whilst having a “policing mechanism” is a necessary condition for something to be a biological individual, Clarke recognises that it is by no means sufficient, on account of its being a “negative” condition: for example, the non-organism that is a human muscle cell “has ample policing mechanisms to cement common purpose amongst its component organelles and genetic material” [423]. The necessary positive mechanism for Clarke then is the “positive capacity to undergo natural selection at its own level” [423]. After relating this suggestion to the biological function of sex, Clarke extends this insight into a second functional criterion for biological individuality: a “demarcation mechanism”, which she defines as “any mechanism that increases or maintains the capacity of an object to undergo between object selection” [424]. Like policing mechanisms, demarcation mechanisms are highly multiply realisable. For example, spatial boundaries and immunity can often play a ‘demarcating’ role. Demarcation, Clarke claims, is also “essential to an evolutionary transition” [426].  As she explains, “Evolutionary transitions in individuality can be viewed as a failure to meet the demarcation challenge on the part of the lower-level individual. Mitochondria, for example, have lost their biological individuality because they became subsumed within eukaryotic cells” [426].

Clarke’s two mechanisms are, she thinks, sufficient criteria for biological individuality. She holds that “Biological individuals are all and only those objects that possess both kinds of individuating mechanism” [427]. This may seem like a very bold claim, but Clarke is anxious to point out is that the very nature of these mechanisms ensures that individuality is a continuous concept. She makes the important observation that “by incrementally increasing an object’s capacity biological individuals for heritable variance in fitness, compared to the capacity of its parts, individuating mechanisms can gradually push the object through an evolutionary transition in individuality” [430]. Indeed, she argues convincingly that it is necessary to recognise this kind of continuity in individuation in order to understand how evolutionary transitions happen at all.

In his 2012 paper “Darwinian Individuals”, Peter Godfrey-Smith outlines a somewhat more complicated account of biological individuality than Clarke’s. Although it has many features in common with Clarke’s, and whilst it’s not clear that the two accounts are in any kind of strong tension, Godfrey-Smith’s separation of two partly-overlapping sub-genres of biological individuals, “Darwinian individuals” and “Organisms”, and his very detailed accounts of each, lead to a scheme which is extremely good at dealing with ‘borderline’ cases, and yet produces much more definite entailments about specific cases than Clarke’s account. Clarke, I think, effectively argues for the value of a ‘functional’ definition of biological individuality, but I will argue that Godfrey-Smith’s work shows that a broadly functionalist approach can be combined with specific biological properties to produce a more complete overall account of biological individuality.

Both Clarke and Godfrey-Smith are chiefly concerned with coming up with an account of biological individuality fully in tune with the usage of “individual” within evolutionary theory. Clarke’s account is peculiarly devoted to what Godfrey-Smith specifically demarcates as the “Darwinian individual”, since her two individuating mechanisms have the ultimate function of enhancing “heritable variation in fitness”. In Godfrey-Smith’s attempt to come up with an account of the Darwinian individual, reproduction is the key factor (whereas for Clarke it goes along for the ride to some extent). Like Clarke, however, Godfrey-Smith is mainly concerned with “collective” individuals in formulating his account. Unlike Clarke, Godfrey-Smith’s account is explicitly continuous: he sees Darwinian individuality in terms of three dimensions, with the most exemplary cases measuring ‘high up’ in all three and non-Darwinian individuals measuring very ‘low down’ in all three. The first dimension or “parameter” is B, which stands for “bottleneck”. By this, Godfrey-Smith means any kind of “narrowing” that “marks the divide between generations […] often to a single cell” (as in humans) [2012: 6]. The second dimension is G, which stands for “germline”. G measures the degree of reproductive specialization within a collective. This property helps usefully distinguish kinds of ‘eusocial’ species. For example, in honey bee colonies “the queen reproduces (along with the male "drones"), and the female workers do not” (high score for G), whereas “In other insects, including other bees, there is no reproductive division of labor” (low score for G) [7]. The third and final, more functional dimension is I, which stands for “integration”. This does the ‘work’ of parts of both of Clarke’s individuating mechanisms, involving a “general division of labor (aside from that in G), the mutual dependence of parts, and the maintenance of a boundary between a collective and what is outside it” [7]. Godfrey-Smith uses this three-dimensional account to come up with an ingenious 1×1×1 cubic visualisation of where various species ‘sit’ in terms of their level of Darwinian individuality. Humans (and other mammals, marsupials, birds, many amphibians and many fish) are prototypical Darwinian individuals, with perfect (1,1,1) scores for each parameter; the Volvox carteri alga also scores highly with 1, 1, 0.5 (B, G, I); clonal colonies like the Aspen ramet scores 0.5, 0.5, 1; sponges score 0, 0, 0.5; and a buffalo herd is not a Darwinian individual at all, since it scores 0, 0, 0.

It seems to me that Godfrey-Smith’s ability to represent his classifications so elegantly represents a distinct advantage of his account over Clarke’s. In this, I fully endorse Daniel Dennett’s praise of the same diagrams in his review of Godfrey-Smiths’s 2009 book Reflections on Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection.

Godfrey-Smith then moves onto his account of ‘organismality’, where an ‘organism’ is understood as something distinct from a Darwinian individual – a concept that Clarke does not have. The way Godfrey-Smith defines an organism is as follows: “Systems comprised of diverse parts which work together to maintain the system's structure, despite turnover of material, by making use of sources of energy and other resources from their environment” [12]. This he calls the traditional, ‘metabolic’ view of a biological individual. Ultimately, the combination of this continuous organism concept and the Darwinian individual concept allows for Godfrey-Smith to define biological individuality for all of life. Many biological individuals – like humans, or fruit flies – are both Darwinian individuals and organisms. A much smaller number would be classified as relatively prototypical examples of Darwinian individuals but not organisms: “scaffolded reproducers” like viruses, along with chromosomes and genes [16]. Finally, some organisms are not Darwinian individuals. The more significant cases in this category “are certain kinds of symbiotic associations” [16]. Godfrey-Smith cites Dupre and Malley [2009] as showing that “most or all plants and animals live in close associations with symbionts” [16]. One specific example of a very close symbiotic relationship whose significance has only recently been uncovered is that between various tree species and “mycorrhizal fungi” which connect root systems in forests such that trees can ‘communicate’ threats and distribute resources to other trees in stress [Macfarlane, 2016]. (Basically, such tree-fungi fusions seem to fall under the category of organisms that are not Darwinian individuals (the fungi are crucial to the tree's fitness, as in the other example of a symbiont that is an organism but not a Darwinian individual which I'm about to discuss, but the tree and the fungi do not reproduce together, as one, in contrast to the aphid-Buchnera symbiosis.) Godfrey-Smith’s best example of an organism (albeit a non-prototypical organism) that is not a Darwinian individual is the “squid-Vibrio combination”, which has a “horizontally transmitted symbiont” as opposed to the “vertically transmitted symbiont” of the oft-cited aphid-Buchnera symbiosis. Even though the squid has evolved six internal ‘chambers’ designed to take in the bacteria that create a luminescent, moon-light-like patterning on their body and help them avoid avian predation at night, the fact that the squid are not born with these bacteria inside them means the partnership does not count as a Darwinian individual.

I think the big advantage Godfrey-Smith’s complicated account has over Clarke’s much more economical one is that, whereas he can apply his scheme to these exotic cases and produce definite (albeit ‘continuous’) verdicts, such verdicts do not directly fall out of Clarke’s considerably looser scheme (it seems to me that Clarke's account makes it very hard to disentangle the very relevant differences between the type of symbionts I discussed, for example). Clarke, in fact, ends her 2013 paper by insisting on the implausibility of a general system of classification for all of life – and yet it seems to me that that’s effectively what Godfrey-Smith achieves.

Reference List

Clarke, Ellen (2010). “The Problem of Biological Individuality”, Biological Theory, 5 (4): 312-325.

(2013). “The Multiple Realizability of Biological Individuals”, Journal of Philosophy 110 (8): 413-435.

Dawkins, Richard (1982). The Extended Phenotype, Oxford University Press.

Dennett, Daniel (2011). “Homunculi rule: Reflections on Darwinian populations and natural selection by Peter Godfrey Smith”, Biology and Philosophy 26 (4): 475-488.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter (2012). Frédéric Bouchard and Philippe Huneman (eds.) “Darwinian Individuals” in From Groups to Individuals: Perspectives on Biological Associations and Emerging Individuality, MIT Press. Accessed from:

<http://www.petergodfreysmith.com/PGS_Darwinian_Individuals.pdf>

Macfarlane, Robert (2016). “The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web”, The New Yorker, August Issue:

<http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-secrets-of-the-wood-wide-web>

Uncited:

Wilson, Robert A. and Barker, Matthew, "The Biological Notion of Individual", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.): <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/biology-individual/>.

Now that you've read that essay, I'm just start talking about how what you just read relates to the very deepest issues in metaphysics. Here goes.

I think that the better-known ‘species’ problem in the philosophy of biology is highly analogous to this problem of ‘biological individuality’, and I think that the metaphysics of Structural Realism helps us to see these similarities more clearly. It is, however, very complicated to show this, so bear with me.

There’s a great Philip Kitcher quote in a 2012 book I haven’t read called Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy (I found it in Adam Hochman’s reply to Neven Sesardic on race, discussed in my recent post “Solving Race”) which nicely sums up my stance on the issue: “There is a nondenumerable infinity of possible accurate maps we could draw for our planet; the ones we draw, and the boundaries they introduce, depend on our evolving purposes” [150]. What does this mean? It means that the Platonic idea that the philosopher’s job is to “carve nature at its joints” introduces a false teleology which is seriously misleading. If you want an equally pithy slogan for the alternative metaphysical view, try this dialethic aphorism: nature has infinite joints and no joints. What I mean by this is that, although certain sets of joints will have help us increase our store of information, knowledge and our ability to predict the future far better than others, we can’t say where the joints are really because there is no place where the joints are really because there was no designer and nature itself doesn’t carve (agents carve). To focus specifically on biology, what this means is this: there are no absolutely True Biological Categories, there is no Objective Truth about how we should taxonomise dogs and wolves, whether marsupials count as mammals, whether those skeletons found in Morocco were really homo Sapiens or proto-homo Sapiens, or whatever. There is likewise no Objective Fact about whether honey bee colonies or coral and their algae are really one organism or two, or whether (per the Gaia Hypothesis) the earth is really an organism or just a homeostatic system with feedback cycles and some policing mechanisms, or whether there are really human races or just clinally varying ethnic groups. As Godfrey-Smith apparently likes to say, ESSENTIALISM IS DEAD!

Along similar lines (and with much relevance to this ‘problem of individuality’), we should also note, as David Hume did back in 1737, that our fundamental intuitions about the persistence of macroscopic objects and living things make no empirical sense. What is the sense in which that percept of a tree your brain processed ten minutes ago was a representation of the same tree a percept of which your brain is processing now? Only that the time slice you’re ‘looking at’ now evolved directly from the one ten minutes ago. What cannot be true, no matter how we want to believe it, is that the two time slices are identical. Why can’t this be true? Because the two time slices have loads of different properties, even just according to the macroscopic or standard, anthropic descriptions (there are perceptible differences in position of leaves, in position of ants on trunk, on the specific birds nesting or roosting or resting, you know that there has been some capillary action inside the tree to transmit water, and so on and so forth). So it’s a mistake to say that “the same tree persists through time”! The two trees are not the same tree! They’re different trees! Much closer to home are those famous questions of personal identity over time. We surely want to say that the five-year-old time-slice with ‘my name’ is identical with the set of human time slices typing these words. But any two five-year-old human time-slices are going to have more properties in common than this one does with that one to which we nevertheless ‘want to say’ I am identical… And if so, how does it make any sense at all to say “I am the same person as I was when I was five”? [Hume made these observations several hundred years ago, and I defend his bundle theory here (though I don’t endorse my rejection of ‘perdurantism’ here for reasons we’ll come to): http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/05/persistence-and-personal-identity.html]. Now, later, I’ll explain how Structural Realism helps us make sense of how this can all be true while still allowing us to say that trees and people and chairs are perfectly real and also that they do in fact perdure.  The key point is that recognising all this relativity does not at all mean we slide into some kind of weird kind of Idealism or start babbling nonsense about ‘texts’ like some kind of Pomo ninny. To understand why it doesn’t mean this means understanding Structural Realism – so that’s where we’ll turn to now.

I only very recently ‘got’ Structural Realism. After reading the book Every Thing Must Go at the beginning of 2016, the thing that most confused me – though I felt I learnt a huge amount from the book and was taken with a lot of it – was how Ladyman and Ross and the rest of the crew could simultaneously reject the ‘levels’ metaphor, and maintain that oxygen, nitrogen, trees, animals, markets and “prices” (yes, prices) were real (even if non-fundamental and ‘second-order’). This seemed to me like a contradiction. I also strongly shrinked from their Quinean-type claim that any old entity used in a scientific theory ought to be regarded as real simply if it ‘pays its rent’ in contributing to the scientific success (so to speak). This particularly irked me when it came to their discussions of economics (and I generally just disliked the fact they kept talking about economics because I am a Steve Keen fan and (as far as politics and economics go) only read post-Keynesian economists, Stiglitz, Chomsky and Peter Turchin, and consequently have been led to believe that the entire economics profession should be radically reformed (incidentally, I also constantly got this really right-wing vibe from the book, not only because of the early footnote where they randomly slag off Marx and the repetitive references to mainstream economics, but because of the constant aggression and belligerence (only ameliorated by the fact that they used ‘she’ as the default pronoun)).

It was only a couple of months ago that I suddenly understood how Ladyman and Ross could happily and consistently reject the ‘levels’ metaphor and mereology while maintaining that people, chairs, table, cats, lemurs, ants, bacteria, species, prices, markets, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfuric acid, (and so on and so forth) are all “real patterns”. The trick was being reminded of Dennett's discussions of Conway's famous Game of Life cellular automaton. Here's the takeaway:

In some sense, everything is quantum fields (or whatever). This simply has to be true. Fundamental physics is fundamental in the sense that (we’re pretty sure) it describes phenomena to the same level of accuracy in every region of the observable universe. You don’t need what Ladyman and Ross call a “locator”, or an “address” for fundamental physics; it’s fundamental because the laws of fundamental physics are universal laws, describing universal structures of reality. Hence, in some sense, everything is quantum fields. So there’s one level of reality, and it is that described by fundamental physics.

So what’s with all this other less general shit? Where does it fit in? How can you be allowed to say everything that isn't fundamental physics can nevertheless be real if you insist that there’s only one level of reality? The answer is to think about The Game of Life. Out of simple patterns in The Game of Life you see more complicated patterns ‘emerge’ – patterns which are stable and persistent and which, if you track them, allow you to compress a lot of information about the dynamics of the system. What is the analogy with the real world? Well those stable, information-compressing patterns in the Game of Life have a direct analogue: any entity that earns its keep in institutionally approved and predictively successful science basically has to be one of those stable, information-compressing patterns. So how do we decide what is real of the patterns in reality that aren't the structures directly described by fundamental physics? Well, any kind of ‘projectible’ – stable, trackable – pattern is real. And how do we determine the projectible patterns? Well, our heuristic is that any ‘entity’ that pays rent in contributing indispensably to scientific theories that achieve significant empirical success in making predictions is a real pattern. And how have we avoided multiplying the levels of reality? Because even though these patterns have a life of their own, they are still patterns in fundamental physics. You, me, that bug, jellyfish, amoebas and prices are projectible patterns in the fundamental structures of reality (as Ladyman and Ross say, this view dispenses even the need for distinguishing between types and tokens, between categories and instances; real types and real tokens are both just projectible ‘patterns’ (and so the problem of ‘species’ and the problem of ‘individuality’ really become extremely similar problems)). So there is one level of reality, and we are patterns in it. There it is!

Hopefully, it’s possible to see why this metaphysics allows us to defend a kind of ‘perdurantism’ against the extreme Humean bundle theory that I defended just before (days before) I had these insights. An individual human is a stable, persistent, projectible pattern. You can confidently track them as stable patterns, described in different contexts by different fields (economics, anthropology, psychology) but more or less stable in terms of properties, throughout their worldlines. So they are real patterns and an individual human is a really persistent pattern (a real four-dimensional worm), even if the individual time slices (of the four-dimensional worm) are not really identical.

Something like that seems true anyway. (Incidentally, I’m appreciating Ladyman and Ross’ work even more on the second reading. Every Thing Must Go really is an impressive book.)

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[1] It should be noted that most of them clearly require conjunction with another one of the candidates to constitute any kind of non-circular criterion for biological individuality.

An Essay that could go much deeper on "Evolutionary Debunking" of Morality and those Psychologists who think that Science can tell us about Meta-ethics

4. How reliable is moral cognition? Does evolution debunk morality?

Evolution does not “debunk morality” (a stupid and annoying phrase). Hume gave the main arguments debunking strong (non-teleology-based) moral objectivism long before Darwin. Evolution put the final nail in the coffin of teleological metaphysics, which further reinforced the importance of Hume’s arguments, and 20^th Century work in evolutionary biology, ethology, evolutionary psychology and (evolutionary) neuroscience has helped bring out the important implications of the fact that our ‘moral faculty’ is at least grounded in a limbic system and norm-generator that have their specific form only because this form has been selected for. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to claim that these discoveries have had earth-shattering conclusions for meta-ethics: they have not shown that a Mackean Error Theory or some form of expressivism is the correct account of human moral language, because they have not shown that it is impossible to reason about ethics. I argue that, in roughly the same way that we accept that knowledge of evolution does not “debunk” mathematics, we ought to accept that knowledge of evolution does not “debunk” the grand philosophical tradition of reasoning about ethics, from Plato to Parfit (or show that we should give up debating ethical dilemmas).[1] 

Long before Darwin, David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature famously argued: a) that one can’t deduce a prescription from any number of descriptive statements, b) that beliefs are not in themselves motivating and c) that it is a category error to think that desires or preferences are rational or irrational in themselves. The first is a straightforward logical truth,[2] with (of course) extremely important consequences for very naïve views about ethics. Nevertheless, the observation of this logical truth was not fatal to full-blooded moral objectivism for scientific rationalists before Darwin, because a pre-Darwinian scientific rationalist could still rationally believe in some kind of teleological metaphysics. In fact, most pre-Darwinian Enlightenment figures did believe in some kind of teleological metaphysics (either taking the form of Christianity (like Newton, Locke or Kant) or some kind of Deism (like Spinoza or Voltaire)). Galileo and Newton had obviously shown that Aristotle’s teleological physics was hopelessly flawed, but their theories hadn’t shown that there could not be purpose in creation. Newton certainly didn’t think he had shown that!

However, as philosophers have been pointing out for more than a century, with Darwin’s theory of evolution came the deathblow to the ancient Aristotelian worldview that design was inherent in nature (that, e.g., the undeniable telos of Man, “the rational animal”, is to be a zoon politikon who fully exercises his powers of reason and attains eudaimonia). This is because Darwin showed that all appearance of design in nature was just that: teleonomy, not teleology, because all life evolved from completely unconscious processes over very long stretches of time. This conclusion destroys any claim for the objectivity of teleological ethics, thereby rendering unjustifiable arguments from “the natural” for or against actions or practices.[3] 

Without any contribution from an understanding of evolution, b) and c) do further violence, if true, to naïve ethical views, because they jointly imply the conclusions i) that even if there were absolutely ‘true’ moral judgments which all sufficiently intelligent species would eventually converge on, an omniscient (and logically omniscient) organism could recognise these ‘true’ judgments and act monstrously nevertheless, because of a lack of motivation to do good, and ii) that it would be a category error to think that this lack of motivation would be in itself rational or irrational. Although the most extreme Humean view on rationality of preferences certainly runs into trouble (because having an intransitive preference set seems clearly irrational and because, as Derek Parfit showed [1984, 2011], one can at least come up with niche examples of arbitrary, self-defeating preferences that seem clearly irrational by any standard), a slightly moderated version seems basically impossible to deny. Pertinently, Darwin’s theory gave this line of thought a further power, by bringing out the massive historical contingency of our feelings towards con-specifics. In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself illustrates this point: 

“In the same manner as various animals have some sense of beauty, though they admire widely different objects, so they might have a sense of right and wrong, though led by it to follow widely different lines of conduct. If […] men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters.” [Darwin, 1981/1871: 73]

The basic thought here is that different species have different limbic systems and different forms of social cognition (mainly(?)) because of different historical trajectories, and that there’s no basis for the intuition that one kind of limbic system or form of social cognition produces the true judgments (whereas there is an obvious basis for thinking that having a bigger neocortex may allow for better reasoning, etc).

Since the middle of the 20^th Century, a huge amount of progress has been made in the fields of theoretical evolutionary biology, ethology (particularly primatology), social psychology and neuroscience towards understanding the evolutionary ‘roots’ of our moral faculty and the way people commonly make ethical judgments (the role of reason). Some have claimed that some of this research has dramatic meta-ethical conclusions. I disagree. In the short space I have left, I will do my best to show that this is the wrong inference.

In the introduction, my words suggested that I was mostly concerned with those who have used Darwinian research to argue either for an Error Theory about ethics or some form of expressivism, but there’s actually another, more interesting group who have used this research for a strong meta-ethical conclusion: utilitarians like Peter Singer, Joshua Greene and (possibly) Steven Pinker who think that theoretical evolutionary biology and psychology show a) that we rely on gut intuitions which we rationalise constantly, but that this is specifically a failure to think in consequentialist terms, b) that a rational person ought to become a utilitarian, and c) that ‘reason’ is the main engine of moral progress, where moral progress is basically identified with “expanding the moral circle”. This argument is expounded in greatest detail by Greene in his 2013 book Moral Tribes, although Singer’s well-cited 2005 paper “Ethics and Intuitions” instantiates this argument as well. Quite apart from the simplistic science that is often marshalled in service of this argument (see my first assignment on “Ethics and Intuitions”)[4], it is a category mistake, as Massimo Pigliucci [2012] and Thomas Nagel [2013] argue, to think that empirical research could in itself strongly favour one moral theory over another. Of course, Singer and Greene realise that they also need a philosophical argument to support their interpretation of this evidence – however, like Pigliucci and Nagel, I believe that their arguments fall short of establishing their very strong conclusion that utilitarianism is the ‘true theory’, or the one sensible choice for a rationalist.

As Nagel points out in his 2013 review of Moral Tribes, “You can’t learn about morality from brain science”, there appears to be a contradiction in Greene’s position. On the one hand, Greene does not want to say that utilitarianism is the true theory, i.e. taking a strong realist stance, (as Singer has in recent times been strongly tempted towards [2016]) and yet his advocacy of a sub-Millian utilitarianism with principles that are deeply counterintuitive and unfollowable – which even Greene admits he doesn’t come close to following – strongly suggests the view, as Nagel puts it, that morality is something “more […] than human”. Why a non-realist would hold such a view is inexplicable. Moreover, as Nagel suggests, it is strongly contrary to available evidence to hold that deontic principles can’t form the basis for a universal human ethic, as we can see in the phenomenal international success of ‘human rights’ since World War II [Pinker, 2011 (funnily enough)]. Like Singer, therefore, Greene does not have the grounds he thinks he has to repudiate a more Rawlsian approach to ethical reasoning, without the extreme ambition of de-humanising ethics.

More generally, I think that one thing that unites this utilitarian group of Greene et al, and the as-yet-undiscussed group who use Darwinian research to defend some form of strong anti-rationalism (represented by Haidt) is that they infer from evidence that a massive amount of “rationalisation” goes on in the production of moral judgments by non-philosophers [Haidt, 2012] that major philosophical debates must boil down merely to a clash between very elaborate competing rationalisations. I myself believe that Haidt’s research casts serious doubt on some of the basic assumptions that motivated many great philosophers (e.g. Kant), but I also think there is much of importance that it doesn’t cast doubt on. It doesn’t cast doubt on the fact that human beings can’t change their mind when exposed to moral reasons (in the Rawlsian sense), nor that an astute philosopher can’t tell when a person’s commitment to abstract principle x is in conflict with their position on specific issue y.

Moreover, as Pigliucci points out [2012], one needn’t believe in the ‘truth’ of one moral theory to believe in the possibility of making progress with ethical reasoning. One can, like Pigliucci and I, believe that different frameworks can be applied to different problems. In short, it is not inconsistent with Hume, Darwin or modern psychological and neuroscientific research to advocate a weak form of moral rationalism, which would be committed to the view that certain points of consensus among modern philosophers have much to do with reason (that extreme speciesism is a mistake, that racism and sexism are wrong), but not committed to the view that all issues or dilemmas have a determinate, superassertible verdict which all rational people must accept, or that there is one ultimate theory which all rational people should ultimately converge towards, contra Derek Parfit [2011].

Reference List

Aitken, Thomas (2017). “First Assignment for How Biology Matters to Philosophy: Report”. Accessible (if need be) from:

<http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/04/a-brief-philosophy-of-biology.html>

Darwin, Charles (1981/1871). The Descent of Man, Princeton University Press, New Jersey.

Greene, Joshua (2013). Moral Tribes, Penguin Press.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon Press.

Hume, David (1737). A Treatise of Human Nature, 1992 edition, Prometheus Books, New York.

Nagel, Thomas (2013). “You can’t learn about morality from brain scans”, New Republic. Accessible from:

<https://newrepublic.com/article/115279/joshua-greenes-moral-tribes-reviewed-thomas-nagel>

Parfit, Derek (2011). On What Matters, Oxford University Press.

Pigliucci, Massimo (2012). Answers for Aristotle, Basic Books, New York.

Priest, Graham (1997). “Sexual perversion”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 75:3, 360-372.

Turchin, Peter (2005). War and Peace and War, Penguin US.

Turchin, Peter (2015). Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Best Co-operators on Earth, Beresta Books.

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[1] Knowledge of evolution can help us see that some of the great moral philosophers were more seriously mistaken about various matters than others, with the teleological philosophers (like Plato and his fellow ancients) the most fundamentally mistaken about what can reasonably be said to justify moral claims. The view I will defend is simply that ethical reasoning is not always faux-reasoning or rationalising in the sense that the best ethical reasoners in the philosophical tradition really are deriving conclusions directly from the axioms (general ethical principles) they set up (the constraint on possible axioms is just that any axiom has to seem very appealing to (at least most of) us).

[2] Easy to overlook, of course, because so much of our language is normatively infused, as Hilary Putnam argued (I don’t have time to argue that it would be wrong to think that the linguistic ‘entanglement’ shows that Hume’s ‘guillotine’ is unjustified).

[3] A brief contemporary discussion of this point can be found in Graham Priest’s 1997 paper Sexual Perversion, which points out that to a Darwinian and moral rationalist moral objections using language like “perversion” and “unnatural” carry no weight: if by natural you mean historically adaptive and selected for, then the objection doesn’t go through because a behaviour’s historical adaptiveness has no logical bearing on its rightness or wrongness (this is more or less Hume or G.E. Moore re-hashed).

[4] Pinker, perhaps Singer’s main influence and very much a proponent of the gene-centric theory of evolution, seems unaware of the evidence that Hobbes’ description of ‘human nature’ matches only about 25% of the population in experiments of co-operation games (including outside the West) [Turchin 2005], generally overlooks the massive historical and sociological evidence that people can be highly self-sacrificing for what Atran calls “sacred values” [2001] (though Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature does cite Atran in relation to Israel-Palestine), and seems unaware of the case for multilevel group selection as an explanation of human ‘ultrasociality’, as articulated, for example, in Turchin [2005, 2015].

Solving Race!

Unpacking Complexities on the Issue of Genetics and Race, with some Links to the Best Recent Philosophy-of-Biology Papers on the Subject

Let me begin this post by making something very important very clear: the topic of race is an extremely messy and complicated one. If you can’t articulate what a heritability score is (how it’s computed, using what kinds of studies, why legs have a heritability score of 0), if you have no clue what a “reaction norm” is, if you don’t understand the clinal variation of human groups, if you don’t know anything about palaeoanthropology and how human genetics compares to that of other species, if you don’t know about how taxonomical classification of subspecies works in other species,  if you don’t know about the Flynn Effect, if you haven’t read Guns, Germs and Steel (not to imply that it’s a flawless book ), and if you have no experience with philosophy of biology or analytic metaphysics (I think this is probably the most important), you really should shut the fuck up until you meet these criteria (yes, all of them). You cannot importantly contribute to a serious debate about race if you do not meet these criteria. You will be talking totally at cross-purposes to those who do, and without realising it (that is, you will be suffering from the very common ailment known as the ‘pretence of knowledge’).

Some people say that to say that races are unreal or that race is a social construction is muddle-headed on basically any construal. Two articles that position themselves rhetorically against all views that fall under the label of “social constructionism about race” , and argue that modern genetics shows that we can non-sophistically and non-essentialistically say that race is biological are the paper “The Social Destruction of a Biological Concept” by the philosopher Neven Sesardic (https://philpapers.org/rec/SESRAS) and this long blogpost from the very prominent (on the internet) genetics researcher Razib Khan (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/05/why-race-as-a-biological-construct-matters/#.WR0CzWh942w). Sesardic is an anti-leftist polemicist who sees much of what philosophers and scientists say about race as politically rooted. His paper first appeared in the March 2010 issue of the journal Biology and Philosophy, and it has since been extensively discussed in the philosophical literature. While it is a flawed paper in several different respects (as we will see, when I discuss Hochman’s and Pigliucci’s (❤) replies (https://philpapers.org/rec/HOCATN; https://philpapers.org/rec/PIGWAW )), it is possibly the best recent philosophical defence of ‘racial naturalism’.

Now, I should immediately point out that Sesardic’s diction in the conclusion of the paper suggests that he does not want to be yoked to a strong label like racial naturalism (“My aim in this paper was not to prove the biological reality of race,” he pleads)  (I think that the rhetorical strategy behind this is to position himself as the sane, sober moderate), but he makes very clear throughout the paper that he doesn’t like any variation of the account of race as a “social construction” and strongly disagrees with academics who are perfectly happy to acknowledge the same genetic data and facts about skull morphology and IQ that he makes reference to (meaning that the difference lies in the metaphysics).  It is therefore hard to think of a better label (he clearly thinks there is a substantive disagreement at work; he is not merely saying that the rhetoric of his opponents (Naomi Zack, Dick Lewontin, Phillip Kitcher, Anthony Appiah, Sally Haslanger, Jared Diamond, etc) is misleading).

Khan’s article is not as strong as Sesardic’s; it would be erroneous to say that Khan defends a position that one would call ‘racial naturalism’. In fact, echoing the Kitcher quote that Hochman cites in his reply to Sesardic, Khan writes:

“From a scientific perspective in biology there are not ultimate and fundamental taxonomic facts. There are simply useful ideas and concepts to illustrate and explore the objective phenomena of the natural world. The Species Concepts debate shows us this reality well, as even species can be tendentious. But the debate often shakes out along disciplinary lines. Many more ecological scientists seem to be taken by the ecological species concept, while evolutionary geneticists are more keen on the biological species concept. That is because they are choosing the framework most useful for their ends. There is nothing “Post Modern” in this in that it denies reality. Rather, we are disputing the ideas which we use to capture the essence of real phenomena in compact semantic relations suitable for symbolic representation (whether with math or language).”

Another difference between his and Sesardic’s articles is that Khan is not positioning himself explicitly against fellow academic experts, but against the totally genetically uninformed and very weakly defended racial constructionism of the “literary intellectual” Ta-Nehisi Coates. The reason I grouped these articles together at all is simply because they both don’t really acknowledge the key point that Hochman makes, which goes as follows:

“The metaphysical problem [that “there is a nondenumerable infinity of possible accurate maps we could draw for our planet” [Kitcher, 2007: 209]] is best illustrated by its practical counterpart. Racial labels may be more or less useful proxies for biological variation in different scientific disciplines, and each discipline may support racial naturalism or social constructionism to a greater or lesser extent. It is crucial that these points be separated. For instance, forensic anthropologists are able to allocate skulls, with fairly high accuracy, to the racialized group with which the deceased would have been identified. Does this show that racial labels are useful proxies for biological variation in physical forensic anthropology? Yes. Does this support racial naturalism? No. Why? Because forensic anthropologists translate trait measurements to the “racial” taxonomies societies use, or would have used, to describe missing persons; they do not generally ask whether those taxonomies are scientifically valid. When they do it is in a research context, and their answer is firmly negative.[footnote 21, citing this: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.21006/abstract] Forensic anthropologists are also able to allocate skulls to groups that are separated culturally, linguistically, politically, and historically, and at a finer grain than a racial taxonomy offers. “Race” latches on to human morphological variation, but in a crude way. Forensic anthropologists use racial classification, but this is because we, the public, classify our missing persons racially, not because it is a precise or privileged representation of human morphological diversity.

The debate between race naturalists and social constructionists is best framed not as a dichotomy, nor a continuum, but as a discussion worth having in various scientific, philosophical, and political contexts. This discussion may one day end in eliminativism about race. In the meantime, the social constructionist will expect correlations between racialized groups and various traits. Yet she will, in Gannett’s words, expect such correlations to be “statistical not universal, local not global, contingent not necessary, and accidental not lawful, and expect their corresponding cuts in nature to be interest-relative not mind-independent, dynamic not static, indeterminate not determinate, many not few, overlapping not nonoverlapping, and superficial not deep.”[footnote 22, citing the Gannett quote]”

As I made clear, what Hochman is saying here has parallels in Khan’s own words, but the key point made here that Khan fails to draw attention to and Sesardic totally omits is this: that if another species had the same group differences as our species does, we would not feel the need to come up with categories in any way paralleling our racial categories. As Hochman later argues, and as Pigliucci argues in his excellent reply, modern genetic evidence is firmly against the conclusion that human races rise to the level of subspecies, according to the criteria we apply to other species. Wright’s Fixation Index, or the F_ST, which compares the genetic variation within one or more sub-populations to the amount of variation within the total population using single-locus comparisons (this means (I think) comparing single-nucleotide polymorphisms, as it were, 'one by one', rather than looking for more complicated correlations between multiple loci), is the technique used for sub-species determination, with an F_ST of 0.25 the arbitrarily defined sufficient level for the demarcation of a subspecies. Lewontin’s famous 1972 study “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” showed that, according to this kind of standard, there’s no way you could say our species has a subspecies. Now, as Pigliucci and Hochman discuss (because Sesardic discusses this point, and because Khan possibly nods to it in his use of genetic-clustering data), it is often claimed that Lewontin committed a “fallacy” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin%27s_Fallacy) in inferring anything about the metaphysics of race from a single-locus study (the claim is that it makes sense to look at correlations between lots of loci than just compare this locus in individual A to that locus in individual B), when genetic-clustering studies have since shown that, e.g. ‘Africans’ stick out from the rest of us (although ‘Africans’, if you want to isolate them as a population group (arbitrarily, remember), have significantly more internal genetic diversity than ‘Europeans’ or ‘South East Asians’ (two more arbitrarily isolated population groups)).

Of course, calling this a fallacy is simply an abuse of language; it is no such thing. And here’s what Pigliucci says about the genetic-clustering studies themselves, and how they are abused by people like Sesardic:

“The Rosenberg et al. paper is a study of 52 human populations, whose genetic diversity was characterized using 377 autosomal (i.e., not sex-linked) microsatellite loci scored in 1056 individuals. It is by all means a large sample of genetic variation, and its empirical conclusions are robust (Rosenberg et al., 2005). The significance of the Rosenberg et al. study for Sesardic is that it “did allow an inference of group structure and that, furthermore, five clusters derived from that analysis of purely genetic similarities corresponded largely to major geographic regions” (Sesardic, 2010, p. 153). Yes, but this is an interestingly (and possibly revealing) exercise in selective quotation on Sesardic’s part.

First off, Rosenberg et al. actually found a variable number of major clusters (6, 5, 4 and even 3), depending at what level one stops the analysis. Why pick a particular one as the major finding of the paper, other than because five clusters happen to fit the author’s predilection for the true number of human races? At the very least this is blatant cherry picking of the relevant evidence. Second, and far more damning, Sesardic entirely ignores that Rosenberg and colleagues go on to say (even in the abstract of their paper!) that “we identified … subclusters that often correspond to individual populations.” Are each and all of these subclusters also races, in Sesardic’s opinion? One assumes not, but Sesardic has not given us any compelling reason to think that K = 5 is the racial level because his own basic meaning of ‘race’ (a genetically identifiable cluster of individuals) is compatible with multiple levels of human population substructure. Under a referentialist semantic framework this suggests that ‘race’ as intended by Sesardic has no referent, not that ‘race’ refers to K = 5 but not to K = 6, 4, 3 etc.

What of Tang et al.’s paper? Sesardic summarizes its import thus: “A group of researchers led by geneticist Neil Risch et al., (2002) analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers on a sample of 3636 subjects from the United States and Taiwan. The subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of the four racial groups (white, African American, East Asian and Hispanic). The genetic cluster analysis of the data produced four major clusters, whose correspondence with the four self reported races was near-perfect: the genetic cluster membership and self-identified race coincided in as many as 99.9% of the cases.” Besides the fact that there are specific methodological issues with the Tang et al.’s survey (if one looks closely at their sample, one realizes that all of their Hispanics are Mexican Americans from a single county in Texas, which makes the otherwise surprising “Hispanic” cluster a reflection of mere geographical proximity), again, one can identify legitimate genetic clusters of human populations at a variety of hierarchical levels, but Sesardic offers no principled reason for identifying one such clustering as more fundamentally indicative of races.

So, yes, there is structured genetic variation in human populations. But this is hardly a surprising or controversial notion among human population geneticists, and it does not at all imply any strong correspondence between the available genetic data and folk concepts of races.”

So what does this all mean? It means that we are ‘working backwards’ in a really important sense when we use genetic-clustering studies to bring out genetic differences between human groups that seem in some incredibly rough sense to correspond to our ‘folk’ ideas.

In conclusion, it’s not cool – and philosophically wrongheaded – to be a ‘race realist’. (Incidentally, Charles Murray is acknowledged at the end of Sesardic’s paper, which means this becomes yet another wonderful opportunity to slag off that total piece of shit Sam Harris, who, I am told, did not press Murray on anything when he invited him onto his podcast (doing his usual thing of arrogantly asserting completely false and asinine things on some subject on which he has zero expertise)).


**Postcript, 16th October 2017: just found this: http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html

Maybe one of the best, simple presentations of fallacies in dumb scientism about ethics (the scientism of extreme simpletons like Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, etc)

Phillip Kitcher's 1994 paper dismantling E.O. Wilson's program of biologicizing ethics: Just a neat presentation of the ancient arguments that defeat dumb scientistic, logic-denying positions on ethics 

http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/167win10/kitcher%20-%20four%20ways%20of%20biologicizing%20ethics.pdf

From Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, edited by Elliot Sober

These dumb fucks will never stop ignoring Hume. They will never learn.

A Brief Philosophy of Biology Assignment where I Subtly Attack Singer and Review Recent Work on Human Altruism

Singer and the Evolution of Altruism

Biological Assumptions in Peter Singer’s Ethics and Intuitions:

In this 2005 paper, Peter Singer uses decades-old research in theoretical evolutionary biology and some recent results in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to argue that we should, in general, be highly suspicious of our intuitions when engaging in moral reasoning, since they will tend to lead us astray from the impartial application of abstract moral principles in favour of philosophically indefensible ‘gut’ reactions.  

In the first section of the paper, Singer argues that modern science backs up many of the bleak descriptions of ‘human nature’ contained in the works of Enlightenment philosophers like David Hume and Thomas Hobbes. Singer begins the section by praising the following conjecture of Hume’s: “A man naturally loves his children better than his nephews, his nephews better than his cousins, his cousins better than strangers, where every thing else is equal” [Hume, 1739/1896: 251; Singer: 334]. Singer takes for granted that this is an accurate observation, and gestures towards the Hamiltonian/Dawkinsian, gene-centric kin selection theory of altruism as the explanation for it. Next, Singer begins to make some vaguely-scientifically-tethered claims about prehistory: à la Hobbes, Singer asserts that early human life was “more often a struggle for survival between different human beings” than a struggle against other species [335]. This leads him onto a (once more) unsourced account of the most general evolutionary theory for the origin of extra-genetic altruism, reciprocal altruism; in particular, he claims that “Many features of human morality could have grown out of simple reciprocal practices such as the mutual removal of parasites from awkward places” [336].

Finally, he refers to the empirical work of Jonathan Haidt on moral rationalisation, and Joshua Greene’s very well-publicised studies on the Trolley Problem, along with some neuroscientific studies about the link between abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex and “anti-social behaviour”, to make clear that there is a strong emotional element to the way we typically make moral judgments, and no sense in which our intuitions are based on consistent application of principle [339]. 

Singer uses all these considerations from disparate areas of scientific inquiry for a methodological conclusion about moral philosophy: specifically, he opposes his stance against John Rawls’ (fairly middle-ground) methodological approach to moral reasoning, the principle of “reflective equilibrium” pioneered in A Theory of Justice. Reflective equilibrium is, in Singer’s words, the principle that “where there is no inherently plausible theory that perfectly matches our initial moral judgments, we should modify either the theory, or the judgments, until we have an equilibrium between the two” [344]. Singer disagrees with this because he thinks that it is often most rational often to ignore entirely our pre-theoretic judgments (intuitions) when we encounter a moral dilemma. He thinks that we should concern ourselves only with applying the “plausible theory” (he more or less ignores the complication that a moral theory wouldn’t be plausible in any sense if it ran totally against our moral emotions). Crucially, he thinks the science lends a lot of support to this methodological conclusion, since it shows that our intuitions are not useful “data” when it comes to the process of rigorously reasoning about what we ought to do, and lead us instead towards ethical ‘parochialisms’ and inconsistencies.

Two Scientific Papers Examining Evolutionary (including Multi-Level Selection)_Theories of Co-operation:

1.)    “Human Co-operation” (2013), by David Rand and Martin Nowak.

This paper is a discursive review of laboratory experiments and field studies of human behaviour by a Yale cognitive scientist (Rand) and a Harvard evolutionary biologist and mathematician (Nowak). It focusses on how the empirical evidence bears on the relative strength of the five mechanisms proposed to explain the evolution of human co-operation: direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, spatial selection, multilevel selection, and kin selection. The discussion in this paper relates directly to the vague scientific references made by Singer towards theoretical evolutionary biology, and his apparent belief that kin selection and direct reciprocity are the only games in town.

In their very diplomatic treatment of the evidence supporting each of the five mechanisms, Rand and Nowak seem to suggest that there is good reason to suppose that all five mechanisms have played a role in the evolution of human co-operation. Their analysis therefore doesn’t seem to support more hegemonic views: for example, Hume’s strong claim about the disproportionate power of familial affection (at least if “love” is interpreted in the broad sense that Singer himself seems to want to interpret it). In fact, as Rand and Nowak discuss in the section on multilevel selection, it has been experimentally shown that unrelated strangers can be readily induced to co-operate effectively with each other simply if they are told they now ‘belong to a team’ in competition with another [Rand and Nowak, 419-420].

Singer, of course, is aware of research on the power of group-loyalty and tribalism, as evinced by his references to Jonathan Haidt. However, he seemed unware (in 2005) that this well-studied phenomenon actually constitutes very good evidence for a kind of (probably cultural) group selection towards within-group co-operation, thus undermining purely gene-centric views about the evolution of human co-operation (which tend to downplay the existence of widespread human co-operation).

2.)    “The evolution of extreme cooperation via shared dysphoric experiences” (2017), by Harvey Whitehouse et al (12 contributors).

This paper is a recent interdisciplinary research article in Nature in which the authors lay out a new mathematical model which they claim shows how “conditioning cooperation on previous shared experience can allow individually costly pro-group behavior to evolve”, with evidence provided in the form of the testing of the predictions of the model in a range of sample populations (including military veterans, college fraternity/sorority members, football fans, martial arts practitioners, and twins) [1]. Overall, they obtain strong support for the conclusion “that shared dysphoric experiences are a powerful mechanism for promoting pro-group behaviors which under certain conditions can be extremely costly to the individuals concerned” [6].

This finding doesn’t directly undermine Singer’s biological assumptions in any direct way, although the explanadum of the paper’s thesis (that humans sometimes engage in pro-group behaviours which are “extremely costly to the individuals concerned” (like suicide terrorism and fighting for ‘king and country’ in deadly conflicts [1])) is something that Singer’s human-nature-related assertions in Ethics and Intuitions completely miss out.  Furthermore, one subsidiary empirical conclusion of the article, used as evidence against the notion that self-sacrifice for the group can be fully explained by the so-called “psychological kin” phenomenon, does directly undermine one of Singer’s claims: namely, the Humean one.  As the authors point out early in the piece, a recent survey of participants in the Libyan uprising of 2011, thousands of whom died in combat, found that “frontline fighters were more likely to choose genetically unrelated fellow revolutionaries in preference to family as the group with which they are most fused” [2].

Singer would probably argue that, though these new results do impugn some parts of his generally vague scientific discussion in Ethics and Intuitions, they do not undermine the view that our moral “intuitions” can steer us away from a more rational and universalised morality. Indeed, the idea that powerful, large-scale co-operation tends to be group-based and highly context-dependent, typically reliant on extreme events and highly dependent on the existence of enemy groups, only lends support to the general thesis that we should try our best to transcend our more immediate moral emotions in favour of the application of general principles. On the other hand, it may be that Singer’s own distorted cognitive science has misled him as to the real-world plausibility of a co-operative and altruistic ethic which doesn’t rely psychologically on some kind of group identification. Singer may well overlook the extent to which even non-parochial moral systems rely on the commandeering of group-based moral sentiments; for example, achieving a successful ‘expansion of the circle’ may require the stigmatisation of those who don’t.

Bibliography

Rand, D.G. and Nowak, M.A. “Human cooperation”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 17: 8, August 2013, pp. 413-425.

[Google citations: 348; Journal Citation Reports lists its 2013 Impact Factor at 21.147.]

Singer, P.J. “Ethics and Intuitions”, The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 9: 3, October 2005, pp. 331-352.

[Google citations: 460; Impact Factor of journal: unavailable].

Whitehouse, H, et al. “The evolution of extreme cooperation via shared dysphoric experiences”, Nature: Scientific Reports, 7, Article number: 44292, February 2017.

[Google citations: 1; Impact Factor of journal: 5.228.]