Being Human: Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World

7. Evolution, Ecology, and Ethics

CHAPTER SEVEN Evolution, Ecology, and Ethics The preceding three chapters have documented both external and internal critiques of the dominant Western view of human nature as individualistic , rational, and disconnected from the rest of life. I now turn to an even more internal challenge: the evidence provided by Western science -the presumed pinnacle of what human reason can achieve-that we are related to, dependent upon, and similar to the rest of nature in countless ways. This is not merely one of many possible critiques internal to a diverse and ever-changing Western culture but a challenge from within the heart of reason itself. The very capacity to reason, which has seemed to divide us from other species and from nature in general, now provides evidence that we are not so separate after all. In this chapter I explore some of this evidence, beginning with evolutionary theory, which underlies all the biological sciences. I spend most of the chapter on evolution because it is so fundamental and so controversial in its implications for human nature and humans' place in nature. Within the context of evolution, I look at the increasingly rich picture of nonhuman behavior provided by studies of animal behavior. Finally, I turn to ecological knowledge and its role in ideas about human nature and environmental ethics. EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION Feminists' frequent discomfort with biological explanations of human behavior, noted in the previous chapter, points to some of the ethical I54 Evolution, Ecology, and Ethics and political dangers of biological determinism for women. Further, not only women have suffered, as shown by the results of various efforts over the past century to classify certain races, social classes, and ethnic groups as inferior based on supposedly scientific grounds.' In the late 18oos, Social Darwinists sought to legitimize class divisions as a result of evolutionary processes that elevated those with inherent intellectual and moral capacity. (Thusone Victorian Social Darwinist claimed, "The millionaires are a product of natural election.")^ Some conservatives in Britain and the United States used versions of evolutionary theory to argue for neglect (often not very benign) of the poor. The eugenicists of the early 1900s went further, advocating deliberate selection to ensure that those they deemed less fit did not reproduce, at least not as quickly as the more fit. Nazi scientists infamously applied eugenics to their efforts to preserve the purity of the "Aryan race."3 The obvious dangers of Social Darwinism and eugenics have encouraged , since the 193os, a strong bias in the social sciences and humanities toward a vision of human nature as "blank paper," endlessly malleable by culture. In this model, humans differ from all other animals in being shaped only by nurture and not nature, in lacking, in fact, a nature at all. This assumption underlies many contemporary theories of gender, race, and even nature itself. Constructionist or culturalist approaches so dominate the social sciences now that almost any claim about biologically shaped aspects of human behavior meets with scorn, fear, or aggressive counterattacks. Are these attacks justified? Do all applications of evolutionary theory to Horno sapiens start us on the slippery slope to Social Darwinism and eugenics? Behind these questions lurks the larger issue of whether evolutionary theory should be limited to other life forms, applicable to humans only in relation to our distant origins. More to the point for this book, if ethicists must think clearly and carefully about humanness, should they take evolution into account? Or does something about humans justify setting our species outside the framework of natural selection? This rephrases the question about human distinctiveness raised at the beginning of this book and lurking behind much of the discussion throughout. Different perspectives on what it means to be humanalternatives to the vision of rational, self-sufficient, cultural "mannmust be put in the context of larger questions about whether and how humans diverge from the rest of the natural world. More generally, thinking about what humans are like and should be like, in any cultural or ideological context, requires considering humans' relations to the rest Evolution, Ecology, and Ethics I 5 5 of nature. This necessarily points us to the natural sciences and especially to evolutionary theory. We return, then, to the question of whether evolution can be applied to human nature and, if so, what are the ethical implications of the anthropological understanding thus gained. To begin to answer these questions, we need to understand the process of evolution by natural selection, as first described by Charles...