#1 The Science Of
Sociobiology, E.O. Wilson
(Professor of Biology and
sociobiologist)
Samuel Butler (19th century philosopher): ‘A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.’
Richard Dawkins (20th century biologist): ‘We are survival machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.’
During the American wars of this century, a large percentage of Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded to men who threw themselves on top of grenades to shield comrades, aided the rescue of others from battle sites at the price of certain death to themselves, or made other, often carefully considered but extraordinary, decisions that led to the same fatal end. Such altruistic suicide is the ultimate act of courage and emphatically deserves the country's highest honor. It is also only the extreme act that lies beyond the innumerable smaller performances of kindness and giving that bind societies together. One is tempted to leave the matter there, to accept altruism as simply the better side of human nature. Perhaps, to put the best possible construction on the matter, conscious altruism is a transcendental quality that distinguishes human beings from animals. Scientists are nevertheless not accustomed to declaring any phenomenon off limits, and recently there has been a renewed interest in analyzing such forms of social behavior in greater depth and as objectively as possible.
Much of the new effort falls within a discipline called sociobiology, which is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of social behavior in every kind of organism, including man. It is being pieced together with contributions from biology, psychology and anthropology. There is of course nothing new about analyzing social behavior, and even the word sociobiology has been around for some years. What is new is the way facts and ideas are being extracted from their traditional matrix of psychology and ethology (the natural history of animal behavior) and reassembled in compliance with the principles of genetics and ecology. In sociobiology, there is a heavy emphasis on the comparison of societies of different kinds of animals and of man, not so much to draw analogies (these have often been dangerously misleading, as when aggression is compared directly in wolves and in human beings) but to devise and to test theories about the underlying hereditary basis of social behavior. With genetic evolution always in mind, sociobiologists search for the ways in which the myriad forms of social organization adapt particular species to the special opportunities and dangers encountered in their environment.
A case in point is altruism. I doubt if any higher animal, such as a hawk or a baboon, has ever deserved a Congressional Medal of Honor by the ennobling criteria used in our society. Yet minor altruism does occur frequently, in forms instantly understandable in human terms, and is bestowed not just on offspring but on other members of the species as well. Certain small birds, robins, thrushes and titmice, for example, warn others of the approach of a hawk. They crouch low and emit a distinctive thin, reedy whistle. Although the warning call has acoustic properties that make it difficult to locate in space, to whistle at all seems at the very least unselfish; the caller would be wiser not to betray its presence but rather to remain silent and let someone else fall victim. When a dolphin is harpooned or otherwise seriously injured, the typical response of the remainder of the school is to desert the area immediately. But, sometimes, they crowd around the stricken animal and lift it to the surface, where it is able to continue breathing air. Packs of African wild dogs, the most social of all carnivorous mammals, are organized in part by a remarkable division of labor. During the denning season, some of the adults, usually led by a dominant male, are forced to leave the pups behind in order to hunt for antelopes and other prey. At least one adult, normally the mother of the litter, stays behind as a guard. When the hunters return, they regurgitate pieces of meat to all that stayed home. Even sick and crippled adults are benefited, and as a result they are able to survive longer than would be the case in less generous societies ... ... .
In spite of a fair abundance of such examples among vertebrate creatures, it is only in the lower animals and in the social insects particularly, that we encounter altruistic suicide comparable to man's. A large percentage of the members of colonies of ants, bees, and wasps are ready to defend their nests with insane charges against intruders. This is the reason that people move with circumspection around honeybee hives and yellowjacket burrows, but can afford to relax near the nests of solitary species such as sweat bees and mud daubers ... . Honeybee workers have stings lined with reversed barbs like those on fishhooks. When a bee attacks an intruder at the hive, the sting catches in the skin; as the bee moves away, the sting remains embedded, pulling out the entire venom gland and much of the viscera with it. The bee soon dies, but its attack has been more effective than if it withdrew the sting intact. The reason is that the venom gland continues to leak poison into the wound, while a bananalike odor emanating from the base of the sting incites other members of the hive into launching Kamikaze attacks of their own at the same spot. From the point of view of the colony as a whole, the suicide of an individual accomplishes more than it loses. The total worker force consists of 20,000 to 80,000 members, all sisters born from the eggs laid by the mother queen. Each bee has a natural life span of only about 50 days, at the end of which it dies of old age. So to give a life is only a little thing, with no genes being spilled in the process.
Sharing a capacity for extreme sacrifice does not mean that the human mind and the "mind" of an insect (if such exists) work alike. But it does mean that the impulse need not be ruled divine or otherwise transcendental, and we are justified in seeking a more conventional biological explanation. One immediately encounters a basic problem connected with such an explanation. Fallen heroes don't have any more children. If self-sacrifice results in fewer descendants, the genes, or basic units of heredity, that allow heroes to be created can be expected to disappear gradually from the population. This is the result of the narrow mode of Darwinian natural selection: Because people who are governed by selfish genes prevail over those with altruistic genes, there should be a tendency over many generations for selfish genes to increase in number and for the human population as a whole to become less and less capable of responding in an altruistic manner.
How can altruism persist? In the case of the social insects, there is no doubt at all. Natural selection has been broadened to include a process called kin selection. The self-sacrificing termite soldier protects the rest of the colony, including the queen and king which are the soldier's parents. As a result, the soldier's more fertile brothers and sisters flourish, and it is they which multiply the altruistic genes that are shared with the soldier by close kinship. One's own genes are multiplied by the greater production of nephews and nieces. It is natural, then, to ask whether the capacity for altruism has also evolved in human beings through kin selection. In other words, do the emotions we feel, which on occasion in exceptional individuals climax in total self-sacrifice, stem ultimately from hereditary units that were implanted by the favoring of relatives during a period of hundreds or thousands of generations? This explanation gains some strength from the circumstance that during most of mankind's history the social unit was the immediate family and a tight network of other close relatives. Such exceptional cohesion, combined with a detailed awareness of kinship made possible by high intelligence, might explain why kin selection has been more forceful in human beings than in monkeys and other mammals.
To anticipate a common objection raised by many social scientists and others, let me grant at once that the intensity and form of altruistic acts are to a large extent culturally determined. Human social evolution is obviously more cultural than genetic. The point is that the underlying emotion, powerfully manifested in virtually all human societies, is what is considered to evolve through genes. This sociobiological hypothesis does not therefore account for differences among societies, but it could explain why human beings differ from other mammals and why, in one narrow aspect, they more closely resemble social insects. In cases where sociobiological explanations can be tested and proved true, they will, at the very least, provide perspective and a new sense of philosophical ease about human nature. I believe that they will also have an ultimately moderating influence on social tensions.
Consider the case of homosexuality. Homophiles are typically rejected in our society because of a narrow and unfair biological premise made about them: Their sexual preference does not produce children; therefore, they cannot be natural. To the extent that this view can be rationalized, it is just Darwinism in the old narrow sense: Homosexuality does not directly replicate genes. But homosexuals can replicate genes by kin selection provided they are sufficiently altruistic toward kin. It is not inconceivable that in the early, hunter-gatherer period of human evolution, and perhaps even later, homosexuals regularly served as a partly sterile caste, enhancing the lives and reproductive success of their relatives by a more dedicated form of support than would have been possible if they produced children of their own. If such combinations of interrelated heterosexuals and homosexuals regularly left more descendants than similar groups of pure heterosexuals, the capacity for homosexual development would remain prominent in the population as a whole. And it has remained prominent in the great majority of human societies, to the consternation of anthropologists, biologists and others. Supporting evidence for this new kin-selection hypothesis does not exist. In fact, it has not even been examined critically. But the fact that it is internally consistent and can be squared with the results of kin selection in other kinds of organisms should give us pause before labeling homosexuality an illness. I might add that if the hypothesis is correct, we can expect homosexuality to decline over many generations. The reason is that the extreme dispersal of family groups in modern industrial societies leaves fewer opportunities for preferred treatment of relatives. The labor of homosexuals is spread more evenly over the population at large, and the narrower form of Darwinian natural selection turns against the duplication of genes favoring this kind of altruism ... ... .
... ... Concern over the implications of sociobiology usually proves to be due to a simple misunderstanding about the nature of heredity. Let me try to set the matter straight as briefly but fairly as possible. What the genes prescribe is not necessarily a particular behavior but the capacity to develop certain behaviors and, more than that, the tendency to develop them in various specified environments. It is the evolution of this pattern which sociobiology attempts to analyze. We can be more specific about human patterns. It is possible to make a reasonable inference about the most primitive and general human social traits by combining two procedures. First, note is made of the most widespread qualities of hunter-gatherer societies. Although the behavior of the people is complex and intelligent, the way of life to which their cultures are adapted is primitive. The human species evolved with such an elementary economy for hundreds of thousands of years; thus, its innate pattern of social responses can be expected to have been principally shaped by this way of life. The second procedure is to compare the most widespread hunter-gatherer qualities with similar behavior displayed by the species of langurs, colobus, macaques, baboons, chimpanzees, gibbons and other Old World monkeys and apes that, together, comprise man's closest living relatives. Where the same pattern of traits occurs in man-and in most or all of the primates-we conclude that it has been subject to relatively little evolution. Its possession by hunter-gatherers indicates (but does not prove) that the pattern was also possessed by man's immediate ancestors; the pattern also belongs to the class of behaviors least prone to change even in economically more advanced societies. On the other hand, when the behavior varies a great deal among the primate species, it is less likely to be resistant to change.
The list of basic human patterns that emerges from this screening technique is intriguing:
We must then add the qualities that are so distinctively, ineluctably human that they can be safely classified as genetically based: the overwhelming drive of individuals to develop some form of a true, semantic language, the rigid avoidance of incest by taboo and the weaker but still strong tendency for sexually bonded women and men to divide their labor into specialized tasks. In hunter-gatherer societies, men hunt and women stay at home. This strong bias persists in most agricultural and industrial societies and, on that ground alone, appears to have a genetic origin. No solid evidence exists as to when the division of labor appeared in man's ancestors or how resistant to change it might be during the continuing revolution for women's rights. My own guess is that the genetic bias is intense enough to cause a substantial division of labor even in the most free and most egalitarian of future societies. As shown by research recently summarized in the book The Psychology of Sex Differences, by Eleanor Emmons Maccoby and Carol Nagy Jacklin, boys consistently show more mathematical and less verbal ability than girls on the average, and they are more aggressive from the first hours of social play at age two to manhoood. Thus, even with identical education and equal access to all professions, men are likely to continue to play a disproportionate role in political life, business and science. But that is only a guess and, even if correct, could not be used to argue for anything less than sex-blind admission and free personal choice. Certainly, there are no a priori grounds for concluding that the males of a predatory species must be a specialized hunting class. In chimpanzees, males are the hunters; which may be suggestive in view of the fact that these apes are by a wide margin our closest living relatives. But, in lions, the females are the providers, typically working in groups with their cubs in tow. The stronger and largely parasitic males hold back. Human Decency Is Animal (N.Y. Times Magazine, 12/10/75)
Memes: The New Replicators (Richard Dawkins) -- The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. "Mimeme" comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like "gene." I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to "meme" ... . Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears or reads about a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: "Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell."
For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old. The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the "soup" in which the first memes arose. Once self-copying memes had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off. We biologists have assimilated the idea of genetic evolution so deeply that we tend to forget that it is only one of many possible kinds of evolution. Some memes, like some genes, achieve brilliant short-term success in spreading rapidly, but do not last long in the meme pool. Popular songs and stiletto heels are examples. Others, such as the Jewish religious laws, may continue to propagate themselves for thousands of years, usually because of the great potential permanence of written records.
At first sight it looks as if memes are not high-fidelity replicators at all. Every time a scientist hears an idea and passes it on to somebody else, he is likely to change it somewhat. I have made no secret of my debt in this book to the ideas of Robert L. Trivers. Yet I have not repeated them in his own words. I have twisted them round for my own purposes, changing the emphasis, blending them with ideas of my own and of other people. The memes are being passed on to you in altered form. This looks quite unlike the particulate, all-or-none quality of gene transmission. It looks as though meme transmission is subject to continuous mutation, and also to blending. When we say that all biologists nowadays believe in Darwin's theory, we do not mean that every biologist has, graven in his brain, an identical copy of the exact words of Charles Darwin himself. Each individual has his own way of interpreting Darwin's ideas. He probably learned them not from Darwin's own writings, but from more recent authors. Much of what Darwin said is, in detail, wrong. Darwin if he read this book would scarcely recognize his own original theory in it, though I hope he would like the way I put it. Yet, in spite of all this, there is something, some essence of Darwinism, which is present in the head of every individual who understands the theory. The meme of Darwin's theory is therefore that essential basis of the idea which is held in common by all brains who understand the theory. The Selfish Gene
#2 Biological Determinism:
Two Views
Stephen J. Gould (Professor of
Biology and historian of science) & Bernard Davis (Professor of
Physiology)
Stephen J. Gould (from Ever Since Darwin) -- Replying to a critic of his article in the New York Times Magazine (October 12, 1975), E.O. Wilson wrote: "There is no doubt that the patterns of human social\ behavior, including altruistic behavior, are under genetic control, in the sense that they represent a restricted subset of possible patterns that are very different from the patterns of termites, chimpanzees and other animal species." If this is all that Wilson means by genetic control, then we can scarcely disagree. Surely we do not do all the things that other animals do, and just as surely, the range of our potential behavior is circumscribe by our biology. We would lead very different social lives if we photosynthesized (no agriculture, gathering, or hunting -- the major determinants of our social evolution) ... . But Wilson [‘s work] makes much stronger claims ... . It is, primarily, an extended speculation on the existence of genes for specific and variable traits in human behavior -- including spite, aggression, xenophobia, conformity, homosexuality, and the characteristic behavioral differences between men and women in Western society. Of course, Wilson does not deny the role of nongenetic learning in human behavior; he even states at one point that "genes have given away most of their sovereignty." But, he quickly adds, genes "maintain a certain amount of influence in at least the behavioral qualities that underlie variations between cultures." And the next paragraph calls for a "discipline of anthropological genetics."
Biological determinism is the primary theme in Wilson's discussion of human behavior ... Wilson's primary aim, as I read him, is to suggest that Darwinian theory might reformulate the human sciences just as it previously transformed so many other biological disciplines. But Darwinian processes can not operate without genes to select. Unless the "interesting" properties of human behavior are under specific genetic control, sociology need fear no invasion of its turf. By interesting, I refer to the subjects sociologists and anthropologists fight about most often -- aggression, social stratification, and differences in behavior between men and women. If genes only specify that we are large enough to live in a world of gravitational forces, need to rest our bodies by sleeping, and do not photosynthesize, then the realm of genetic determinism will be relatively uninspiring.
What is the direct evidence for genetic control of specific human social behavior? At the moment, the answer is none whatever (It would not be impossible, in theory, to gain such evidence by standard, controlled experiments in breeding, but we do not raise people in Drosophila bottles, establish pure lines, or control environments for invariant nurturing.) Sociobiologists must therefore advance indirect arguments based on plausibility. Wilson uses three major strategies: universality, continuity, and adaptiveness [see Wilson, above].
1) Universality: ... even if we can compile a list of behavioral traits shared by humans and our closest primate relatives, this does not make a good case for common genetic control. Similar results need not imply similar causes; in fact, evolutionists are so keenly aware of this problem that they have developed a terminology to express it. Similar features due to common genetic ancestry are "homologous"; similarities due to common function, but with different evolutionary histories, are "analogous" (the wings of birds and insects, for example the common ancestor of both groups lacked wings) ...
2) Continuity: Wilson claims, with ample justice in my opinion, that the Darwinian explanation of altruism in W. D. Hamilton's 1964 theory of "kin selection" forms the basis for an evolutionary theory of animal societies. Altruistic acts are the cement of stable societies, yet they seem to defy a Darwinian explanation. On Darwinian principles, all individuals are selected to maximize their own genetic contribution to future generations. How, then, can they willingly sacrifice or endanger themselves by performing altruistic acts to benefit others? The resolution is charmingly simple in concept, although complex in technical detail. By benefiting relatives, altruistic acts preserve an altruist's genes even if the altruist himself will not be the one to perpetuate them ... Natural selection will favor the preservation of such selfserving altruist genes. But what of altruistic acts toward non-relatives? Here sociobiologists must invoke a related concept of "reciprocal altruism" to preserve a genetic explanation. The altruistic act entails some danger and no immediate benefit, but if it inspires a reciprocal act by the current beneficiary at some future time, it may pay off in the long run: a genetic incarnation of the age-old adage: you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours (even if we're not related).
3. Adaptiveness: Adaptation is the hallmark of Darwinian processes. Natural selection operates continuously and relentlessly to fit organisms to their environments. Disadvantageous social structures, like poorly designed morphological structures, will not survive for long ... Human social behavior is riddled with altruism; it is also clearly adaptive. Is this not a prima facie argument for direct genetic control? My answer is definitely "no," and I can best illustrate my claim by reporting an argument I recently had with an eminent anthropologist.
My colleague insisted that the classic story of Eskimos on ice floes provides adequate proof for the existence of specific altruistic genes maintained by kin selection. Apparently, among some Eskimo peoples, social units are arranged as family groups. If food resources dwindle and the family must move to survive, aged grandparents willingly remain behind (to die) rather than endanger the survival of their entire family by slowing an arduous and dangerous migration. Family groups with no altruist genes have succumbed to natural selection as migrations hindered by the old and sick lead to the death of entire families. Grandparents with altruist genes increase their own fitness by their sacrifice, for they enhance the survival of close relatives sharing their genes. The explanation by my colleague is plausible, to be sure, but scarcely conclusive since an eminently simple, nongenetic explanation also exists: there are no altruist genes at all, in fact, no important genetic differences among Eskimo families whatsoever. The sacrifice of grandparents is an adaptive, but nongenetic, cultural trait. Families with no tradition for sacrifice do not survive for many generations. In other families, sacrifice is celebrated in song and story; aged grandparents who stay behind become the greatest heroes of the clan. Children are socialized from their earliest memories to the glory and honor of such sacrifice.
Why imagine that specific genes for aggression, dominance, or spite have any importance when we know that the brain's enormous flexibility permits us to be aggressive or peaceful, dominant or submissive, spiteful or generous? Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But peacefulness, equality, and kindness are just as biological -- and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish. Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a nonbiological "environmentalism"; it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality -- a brain capable of the full range of human behaviors and rigidly predisposed toward none -- against the idea of biological determinism -- specific genes for specific behavioral traits.
But why is this academic issue so delicate and explosive? There is no hard evidence for either position, and what difference does it make, for example, whether we conform because conformer genes have been selected or because our general genetic makeup permits conformity as one strategy among many? The protracted and intense debate surrounding biological determinism has arisen as a function of its social and political message: ... biological determinism has always been used to defend existing social arrangements as biologically inevitable ... . We are both similar to and different from other animals. In different cultural contexts, emphasis upon one side or the other of this fundamental truth plays a useful social role. In Darwin's day, an assertion of our similarity broke through centuries of harmful superstition. Now we may need to emphasize our difference as flexible animals with a vast range of potential behavior. Our biological nature does not stand in the way of social reform. We are, as Simone de Beauvoir said, "the being whose essence lies in having no essence."
Bernard Davis, Storm Over Biology -- Gould's own degree of bias is unusual in a work by a scientist. What is the source of this passion? Not mental testing itself, he makes it clear. Rather, his arguments against this testing are merely weapons for attacking the real enemy: what he calls "biological determinism." As Gould correctly points out, early investigators who tried to measure intelligence were indeed determinists: They had the illusion that they were directly measuring a capacity determined by the genes. But while he continues to tar investigators of behavioral genetics with this brush, in fact they are now all interactionists. For while genetics necessarily began with the simplest relationships, in which a single gene determines a trait (such as the color of Mendel's peas, or a human blood type), the science eventually moved on to the quantitatively varying (metric) physical or behavioral traits, which socially are much more interesting. These were found to depend on multiple genes, and also on their cumulative interactions with the environment. This concept is now precisely formulated as the concept of heritability: a measure of what fraction of the total variance in a trait, in a particular population, is due to genetic differences between individuals -- the other fraction coming from environmental influences.
Since Gould would prefer to combat the straw man of naive, pure determinism, he fails to note how the science of genetics has extensively replaced this concept with interactionism. But since he is too familiar with biology to deny this conceptual shift, he appropriates it for his own ideological argument: "The difference between strict hereditarians and their opponents is not, as some caricatures suggest, the belief that a child's performance is all inborn or all a function of environment and learning. I doubt that the most committed antihereditarians have ever denied the existence of innate variation among children." Curiously, "hereditarians" (Gould's misnomer for interactionists) are not credited with a similar appreciation of both factors. Instead, they are neatly skewered by being called "strict." What, then, is the quarrel about? According to Gould, "the differences [between the camps] are more a matter of social policy and educational practice. Hereditarians view their measures of intelligence as measures of permanent inborn limits. Children, so labeled, should be sorted, trained according to their inheritance and channeled into professions appropriate for their biology." But good investigators, such as Binet, did not want mental testing to become a theory of limits. For them, Gould argues, "mental testing becomes a theory for enhancing potential through proper education."
This is a deliberate effort to blur the issue. With one hand Gould concedes innate differences, and with the other he takes them away. If the two camps really differ mostly about social policy and not about the importance of hereditary factors, why does he struggle so to deny the latter? Similarly, whether the hereditary component is large or small, is it not a fact that individuals differ widely in their phenotypic, developed ability to absorb various kinds of education and to perform various kinds of jobs? Yet the book has not one word about the possible value of mental tests for educational and vocational placement or for comparing educational programs. (However, consistent with Gould's admiration for Binet's circumscribed aim, he does note the value of mental tests in guiding the therapy of his own child.) Finally, in describing the incredibly crude use of the Army's "Alpha" tests in 1917, Gould ignores the current use of sophisticated tests to help the armed forces select candidates for expensive training programs. It is sad that Gould, preoccupied with the destructive social consequences of earlier biological misconceptions, is convinced that any modern studies on human behavioral genetics must have similar consequences. For to the contrary, modern evolutionary biology ... has shown that all species are genetically diverse, and that the differences are not trivial but rather are the source of evolution. With this shift from an essentialist to a populationist view, the genetic differences between races (except for some superficial physical traits) are now seen to be statistical rather than essentially uniform. And since the statistical distributions overlap extensively from one group to another, one cannot infer an individual's potential from his race. Unfortunately, biology has received little credit for this major social contribution, and none at all from Stephen Jay Gould.
#3 Behaviourism and Freedom, B.F. Skinner (psychologist)
Walden II -- Isn't it time we talked about freedom?" I said. "We parted a day or so ago on an agreement to let the question of freedom ring. It's time to answer, don't you think?"
'My answer is simple enough," said Frazier. I deny that freedom exists at all. I must deny it -- or my program would be absurd. You can't have a science about a subject matter which hops capriciously about. Perhaps we can never prove that man isn't free; it's an assumption. But the increasing success of a science of behavior makes it more and more plausible."
"On the contrary, a simple personal experience makes it untenable," said Castle. "The experience of freedom. I know that I'm free."
It must be quite consoling," said Frazier.
"And what's more -- you do, too," said Castle hotly. "When you deny your own freedom for the sake of playing with a science of behavior, you're acting in plain bad faith. That's the only way I can explain it." He tried to recover himself and shrugged his shoulders. "At least you'll grant that you feel free."
"The 'feeling of freedom' should deceive no one," said Frazier. "Give me a concrete case."
"Well, right now," Castle said. He picked up a book of matches. "I'm free to hold or drop these matches."
"You will, of course, do one or the other," said Frazier. 'Linguistically or logically there seem to be two possibilities, but I submit that there's only one in fact. The determining forces may be subtle but they are inexorable. I suggest that as an orderly person you will probably hold -- ah! you drop them! Well, you see, that's all part of your behavior with respect to me. You couldn't resist the temptation to prove me wrong. It was all lawful. You had no choice. The deciding factor entered rather late, and naturally you couldn't foresee the result when you first held them up. There was no strong likelihood that you would act in either direction, and so you said you were free."
"That's entirely too glib," said Castle. "It's easy to argue lawfulness after the fact. But let's see you predict what I will do in advance. Then I'll agree there's law."
"I didn't say that behavior is always predictable, any more than the weather is always predictable. There are often too many factors to be taken into account. We can't measure them all accurately, and we couldn't perform the mathematical operations needed to make a prediction if we had the measurements. The legality is usually an assumption -- but none the less important in judging the issue at hand."
"Like a case where there's no choice, then," said Castle. "Certainly a man in jail isn't free in the sense in which I am free now."
"Good! That's an excellent start. Let us classify the kinds of determiners of human behavior. One class, as you suggest, is physical restraint -- handcuffs, iron bars, forcible coercion. These are ways in which we shape human behavior according to our wishes. They're crude, and they sacrifice the affection of the controllee, but they often work. Now, what other ways are there of limiting freedom?"...
"Force or the threat of force-I see no other possibility," said Castle after a moment.
"Precisely," said Frazier.
"But certainly a large part of my behavior has no connection with force at all. There's my freedom!" said Castle.
"I wasn't agreeing that there was no other possibility -- merely that you could see no other. Not being a good behaviorist -- or a good Christian, for that matter -- you have no feeling for a tremendous power of a different sort."
"What's that?"
"I shall have to be technical," said Frazier. "But only for a moment. It's what the science of behavior calls 'reinforcement theory.' The things that can happen to us fall into three classes. To some things we are indifferent. Other things we like -- we want them to happen, and we take steps to make them happen again. Still other things we don't like -- we don't want them to happen and we take steps to get rid of them or keep them from happening again. Now," Frazier continued earnestly, "if it's in our power to create any of the situations which a person likes or to remove any situation he doesn't like, we can control his behavior. When he behaves as we want him to behave, we simply create a situation he likes, or remove one he doesn't like. As a result, the probability that he will behave that way again goes up, which is what we want. Technically it's called 'positive reinforcement.' The old school made the amazing mistake of supposing that the reverse was true, that by removing a situation a person likes or setting up one he doesn't like -- in other words by punishing him -- it was possible to reduce the probability that he would behave in a given way again. That simply doesn't hold. It has been established beyond question. What is emerging at this critical stage in the evolution of society is a behavioral and cultural technology based on positive reinforcement alone. We are gradually discovering -- at an untold cost in human suffering -- that in the long run punishment doesn't reduce the probability that an act will occur. We have been so preoccupied with the contrary that we always take 'force' to mean punishment. We don't say we're using force when we send shiploads of food into a starving country, though we're displaying quite as much power as if we were sending troops and guns.
"I'm certainly not an advocate of force," said Castle. "But I can't agree that it's not effective."
"It's temporarily effective, that's the worst of it. That explains several thousand years of bloodshed. Even nature has been fooled. We 'instinctively' punish a person who doesn't behave as we like -- we spank him if he's a child or strike him if he's a man. A nice distinction! The immediate effect of the blow teaches us to strike again. Retribution and revenge are the most natural things on earth. But in the long run the man we strike is no less likely to repeat his act."
"But he won't repeat it if we hit him hard enough," said Castle.
"He'll still tend to repeat it. He'll want to repeat it. We haven't really altered his potential behavior at all. That's the pity of it. If he doesn't repeat it in our presence, he will in the presence of someone else. Or it will be repeated in the disguise of a neurotic symptom. If we hit hard enough, we clear a little place for ourselves in the wilderness of civilization, but we make the rest of the wilderness still more terrible. Now, early forms of government are naturally based on punishment. It's the obvious technique when the physically strong control the weak. But we're in the throes of a great change to positive reinforcement-from a competitive society in which one man's reward is another man's punishment, to a cooperative society in which no one gains at the expense of anyone else. The change is slow and painful because the immediate, temporary effect of punishment overshadows the eventual advantage of positive reinforcement. We've all seen countless instances of the temporary effect of force, but clear evidence of the effect of not using force is rare. That's why I insist that Jesus, who was appareutly the first to discover the power of refusing to punish, must have hit upon the principle by accident. He certainly had none of the experimental evidence which is available to us today, and I can't conceive that it was possible, no matter what the man's genius, to have discovered the principle from casual observation."
"A touch of revelation, perhaps?" said Castle.
"No, accident. Jesus discovered one principle because it had immediate consequences, and he got another thrown in for good measure.
I began to see light.
"You mean the principle of 'love your enemies "" I said.
"Exactly! To 'do good to those who despitefully use you' has two unrelated consequences You gain the peace of mind we talked about the other day. Let the stronger man push you around -- at least you avoid the torture of your own rage. That's the immediate consequence. What an astonishing discovery it must have been to find that in the long run you could control the stronger man in the same way! Now that we know how positive reinforcement works and why negative doesn't," he said at last, "we can be more deliberate, and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system, nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That's the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement -- there's no restraint and no revolt. By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave -- the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises. Mr. Castle was free to drop the matchbook in the sense that nothing was preventing him. If it had been securely bound to his hand he wouldn't have been free. Nor would he have been quite free if I'd covered him with a gun and threatened to shoot him if he let it fall. The question of freedom arises when there is restraint -- either physical or psychological. But restraint is only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn't freedom. It's not control that's lacking when one feels 'free,' but the objectionable control of force. Mr. Castle felt free to hold or drop the matches in the sense that he felt no restraint -- no threat of punishment in taking either course of action. He neglected to examine his positive reasons for holding or letting go, in spite of the fact that these were more compelling in this instance than any threat of force. We have no vocabulary of freedom in dealing with what we want to do," Frazier went on. "The question never arises. When men strike for freedom, they strike against jails and the police, or the threat of them -- against oppression. They never strike against forces which make them want to act the way they do. Yet, it seems to be understood that governments will operate only through force or the threat of force, and that all other principles of control will be left to education, religion, and commerce. If this continues to be the case, we may as well give up. A government can never create a free people with the techniques now allotted to it. The question is: Can men live in freedom and peace? And the answer is: Yes, if we can build a social structure which will satisfy the needs of everyone and in which everyone will want to observe the supporting code. But so far this has been achieved only in Walden Two. Your ruthless accusations to the contrary, Mr. Castle, this is the freest place on earth. And it is free precisely because we make no use of force or the threat of force. Every bit of our research, from the nursery through the psychological management of our adult membership, is directed toward that end -- to exploit every alternative to forcible control. By skillful planning, by a wise choice of techniques we increase the feeling of freedom...."