Ayn Rand's Evolution Confusion

I read an article on a friend's Facebook page exploring Ayn Rand's evolution confusion. Written by Vinay Kolhatkar, who has a degree in Economics so is an authority on genetics and psychoneurology. Hey, I'm not a geneticist either. I'm just the brother of the geneticist and a biologist. My knowledge of psychoneurology is limited to a handful of continuing education credits. But, Wow! Where to begin!

 

I suppose what impresses me most is the religious devotion of Ayn Rand's followers. I mean, whatever else you can say about Ayn Rand, she was a fantastically intelligent person. I strongly suspect she was also on the autism spectrum, but, hey, so is David Byrne, that's no barrier to genius. But her followers! The fawning devotion. The fantastic balloon shapes they twist themselves into, in attempt to honor her legacy. Frankly, I think if Rand were around to witness the Atlas Society, I think she might channel Francisco d'Anconia, her character in Atlas Shrugged who bought a worthless copper mine, just to ruin everyone who invested in his enterprises assuming he was brilliant. "Use your own brains!" she might tell them. 

 

Kolhatkar's article more resembles Fundamentalist Christian screeds against evolution. Not that Kolhatkar challenges the basic concept of evolution. But he uses the same technique of learning a couple concepts here and there in other disciplines, and then reinterprets them so that they support his particular Gospel. Just, he follows of the Gospel According to Rand.

Take neuroplasticity. Kolhatkar learned this cool new word, and reinterprets this biological process into a willful act of consciousness. Here's the important quote from the Gospel of Rand: "But the development of a man’s consciousness is volitional: no matter what the innate degree of intelligence he must develop it, he must learn how to use it, he must become human by choice." (Rand, 1973: "The Missing Link," as quoted by Kolhatkar) Without judging this philosophical position (bong!), this has nothing to do with neuroplasticity, which is a biological process that happens whether you want it to or not. Most neuroplasticity occurs at specific developmental stages, and while it persists throughout life, and there is a possibility of vaguely influencing it by deliberately practicing thinking patterns, it is by no means "volitional." So, no, it lends no authority to Rand's Gospel.

I could make fun of Kolhatkar's assertion that human consciousness underwent a flowering--possibly a transformation into a new subspecies of humanity!--3200 years ago in Ancient Greece. This is laughable because of his dating. 1200 BC was not the Golden Age of Athenian Philosophy. It was the beginning of the Greek Dark Ages. At this period, the biggest question on the minds of Greek philosophers was "Can I bash you before you bash me?"

 

But the truly mind-blowing silliness is when he dives into a crack-pot theory from the 1970s, Julian Jaynes's “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” As Kolhatkar explains this theory, it holds that, prior to the enlightenment of the dark ages, people shambled around following command suggestions from the voices in their heads. Humanity was in the grip of a perpetual pandemic of schizophrenia.

 

His ignorance of pre-civilized humanity is amply demonstrated by his suggestion that people might have understood these voices as being those of "kings." For the first 190,000 years or so, no one in the world would have understood any voice as being that of a king, because there were no kings. Anywhere. In the entire world. But this isn't really a funny confusion. It's a phenomenal excrescence of ethnocentrism to suppose that pre-modern people were not engaged in conscious thought. As such, it's no surprise he believes that the first civilization to undergo this awakening is the first one of white people in Europe.

 

Perhaps the biggest boggler in Kolhatkar's essay is his attempt to unravel the contradiction between evolution and free will. What's that? You didn't know there was a contradiction between evolution and free will? Neither did I. But Kolhatkar claims "most evolutionary biologists deny free will." So I asked Dr. Bruce Wightman, Professor of Genetics at Muhlenberg. Dr. Wightman's response was that biologists don't so much deny "free will" as ignore it. It is, after all, a philosophical question, not something that can be studied scientifically. 

His guess as to what could possibly be the matter was the observation that behavior can be described as adaptive. As adaptive, it could be subject to natural selection. But in no way is behavior determined by natural selection. There are three reasons for this. The first is that obviously while genes influence behavior, they are only one of many influences. Since evolution is only concerned with the inheritance of traits, it only plays a role in this one influence. The second is that "fitness" is not the only selector for traits. Evolutionary biologists are increasingly learning how big a role random chance plays in evolution. Fitness is only an overall trend of inheritance, not a determiner. The third is simply common sense: no matter what influence my ancestry has on my behavior, I as an individual may freely choose as I see fit. Natural selection applies after I behave. Natural selection does not prevent me from attempting to fly off the Empire State Building. But it does remove my genes from the gene pool if I do.

This is why I think Kolhatkar's essay reads more like religious dogma than science. There isn't really any conflict to be resolved between evolution and free will. The real problem is that Ayn Rand expressed reservations about evolution. This is intolerable to her followers, unless they can come up with a reason that she was right. It reminds me of a skreed I read once, where a man set out to prove that orchid seeds, in 30 AD, must have been 100x bigger than they are now, because Jesus said the mustard seed was the smallest of seeds. In the same way, he collected random unusual scientific facts, made them imply things they didn't, and concluded it was possible Jesus was right--and since Jesus is always right, then that proved that everything he made up was true. But for those of us who don't need every word to come out of Ayn Rand's mouth to be true, there's actually no problem here that needs solving.

Kolhatkar doesn't stop here, though, he goes all the way into Social Darwinism. He calls it "gene-culture co-evolution," but it's the same idea that Hitler found so appealing. There may be cultural change that resembles evolution by way of metaphor. But that has nothing to do with the theory of evolution. Do I need to write that in bigger text? Survival of the fittest is a very simple concept. Genes that make an organism more fit for a particular situation are passed down to offspring. There is no moral judgement. There is no progress. There is no "highly evolved." There is no purpose, no goal, no intention, no nothing. There is just the genes. They are passed down because they are there, and the genes of the dead organism are not there. 

 

Culture is knowledge. It is not passed down through reproduction but through association, adoption, innovation. By metaphor, we might say that those cultural practices that are more beneficial will be adopted, but even to say this we would need to define what we meant by beneficial. Consider that culture can perpetuate without the survival of the people who practice them. Kolhatkar's beloved Greek culture spread into Rome even while Rome defeated Greece. Now, the British consider themselves heirs of Graeco-Roman culture, even when they were part of the EU and putting punishing austerity rules on the Greeks. What was it that passed down, and to who, and how? None of these questions exist for genes. Are they there? Then they passed down. To treat cultural practices the same way, we would have to say that those culture practices that spread are the ones that are best at spreading. Which is to have said nothing useful at all. So whenever anyone ever talks about "cultural evolution," they make value judgements, and invariably finding their own culture to be the one that deserves to be spread. Once was enough. We don't need any more Nazis. 

 

But for me, the most annoying moment is when he tries to puzzle out why people believe in religion. The very question pathologizes religion, as if there is something fundamentally abnormal and unexpected about the way people understood the world for 197,500 of our 200,000 years. Nearly 99% of human history. This is the psychological equivalent of asking what is wrong with organisms that can't survive without oxygen. If religion is pathology, the human race is pathological. Of course, having diagnosed our entire preliterate species with schizophrenia, perhaps this prospect is reasonable to him. But this is another case where he clings religiously to Rand's rejection of religion. 

 

Approaching the question scientifically, we see that the human brain is hardwired to look for patterns, to try to explain the world. Anyone who has bought a scratch ticket, and felt the impulse to scratch it in a particular way, as if your approach to the ticket would change the numbers printed on it, has felt this drive to find patterns in the world. We needed the world to make sense. Religion made sense of the world.

 

Science is a more reliable way to make sense of the world. It is a more effective way to understand the world. But it is the same neurological drive. When Kolhatkar suggests the "religion gene" has been found, never mind where he thinks it is, he's is down at the duck pond, swimming with the quacks.

But I suppose the last word goes to his triumphal proclamation that the “bicameral mind” has never been disproven. This is the last refuge of the illogical. It’s hard to disprove something for which there is no evidence. The irony is that once again he is seeking refuge in religious arguments. Science has never “disproven” the existence of God. Many things have never been disproven. The Loch Ness monster. Werewolves. The Great Green Arklesneezer. No one has proven that I am not the reincarnation of Cleopatra. There is no proof that the universe was not created two seconds ago--complete with fossils and memories of a past that never happened. No one has ever proven that there aren’t invisible astral arachnids controlling your actions with tiny blue-tooth cell phones. His whole essay is devoid of any reason to take this nuttiness seriously, just a lot of mistaken and some vaguely racist speculations about what could be if it all were true.

 

Dagny Taggart, in Atlas Shrugged, jumps out of her brother's car rather than take part in a debate about the safety of Reardon metal. She knew that to debate the question was to validate it as reasonable. Just as there was no evidence that Reardon metal was unsafe, there is no evidence of a bicameral mind. Just jump out of the car.