The Individual or the Group?
A Question that Arises in Science, Law and Language
Talk to Old Guard, Princeton University, December 5, 2007
Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. The First Hit: Language
3. The Second Hit: Law
4. The Third Hit: Science
5. Conclusions
References
1. Introduction
The question, whether the individual or the group is more important, is one of the basic problems that we have to deal with as human beings and as members of a civilized society. It goes to the root of our ethics, our laws and our politics. A few months ago, in August 2007 to be precise, this question hit me from three different directions in one week. The first hit came from Caroline Humphrey, a distinguished anthropologist at Cambridge University, who has worked extensively in Mongolia and Central Asia and happens to be fluent in Russian. The second hit came from the lawyer Lawrence Latto in Washington, former editor of the Columbia Law Review, an expert on American constitutional law. The third hit came from the biologist Richard Dawkins at Oxford University, author of a classic book, "The Selfish Gene", that explains how we are subject to the tyranny of our genes and how we may escape from it. Humphrey is an expert on language, Latto on law, and Dawkins on science. I found it striking that the same question, the clash in human society between the interests of the individual and the interests of the group, should arise in three widely separated contexts. I will describe the three hits in turn and then put them together and arrive at some conclusions.
2. The First Hit: Language
Caroline Humphrey gave a talk at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society with the title, "Alternative Freedoms", in April 2005, and her text was published in the Proceedings of the Society, volume 151, pages 1-10, in March 2007. Her concern was the illusion prevalent in America that the American idea of freedom has a meaning that can be readily understood and shared by people all over the world. If our idea of freedom is to be shared by people belonging to other cultures, then our word for freedom must be translatable into their languages. If translation of the word fails, then understanding of the idea must also fail. Humphrey examines in detail the translation of the word "freedom" into Russian, and shows us how and why the translation fails.
There are three Russian words that are commonly used to translate the English word "Freedom".
They are "Svoboda", "Mir" and "Volya". Each has different overtones of meaning and history that are foreign to our way of thinking. "In medieval times", Humphrey writes, "svoboda, which is based on the root 'svoi' (self, ours), seems to have meant something rather different, that is, the security and well-being that result from living amongst one's own people. Svoboda first of all was the agglomeration of practices of our own way of life, most fundamentally contrasted with those of alien people and enemies. It suggests an image of a social kind of freedom, one that was not centred on the singular individual."
She continues with "Mir". "Mir has the meaning of the universe, all humanity, the world, or any given world, and in the past it also referred to the rural commune, the social world of the peasant. Mir points to the well-being naturally present between all persons, communities, and their environment. This is the idyllic image of the universalised community, which ignores its fatal downside, namely, that if individuals subordinate themselves to such a totality they may be easily manipulated by any government claiming to represent it. I hope this helps explain the deeply non-intuitive fact (to us) that there are Russian villagers today who identify freedom, precisely with Stalinism. Freedom here melds svoboda with mir, producing an emotion of security, warmth, and expansiveness that is still remembered by older people today."
Lastly comes "Volya". "Many people hold that the true Russian word for freedom is volya. Volya means 'will' as well as individual, personal freedom. Volya is sensation, emotion, and action. But volya too has dark shadows. In political life there can be a volya that indicates a despotic freedom of action. The psychic consequences of unrestrained volya are likely to be destructive to the very person holding it." Humphrey sums up her three notions of freedom in Russia as follows: "What I have tried to describe so far is three different concepts of freedom, how they were related to one another in the Soviet context, and how each of them came at a heavy cost, of distance from reality, of fear, of anger or isolation."
The image that Humphrey uses to illustrate Russian notions of freedom is the Chukotka region of far eastern Siberia, which her student Niobe Thompson has studied in depth. Chukotka today is divided into two worlds, the rich, warm, insulated world of oil-fields and luxury hotels, and the cold, dark, dangerous world of the Arctic wilderness outside. Inside the fence, freedom is svoboda, the freedom of a tightly organized Mafia to run its own business. Outside, freedom is volya, the freedom of groups of pioneers to roam and take their chances in an endless expanse of frozen lakes and forests. "Volya has become the sphere for personal ethics and svoboda that of efficacious yet immoral action. The new svoboda furthermore is associated with privilege and foreignness, indeed with the humiliation of what Russians see as imperialism and global power. Meanwhile, Mir has evaporated, perhaps, though, to morph into the freedom of pure space (prostor), nature, the environment." None of the three words carries the same resonances as our word "freedom". The nuances of language reveal profound differences between the English and Russian cultures. The main difference lies in the relative importance of the individual and the group. Russian culture missed the Renaissance which turned Western Europe toward the cult of the individual.
During the time of the Renaissance, Russian culture was dominated by the fight against Tartar hegemony, a fight that demanded loyalty to the group and self-sacrifice of the individual. To defeat the Tartars, Russians had to learn to think like Tartars. All the way to the twenty-first century, Russian Tsars, and their successors Lenin and Stalin and Putin, were consolidating their personal power like Tartar Khans, while English Kings were at the same time yielding their power to assemblages of merchants and lawyers.
When we look beyond Europe and Russia to the rest of the world, translation of our words and our ideas becomes even more difficult. Moslem culture and Sino-Japanese culture are even more group-centered than Russian culture. Our individualistic concept of freedom seems natural only to a minority of people. Since we are a minority, it is important for us to understand how the rest of the world thinks. We may even have something to learn from the majority.
3. The Second Hit: Law
The second hit was an article with the title, "Has the Supreme Court Lost its Way?", published in the September 2007 issue of the magazine, "Washington Lawyer" by Lawrence Latta, a lawyer who runs a private practice in Washington. Latto analyzes the history ap.d the consequences of a famous case, "Regents of the University of California versus Bakke", decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1977 with a vote of five to four, the nine judges explaining their reasons in six separate opiniops. Allan Bakke was a white student who applied for admission to the medical school of the University of California at Davis. Bakke was denied admission. Of the hundred places for new students, the University had set sixteen aside for members of four specified minority groups. Bakke sued the University, claiming that his exclusion was a denial of his right to equal protection of the laws. He claimed that the University had violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race by any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. The case came first to the state Supreme Court of California, which decided in favor of Bakke. The University appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court, which again decided in favor of Bakke. Bakke was admitted to the medical school and the quota of sixteen places for minority students was abolished. During the subsequent thirty years, the Bakke decision has served as a precedent for many decisions in similar cases when public school or public university administrators tried to maintain special programs for racial minority groups. At issue in all these cases is the clash between two rights, the right of an individual to equal protection of the laws, and the right of a group that is disadvantaged as a result of past discrimination to obtain an equal share of educational opportunities. The Bakke decision, and the later decisions based on the Bakke precedent, said that the right of the individual must prevail over the right of the group. These decisions have reinforced the tendency of Americans to think of America as a society of individuals rather than a society of communities.
Lawrence Latto is saying that the Bakke decision was legally and morally wrong, and that the Supreme Court has lost its way by following the Bakke decision as a precedent. To support his view of the matter, Latto quotes President Lyndon Johnson, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others', and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates". Latto allows that Johnson "probably was less qualified by temperament and ability than anyone to be a judge", but still maintains that Johnson was right. For Johnson the basic issue was fairness. In a society that has historically treated minority groups unfairly, equal rights for the individual are not enough. Minority groups think of themselves as groups rather than as individuals. To them, fairness means fairness to the group. To' the black community, fairness means that the community should have a sliare of professionally trained doctors proportional to their population. It is not enough for the individual black student to have an equal chance to compete with better-prepared whites.
The main part of Latto's essay is a detailed analysis of the legal opinions that the judges wrote to justify their decisions. The judges were preoccupied with fine points of constitutional law rather than with trying to achieve fairness. The main issue as they saw it was which of two criteria should govern the constitutionality of state programs providing special assistance to minority citizens. The two criteria are called rationality and strict scrutiny. Rationality means that the program is constitutional if it is reasonably designed to achieve its aim of helping disadvantaged minorities. Strict scrutiny means that the judges have the duty to scrutinize the program rigorously and declare it unconstitutional if they find that it is not "narrowly tailored" to achieve a "compelling governmental interest". The majority of five judges believed in strict scrutiny, the minority of four believed in rationality, and this ideologjcal division determined the outcome of the case.
Latto describes how the doctrines of rationality and strict scrutiny originated in a lengthy and abstruse opinion written in 1937 by Justice Stone. Justice Stone wrote the opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court, upholding a judgment that condemned the Carolene Products Company, a dairy in Georgia, for violating the Filled Milk Act of 1923, which prohibited the interstat,e sale of milk containing any fat other than butter fat. Justice Stone used the criterion of rationality to uphold the Filled Milk Act, which was all that he needed to settle the case against Carolene Products. But then he went on to write an even lengthier footnote to his opinion, observing that the criterion of rationality might not always be sufficient. He remarked that a more exacting judicial scrutiny might be required for a review of statutes directed at particular religious or racial minorities. "Prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry". Latto concludes his summary of Stone's opinion by saying, "The footnote is written in the terse, precise, and somewhat turgid fashion of a judge of the very highest rank."
Five of the justices who deliberated upon the Bakke case forty years later decided that this was a case to which the Stone footnote was clearly relevant. They wrote several opinions explaining how they applied their strict scrutiny to the affirmative action program of the University of California and found it unconstitutional, either because it was not "narrowly tailored" enough, or because it was not "responsive to a compelling governmental interest". Their judgment was a historical turning-point, providing a legal precedent for overturning affirmative action programs in schools and universities all over the country. As the years went by, the ascendancy of individual rights over group rights became more and more firmly established. After telling the story of the judges and their opinions in the Bakke case, Latto asks the question, "Why did they make this bad decision?" and answers it, "Probably because of the arrogance that too often occurs in persons with unlimited and unaccountable power. The threshold question was, who should be the primary decision maker, the Congress, the state legislatures and their agencies, or the Court? Naturally, they believed that they were better equipped to do the job. Also it increased, rather than diminished, their role. But they missed the point and, being so entranced by the intricacies of their craft at which they were so skilled, they found all the wrong reasons for making this choice. ... The Court's too long delayed decision in 'Brown versus Board of Education' was met with vigorous resistance that lasted for decades but did not prevent much progress from being made toward a country with more freedom and opportunity for all. It is still a work in progress. It is strange that the Supreme Court, which we view as the protector of our liberties and even of certain natural rights, should now erect a barrier against more rapid progress toward that end". Latto is here using the words "freedom" and "liberties" to mean the rights of minority groups to equal education and equal opportunities. The Supreme Court and the majority of Americans use the same words with a different meaning, paying attention to the rights of individuals only.
4. The Third Hit: Science
The third hit will take the longest to explain, because it involves some scientific jargon. I will try to keep the jargon to a minimum. The hit happened at a gathering of scientists invited by John Brockman to stay overnight at Eastover, his beautiful farm in rural Connecticut. John Brockman is a literary agent who presides over a group of people called the Reality Club, with a web-site called "Edge", where he invites scientists and writers to engage in discussions about questions of the day. The meeting at Eastover was a rare event at which devotees of the web-site could meet face to face. I was delighted to find there two famous biological entrepreneurs, Craig Venter who is world champion reader of genomes, and George Church who is world champion writer of genomes. Craig Venter has spent the last year cruising around the world in a boat equipped with sequencing equipment, fishing out of the ocean samples of thousands of species of marine organisms previously unknown to science, and sequencing their DNA. George Church has spent the last year perfecting his techniques for synthesizing long stretches of DNA embodying any given sequence of base-pairs. Venter is able to translate any naturally occurring piece of DNA into a piece of computer-code spec-ifying the sequence of its base-pairs. Church is able to translate any computer-code sequence back into a piece of synthetic DNA with the specified base-pairs accurately placed in the right order.
Working together, these two technologies will soon give us the ability to design and construct living creatures for fun and for profit. They give new meaning to the phrase, "Genetically Modified Organisms". Most people are afraid of genetically modified organisms, because they imagine such organisms being the property of big corporations such as Monsanto. There are good reasons for distrusting Monsanto. Monsanto has made a habit of inserting genes for poisonous pesticides into crop-plants such as cotton and soybeans. But genetically modified organisms may not belong much longer to the big corporations. I am making a prediction, that biological technology will soon be domesticated, just as computer technology was domesticated during the last fifty years. I see the technologies of Craig Venter and George Church rapidly becoming user-friendly and cheap enough to be accessible to ordinary farmers and gardeners and animal-breeders. I am saying that these technologies are instruments of liberation rather than oppression, giving small farmers and breeders the chance to be creative and also to be economically productive. This was the background out of which our conversation at Eastover arose.
A few days before the meeting, John Brockman put onto his "Edge" web-site an extract from my book, "A Many-colored Glass", which had just been published by the University of Virginia Press. The extract was called, "Our Biotech Future", and outlined my views about the past and future of life on this planet. Following the ideas of the great biologist Carl Woese, I divided the past history of life into three periods. The first period I call the Pre-Darwinian era, when all life consisted of primitive cells sharing genetic information freely, with no division into separate species. Biologists call this free sharing "horizontal gene transfer", since it is unlike the normal vertical transfer of genes from mother to daughter. The second period I call the Darwinian Interlude, when all life was divided into species and each species refused to share genetic information with others. The third period I call the Post- Darwinian Era, the era in which we are now living. Here is the extract that appeared on the "Edge" web-site:
"The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery of life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established, evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.
"Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between tw_ periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo Sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. And now, as Homo Sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, an_,,'the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented."
John Brockman had sent this extract to Richard Dawkins in Oxford and asked for his comments. On the morning of the meeting at Eastover, Dawkins E-mailed his comments to Brockman. Brockman invited me to talk to the assembled gathering, and then, as soon as I had finished, read Dawkins's comments aloud. Here is what Dawkins wrote:
"By Darwinian evolution Woese means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them. These two quotations from Dyson constitute a classic schoolboy howler, a catastrophic misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution, both as Darwin understood it, and as we understand it today in rather different language, is not based on the competition for survival of species. It is based on competition for survival within species. Darwin would have said competition between individuals within every species. I would say competition between genes within gene pools. The difference between those two ways of putting it is small compared with Dyson's howler (shared by most laymen: it is the howler that I wrote The Selfish Gene partly to dispel, and I thought I had pretty much succeeded, but Dyson obviously hasn't read it!) that natural selection is about the differential survival or extinction of species. Of course the extinction of species is extremely important in the history of life, and there may very well be non-random aspects of it (some species are more likely to go extinct than others) but, although this may in some superficial sense resemble Darwinian selection, it is not the selection process that has driven evolution. Moreover, arms races between species constitute an important part of the competitive climate that drives Darwinian evolution. But in, for example, the arms race between predators and prey, or parasites and hosts, the competition that drives evolution is all going on within species. Individual foxes don't compete with rabbits, they compete with other individual foxes within their own species to be the ones that catch the rabbits (I would prefer to rephrase it as competition between genes within the fox gene pool).
"The rest of Dyson's piece is interesting, as you'd expect, and there really is an interesting sense in which there is an interlude between two periods of horizontal transfer (and we mustn't forget that bacteria still practise horizontal transfer and have done throughout the time when eucaryotes have been in the 'Interlude'). But the interlude in the middle is not the Darwinian Interlude, it is the Meiosis-Sex-Gene-Pool-Species Interlude. Darwinian selection betwen genes still goes on during eras of horizontal transfer, just as it does during the Interlude. What happened during the 3-billion-year Interlude is that genes were confined to gene pools and limited to competing with other genes within the same species. Previously (and still in bacteria) they were free to compete with other genes more widely (there was no such thing as a species outside the 'Interlude'). If a new period of horizontal transfer is indeed now dawning through technology, genes may become free to compete with other genes more widely yet again. As I said, there are fascinating ideas in Freeman Dyson's piece. But it is a huge pity it is marred by such an elementary mistake at the heart of it. Richard."
As an addendum to this message, Brockman added, "Dawkins asked me to make it clear that his E-mail was written hastily as a letter to me, and was not designed for publication, or indeed to be read out at a meeting of biologists at your farm." In spite of that, he read it anyway, and invited me to respond. I responded as follows:
"Dear Richard Dawkins, thankyou for the E-mail that you sent to John Brockman, saying that I had made a 'school-boy howler' when I said that Darwinian evolution was competition between species rather than between individuals. You also said I obviously had not read The Selfish Gene. In fact I did read your book and disagreed with it for the following reasons. Here are two replies to your E-mail. The first was a verbal response made immediately after Brockman read it aloud at his farm. The second was written the following day after thinking more carefully about the question.
"First response. What I wrote is not a howler and Dawkins is wrong. Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptatjons. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size. So big steps are most likely when populations are small, giving rise to the 'punctuated equilibrium' that is seen in the fossil record. The competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.
"Second response. It is absurd to think that group selection is less important than individual selection. Consider for example Dodo A and Dodo B, competing for mates and progeny in the dodo population on the island of Mauritius. Dodo A competes much better and has greater fitness, as measured by individual selection. Dodo A mates more often and has many more grandchildren than Dodo B. A hundred years later, the species is extinct and the fitness of A and B are both reduced to zero. Selection operating at the species level has trumped selection at the individual level. Selection at the species level wiped out both A and B because the species neglected to maintain the ability to fly, which was essential to survival when human predators appeared on the island. This situation is not peculiar to dodos. It arises throughout the course of evolution, whenever environmental changes cause species to become extinct.
"In my opinion, both these responses are valid, but the second one goes more directly to the issue that divides us. Yours sincerely. Freeman Dyson". Richard Dawkins did not concede. He remained silent and so allowed me to have the last word.
After this lengthy description of Dawkins's hit and my response, let me explain why this question of the relative importance of individual selection and group selection is crucial to the evolution of our own species. Our species is unique as the inventor of civilization. How could this have happened? Civilization means the peaceful cooperation of societies much larger than the families or tribes that are held together by genetic relatedness. Peaceful cooperation requires that individuals behave altruistically, helping others at some cost to themselves. Our species did not invent altruism. Many other species, for example ants and bees and wolves and baboons, behave altruistically. But these other species are organized in genetically related groups, and are altruistic only within the group. Humans invented the extension of altruism beyond the family and the tribe_ This extension is called by biologists "the evolution of altruism". There are strongly divergent opinions as to how it could have happened, with Dawkins and me on opposite sides of the argument.
Two facts are clear. First, group selection favors the growth of big societies with altruistic rules of behavior. Big societies tend to prevail in the struggle for survival, either by wiping out small societies or by absorbing them. Second, individual selection within a big society does not favor altruism. Within a big group with altruistic rules, individual selection favors the cheater who breaks the rules. Cheating becomes easier when the group becomes larger. This is the paradox which makes the evolution of altruism hard to understand. Individual selection by itself will lead to a society of cheaters and a breakdown of altruism.
One way to resolve the paradox is to combine altruism with vengeance. Vengeance means a positive delight associated with the act of punishing cheaters. Vengeance is the dark side of altruism, but seems to be necessary for altruistic societies to evolve beyond a certain size. We know that vengeance is deeply rooted in our nature. Vengeance is especially enjoyable, as Gilbert's Mikado observed, when the punishment fits the crime. I remember as a child in England enjoying the celebration of the punishment of Guy Fawkes on November 5 each year far more than I enjoyed the celebration of the birth of Jesus. Guy Fawkes was the traitor who tried to blow up the King and Parliament together in the Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1604. He was publicly burnt alive in a particularly gruesome fashion. As children, we sang the bellicose second verse of our National Anthem, "Oh Lord our God arise, Scatter his enemies, And make them fall. Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On Thee our hopes we fix" and so on, with far more gusto than the insipid first and third verses. Delight in punishing cheaters is innate in our species, and has made us what we are, an intimate mixture of altruism and vengeance, love and hate. Altruism means to love our neighbors as ourselves. Vengeance means to take delight in punishing sinners.
There is a close analogy between the organization of human beings into societies and the organization of cells into human beings. A human being is a community of cells. Our somatic cells, all the cells that are not germ cells, are totally altruistic. A somatic cell gives up its individual freedom and lives to serve the community. Even in this perfectly altruistic community, cheating is a problem. Occasionally a somatic cell cheats and begins to live and reproduce itself independently. The offspring of the cheater become a cancer which destroys the community. But the community has devised an extreme form of punishment to discourage cheating. The punishment is called apoptosis or programmed cell death. Every cell carries a supply of lethal chemicals that will kill it, as soon as they are released. If a cell shows any signs of being a cheater, the community gives it a signal that releases the chemicals and causes it to die. Cancers only arise when a cell is a cheater and the punishment system happens to be disabled. A similar punishment system based on compulsory suicide was used in ancient Athens to punish the philosopher Socrates. The more altruistic the society, the more vindictive the punishment.
Sociologists have invented an ingenious game called the Ultimatum Game, to test quantitatively the vindictiveness of humans. The game is very simple and has been played by members of primitive tribes in many countries as well as by educated people in modern cities. In each game there are two players, A and B. A substantial sum of money, at least a day's wages in the local currency, is placed on the table, with the following rules explained in advance and agreed to by the players. Player A must divide the sum into two parts, one for A and the other forB. B then has the choice of saying yes or no to this division. If B says yes, then both A and B collect their shares as determined by A. If B says no, then the money is removed and both players get nothing. The point of the game is that B has nothing to gain from saying no, except the joy of punishing A for not being more generous. If both players were only interested in maximizing their gains, then A would offer very little to B and B would still say yes. But in fact, the result of the game is very different. Usually A offers to B between one quarter and one half of the total, and usually B says yes. In the unusual case when A offers less than one quarter, B usually says no. This same pattern of results is seen in many different cultures all over the world. If A offers less than a quarter, he is seen as a cheater, and B values the joy of punishing a cheater more highly than the joy of collecting a prize.
This harmless and illuminating game leads to the following hypothesis about the evolution of altruism. Altruism and vengeance evolved together in human societies. Within each society, individual selection favored the survival of altruists because cheaters were severely punished.
In the competition between societies, group selection favored the survival of vengeance because societies that did not punish cheaters could not work or fight effectively. Individual selection and group selection were both essential to making us what we are. Individual selection gave us altruism and group selection gave us vengeance. This hypothesis does not tell us the whole truth about the evolution of human nature, but it must be at least a part of the truth.
5. Conclusions
Let me briefly summarize what we have learned from these three writers coming at us from different directions. Caroline Humphrey the anthropologist tells us that our western concept of freedom as belonging to the individual rather than the group is not widely shared. Even in the west it is a recent development, originating in the Renaissance and unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Athens in the fifth century BC considered itself to be a shining example of a free society, but still condemned Socrates to death for corrupting young people with ideas that did not conform to community norms. Lawrence Latto the lawyer tells us that the United States Supreme Court has led our country astray by giving human rights of individuals priority over human rights of disadvantaged groups. The legal sanctification of individual rights by the Supreme Court is even more recent than the Renaissance. The tilt toward individual rights started only thirty years ago, when the Bakke case gave judges an opportunity to launch a backlash against the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Richard Dawkins the biologist scolds me sharply for my statement that group selection is at least as important as individual selection in the evolution of humans and other creatures. He maintains dogmatically the doctrine that natural selection acts only on individuals or on individual genes. Dawkins's doctrine is also of recent origin. The notion of group selection was widely accepted by evolutionary biologists, including Darwin, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The subtitle of Darwin's great work, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," shows that Darwin thought of selection as acting on races rather than on individuals.
Having heard the three messages, I agree with Humphrey and Latto and disagree with Dawkins. I see the roots of freedom and human rights and altruistic behavior growing historically within tight-knit communities and continuing today to belong to the communities. Individual rights and individual freedom are precious, but they are a recent and precarious addition to the old communitarian tradition. The road to a freer and more peaceful world lies through compromise, with equal respect paid to individual and community values. Anthropologists and lawyers and biologists should all be ready to help us make such compromises.
References
Brockman, John, 2007. "Life: What a Concept! An Edge Special Event at Eastover Farm", on web-site (www.edge.org). August 2007.
Dawkins, Richard, 1976. "The Selfish Gene" [Oxford, Oxford University Press].
Dyson, Freeman J., 2007. "A Many-colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe" [Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press].
Humphrey, Caroline, 2007. "Alternative Freedoms", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 151, 1-10.
Latto, Lawrence J., 2007. "Has the Supreme Court Lost its Way?", Washington Lawyer, September 2007, 35-41.
1. Introduction
2. The First Hit: Language
3. The Second Hit: Law
4. The Third Hit: Science
5. Conclusions
References
1. Introduction
The question, whether the individual or the group is more important, is one of the basic problems that we have to deal with as human beings and as members of a civilized society. It goes to the root of our ethics, our laws and our politics. A few months ago, in August 2007 to be precise, this question hit me from three different directions in one week. The first hit came from Caroline Humphrey, a distinguished anthropologist at Cambridge University, who has worked extensively in Mongolia and Central Asia and happens to be fluent in Russian. The second hit came from the lawyer Lawrence Latto in Washington, former editor of the Columbia Law Review, an expert on American constitutional law. The third hit came from the biologist Richard Dawkins at Oxford University, author of a classic book, "The Selfish Gene", that explains how we are subject to the tyranny of our genes and how we may escape from it. Humphrey is an expert on language, Latto on law, and Dawkins on science. I found it striking that the same question, the clash in human society between the interests of the individual and the interests of the group, should arise in three widely separated contexts. I will describe the three hits in turn and then put them together and arrive at some conclusions.
2. The First Hit: Language
Caroline Humphrey gave a talk at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society with the title, "Alternative Freedoms", in April 2005, and her text was published in the Proceedings of the Society, volume 151, pages 1-10, in March 2007. Her concern was the illusion prevalent in America that the American idea of freedom has a meaning that can be readily understood and shared by people all over the world. If our idea of freedom is to be shared by people belonging to other cultures, then our word for freedom must be translatable into their languages. If translation of the word fails, then understanding of the idea must also fail. Humphrey examines in detail the translation of the word "freedom" into Russian, and shows us how and why the translation fails.
There are three Russian words that are commonly used to translate the English word "Freedom".
They are "Svoboda", "Mir" and "Volya". Each has different overtones of meaning and history that are foreign to our way of thinking. "In medieval times", Humphrey writes, "svoboda, which is based on the root 'svoi' (self, ours), seems to have meant something rather different, that is, the security and well-being that result from living amongst one's own people. Svoboda first of all was the agglomeration of practices of our own way of life, most fundamentally contrasted with those of alien people and enemies. It suggests an image of a social kind of freedom, one that was not centred on the singular individual."
She continues with "Mir". "Mir has the meaning of the universe, all humanity, the world, or any given world, and in the past it also referred to the rural commune, the social world of the peasant. Mir points to the well-being naturally present between all persons, communities, and their environment. This is the idyllic image of the universalised community, which ignores its fatal downside, namely, that if individuals subordinate themselves to such a totality they may be easily manipulated by any government claiming to represent it. I hope this helps explain the deeply non-intuitive fact (to us) that there are Russian villagers today who identify freedom, precisely with Stalinism. Freedom here melds svoboda with mir, producing an emotion of security, warmth, and expansiveness that is still remembered by older people today."
Lastly comes "Volya". "Many people hold that the true Russian word for freedom is volya. Volya means 'will' as well as individual, personal freedom. Volya is sensation, emotion, and action. But volya too has dark shadows. In political life there can be a volya that indicates a despotic freedom of action. The psychic consequences of unrestrained volya are likely to be destructive to the very person holding it." Humphrey sums up her three notions of freedom in Russia as follows: "What I have tried to describe so far is three different concepts of freedom, how they were related to one another in the Soviet context, and how each of them came at a heavy cost, of distance from reality, of fear, of anger or isolation."
The image that Humphrey uses to illustrate Russian notions of freedom is the Chukotka region of far eastern Siberia, which her student Niobe Thompson has studied in depth. Chukotka today is divided into two worlds, the rich, warm, insulated world of oil-fields and luxury hotels, and the cold, dark, dangerous world of the Arctic wilderness outside. Inside the fence, freedom is svoboda, the freedom of a tightly organized Mafia to run its own business. Outside, freedom is volya, the freedom of groups of pioneers to roam and take their chances in an endless expanse of frozen lakes and forests. "Volya has become the sphere for personal ethics and svoboda that of efficacious yet immoral action. The new svoboda furthermore is associated with privilege and foreignness, indeed with the humiliation of what Russians see as imperialism and global power. Meanwhile, Mir has evaporated, perhaps, though, to morph into the freedom of pure space (prostor), nature, the environment." None of the three words carries the same resonances as our word "freedom". The nuances of language reveal profound differences between the English and Russian cultures. The main difference lies in the relative importance of the individual and the group. Russian culture missed the Renaissance which turned Western Europe toward the cult of the individual.
During the time of the Renaissance, Russian culture was dominated by the fight against Tartar hegemony, a fight that demanded loyalty to the group and self-sacrifice of the individual. To defeat the Tartars, Russians had to learn to think like Tartars. All the way to the twenty-first century, Russian Tsars, and their successors Lenin and Stalin and Putin, were consolidating their personal power like Tartar Khans, while English Kings were at the same time yielding their power to assemblages of merchants and lawyers.
When we look beyond Europe and Russia to the rest of the world, translation of our words and our ideas becomes even more difficult. Moslem culture and Sino-Japanese culture are even more group-centered than Russian culture. Our individualistic concept of freedom seems natural only to a minority of people. Since we are a minority, it is important for us to understand how the rest of the world thinks. We may even have something to learn from the majority.
3. The Second Hit: Law
The second hit was an article with the title, "Has the Supreme Court Lost its Way?", published in the September 2007 issue of the magazine, "Washington Lawyer" by Lawrence Latta, a lawyer who runs a private practice in Washington. Latto analyzes the history ap.d the consequences of a famous case, "Regents of the University of California versus Bakke", decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1977 with a vote of five to four, the nine judges explaining their reasons in six separate opiniops. Allan Bakke was a white student who applied for admission to the medical school of the University of California at Davis. Bakke was denied admission. Of the hundred places for new students, the University had set sixteen aside for members of four specified minority groups. Bakke sued the University, claiming that his exclusion was a denial of his right to equal protection of the laws. He claimed that the University had violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race by any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. The case came first to the state Supreme Court of California, which decided in favor of Bakke. The University appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court, which again decided in favor of Bakke. Bakke was admitted to the medical school and the quota of sixteen places for minority students was abolished. During the subsequent thirty years, the Bakke decision has served as a precedent for many decisions in similar cases when public school or public university administrators tried to maintain special programs for racial minority groups. At issue in all these cases is the clash between two rights, the right of an individual to equal protection of the laws, and the right of a group that is disadvantaged as a result of past discrimination to obtain an equal share of educational opportunities. The Bakke decision, and the later decisions based on the Bakke precedent, said that the right of the individual must prevail over the right of the group. These decisions have reinforced the tendency of Americans to think of America as a society of individuals rather than a society of communities.
Lawrence Latto is saying that the Bakke decision was legally and morally wrong, and that the Supreme Court has lost its way by following the Bakke decision as a precedent. To support his view of the matter, Latto quotes President Lyndon Johnson, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others', and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates". Latto allows that Johnson "probably was less qualified by temperament and ability than anyone to be a judge", but still maintains that Johnson was right. For Johnson the basic issue was fairness. In a society that has historically treated minority groups unfairly, equal rights for the individual are not enough. Minority groups think of themselves as groups rather than as individuals. To them, fairness means fairness to the group. To' the black community, fairness means that the community should have a sliare of professionally trained doctors proportional to their population. It is not enough for the individual black student to have an equal chance to compete with better-prepared whites.
The main part of Latto's essay is a detailed analysis of the legal opinions that the judges wrote to justify their decisions. The judges were preoccupied with fine points of constitutional law rather than with trying to achieve fairness. The main issue as they saw it was which of two criteria should govern the constitutionality of state programs providing special assistance to minority citizens. The two criteria are called rationality and strict scrutiny. Rationality means that the program is constitutional if it is reasonably designed to achieve its aim of helping disadvantaged minorities. Strict scrutiny means that the judges have the duty to scrutinize the program rigorously and declare it unconstitutional if they find that it is not "narrowly tailored" to achieve a "compelling governmental interest". The majority of five judges believed in strict scrutiny, the minority of four believed in rationality, and this ideologjcal division determined the outcome of the case.
Latto describes how the doctrines of rationality and strict scrutiny originated in a lengthy and abstruse opinion written in 1937 by Justice Stone. Justice Stone wrote the opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court, upholding a judgment that condemned the Carolene Products Company, a dairy in Georgia, for violating the Filled Milk Act of 1923, which prohibited the interstat,e sale of milk containing any fat other than butter fat. Justice Stone used the criterion of rationality to uphold the Filled Milk Act, which was all that he needed to settle the case against Carolene Products. But then he went on to write an even lengthier footnote to his opinion, observing that the criterion of rationality might not always be sufficient. He remarked that a more exacting judicial scrutiny might be required for a review of statutes directed at particular religious or racial minorities. "Prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry". Latto concludes his summary of Stone's opinion by saying, "The footnote is written in the terse, precise, and somewhat turgid fashion of a judge of the very highest rank."
Five of the justices who deliberated upon the Bakke case forty years later decided that this was a case to which the Stone footnote was clearly relevant. They wrote several opinions explaining how they applied their strict scrutiny to the affirmative action program of the University of California and found it unconstitutional, either because it was not "narrowly tailored" enough, or because it was not "responsive to a compelling governmental interest". Their judgment was a historical turning-point, providing a legal precedent for overturning affirmative action programs in schools and universities all over the country. As the years went by, the ascendancy of individual rights over group rights became more and more firmly established. After telling the story of the judges and their opinions in the Bakke case, Latto asks the question, "Why did they make this bad decision?" and answers it, "Probably because of the arrogance that too often occurs in persons with unlimited and unaccountable power. The threshold question was, who should be the primary decision maker, the Congress, the state legislatures and their agencies, or the Court? Naturally, they believed that they were better equipped to do the job. Also it increased, rather than diminished, their role. But they missed the point and, being so entranced by the intricacies of their craft at which they were so skilled, they found all the wrong reasons for making this choice. ... The Court's too long delayed decision in 'Brown versus Board of Education' was met with vigorous resistance that lasted for decades but did not prevent much progress from being made toward a country with more freedom and opportunity for all. It is still a work in progress. It is strange that the Supreme Court, which we view as the protector of our liberties and even of certain natural rights, should now erect a barrier against more rapid progress toward that end". Latto is here using the words "freedom" and "liberties" to mean the rights of minority groups to equal education and equal opportunities. The Supreme Court and the majority of Americans use the same words with a different meaning, paying attention to the rights of individuals only.
4. The Third Hit: Science
The third hit will take the longest to explain, because it involves some scientific jargon. I will try to keep the jargon to a minimum. The hit happened at a gathering of scientists invited by John Brockman to stay overnight at Eastover, his beautiful farm in rural Connecticut. John Brockman is a literary agent who presides over a group of people called the Reality Club, with a web-site called "Edge", where he invites scientists and writers to engage in discussions about questions of the day. The meeting at Eastover was a rare event at which devotees of the web-site could meet face to face. I was delighted to find there two famous biological entrepreneurs, Craig Venter who is world champion reader of genomes, and George Church who is world champion writer of genomes. Craig Venter has spent the last year cruising around the world in a boat equipped with sequencing equipment, fishing out of the ocean samples of thousands of species of marine organisms previously unknown to science, and sequencing their DNA. George Church has spent the last year perfecting his techniques for synthesizing long stretches of DNA embodying any given sequence of base-pairs. Venter is able to translate any naturally occurring piece of DNA into a piece of computer-code spec-ifying the sequence of its base-pairs. Church is able to translate any computer-code sequence back into a piece of synthetic DNA with the specified base-pairs accurately placed in the right order.
Working together, these two technologies will soon give us the ability to design and construct living creatures for fun and for profit. They give new meaning to the phrase, "Genetically Modified Organisms". Most people are afraid of genetically modified organisms, because they imagine such organisms being the property of big corporations such as Monsanto. There are good reasons for distrusting Monsanto. Monsanto has made a habit of inserting genes for poisonous pesticides into crop-plants such as cotton and soybeans. But genetically modified organisms may not belong much longer to the big corporations. I am making a prediction, that biological technology will soon be domesticated, just as computer technology was domesticated during the last fifty years. I see the technologies of Craig Venter and George Church rapidly becoming user-friendly and cheap enough to be accessible to ordinary farmers and gardeners and animal-breeders. I am saying that these technologies are instruments of liberation rather than oppression, giving small farmers and breeders the chance to be creative and also to be economically productive. This was the background out of which our conversation at Eastover arose.
A few days before the meeting, John Brockman put onto his "Edge" web-site an extract from my book, "A Many-colored Glass", which had just been published by the University of Virginia Press. The extract was called, "Our Biotech Future", and outlined my views about the past and future of life on this planet. Following the ideas of the great biologist Carl Woese, I divided the past history of life into three periods. The first period I call the Pre-Darwinian era, when all life consisted of primitive cells sharing genetic information freely, with no division into separate species. Biologists call this free sharing "horizontal gene transfer", since it is unlike the normal vertical transfer of genes from mother to daughter. The second period I call the Darwinian Interlude, when all life was divided into species and each species refused to share genetic information with others. The third period I call the Post- Darwinian Era, the era in which we are now living. Here is the extract that appeared on the "Edge" web-site:
"The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery of life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established, evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.
"Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between tw_ periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo Sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. And now, as Homo Sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, an_,,'the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented."
John Brockman had sent this extract to Richard Dawkins in Oxford and asked for his comments. On the morning of the meeting at Eastover, Dawkins E-mailed his comments to Brockman. Brockman invited me to talk to the assembled gathering, and then, as soon as I had finished, read Dawkins's comments aloud. Here is what Dawkins wrote:
"By Darwinian evolution Woese means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them. These two quotations from Dyson constitute a classic schoolboy howler, a catastrophic misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution, both as Darwin understood it, and as we understand it today in rather different language, is not based on the competition for survival of species. It is based on competition for survival within species. Darwin would have said competition between individuals within every species. I would say competition between genes within gene pools. The difference between those two ways of putting it is small compared with Dyson's howler (shared by most laymen: it is the howler that I wrote The Selfish Gene partly to dispel, and I thought I had pretty much succeeded, but Dyson obviously hasn't read it!) that natural selection is about the differential survival or extinction of species. Of course the extinction of species is extremely important in the history of life, and there may very well be non-random aspects of it (some species are more likely to go extinct than others) but, although this may in some superficial sense resemble Darwinian selection, it is not the selection process that has driven evolution. Moreover, arms races between species constitute an important part of the competitive climate that drives Darwinian evolution. But in, for example, the arms race between predators and prey, or parasites and hosts, the competition that drives evolution is all going on within species. Individual foxes don't compete with rabbits, they compete with other individual foxes within their own species to be the ones that catch the rabbits (I would prefer to rephrase it as competition between genes within the fox gene pool).
"The rest of Dyson's piece is interesting, as you'd expect, and there really is an interesting sense in which there is an interlude between two periods of horizontal transfer (and we mustn't forget that bacteria still practise horizontal transfer and have done throughout the time when eucaryotes have been in the 'Interlude'). But the interlude in the middle is not the Darwinian Interlude, it is the Meiosis-Sex-Gene-Pool-Species Interlude. Darwinian selection betwen genes still goes on during eras of horizontal transfer, just as it does during the Interlude. What happened during the 3-billion-year Interlude is that genes were confined to gene pools and limited to competing with other genes within the same species. Previously (and still in bacteria) they were free to compete with other genes more widely (there was no such thing as a species outside the 'Interlude'). If a new period of horizontal transfer is indeed now dawning through technology, genes may become free to compete with other genes more widely yet again. As I said, there are fascinating ideas in Freeman Dyson's piece. But it is a huge pity it is marred by such an elementary mistake at the heart of it. Richard."
As an addendum to this message, Brockman added, "Dawkins asked me to make it clear that his E-mail was written hastily as a letter to me, and was not designed for publication, or indeed to be read out at a meeting of biologists at your farm." In spite of that, he read it anyway, and invited me to respond. I responded as follows:
"Dear Richard Dawkins, thankyou for the E-mail that you sent to John Brockman, saying that I had made a 'school-boy howler' when I said that Darwinian evolution was competition between species rather than between individuals. You also said I obviously had not read The Selfish Gene. In fact I did read your book and disagreed with it for the following reasons. Here are two replies to your E-mail. The first was a verbal response made immediately after Brockman read it aloud at his farm. The second was written the following day after thinking more carefully about the question.
"First response. What I wrote is not a howler and Dawkins is wrong. Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptatjons. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size. So big steps are most likely when populations are small, giving rise to the 'punctuated equilibrium' that is seen in the fossil record. The competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.
"Second response. It is absurd to think that group selection is less important than individual selection. Consider for example Dodo A and Dodo B, competing for mates and progeny in the dodo population on the island of Mauritius. Dodo A competes much better and has greater fitness, as measured by individual selection. Dodo A mates more often and has many more grandchildren than Dodo B. A hundred years later, the species is extinct and the fitness of A and B are both reduced to zero. Selection operating at the species level has trumped selection at the individual level. Selection at the species level wiped out both A and B because the species neglected to maintain the ability to fly, which was essential to survival when human predators appeared on the island. This situation is not peculiar to dodos. It arises throughout the course of evolution, whenever environmental changes cause species to become extinct.
"In my opinion, both these responses are valid, but the second one goes more directly to the issue that divides us. Yours sincerely. Freeman Dyson". Richard Dawkins did not concede. He remained silent and so allowed me to have the last word.
After this lengthy description of Dawkins's hit and my response, let me explain why this question of the relative importance of individual selection and group selection is crucial to the evolution of our own species. Our species is unique as the inventor of civilization. How could this have happened? Civilization means the peaceful cooperation of societies much larger than the families or tribes that are held together by genetic relatedness. Peaceful cooperation requires that individuals behave altruistically, helping others at some cost to themselves. Our species did not invent altruism. Many other species, for example ants and bees and wolves and baboons, behave altruistically. But these other species are organized in genetically related groups, and are altruistic only within the group. Humans invented the extension of altruism beyond the family and the tribe_ This extension is called by biologists "the evolution of altruism". There are strongly divergent opinions as to how it could have happened, with Dawkins and me on opposite sides of the argument.
Two facts are clear. First, group selection favors the growth of big societies with altruistic rules of behavior. Big societies tend to prevail in the struggle for survival, either by wiping out small societies or by absorbing them. Second, individual selection within a big society does not favor altruism. Within a big group with altruistic rules, individual selection favors the cheater who breaks the rules. Cheating becomes easier when the group becomes larger. This is the paradox which makes the evolution of altruism hard to understand. Individual selection by itself will lead to a society of cheaters and a breakdown of altruism.
One way to resolve the paradox is to combine altruism with vengeance. Vengeance means a positive delight associated with the act of punishing cheaters. Vengeance is the dark side of altruism, but seems to be necessary for altruistic societies to evolve beyond a certain size. We know that vengeance is deeply rooted in our nature. Vengeance is especially enjoyable, as Gilbert's Mikado observed, when the punishment fits the crime. I remember as a child in England enjoying the celebration of the punishment of Guy Fawkes on November 5 each year far more than I enjoyed the celebration of the birth of Jesus. Guy Fawkes was the traitor who tried to blow up the King and Parliament together in the Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1604. He was publicly burnt alive in a particularly gruesome fashion. As children, we sang the bellicose second verse of our National Anthem, "Oh Lord our God arise, Scatter his enemies, And make them fall. Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On Thee our hopes we fix" and so on, with far more gusto than the insipid first and third verses. Delight in punishing cheaters is innate in our species, and has made us what we are, an intimate mixture of altruism and vengeance, love and hate. Altruism means to love our neighbors as ourselves. Vengeance means to take delight in punishing sinners.
There is a close analogy between the organization of human beings into societies and the organization of cells into human beings. A human being is a community of cells. Our somatic cells, all the cells that are not germ cells, are totally altruistic. A somatic cell gives up its individual freedom and lives to serve the community. Even in this perfectly altruistic community, cheating is a problem. Occasionally a somatic cell cheats and begins to live and reproduce itself independently. The offspring of the cheater become a cancer which destroys the community. But the community has devised an extreme form of punishment to discourage cheating. The punishment is called apoptosis or programmed cell death. Every cell carries a supply of lethal chemicals that will kill it, as soon as they are released. If a cell shows any signs of being a cheater, the community gives it a signal that releases the chemicals and causes it to die. Cancers only arise when a cell is a cheater and the punishment system happens to be disabled. A similar punishment system based on compulsory suicide was used in ancient Athens to punish the philosopher Socrates. The more altruistic the society, the more vindictive the punishment.
Sociologists have invented an ingenious game called the Ultimatum Game, to test quantitatively the vindictiveness of humans. The game is very simple and has been played by members of primitive tribes in many countries as well as by educated people in modern cities. In each game there are two players, A and B. A substantial sum of money, at least a day's wages in the local currency, is placed on the table, with the following rules explained in advance and agreed to by the players. Player A must divide the sum into two parts, one for A and the other forB. B then has the choice of saying yes or no to this division. If B says yes, then both A and B collect their shares as determined by A. If B says no, then the money is removed and both players get nothing. The point of the game is that B has nothing to gain from saying no, except the joy of punishing A for not being more generous. If both players were only interested in maximizing their gains, then A would offer very little to B and B would still say yes. But in fact, the result of the game is very different. Usually A offers to B between one quarter and one half of the total, and usually B says yes. In the unusual case when A offers less than one quarter, B usually says no. This same pattern of results is seen in many different cultures all over the world. If A offers less than a quarter, he is seen as a cheater, and B values the joy of punishing a cheater more highly than the joy of collecting a prize.
This harmless and illuminating game leads to the following hypothesis about the evolution of altruism. Altruism and vengeance evolved together in human societies. Within each society, individual selection favored the survival of altruists because cheaters were severely punished.
In the competition between societies, group selection favored the survival of vengeance because societies that did not punish cheaters could not work or fight effectively. Individual selection and group selection were both essential to making us what we are. Individual selection gave us altruism and group selection gave us vengeance. This hypothesis does not tell us the whole truth about the evolution of human nature, but it must be at least a part of the truth.
5. Conclusions
Let me briefly summarize what we have learned from these three writers coming at us from different directions. Caroline Humphrey the anthropologist tells us that our western concept of freedom as belonging to the individual rather than the group is not widely shared. Even in the west it is a recent development, originating in the Renaissance and unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Athens in the fifth century BC considered itself to be a shining example of a free society, but still condemned Socrates to death for corrupting young people with ideas that did not conform to community norms. Lawrence Latto the lawyer tells us that the United States Supreme Court has led our country astray by giving human rights of individuals priority over human rights of disadvantaged groups. The legal sanctification of individual rights by the Supreme Court is even more recent than the Renaissance. The tilt toward individual rights started only thirty years ago, when the Bakke case gave judges an opportunity to launch a backlash against the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Richard Dawkins the biologist scolds me sharply for my statement that group selection is at least as important as individual selection in the evolution of humans and other creatures. He maintains dogmatically the doctrine that natural selection acts only on individuals or on individual genes. Dawkins's doctrine is also of recent origin. The notion of group selection was widely accepted by evolutionary biologists, including Darwin, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The subtitle of Darwin's great work, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," shows that Darwin thought of selection as acting on races rather than on individuals.
Having heard the three messages, I agree with Humphrey and Latto and disagree with Dawkins. I see the roots of freedom and human rights and altruistic behavior growing historically within tight-knit communities and continuing today to belong to the communities. Individual rights and individual freedom are precious, but they are a recent and precarious addition to the old communitarian tradition. The road to a freer and more peaceful world lies through compromise, with equal respect paid to individual and community values. Anthropologists and lawyers and biologists should all be ready to help us make such compromises.
References
Brockman, John, 2007. "Life: What a Concept! An Edge Special Event at Eastover Farm", on web-site (www.edge.org). August 2007.
Dawkins, Richard, 1976. "The Selfish Gene" [Oxford, Oxford University Press].
Dyson, Freeman J., 2007. "A Many-colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe" [Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press].
Humphrey, Caroline, 2007. "Alternative Freedoms", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 151, 1-10.
Latto, Lawrence J., 2007. "Has the Supreme Court Lost its Way?", Washington Lawyer, September 2007, 35-41.