One might think the insufficiency of any explanatory model to describing essential elements of experience might raise doubts about the model itself, but when the problem of altruism is acknowledged, it is generally addressed by a redefinition of altruism which makes it much more conformable to neo-Darwinist theory. Yet altruism as an idea has not been passive in all this. If I may borrow the language of this genre, it has in some cases parasitized other concepts. By the extremely parsimonious standards of neo-Darwinism, it is the proverbial bad penny, liable to show up anywhere. Michael Gazzaniga reports a question raised by Geoffrey Miller, another evolutionary psychologist. “Most speech appears to transfer useful information from the speaker to the listener, and it costs time and energy. It seems to be altruistic. What fitness benefit can be attained by giving another individual good information? Reviewing the original argument of Richard Dawkins and John Krebs, Miller states, ‘Evolution cannot favor altruistic information-sharing any more than it can favor altruistic food-sharing. Therefore, most animals’ signals must have evolved to manipulate the behavior of another animal for the signaler’s own benefit.’ And other animals have evolved to ignore them, because it didn’t pay to listen to manipulators.” Ergo, it seems, we, alone among the animals, have language. Why the complexity of language and our adeptness in the use of it? Gazzaniga says, “Considering this conundrum, Miller proposes that language’s complexities evolved for verbal courtship. This solves the altruism problem by providing a sexual payoff for eloquent speaking by the male and the female.” So informative speech is at peril of presenting the theorist with an instance in which a speaker confers benefit to another at cost to himself. But wait! There is manipulation! There is sexual payoff! Does this answer the question about the cost of sharing information? No. Nevertheless, our nature is defined as if determined by the nature of hypothetical primitives, humanlike in their ability to have and give information, but finding neither use nor pleasure in doing so.5
This is one instance of the fact that possible altruism can be detected in many kinds of human behavior, and that where it is even apparently detected it is obviated by elaborations of theory that would have consequences for the understanding of important evolutionary issues — pair bonding, for example, or the early history of the animal brain — since animals supposedly had a capacity for manipulation until it was selected against. Charming as the notion is that our proto-verbal ancestors found mates through eloquent proto-speech — oh, to have been a fly on the wall! — it has very rarely been the case that people have had a pool of eligible others to select among on the basis of some pleasing trait. Endogamy or restricted exogamy among small groups, the bartering of daughters, and status considerations all come into play. It often seems that American anthropologists forget how fluid our culture is and how exceptional our marriage customs are, globally and historically. Pyramus and Thisbe, Eloise and Abelard, Romeo and Juliet, even if they had lived and were able to reproduce, would have been far too exceptional to have influenced the gene pool. And consider those animals who were capable of manipulation and then capable of indifference to it, so that the capacity for it faded away. How did this initial complexity arise? Do animals now have any comparable insight into the motives of others? These neuroscientists tend to say no, though such insight would seem to confer a marked survival advantage. There is more than a little of the just-so story in this theoretical patch on the cost-benefit problem supposedly posed by the phenomenon of human speech. In this way, the specter of altruism, like a lancet fluke in the brain of an ant, distorts Darwinian argument and carries it far beyond the conceptual simplicity for which it is justly famous.
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I am indebted to Daniel Dennett for the ant and the lancet fluke, a metaphor that comes to mind often as I read in his genre. For example, consider poor Phineas Gage, the railroad worker famous for the accident he sufered and survived more than 150 years ago, an explosion that sent a large iron rod through his skull. Wilson, Pinker, Gazzaniga, and Antonio Damasio all tell this tale to illustrate the point that aspects of behavior we might think of as character or personality are localized in a specific region of the brain, a fact that, by their lights, somehow compromises the idea of individual character and undermines the notion that our amiable traits are intrinsic to our nature.
Very little is really known about Phineas Gage. The lore that surrounds him in parascientific contexts is based on a few anecdotes of uncertain provenance, to the effect that he recovered without significant damage — except to his social skills. Gazzaniga says, “He was reported the next day by the local paper to be pain free.” Now, considering that his upper jaw was shattered and he had lost an eye, and that it was 1848, if he was indeed pain free, this should surely suggest damage to the brain. But, together with his rational and coherent speech minutes after the accident, it is taken to suggest instead that somehow his brain escaped injury, except to those parts of the cerebral cortex that had, till then, kept him from being “‘fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane.’” He was twenty-five at the time of the accident. Did he have dependents? Did he have hopes? These questions seem to me of more than novelistic interest in understanding the rage and confusion that emerged in him as he recovered.6
How oddly stereotyped this anecdote is through any number of tellings. It is as if there were a Mr. Hyde in us all that would emerge sputtering expletives if our frontal lobes weren’t there to restrain him. If any kind of language is human and cultural, it is surely gross profanity, and, after that, irreverence, which must have reverence as a foil to mean anything at all. If to Victorians this behavior seemed like the emergence of the inner savage, this is understandable enough. But from our vantage, the fact that Gage was suddenly disfigured and half blind, that he suffered a prolonged infection of the brain, and that “it took much longer to recover his stamina,” according to Gazzaniga, might account for some of the profanity, which, after all, culture and language have prepared for such occasions. But the part of Gage’s brain where damage is assumed by modern writers to have been localized is believed to be the seat of the emotions. Therefore — the logic here is unclear to me — his swearing and reviling the heavens could not mean what it means when the rest of us do it. Damasio gives extensive attention to Gage, offering the standard interpretation of the reported change in his character. He cites at some length the case of a “modern Phineas Gage,” a patient who, while intellectually undamaged, lost “his ability to choose the most advantageous course of action.” Gage himself behaved “dismally” in his compromised ability “to plan for the future, to conduct himself according to the social rules he previously had learned, and to decide on the course of action that ultimately would be most advantageous to his survival.” The same could certainly be said as well of Captain Ahab. So perhaps Melville meant to propose that the organ of veneration was located in the leg. My point being that another proper context for the interpretation of Phineas Gage might be others who have sufered gross insult to the body, especially those who have been disfigured by it. And in justice to Gage, the touching fact is that he was employed continually until his final illness. No one considers what might have been the reaction of other people to him when his moving from job to job — his only sin besides cursing and irritability — attracts learned disapprobation.7