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Sociobiology and Ethical Reflection
By Don S. Browning and Bernie Lyon

This essay reviews the following contributions to the debate over sociobiology:

On Human Nature, by E.O. Wilson (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1978), 260 pp. $12.50
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, by Mary Midgley (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 376 pp. $12.50

The Biological Origin of Human Values by George E.Pugh (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 461 pp. $20.00.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 224 pp $2.95

The Use and Abuse of Biology, by Marshall Sahlins (Ann Arbor The University of Michigan Press, 1977) 120 pp. $3.95.
Sociobiology and Behavior by David P Barash (New York: Elsevier, 1977), 378 pp. $6.95.

The Sociobiology Debate ed by Arthur Caplan (New York: Harper and Row 1978), 514 pp. $12.50.
Sociobiology and Human Nature, ed by Michael S. Gregory, Anita Silvers and Diane Sutch (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978) 326 pp. $14.95.

THE PUBLICATION of E.O. Wilson's On Human Nature is a publishing event with striking similarities to the appearance of B F Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Both were aggressive and popularly-written statements claiming the centrality of their respective views for interpreting human behavior. Both books are colossal, and perhaps productive, overstatements. Skinner reduced all human behavior to the determinisms of environmental reinforcements. Wilson does just the opposite, he reduces human behavior to the determinism of genetic reproduction. For the one, environment explains all, for the other, genes explain all---or at least nearly all.

Wilson is clearly more ambivalent about his deterministic point of view than is Skinner. One moment Wilson boldly asserts that genes are the ultimate causal factors behind all human behavior. The next moment he makes appeals to the importance of "will" and the necessity of rational ethical reflection for the task of picking and choosing between our various biologically inherited tendencies. Both books are written with a missionary zeal for the salvatory potentialities of their

Don S. Browning is Professor of Religion and Psychological Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Dean of the Disciples Divinity House. He has written widely in the fields of psychology and religion, including The Moral Context of Pastoral Care (1976), Generative Man: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (1973), and Atonement and Psychotherapy (1966). His book Pluralism and Personality: William James and Some Contemporary Cultures of Personality will be published by Bucknell University Press in 1980. Bernie Lyon is a Ph.D. student in the field of Religion and Psychological Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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respective disciplines. Both men believe that the world's problems are at a stage of extreme emergency and that only their perspective on human affairs will show us how to save ourselves.

But Wilson is obviously the more impatient of the two Skinner wrote his popular essay rather late in his career. His work on operant conditioning had been underway for decades. Wilson is a younger man. In a rather short span of time, he has written a trilogy of books (The Insect Societies, 1971, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 1975; and On Human Nature, 1978) exploring the general field of sociobiology and advancing arguments about how it is both indispensable and crucial for the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and even the humanities. These claims were stated first most forcefully in the programmatic last chapter of Sociobiology, which he daringly entitled "Man From Sociobiology to Sociology ." On Human Nature advances these claims in a popular and even speculative format designed to provoke maximum attention and the widest possible public debate. Read from this perspective, the book is clearly a success. Whether the book, however, can sustain a critical reading and just what might be in the field of sociobiology that would interest the thoughtful Christian are issues I hope to investigate in the following pages.

I

Sociobiology, of course, is not the creation of E.O. Wilson, just as behaviorism was not the creation of Skinner alone. As Pavlov, Watson, and Thorndike stood behind Skinner's work, so Darwin, Lamarck, Mendel, Lorenz, Dobzhansky, and George C. Williams stand behind Wilson. Wilson contributed to sociobiology primarily through his studies of insect behavior, but his more popular and programmatic writings build on a long tradition in biology starting with Darwin and moving into the present. Theology and the philosophy of religion themselves certainly have not gone untouched by this tradition. American philosophical pragmatism, associated with the names of James and Dewey, were decisively influenced by Darwinist modes of thought as were, of course, the "evolutionary ethicians" at the turn of the century. Functionalism in both the social sciences and theology has strong roots in this Darwinist tradition. Functional and evolutionary styles of thinking have had far more influence on American religious thought than our post neoorthodox theological consciousness is inclined to admit. Furthermore, if Wilson had read William James on the subject of the plurality of human biological interests, he would not have made some of the mistakes that he did. Hence, sociobiology has been around, in one form or another, for a long time.

Wilson's vision of sociobiology has clearly discernible religious dimensions. Wilson senses the current malaise that hovers over the Western consciousness. Traditional religion, he contends, can no longer provide the energizing vision needed to keep modern people from

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sinking into self-preoccupation and narcissism. A new meaning for human existence is needed, a meaning that is immanent within the very life process itself. This meaning Wilson finds in the most rudimentary strivings of each person's genetic self-duplication. Wilson tells us that "no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history" (On Human Nature, p. 2). More specifically this means that "the brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly" (Ibid., p. 2).

Such statements point to the first of two major theses of the book. This is the more rigorous or deterministic form of his argument. In brief, it is the claim that all human activity, interests, ideologies, and beliefs have as their ultimate cause our own genes' blind thrust to replicate themselves. When Wilson speaks like this-and it is often-he is unapologetically the biological mechanist, the philosophical materialist, and the disciplinary imperialist who argues that what is really important about each human activity is its ultimate cause in our genes' mechanical fight for survival.

This same point of view is stated more precisely in Barash's textbook entitled Sociobiology, and Behavior. Barash makes a distinction that is only implicit in Wilson, i.e., the distinction between the "ultimate" and the "proximate" causes of behavior. Barash admits that there are proximate causes of behavior (psychological, sociological, economic), but the really ultimate (read: really important) causes are the genetic ones. Dawkins, in the beginning of his beautifully written and highly learned book, The Selfish Gene, is even bolder and more reductionistic than are Wilson and Barash. For Dawkins, human beings and their bodies are nothing more than protective coats or "survival machines" for serving the genes which inhabit them. Humans are, Dawkins suggests in his preface, "robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes" ( The Selfish Gene, p. ix).

II

But the rigorous form of Wilson's argument is not maintained throughout the book. The difficulty with On Human Nature is that once having taken the more deterministic stand, Wilson never has hold of the actual philosophical grounds which permit him to take the more liberal and pluralistic view that actually emerges in the book. For, at the same time that he takes the deterministic and mechanistic point of view, he also seems to repudiate it. Nowhere in this book, or in his other writings, does Wilson actually argue that knowledge of biology provides humans with the sufficient grounds for ethical reflection and decision. The wiser and more useful form of Wilson's argument is that knowledge of human biology is a necessary, but not sufficient, grounds for ethical reflection and decisions. In one place Wilson writes that "human nature is... a hodgepodge of special genetic adaptations to an environment largely vanished, the world of the Ice-Age hunter-gatherer" (ibid, p 196). Not

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all of humanity's wants and biological tendencies are equally relevant to the adaptive task in any given environmental situation. Some of our tendencies need to be suppressed and some need to be encouraged. The task of evolutionary biology is to measure the biological regularities and constraints caused by our genetic programming, to locate their source in the brain, and finally to explain their significance through the "reconstruction of the evolutionary history of the mind" (ibid., p. 6).

Wilson acknowledges that charting this range of biologically determined human responses is not itself identical to the ethical task. The ethical task involves specifying "which of the censors and motivators should be obeyed and which ones might better be curtailed or sublimated" (ibid., p. 6). Sociobiology is necessary for ethical reflection and decision making; it provides the moral philosopher with the knowledge of the biological needs and tendencies within which ethical thinking must make its choices. Wilson offers an imaginary situation to clarify his position: if all the responses of all species could be studied and represented, there might be 23 such responses that could be labeled A through Z. Humans might exhibit only responses A through P, and individuals under the pressure of particular cultural learnings might show only responses A through F or G through K. It is important, Wilson would argue, for ethics to know that human potentialities are limited to the response range A through P and that Q through Z are outside of the range of human possibility. Either these latter kinds of responses are impossible for people, or people will not maintain them for long, or finally they will be maintained only at great cost to other human values.

Hence, human slavery is not a possibility for humans although it would certainly be most natural for an intelligent creature with the genetic heritage of an ant. Or again, polyandry is probably not a real possibility for the organization of human sexuality for reasons which population genetics understands. If the duplication of one's own genes is the master life motive, then women, with the limited number of eggs they produce in a lifetime (around 400), have much more at stake in sexual reproduction than do men who theoretically could impregnate thousands of women. Hence Wilson believes that it is a fact of biological evolution that men are naturally more sexually adventurous and that women are more inclined to bond with one dependable man who will help them make a success (bring to term and preserve) what takes her so much effort to achieve. For someone to advocate polyandry seriously would be, from Wilson's perspective, clearly unethical because it would take people far beyond the range of behavior typical of the human species. As an experiment, it would be doomed to failure and would create great havoc in the process.

At this level of argument, Wilson has clearly gone beyond the thoroughgoing mechanism of the rigorous form of his position. But he does not seem to recognize that to admit biological knowledge does not completely determine our ethical decisions and that, instead, our ethical decisions transcend and select from a wide range of sometimes compet-

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ing biological urges. In short, Wilson apparently concedes that the genetic mechanism does not rule all aspects of human behavior.

III

When Wilson advances his argument at this level, even though it is confused, he is in very good company. Decades ago William James and more recently Mary Midgley, in her sparking and sophisticated Beast and Man, have both offered similar views on the relation of biology to ethics. But neither James nor Midgley makes the mistake of overcommiting themselves to philosophical materialism and mechanism. As early as 1878 in his remarkable essay entitled. "Remarks of Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence," and throughout various chapters in his monumental Principles of Psychology, James develops an image of humans as the most instinctually rich and pluralistic of all the creatures. ¹ This instinctual richness and plasticity, although the very source of humanity's repertoire of adaptive responses, is also the source of possible confusion and even conflict. From James' point of view, human instinctual confusion forces people toward the use of intelligence and morality. Intelligence and morality select and guide humanity's great range of biologically-grounded adaptive responses. It is precisely because of this extensive repertoire of biological interests and responses that humans are condemned to morality as a primary strategy for living. It is the function of morality, James argued, to resolve the conflicts, both interpersonal and intrapsychic, between the various biological interests and responses that evolution has left with humanity.

Mary Midgley, however, states this point of view with even greater clarity than either James or Wilson. Midgley's widely acclaimed Beast and Man should be read as a sympathetic critique of sociobiology in general and Wilson in particular. Midgley is a philosopher trained in the British tradition of ordinary language analysis. But in ways untypical of that tradition, she is interested in the biological study of humans and is convinced of the relevance of biological knowledge for moral philosophy. Midgley is critical of Wilson's alleged mechanistic philosophical learnings, and much of her book is dedicated to its refutation. But her book was written with Wilson's Sociobiology, in mind and was published before the appearance of his On Human Nature. Midgley's statement about the relation of biological knowledge to ethics, although devoid of Wilson's unfortunate mechanistic dogmatism, is not all that far from the position that Wilson himself holds in his saner moments. Listen to some of the following quotations from her spirited and insightful book:" All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like" (Beast and Man, p 166). Or again, "Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires" (Ibid., p. 168). Moral "rules and

¹ See his "Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence ' in James's Collected Essays and Reviews (New York Russell and Russell 1920), pp 43-68 and Chapters 2 3 and 24 of The Principles of Psychology, Vols. I and II (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), Vol. I pp. 12-103 and Vol. II, pp. 383-441.

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principles, standards and ideals emerge as part of a priority system by which we guide ourselves through the jungle" of conflicting and competing biological interests and responses (Ibid., p. 169). And finally, the "traditional business of moral philosophy is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from different sides of our nature" (Ibid., p. 169). And insofar as sociobiology has something to contribute to surveying and charting these innate biological tendencies, it makes a necessary, although not sufficient, contribution to ethical reflection and decision- making.

IV

In spite of the above similarities with the Wilson of On Human Nature, Midgley advances a major critical argument against him that should not be overlooked. Midgley is severely and rightly critical of Wilson's reduction of all human motivation to that one great drive toward survival and reproduction of our individual gene pools. Both Wilson and Dawkins follow the celebrated theories of George C. Williams who has advanced the theory that evolution proceeds on the basis of "individual" in contrast to "group" selection.² By this it is meant that evolution proceeds through environmental selection of individuals according to their genetic fitness-i. e. , their reproductive success, rather than through the process of the selection of groups according to the adaptive qualities of the group. The selected individuals are the ones who leave comparatively more reproducing off-spring who, in turn, luckily have the same fit and adaptive genes. This is the theory of biological evolution now considered to be dominant and almost normative. This is the theory of evolution advanced in Donald Campbell's 1975 presidential address before the American Psychological Association, which he used to launch such a devastating attack on the superficial images of humanity to be found in most of contemporary psychology. This is the theory of human evolution that stands behind the idea of the selfish gene-i.e., the idea that we are all always and everywhere driven by the clearly egoistic need to replicate and preserve our own genes through sexual reproduction. It is by granting this theory the status of almost irrefutable science that Campbell advanced his famous critique on the romantic and permissive presuppositions associated with most of contemporary psychology, but especially psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology.³ Although Midgley can appreciate the realist that the Williams-Wilson-Campbell-Dawkins kind of thinking represents, she believes it is lamentably, one-sided, even from a biological perspective Midgley, as did James many years ago, argues for a plurality of biological needs, the drive toward the immortality of our genes as being only one among many. We value more than survival, although we certainly do value that. We cannot reduce all our strivings

² See George C. Williams, Sex and Evolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1975) or his Adaptation and Natural Selection (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1966).
³ Donald Campbell, "On the Conflicts Between Biological and Social Evolution and between Psychology and Moral Tradition Zygon Vol. 11 (Sept 1976) pp. 167-208.

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to that "one basic one of efficiency in surviving" (Ibid., p. 152) All creatures, and especially humans, have a plurality of biological interests, and the task is to balance them all in ways consistent with survival, but not necessarily simply for survival. It is because we want so many things, all of which are not easily reconcilable, that moral philosophy (and, perhaps, moral theology) has its unique task. Midgley tells us that "moral philosophy, unlike straight moralizing, arises from and thrives on a plurality of values" (Ibid., p. 167).

James developed a similar point of view nearly a century ago. Following Darwin, he divided the causes of evolution into two spontaneous variation and natural selection .Spontaneous variation is that mysterious process whereby biological givens (our gene pool in Wilson's terminology) in individuals change, something new emerges or is mysteriously created. Natural selection refers to the way environmental conditions select some characteristics and not others James's point (and here he is probably consistent with Darwin) is that spontaneous variation has given humans a wide range of natural biological interests.We have interests in pleasure, beauty, love, friendship, and even religion.All of these tendencies may be fed (although perhaps not specifically rooted) in our biological interests .These are the values that make life worth living-that make it interesting. We are interested in survival, but we are interested in more. The formula for James goes something like this we have all kinds of interests and survival is just one. But any tendency that we have, insofar as it has been selected by the environment and preserved, probably also has (or has had) secondary survival and adaptive value.⁴ Hence James, like Midgley, sees human beings as a plurality of biological needs and tendencies, only some of which are interested in the replication and immortality of genes. Also very much like Midgley, James saw the task of ethics as a matter of mediating between and hierarchically ordering these conflicting human desires and wants James could agree with Midgley's way of articulating the role played by our inherited human nature in the process of ethical thinking. "The central factors in us must be accepted, and the right line of human conduct must lie somewhere within the range they allow" (Beast and Man, p. 81). The acceptance of our finitude and creatureliness is certainly one of the significant cultural and potentially religious-implications of the sociobiology movement.

V

The direction represented by James and Midgley yields a much richer image of human nature than is often associated with biology. Biologically-grounded images of human beings are often thought to show them as interested primarily in food, water, and sex. They are often thought to depict humans as bundles of elementary secretions, reflexes, and low-level impulses. But a much larger and more humane

⁴ For this interpretation of James, see Don Brownings forthcoming Pluralism and Personality: William James and Some Contemporary Cultures of Personality:(Bucknell University Press 1980).

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image is now emerging in the biological literature George Pugh's The Biological Origin of Human Values is a good example of this direction. Pugh certainly acknowledges the importance of the motive to replicate our own genes, but, in contrast to Wilson and much closer to James and Midgley, he articulates a model of humanity that gives biological grounding to some of the capacities commonly thought to be at the very essence of humankind.

Pugh divides human values into primary and secondary values. The primary values are biological and related to species survival, but as James thought was the case, they have intrinsic satisfactions and are not always functioning solely for the sake of survival. Pugh divides our primary values into selfish, social, and intellectual values and demonstrates rather convincingly that there are biological roots to them all. We are certainly selfish creatures, but we also, in ways which Wilson misses, have real altruistic impulses that are not just derived from our narrow desire to preserve the bearers of our own genes. As Pugh observes, "the instinctive values include a mix of both altruistic and selfish elements." ( The Biological Origin of Human Values, p. 30). Our higher level intellectual capacities also have biological roots and are not just derived from our frustrated libidinal impulses, as early psychoanalysis and some forms of behaviorism have contended.

As rich as are our primarily values, Pugh admits that we cannot live by them alone. We need what he calls secondary values, which are moral values, to order and guide our primary values. Pugh, then, is well within the basic message of the sociobiology tradition. We need to live, he would counsel, within the central tendencies of our biological inheritance, but ethics needs to select even more specifically those values which can be organized into harmonious human communities. In many ways, Pugh's book is far more satisfying than is Wilson's. It does not have the philosophical sophistication of Midgley's Beast and Man, but in certain ways it brings under one cover some of the better insights of both Wilson and Midgley. It is not a book without its problems, but both theologians and ministers can certainly read it with profit.

VI

Finally, what is the contribution of sociobiology to theology and the contemporary religious situations. Are we to throw Wilson out because of his uncritical and inconsistent advocacy of philosophical materialism? Or are we to repudiate him because he claims biology has relevance for ethics and in so doing fails to understand the importance of revelation, Scripture, and the imperatives of the will of God?

Wilson does have a positive view of the role of religion in human affairs He believes that religions can play an adaptive role in the struggle for survival. Most distinctively, Wilson follows Ralph Burhoe and Hans Mol in seeing religion as a mechanism for sanctioning and sacralizing group identity; it helps preserve the adaptive strategies and identities which have been selected as successful through the eons of human interaction with the environment (On Human Nature, pp 188

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and 248). But the careful reader can detect considerable confusion in Wilson's thinking about religion. He waffles back and forth between recommending that a materialistic version of evolutionary theory itself provides the new religious myth (Ibid., p. 192) and suggesting that, after all, God can easily be credited with getting the entire evolutionary process going as its first cause-a position that goes far beyond strict scientific materialism (Ibid., p. 205). After initially throwing out religion as a tenable answer to the malaise of modernity, it is surprising to see him write in the final paragraphs that "God remains a viable hypothesis as the prime mover, however undefinable and untestable that conception may be." (Ibid., p. 205).

But what use can Christian theology make of sociobiology. The answer to that question will depend on one's prior methodological commitments about how theology should be done. Obviously, if sociobiology is relevant to theology at all, it is relevant to theological ethics. But if one's method of doing theological ethics is based exclusively on Scripture and is in no way open to philosophy or the human sciences, then the claims of sociobiology, even when cleaned up and made more acceptable by a Midgley or a James, would be of little interest. But if one's methodology leads one to take philosophy and the human sciences seriously, then sociobiology could be of considerable interest. Since my own methodological commitments lead me in the latter direction, let me investigate some of its possibilities.

We already have seen that, in spite of their differences, Wilson, Midgley, Pugh, and Barash all agree that sociobiology provides necessary, but not sufficient, information for productive ethical thinking. In other words, in order to use the possible facts of sociobiology normatively, one must bring a moral point of view to these facts. It could be argued that the Judaeo-Christian tradition provides a moral perspective which might refine and order the facts of sociobiology. But to make this argument one would have to distinguish between this tradition's more abstract moral demands for justice and respect of persons and its more specific and concrete moral injunctions. Sociobiology does not provide these more abstract moral demands for justice and the respect of persons. These formal ethical points of view may be philosophically derivable, but they are also clearly revealed and made vivid and powerful in the symbols of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. But if theologians bring this spiritually vivified moral point of view to the facts of sociobiology, what more do theologians learn that they do not already know?

The potential contribution of sociobiology, or for that matter, any science that may deepen our knowledge of humanity, comes at the level of addressing more concrete issues pertaining to how we should order our daily lives-at the level of practical ethical reflection. Sociobiology tells us to work out our concerns about justice and mutual respect within a clear picture of human finitude, creatureliness, and limitation. It tells us we cannot become everything and anything It reminds us that there are real limits to our becoming. Sociobiology challenges the illusions of

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behaviorism, existentialism, and humanism about the infinite malleability of our natures.

VII

In short, sociobiology offers to the moral theologian or theological ethicist a new approach to natural law thinking in the field of religious ethics. Whereas the old Catholic tradition was based on an inadequate biology that centered on the analysis of supposed goals of certain natural functions, the new method of natural law thinking would be different. This new form would only tell us of our central tendencies the central tendencies- of our biological natures which we must in some way obey. But this form of natural law thinking would repudiate the idea that everything proved to be natural must be deemed to be morally good. In fact, just the reverse would be the case. Some natural inclinations should clearly be suppressed or otherwise controlled simply because they conflict with other natural goods that are more fundamental or more important for present or long-term adaptive purposes.

Hence, good and reliable sociobiological data might give the moral theologian or theological ethicist a purchase on some of the slippery contemporary ethical issues that biblical theology seems unable to handle satisfactorily all by itself. Issues in sexuality. marriage, male/female relations, adulthood, aging, and even death might be profitably addressed when using, at least to a degree, the insights of sociobiology.

But to use sociobiology in this way is a delicate and complicated task. It is difficult, as is the case with almost every human science, to find clear and authoritative ways to read the facts of this new and fragile discipline. For that reason, and others as well, the field of sociobiology is readily susceptible to ideological distortion. This is especially, true at that juncture where sociobiology and ethics might relate Several essays in two recent symposia, The Sociobiology Debate and Sociobiology and Human Nature, address sociobiology as ideology. Both volumes contain important essays by the Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People. In addition, Marshall Sahlin's. The use and Abuse of Biology, is a brilliant and detailed attack on both the logical errors of sociobiology and its ideological distortions.

There is little doubt that there is a great deal of de facto error and ideology in the sociobiology literature. But if science is anything. it is precisely a method designed gradually to make progress toward removing such errors and distortions. There is every reason to believe that sociobiology will make progress and that its facts will become clearer and its ideologies fewer. In the meantime, theology should open itself to a cautious and reasoned dialogue with it. Theology, at its higher levels of vision about the reality of a morally serious yet gracious God, has nothing to fear from sociobiology. At its more concrete levels of moral deliberation, theology may well profit from sociobiology's growing knowledge about our central tendencies, and sociobiology may well profit from the moral point of view implicit in our Western theological tradition-a point of view that is necessary for sociobiology to realize its own potential contributions to our understanding of human nature.