Social Echo and Rational Economics

In the construction of economic theories, from Plato and Aristotle to Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and beyond, assumptions about human nature have taken their toll to the detriment of effective predictability of markets and systems. The need to predict, plan and reason about systemic behaviour, too strong to admit postponement, overrun the obvious lack of knowledge about the human animal. Economics thus framed new ideologies, such as Marxism or capitalism, which in turn guided scientific exploration. An example of ideological framing causing a sociological paradox is eugenics. Since Galton and Darwin, eugenics has been the logical projection of evolutionary theory applied to humans. But although the idea was accepted in the beginning by liberals and leftists, it became an abomination following its corruption by the Nazis. Since the end of WWII whenever it resurfaces it is being slammed down by an almost hysterical reaction from academia and the Press (James Watson being a recent victim of this). And yet the idea persists, albeit dressed in other hides; in socialist-inspired models of egalitarianism, in laws that regulate abortions to the detriment of the middle classes, in genetics research (cloning in particular), and in educational systems. Eugenics makes one huge assumption: that by selecting for higher intelligence humanity will become, in a few generations, less violent, more altruistic and wiser. And yet, the correlation between higher intelligence and the desired attributes of peace, social cohesion and wisdom is a weak one. It smacks of wishful thinking and cultural bias. Human beings are highly intelligent animals, not angels, not creatures that stand apart from the rest. We are apes, and when push comes to shove we act like ones too – regardless of our intelligence, or good manners. War is the most obvious testament to our innate cruelty. If anything, our ingenuity seems to have been invested more in engineering war machines that in anything else.
Recent discoveries in neuroscience promise to shed much-needed light in what constitutes a human being. Deciphering the unconscious circuitry would be a task of monumental proportions dwarfing the Human Genome Project by several degrees of magnitude. Alas, the result - if successful - will be of limited use. As in the case of genes, interactions in the whole seem to play a role more important than the interacting parts alone. The infusion of neuroscience into sociology and economics is a welcome development. Nevertheless, owing to the infancy of neuroscience it should be expected that social framing will once again take the upper hand, leading to new “realistic” economic theories that reason the animal inside us. Once more, experts will reason about social systems forgetting that human activity is diffused and dominated by unconscious, autonomic, neuropsychological systems that enable people to function effectively without always calling upon the brain's scarcest resource– attentional and reasoning circuitry. To reason about non-reason is a paradox that we cannot escape. We can only understand an echo of what the human society is truly all about. The dilemma will always be how much we want to believe in it.

Darwin 101 for politicians

No other idea in human history has had a more profound impact on modern society than the evolutionary theory, independently conceived by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace 150 years ago. In neat, concise, transparent terms, it explains the multiversity of lifeforms that have replenished Earth since billions of years, the shooting of species from other species and, ultimately, the emergence of human beings. Its explanatory power is omnipotent. Evolution occurs because of natural selection. In the ever-changing environment of our planet creates conditions where certain, randomly appearing, traits in a species favor particular individuals over others, who then go on to procreate more often. By procreating they pass those favorable traits to their offspring, and this, over time, changes the whole profile of the species. A new species is thus born. From humble bacteria and viruses to sophisticated, intelligent, car-driving mammals, there has been not a single case in biology that has countered evolutionary theory. On the contrary, evolution has been confirmed again and again, not only by fossil records and discoveries in geology and the past climate of Earth but, more importantly perhaps, by probing into the nexus of life, the cell itself. The discovery of DNA as the principal promulgator of genetic information across generations has confirmed Darwin and Wallace beyond any doubt. We, and the apes, and the fish and the trees and every living thing, are indeed the products of natural selection, the descendants of a common unicellular great-great-grandfather that appeared on Earth some four billion years ago.

It is therefore not at all surprising that such a powerful idea spilled over quickly from the curious observation of amphibious lizards and garrulous birds in the Galapagos Islands and the Amazon forest, and entered the controversial realm of human society. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, was first to coin the term “eugenics” and reinterpret evolutionary theory as political philosophy. Faced with the dilemma of altruism that lead to medicine being supplied to the “poor”, the “feeble-minded” and the “sick”, and therefore ease the propagation of “inferiors”, he suggested that human society should develop towards a world of “superiors” by selectively breeding the best with the best. Being a liberal, Galton proposed that active measures should prune amongst the “poor” for those with talent.

His proposition inspired, several decades later, the instigation of the welfare state in the UK. In the US, a virtually apartheid state in the beginning of the 20^th century, eugenics were taken more literally and several States introduced forced sterilization of mentally-ill patients and others who were deemed “inferior”. Interestingly, Karl Marx was very excited about evolutionary theory. He sent Darwin a copy of his book “Das Kapital”, and wrote to his friends how evolution and class struggle seemed to go hand in hand happily. As species evolved through strife towards perfection so would human society, ultimately arriving at a classless utopia through the uprising of the oppressed workers. And yet later on, in Soviet Union, Darwinism fell quickly out of favor. Orthodox communists of the Stalinist era supported instead the acquisition of new genetic characteristics during one’s lifetime, which could then be passed on to one’s offsprings. This idea is called “Lamarckism” (from the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) and it made more sense to communist visionaries who dreamt of shaping man as the ultimate altruist. Trofim Lysenko, a notorious charlatan agronomist, denounced Darwin with the full support of the Communist Party and applied the flawed Lamarckian theory in Soviet agricultural projects, with disastrous effects.

Evolutionary theory trumps all other explanations about life on Earth. Nevertheless, it is one thing to scientifically and unequivocally explain why bats have wings, or why we have five fingers in each hand instead of six, and totally different why the variation in intelligence, or prowess, or beauty. Implying a genetic cause for such inequalities - as evolutionary theory surely does - smacks of biological determinist: i.e. that you are who you are because you were born like this, and there is nothing you can do about it. Which goes against the liberal ideology of freedom to chose and the right to prosper, as well as the socialist ideal of equality and justice. Thus, Social Darwinism, the idea that competition drives evolution in human societies, ultimately collided with almost every color in the political spectrum of the 20^th century, except perhaps fascism and Nazism which saw in the “survival of the fittest” the foundation of their totalitarian and racist ideologies. Eugenics, originally inspired by a liberal thinker in Victorian England, was corrupted and ultimately led to the crematoria of Auschwitz. That tragic event alone was enough to tarnish Social Darwinism with a terrible reputation which persists to our day.

Enter sociobiology, which many critics consider as Social Darwinism in disguise. Originally inspired to explain complex behavior in the animal world, sociobiology is routinely applied to interpret just about everything, from the dot com and real estate bubbles, to why rich men attract women more and why wealth is relative and never absolute. A new breed of economists, inspired by evolutionary thinking, takes issue with Adam Smith’s original assumption of rational players in the economy. These “behavioral economists” explain the stock markets in terms of instincts genetically inherited from our hominid ancestors that rummaged the ancestral savannas of Africa. Greed that drives markets up is seen as a battle for status amongst players who want to increase their wealth and therefore their chances of mating with a preferred member of the opposite sex. Fear – the factor that swings markets down - as the result of not wanting to lose high status, which in human societies is determined, and defined, by money.

Notable sociobiologists such as E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, contend that sociobiology is science, not ideology. That, unlike Social Darwinism, it does not say what ought to be done butwhy something happens. Yes, but surely if one has an explanation for social behavior then oneought to be compelled to take action according to that scientific knowledge. If Darwinism explains, for example, murder as a way for hierarchically-low (i.e. poorer or destitute) young males to assert their dominance, then punitive measures should be restructured accordingly. Moreover, critics of sociobiology, such as the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, argue that traits such as genre or identity are social constructs and have nothing to do with inherited genes. It is nurture not nature, they say, that carries the day and therefore a socialist utopia of socio-economic equality is ultimately feasible.

The debate of nature versus nurture is bound to define political thinking in the current century too. For, if evolution provides us with a scientific insight to human nature, we must rid ourselves of ideology, whether liberal or socialist, and embrace a neutral, scientific perspective on society. The only caveat, alas so common in science, is to distinguish between cause and effect. Are we humans what we are because of our genes? Or are we because of what we think ourselves to be?

published in the Athens News, on Friday 30th January

21st Century Eugenics - 1

Synopsis for a Café Scientifique delivered in Thessaloniki)

Eugenics was a liberal vision because, at the time of Sir Francis Galton, it was radical and against the Victorian class system. By going beyond the class structure, eugenics envisioned a future world of enhanced humans irrespective of class background. It was a truly egalitarian vision inspired by Darwinism and aiming for a balance between nature and nurture.
Following the destruction of the European class system after the carnage of WW1, egalitarian ideas were split between the Left focusing more on the “nurture” side of the argument and the Right corrupting the “nature” side and replacing it with “race”. Liberalism – expressed in the few remaining parliamentary democracies - found itself in the uneasy middle, a follower rather than a leader, a defender of its hijacked ideology.
The extreme Left in Soviet Union and the extreme Right in Nazi Germany were responsible for genocide; the former in “re-education gulags” the latter in “concentration camps”. It was thus that eugenics got a bad name, particularly from the Nazi atrocities which were linked to eugenics during the Nuremberg Trial. The line of the defence for the Nazi criminals was that they did little else compared to what the Americans were doing in their own country by means of forceful sterlization programs. The irony is, of course, that the Nazis while exterminating the Jews were aiming to destroy not an "inferior" race but an antagonistic one, a people who despite their small number had contributed immensely in the European civilisation. Race was a pretext; and this is why a big number of European Christians eagerly joined the Nazis in the slaughter.
Egalitarianism was redefined by the European Left after the war as in direct opposition to eugenics – conveniently forgetting the millions that were dying in Siberia.
But the idea has refused to disappear, because it bods with the fundamental value system of most human beings, i.e. the enhancement of our abilities. In the 21st century eugenics is not used as a term anymore (in order not to elicit negative reactions), but the idea is there, alive and well, manifesting both in technologies that intervene in the genetic make-up of the unborn (“designer babies”), as well as in technologies that may enhance already born humans. How many of us would refuse to becoming cleverer, stronger, healthier, younger and more sexually potent?

The dilemmas of enhancement
There are at least three major moral and political dilemmas that I would like to discuss. The first has to do with the control of the eugenics technologies. Should one support the liberal, free-market economics model, where private companies sell the technologies to the consumers? Or should one involve the State? And to what degree? The dilemma is obvious. If we follow a free-market approach we may arrive at a new class system, where the ultra rich will be able to use the expensive technology to enhance themselves and their offspring. We may end up with a superhuman class, the “GenRich” as it is often called. If we make eugenics a state-controlled commodity, then we uneasily reproduce a totalitarian scenario for the future. One must not forget that the Nazi party was a socialist one.
The second dilemma that I would like to discuss has to do with the technologies themselves. Both pre-natal genetic interventionism and post-natal enhancement (genetic or otherwise) have merits that need to be discussed. For example, in the case of post-natal enhancement how much down the road to becoming cyborgs we go? Finally, the third issue for discussion would be our motivation for human enhancement. One may argue that this is obvious: self-interest. One wants to be an enhanced person because it improves his or her competitiveness in the world. It is precisely the meaning of competitiveness that needs to be discussed. In a planet heading for an environmental tipping point competitiveness may not be the correct strategy, but collaboration. Altruism should be enhanced at the expense of selfishness. But, assuming a genetic disposition for those two social traits, how much does it matter which trait to select for? Is human behaviour governed by genetics? Or is it a result of framing the right game, as many game theorists would argue? And if so, what other reasons we may have for human enhancement? Colonizing another planet may be one of them. For example if humans are ever going to survive on Mars they will have to genetically change; the gravity of the planet is less and its atmosphere (even after terraforming) thinner. Is Eugenics the correct strategy for space colonization?