Evolution, Sexual Ethics, and Bananas

While scrolling through the internet, I came across an article answering a question I’d never asked before: namely, why didn’t we evolve to produce asexually, the way plants do? The answer it offered was that sexual reproduction protected us from parasitic contagion (never mind all the things it opens us up to), taking as its prime example bananas. Which, you know, produce asexually, because otherwise life would be very weird.

Once again, this brings me face to face with the idea that somehow something less complicated than a strain of bananas mutated to the extent that it became human, which I still find bizarre. To be clear, I am not going to discuss whether evolution alone is a good explanation for biological life (although I am very fond of the argument that evolution, being so improbable on its own, would be a miracle in itself). I am instead going to discuss the claim: “our morals are part of our evolutionary makeup; they are advantageous to the continuation of society and the species. They don’t need any other explanation.”

Now, the most obvious problem is that such morals aren’t ‘morals’ per se, any more than a taste for fruit is moral because it helps the continuation of the species. First, they’re ‘good’ only in the sense that they’re practical, the way the shortest GPS route is good; there is no moral dimension. Secondly, this ignores the all-important free will of morality: if I’m to admire your kindness, say, I have to believe you did it through conscious choice, not because you were preconditioned to, or your kindness doesn’t mean any more than Siri’s when she wishes me a good morning.

Those objections, for me (for Nietzsche, too), are enough to make any such morality meaningless. But they aren’t what I want to focus on; I have a more speculative project in mind. It occurs to me that all these attempts to explain away behaviors that seem extremely puzzling given undirected evolution are very ad hoc; we start with our hypothesis and then invent increasingly complicated narratives to make the evidence fit. It’s hardly the scientific method.

So instead, let’s pretend we have no moral intuitions and start from scratch to hypothesize what to expect from evolution-based morality, and then see if the shoe fits. (This also means leaving aside animal behaviors or, for that matter, banana behaviors, that we anthropomorphize ad hoc to explain our own.) There are a couple of guiding principles. Firstly, anything that helps the species survive is moral; anything that hurts that is immoral. Secondly, we’re looking at natural selection in the here and now, which means we’re looking for what’s going to help us and our kids survive, not what’s going to look coolest in 200 years or help us stave off some yet-unheard-of problem.

Now, if we just want to have as many of us as possible, I suggest we should take as our baseline morality the sexuality of rabbits. Contraceptives, asexuality, homosexuality, and monogamy should be some of the worst sins around, since they halt procreation. Now, possibly monogamy is needed for females, since we can only have so many children and need to be around for them afterwards (having longer lifespans than rabbits, after all), but it seems that the males should have a moral imperative to impregnate as many people as often as possible.

To survive, of course, our families would have to have some sort of protection, and more females than males, which suggests that, after all, it is better to have harems, where the most powerful males survive and procreate and the others are either killed or kept in line to protect the tribe. The females’ moral duties would center around making sure the children grow to adulthood, and the males’ would center around protection, provision, and impregnation. This also means that once a woman is past child-bearing age, she should be kicked out to eliminate unnecessary competition for resources.

I am certainly not trying to say that this is what all atheists want or what society would devolve into if we accept atheism. My point is that, if we take evolution as a basis for morality, all of these things are morally right – not practical or permissible, but right, and not doing them is wrong and blameworthy. We should be designed to find these commendable and pleasurable. If evolution made morality, then might – whatever survived – literally made right – it physically encoded our morality. And this is what we end up with when might makes right.

“Wait!” you say. “This is awfully short-sighted. We could never build civilizations like this, without trust or compassion or reflection or sacrifice being valued. This crude picture of just continuing the species doesn’t allow for what we really want when we talk about the advance of human society: we don’t just want to survive; we want to do so in a distinctly human, rational, reflective way.”

But evolution doesn’t care if we can build civilization or write Declarations of Independence or reason about what we do. It doesn’t design us to look for the true, the good, and the beautiful. It designs us to survive, not to live. It doesn’t fit with our intuitions about the world, our intuitions that value people over genomes, reason over strength, and faithfulness over fruitfulness. The fact that we can use this data from our intuitions as an objective check on our evolution hypothesis is itself a proof of something beyond science, something by which we judge the natural world, that must therefore be outside of it.

At the end of the movie Age of Ultron, the main villain is speaking with one of the heroes and tells him that humanity is doomed (which, by the way, makes life meaningless if true). The response is “a thing is not beautiful because it lasts.” (Hear my comments here.) But if everything we know and value is determined by evolution, this should be precisely why we find things beautiful or moral or valuable – not because we are perceiving a truth about them, but because they are most likely to last, and thus we are pre-wired to be attracted to them.

This is the hero speaking at the end of the movie, though, so we know he’s meant to be right. Beauty is separate from practicality; it is something that transcends us and our needs. Life is not just about propagating DNA; there is a bigger world out there, one with objective meaning and morality and, yes, beauty. Let’s stop trying to cram it into an explanation that doesn’t fit and go looking for the real answers.

“bananas” by www.bluewaikiki.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0