March 2007
Brain Chemistry

Why Evolutionary Biology Embraces the Bogus

By Deepak Chopra

ecently quite a few stories have appeared in the media touting new explanations for such diverse things as altruism, generosity, and music. These complex matters, we are told, can be traced to the brain, which is dependent upon genes, and genes in turn dependent upon evolutionary biology. Thus one reads articles with headlines like "Are You a Giving Person? Your Brain Tells Why" and "Music on the Brain: Why We Are Hard-Wired to Rock." There's a great air of confidence in these stories, generated by new developments in the related sciences being covered. What's left untold is how atrophied the opposite worldview is becoming. Explaining why someone is a giving person used to come down to culture, human values, religion, and philosophy.

As someone who cherishes that endangered worldview, but who at the same time wants to see valid scientific progress, let me take one issue, the claim of evolutionary biology to explain something as complex as generosity, altruism, or music. Such claims are thoroughly bogus. They do not invalidate the whole field of evolutionary biology. They simply step over the boundary of believable explanations.

What evolutionary biology and genetics cannot deal with is the philosophical order of explanation. You cannot obtain a true answer to any question unless you know the proper category of explanation. Let's say a stray cat comes to my door, and my wife asks me what it wants. If I say "world peace," my order of explanation is skewed. That seems simple enough. Now let's say that a man loses his job, becomes depressed, and wants a prescription for Prozac. What made him depressed isn't the imbalance of serotonin in his brain but the loss of his job. Yet science continues to offer this kind of wrong explanation all the time. It mistakes agency for cause. The brain is serving as the agent of the mind, it isn't causing mind. The primordial soup served as the agent for creating life, it didn't cause life.

Reductionism-which too many scientists are guilty of, as are their opponents, the creationists--tries to smoosh all questions to fit one explanatory mold, that of physical matter. Creationists, for their part, try to smoosh all questions into being acts of God. Nietzsche, an expert at disdain, rejected what he called the doltish assumptions of materialism. In a kinder vein let me offer an example of how explanations can be correctly arrived at:

A car driven by a drunk driver swerves off the road in a blizzard. Several kinds of people show up at the scene, and each one is asked "What caused this accident?" A car mechanic points to the steering wheel and the drive train, which turned the car off a straight line. A driving instructor says that the driver lacked the skill to negotiate a slippery road. A doctor says the driver's reflexes were impaired by alcohol. A psychologist says that the driver had a fight with his wife at a party and therefore drank too much out of anger. The driver himself says that he must have dozed off for a moment.

It's obvious that all these answers fit the worldview of the person answering. They each occupy a different order of explanation. Theories power perceptions. But it's also obvious that the car mechanic is furthest from giving a cogent answer. By confining himself to the steering wheel and drive train, he can provide an explanation that is mechanically correct but totally wrong-headed. In our hyper-technical world today, we can add some experts at the accident scene who are wrong-headed in a more impressive way. A neurologist holds up an MRI of the driver's brain and locates impaired activity in the motor cortex. A cell biologist detects minute alterations in sugars and enzymes in the liver. A quantum physicist calculates the amplitude of the probability curve that collapsed to produce neurotransmitters in the synaptic gaps of the driver's cerebrum.

Does the addition of ultra-specificity on any of these planes offer an answer better than the driver's "I must have dozed off"? Actually, no. The key element is intuitive. You must intuit the correct order of explanation before you can sensibly offer the correct answer. Otherwise, you aren't finding truth; you are just filling in a conceptual map that you brought to the scene beforehand. When a devout Christian asks God to heal her instead of going to the doctor, rationalists feel frustrated because in their eyes she is stubbornly relying on the wrong order of explanation (i.e., attributing disease to sin and cures to God's mercy), but they rarely see the same flaw in themselves.

Evolutionary biology isn't a magic science or a privileged one. It brings a preconceived model to a problem. It applies that model without looking to the right or the left. It has a strong bias in favor of material fact instead of abstract philosophy. Those very qualities have caused the embrace of bogus explanations and false truths.

The following should seem obvious:

-- Cause and effect, being mechanical, apply to mechanical situations
-- Physical explanations don't automatically hold for all situations
-- Human beings do lots of non-physical things.

These assumptions are either ignored or flouted by many enthusiasts for evolutionary biology. Recently I touched on the topic of music and how it might be connected to the brain. Researchers told journalists that evolutionary biology would eventually explain why the brain developed its response to music. This is wholly bogus. What will actually happen is the same thing that happens in evolutionary biology all the time:

1. The investigators will work post hoc from a conclusion that already exists.

That is, we already know music evolved and survived. No condition that contradicts its survival will be examined, only that data which fits the model of evolution as presently understood will be acceptable. This is quite invalid reasoning, because it always winds up proving one's own preconceptions. By analogy, let's say a model of parenting holds that criminals are the result of bad child-rearing. Whenever a criminal appears, he would be blamed on his parents, not because that's true but because it fits the theory. The conclusion precedes the investigation.

2. Associations will be mistaken for causes.

Many rich people go around in long black limousines. Does this mean that black is the color of the rich? That long cars make you wealthy? That long black cars favor the survival of the people inside? Obviously not. We intuitively know how to select a cause as opposed to an association. Evolutionary biology tends to forget intuition. Since all surviving societies have some form of music, the assumption is made that cause-and-effect must be at work. This is as bogus as claiming that the color of a limo must be at work in the survival of the rich.

3. Only physical evidence will count, but a lot of fudging will go on.

As devised by Darwin, evolution depended upon physical evidence in the fossil record for its proof. Being a curious person and confident in his theory, Darwin speculated that non-physical traits might be subject to evolution. This proves to be the case if it isn't carried too far. A person who's born with the trait of being totally solitary, unable to abide the slightest human contact, won't breed and pass on his genes. But extending this to such behaviors as altruism, love, or music-making can border on the absurd. We have no possible way of knowing that a prehistoric person learned to whistle in tune because his genes prompted that ability, or that this ability ever developed competitively, or that it attracted more mates, or that once attracted, these mates passed on the gene to an entire society. The whole explanatory chain is pure fudging, and it goes on all the time in this science.

4. Competing explanations will find no valid way of choosing a winner.

Like everything else in the evolutionary worldview, explanations must compete for survival. Galen's medicine couldn't compete with Harvey's when it came to explaining the circulation of blood, Ptolemaic astronomy couldn't compete with Copernicus in explaining planetary orbits. So what if two explanations arise in evolutionary biology? Assume that the gene for music is isolated. As an evolutionary development, the cause for this is that one gene pool didn't contain music and died out, while another gene pool did contain music and survived. If explanation A holds that prehistoric women were attracted to men who whistled while explanation B holds that prehistoric men ran away from men who whistled, there's no valid way to choose. In the absence of physical data, evolution is a highly dubious model to apply to behavior.

I realize that this kind of critique frustrates and even infuriates materialists. But objectively speaking, there are good reasons for being skeptical that large areas of speculation, such as evolutionary psychology, have any validity at all. Even biologists show considerable skepticism in this regard. They can see why genes explain the appearance of hemoglobin without necessarily being as successful in explaining the appearance of Bach. In the current climate of belief, however, the model of evolutionary biology is being painted far and wide across the landscape. •