Archive of the Category 'Book Review'

Book Review: Humanism in Business

Posted: February 22, 2008

The book named above is still in press with Cambridge University Press. I received an advance draft copy from one of its five editors, Michael Pirson, who approached me after having read a draft of Being Human. [Michael not only read Being Human, he wrote a short review of it that I will post separately.] Michael’s book lives up to its sub-title, “Perspectives on the Development of Responsible Business in Society” by having 23 chapters with 28 authors. It is truly an unusual book whose goal is no less than the launching of a movement dedicated to focusing business on the improvement of the human condition, no longer on the maximization of shareholder wealth. The book’s contributors are members of an informal network called HuMaNet, and they are mostly a mix of business school academics, philosophers, along with NGO and conventional business managers. Of course, no one book will be able to establish a serious social movement but, in my opinion, this book gives their effort a serious start.As the author of Being Human, I am frankly astonished at the amount of overlap of this new book with mine, given such different origins. In contrast to Being Human, which is built on the contributions of all the sciences of human behavior starting with Darwin, the Humanism in Business book is built primarily upon the contributions of leading philosophers throughout human history. In spite of this difference their definition of human nature has significant overlap with that of RD theory. Beyond that, their implications for action directed toward the business community are remarkably parallel to those in Being Human.

I am in a quandary as to how to convey in a few words the evidence of this remarkable overlap. I can say that my first message back to Michael Pirson after finishing the book was, “There cannot be a shadow of a doubt that we are studying the same beast.” Beyond such a declaration I will offer below just a few highlights of this as yet unpublished book so that its relevance to the Being Human story becomes clear.

This volume starts off with an analysis of humanistic thought by citing the work of sages and philosophers across time and place. I will quote from Cherry’s chapter on ‘The Humanist Tradition’’:

“Strands of humanist thought can be seen throughout human history. Just as most human societies have held a wide range of beliefs in gods and supernatural forces, it seems too that most societies have included skeptics who have doubted these gods and sought to explain the world solely in natural terms. Many of these skeptics emphasized that happiness here on earth was more important than speculative notions about life after death. Similarly, human communities have always developed moral codes, and some have justified these codes by appeals to reason, humanity, or community, rather than to gods and the supernatural… In addition to humanist thought that stood outside of, or in opposition to, religion, we also see more or less humanist thinkers within many religions traditions… Humanism has often been portrayed as a Western invention, but in fact humanist ideas have arisen independently in cultures all over the world. The humanist heritage of ancient Greece shaped Western civilization and therefore in central to the development and spread of humanism in the modern world. However, India and China have older humanist histories. These rich humanist traditions reveal that common principles can arise in the most diverse environments, and suggest that the humanist goal of living an ethical and fulfilling life, guided by reason, is an aspiration with universal appeal.”

In a summation that appears tautological but is not, “Humans are humane, guided by reason they care about others as well as about self.” Such a definition is consistent with that of RD theory in its proposition that humans have a drive to bond and to comprehend as well as drives to acquire and defend, with the resultant conflicts worked through by the balancing and reasoning capacity of the prefrontal cortex.

The book proceeds to address how humanism is expressed through the historical development of basic human institutions, political, economic, art, religion and science. They cite the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution as a turning point in humanizing political institutions. Its watchword, ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’ is the very essence of humanism. This parallels the treatment of this issue in Being Human.

At this point the book moves on to its central theme, the relevance of humanism to corporations, the business structures that grew in the 19th century to be the dominant economic institutions worldwide. The book analyzes the almost chance way corporations became defined, both by legal logic and by academic economics, in ways that locked corporate power to property ownership. This definition marginalized the contributions of all other stakeholders to corporate wealth creation. It created the presumption that the single goal of the corporation was the maximization of stockholder wealth. This presumption played out in the rapid growth of corporations to national and international scope in the 19th century. In Europe and in America this created great inequalities in the distribution of wealth along with many other abuses. Marx was moved by a humanist impulse to decry this situation, but, at enormous cost to the world, his explanations and his recommendations proved to be far off target. The book’s overall historic analysis of corporations is again parallel with that offered in Being Human, except the latter book explains the process as being more a result of the Spencerian misunderstanding of Darwin and the existence of free-riders who, without a conscience, led the way in using the corporate form to marginalize contributors other than investors.

The book moves on to examine the gradual development of humanist thought about the corporation in the 21st century. This was expressed in many ways; in the governmental reform and regulatory efforts of both of the Roosevelt administrations, in critiques of neo-classical economics, in philosophical writing about human rights and freedom from coerced choices, in reform movements within corporations themselves and in some of the research and teaching in business schools.

The final chapters of the book report on several recent developments that the authors see as concrete manifestations of a here-and-now humanist movement, alive and well in business practice. They report on the activities of three corporations that have in their own industries become successful exemplars of making the improvement of the human condition the central mission of their corporate life. One chapter focuses on the development within business schools of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS). This is a rapidly growing research network that focuses on the systematic study of how business can improve its performance in human terms. Another chapter focuses on the long-term partnerships that the World Wildlife Federation has forged with several large transnational firms to jointly pursue the goal of complete sustainability in regard to natural resources and climate stabilization. One chapter deals with the great promise of micro-financing as an approach to the grass roots development of emerging economies. Another chapter deals with an amazing development in Latin American barrios that is moving forward by local youths training other local youths in computer science using ‘applied empathy’ methods. This is but one example of ‘social entrepreneurship’. The book discusses a shift in the top governance mechanisms of corporations from total control by shareholders toward the ‘stakeholder’ model of control by means of a balanced representation of all the major stakeholders including not only investors, but also employees, customers, suppliers and the general public.

The last chapter of the book, more than any other, links the theme of humanism to the evolutionary biology approach of Being Human. It was written by Muhammad Yunus, the pioneer of micro-finance and entitled, “Social Business Entrepreneurs Are the Solution.” Some quotes from Yunus’ chapter will best make my point about the linkage:

“Many of the problems in the world remain unresolved because we continue to interpret capitalism too narrowly. In this narrow interpretation, we then create a one-dimensional human being to play the role of entrepreneur. We insulate him from other dimensions of life, such as the religious, the emotional, the political, and the social. He is dedicated to one mission in his business life: maximizing profit. Masses of one-dimensional human beings support him by backing him with their investment money to achieve the same mission. The free market game, we are told, works out beautifully with one-dimensional investors and entrepreneurs. Have we been so mesmerized by the success of the free market that we don’t dare to question it? Have we worked so hard at transforming ourselves absolutely into one-dimensional human beings – as conceptualized in economic theory – to facilitate the smooth functioning of the free market mechanism?

Economic theory postulates that you contribute to society and the world in the best possible manner when you concentrate on squeezing out the maximum for yourself. Once you get your maximum, everybody else will get his or hers too. As we follow this policy, we sometimes begin to doubt whether we are doing the right thing by imitating the entrepreneur created by theory. After all, things don’t look too good around us. We nevertheless quickly brush off such doubts by maintaining that bad things happen as a result of ‘market failures’ – well-functioning markets do not produce unpleasant results, do they? I do not think things are going wrong due to ‘market failure.’ The causes lie much deeper. Let us be brave and admit that they are the result of ‘conceptualization failure.’ More specifically, it is the failure of economic theory to capture the essence of human beings. Everyday human beings are not one-dimensional entities; they are excitingly multi-dimensional… They are [also] people referred to as ‘social entrepreneurs’ in formal parlance. Social entrepreneurship is in fact an integral part of human history. Most people take pleasure in helping others and all religions encourage this quality in human beings… Once a social entrepreneur operates at 100 percent or beyond the cost recovery point, he has actually graduated into another world, the business world with its limitless expansion possibilities. This is a moment worth celebrating… This is the critical moment of significant institutional transformation. The social entrepreneur has migrated from the world of philanthropy to the world of business. To distinguish him from the first two types of entrepreneur listed earlier, we will call him a ‘social business entrepreneur.’ Social business entrepreneurs make the market-place more interesting and competitive… Social business entrepreneurs can become very powerful players in national and international economies… We do not pay attention to them because we are blinded by prevailing theories. If social business entrepreneurs exist in the real world – as it seems they do—it makes no sense that they are not accommodated within current conceptual frameworks. Once we have recognized social business entrepreneurs, the supportive institutions, policies, regulations, norms and rules can be developed to help them enter the mainstream.

In conclusion the book stresses the theme of humanism in business in terms of seeking the goal of sustainability, not only in terms of the earth’s resources, but also in terms of relationships to all the contributors to the creation of wealth. They propose that the corporation needs to be conceived as a community of people who are committed not only to one another’s sustainable well being, but beyond that to the further enrichment of one another’s lives. Call it sustainability plus.

Tags: Book Review, Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior | 1 Comment »

Book Review: Bringing Up a Moral Child

Posted: February 18, 2008

I very recently came upon a remarkable book by Michael Schulman and Eva Mekler about morality that was well ahead of its times – Bringing Up A Moral Child. Even though it was written in 1985, it clearly sees that children start life with a moral sense. It even makes a distinction between moral reasoning and a moral sense, a feeling for right and wrong. Moral reasoning was studied by psychologists such as Piaget and Kohlberg and emerges, they argue, on a step-by-step basis between the ages of 5 and full maturity. On the other hand, according to Schulman and Mekler, a moral sense can be seen in the behavior of infants well before they can talk. Selected quotations make these points and more:

A moral child is one who strives to be kind and just. Notice that the words kind and just both refer to how our behavior affects other people. Morality, of course, is concerned with how we treat our fellow humans. We call children kind when they strive to help others. We call them just or fair when they treat people without bias of favoritism, when they try to see that everyone, including themselves, is judged according to the same rules, shares burdens equitably, and receives what he or she deserves.

When children are kind and just, we will also find that they behave responsibly toward others and try to keep their promises to them… Moral behavior has two components: Its intention must be good, in the sense that its goal is the well-being of one or more people; and it must be fair or just, in the sense that it considers the rights of others without prejudice or favoritism…

Can people gain pleasure simply by giving someone else pleasure or by alleviating another person’s pain? They most certainly can. Most of us have known this pleasure in our lives, whether through giving to a child, a spouse, a friend, or even a stranger. Giving is a great joy. And, as psychologist Robert Weiss has shown, easing someone’s pain is, in and of itself, an effective positive reinforcer. He found that people work harder and faster on a task when their only payoff is reducing the discomfort of someone they’ve never met before. There have been, to be sure, philosophers (Hobbes) and psychologists (Freud) who have seen human beings as intrinsically self-centered and uncaring, having nary a kind impulse except through the civilizing forces of family and society. But research evidence argues against this dark vision. To cite just one study, a team of psychologists observed twenty-six children, from three to five years old, during thirty hours of free play in a preschool setting. The record shows that during that time the children engaged in approximately 1,200 “altruistic” acts including sharing, cooperating, helping, and comforting…

Human beings have not evolved as solitary creatures. For our early ancestors the survival of an individual depended very much on the survival of his or her group. An intact group was better able to hunt and gather food, build shelter, and defend itself from enemies and predators than individuals on their own. When an individual cared for and protected the members of his group, it made the group more likely to stay together and survive, and, in turn, increased that person’s own chances of staying alive. Inclinations to be kind and just, which promote the welfare of our fellow group members and keep our group intact, have, through natural selection, become an intrinsic part of being human because they have had survival value…

[A] foundation stone of morality is the child’s miraculous ability to react with empathy to someone else’s feelings. Empathy refers to a person’s feeling bad over someone else’s unhappiness and good over another’s joy. Empathy is surprisingly common in children and appears to be an inborn capacity to recognize and “feel” other people’s emotions.

Sometimes in family counseling sessions, when we are talking about teaching morality, a parent will ask, ”But isn’t a moral sense something a child is either born with or not?” This is a question that philosophers have debated for centuries. It cannot be answered with as simple yes or no. Children don’t have to learn to feel empathy when they see others suffering. They are born, in varying degrees, with that ability. But a child can be taught to attend to people’s feelings more closely so that empathy occurs more often and more easily…

The quotes above were all taken from the first chapter of this remarkable book. The rest of the book provides parents and other child caregivers with detailed advice on helping a child develop their own innate sense of right and wrong. This is done, they say, with loving guidance. This socialization process helps the child search for a way to harmonize its own innate values with those of their birth culture. The book offers a host of sample dialogues with young people, from toddlers through adolescents that can help them in finding a moral way to deal with the challenges of each age. These discussions focus on the unintended as well as the intended consequences that are apt to follow any given decision. They help the individual chooser to take responsibility for all these anticipated consequences in selecting the ‘best’ choice of action. By this process they help the learner see that they are not helpless in struggling with the forces of their times, but that they have agency, they can make choices that can make a difference. The last chapter is entitled, “When Morals and Other Values Collide: Helping Your Child Maintain Morals in the ’Real’ World.” This book will be my favorite one to give to new parents.

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Book Review: Supercapitalism

Posted: February 3, 2008

Robert Reich has written an unusually insightful book about the co-evolution of US corporations and the American government in the last sixty years. Its subtitle encapsulates this story as “The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life.” His last chapter starts with a reprise of his argument: Supercapitalism has triumphed as power has shifted to consumers and investors. They now have more choice than ever before, and can switch ever more easily to better deals. And competition among companies to lure and keep them continues to intensify. This means better and cheaper products, and higher returns. Yet as supercapitalism has triumphed, its negative social consequences have also loomed larger. These include widening inequality as most gains from economic growth go to the very top, reduced job security, instability of or loss of community, environmental degradation, violations of human rights abroad, and a plethora of products and services pandering to our basest desires. These consequences are larger in the United States than in other advanced economies because Americas has moved deeper into supercapitalism. Other economies, following closely behind, have begun to experience many of the same things.

Democracy is the appropriate vehicle for responding to such social consequences. That’s where citizen values are supposed to be expressed, where choices are supposed to be made between what we want for ourselves as consumers and investors, and what we want to achieve together. But the same competition that has fueled supercapitalism has spilled over into the political process. Large companies have hired platoons of lobbyists, lawyers, experts, and public relations specialists, and devoted more and more money to electoral campaigns. The result has been to drown out voices and values of citizens. As all of this has transpired, the old institutions through which citizen values had been expressed in the Not Quite Golden Past [roughly from 1945 to 1970] –industry-wide labor unions, local citizen-based groups, “corporate statesmen” responding to all stakeholders, and regulatory agencies– have been largely blown away by the gusts of supercapitalism.

Reich argues that the trend toward supercapitalism started with technological changes that lowered the cost of global transportation, such as cargo containers on container ships, super railways and highways, and the cost of global communication, the Internet that connected low-cost computers. The globalization that followed led to hyper-competition within industries and even between them, as industry boundaries fell, products proliferated and the bigger firms reached for international supply chains and worldwide customers. This has been great for the consumer and the investor part of us, but is has not been good for the citizen part of us that wants social justice, quality education, affordable healthcare and clean environments for all. He does not blame corporate leaders for putting enough money into the Washington scene to dominate the political process. They feel forced to do it to maintain their competitive position in a game where, if one is not a big winner, one will be a big loser. In RD terms, this game puts so much pressure on one’s drives to acquire and defend that it overrides one’s drive to bond with the wider community.

Reich has done a better job of describing these events than he has in prescribing cures. He provides a sample of promising reform policies for federal legislation but he despairs of getting them enacted. He wishes there was a way to get corporate money out of Washington but sees only hopelessly weak efforts to date. He seems totally unaware of the method we described in Chapter 11 of Being Human for the public funding of all federal elections to a fully-competitive level, the ‘Just $6’ approach. He does make it very clear, however, what a great blessing some such system would be for the public. It could restore the balance in Washington between all four drives that the founders intended (see Chapter 8 of Being Human). He does see that even corporate leaders could welcome regulations that gave all competitors a level playing field, so they could save all the money they now feel forced to send in Washington’s direction. With ‘Just $6” in place regulators could be expected to establish the general rule the all corporations would be expected, as the economists say, to ‘internalize’ all the costs they generate instead of ‘externalizing’ them, as they do now, to their human and natural environment. Such rules would not need to stop economic progress, but the pace would be moderated to enable comparable progress on our widely-shared goals.

Tags: Book Review, Drive to Acquire, Drive to Defend | 1 Comment »

Book Review: Art and Intimacy: How The Arts Began

Posted: January 21, 2008

Art and Intimacy: How The Arts Began by Ellen Dissanayake was published in 2000, and, like Constant Battles reviewed below, I can only wish I had come across it earlier. It is an amazing and wondrous book. It is repetitious but the points it makes are so important and difficult for our modern minds to grasp that I, for one, am thankful for its redundancies.

If any readers of RD theory have doubts about the fundamental nature of the human drive to bond (dB) in mutually caring relationships, they only have to read the first two chapters, Mutuality and Belonging. She makes the process of bonding come alive in her descriptions and pictures of the emotion-laden exchanges between mothers and their infants throughout the world.
If any readers of RD theory have doubts about the fundamental nature of the drive of humans to comprehend (dC) and learn how to make sense of the world, they only have to read Chapter 3, Finding and Making Meaning. As the book’s title indicates, it emphasizes art as a mode for making meaning, but it does not belittle religion and science as other modes.

Chapter 4, ‘Hands-on’ Competence, puts a fresh perspective on the drive to acquire (dD). It humanizes this drive as a search for a sense of competence in our dealing with the essentials of the material world with respect, as well as with skill. It shows how the industrial/informational revolutions have distorted and diminished our sense of this competence. The only fault I have with this point is that the author understates, I believe, the potential for people to build a sense of competence from mastering complex machinery, including computers.

The book’s last two chapters unify its message around art by showing how all art forms have served to evoke and increase our sensibilities to our most basic human emotions by Elaborating (the title of Chapter 5) art objects to help humans take seriously the fundamentals of human existence. It’s contribution in this regard will enable me to rewrite the portions of Chapter 9 of Being Human that cover the contributions of the arts to making meaning. I have always felt that this part of the RD theory was inadequately expressed.

I am tempted to quote many parts of this remarkable book but I will limit myself to its last paragraph that is, surprisingly, a quotation from another person.

I cannot do better than to end this chapter with some impassioned words from Robert Hughes, which come from a quite different approach to the arts but echo uncannily the message of this book:

One of the ways you measure the character—indeed, the greatness—of a country is by its public commitment to the arts. Not as a luxury; not as a diplomatic device; not as a social placebo. But as a commitment arising from the belief that the desire to make and experience art is an organic part of human nature, without which our natures are coarsened, impoverished, and denied, and our sense of community with other citizens is weakened. This may sound like rhetoric, but after twenty-six hears of writing in America I know it to be true—I know it in my heart, my sometimes mean and irritable writer’s heart. The arts are the field on which we place our own dreams, thoughts, and desires alongside those of others, so that solitudes can meet, to their joy sometimes, or to their surprise, and sometimes to their disgust. When you boil it all down, that is the social purpose of art: the creation of mutuality, the passage from feeling into shared meaning.

Tags: Book Review, Drive to Comprehend, Drive to Bond, Drive to Defend | 0 Comments »

Book Review: Constant Battles

Posted: January 2, 2008

I was recently introduced by Richard Wrangham to a book I should have read in 2002 when it was published. It is Constant Battles by Steven LeBlanc, a physical anthropologist colleague of Wrangham’s at Harvard. LeBlanc’s book pulls together the uniformities of the behavior of ancient tribes as revealed at their living and battle sites around the world. The behavior pattern that emerged is well captured by the book’s title. These battles had high mortality rates: they were not the sham battles that some have reported. Even contemporary tribes such as the Hopi, with their well-deserved reputation of peacefulness, have a history of constant battles in the not-too-distant past. My lingering belief in the “myth of the noble savage” has been wiped out by the facts. However, I hasten to add, LeBlanc’s facts also reinforce the point made in Being Human, that tribal people were well bonded in mutual-caring ties within their tribes. The constant fighting was inter-tribal. I will be doing some rewriting of Chapter 5 of Being Human, where this issue is discussed, to take account of LeBlanc’s work.

But LeBlanc’s second point is the bigger one. He assembles evidence that inter-tribal fighting was tightly associated with an imbalance between the carrying capacity of the local eco-system and the size of the local population. In simple terms, when a tribes’ hunger exceeded its local food supply, the desperate tribe fought for the food of its neighbors. Hunter-gatherer tribes around the globe never seemed able to achieve a sustainable balance between their population levels and their local eco-system. Warfare was the consequence. This dramatic finding clearly has significant implications for the 21st century. There can be no doubt that the current worldwide balance between population levels and essential resources is moving toward the negative zone, and the problem of warfare has not yet been solved by any means. Of course, it can be argued that contemporary wars are often caused by ideological or cultural conflicts, and they might well be led by egomaniacal free-riders. But even if LeBlanc’s causes are only partial ones in today’s world, it is very difficult to argue that the search for ecological balance is not essential and urgent for the future of our species.

LeBlanc does offer us some good news. This is the finding that, if the tribes studied were ever able to attain an ecosystem /population balance as the Hopi now have, they became peaceable. There was no evidence of a universal aggression drive. This argues that it is possible for humans, with RD theory’s four drives at work in harness with a powerful cognitive capacity, to achieve a peaceful and comfortable life for all. There are sound reasons to expect that, if humans can now work their way into a sustainable relationship with the earth’s resources and constrain free-riders, a WWIII holocaust can be avoided.

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Book Review: Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters

Posted: January 2, 2008

I just finished reading a new book entitled: Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. It was written by two evolutionary psychologists, Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, and its subtitle tells us that it is an integrated theory of human behavior. “From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do.” Clearly the authors are offering an alternative general theory to the Renewed Darwinian (RD) Theory of Human Behavior and this calls for our attention and a book review.

This book provides us a number of useful additions to our knowledge of human behavior in terms of specific adaptations that help human pursue their goals. In spite of this fact, the book serves to highlight that the field of evolutionary psychology suffers from a single flaw that seriously undermines the reliability of many of its findings. The field as a whole seems stuck, as is neo-classical economics, on Spencer’s version of the ultimate drives of human behavior, and ignores Darwin’s version. They clearly see the human drives to acquire and defend, but are blind to the drives to bond and comprehend. In terms of RD theory that makes them, in effect, half right, but, unfortunately, half wrong.

The authors designed their book as “an introduction to evolutionary psychology for a general nonacademic audience” (preface xiv). In my opinion they have done this superbly. Chapter 1 is entitled, ”What is Evolutionary Psychology.” It answers this question not only clearly and concisely, but, more importantly from our point of view, their answers are almost totally congruent with RD theory. They define evolutionary psychology as the application of evolutionary biology to human behavior. They contrast their theory with the “Standard Social Science Model.” As a person whose training has been in this model, their characterization of this model is painful and harsh, but I cannot deny its accuracy.

To quote:

a set of related principles characterize its main tenets.
1. Human [behavior] is exempt form biology…
2. Evolution stops at the neck,…
3. Human nature is a tabula rasa (a blank slate)…
4. Human behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. (Pg. 12-13)

They contrast these statements with the four principles of evolutionary psychology:

1. Humans are animals [subject to the same laws of evolution as other animals]…
2. There is nothing special about the human brain… [The brain is just another body part, just like the hand or the pancreas]…
3. Human nature is innate…
4. Human behavior is the product of both innate human nature and the environment.

RD theory not only is congruent with these principles, it builds upon them. I found only two points to question in this chapter, but they are important ones. They argue that, “human evolution pretty much stopped about ten thousand years ago”. RD theory argues that human evolution has not stopped and can never stop as long as the species survives. It is moving at its regular pace and perhaps even somewhat faster. This is true, even though the cutting-edge of change in modern times has moved on to changes originated by culture and science. More importantly, RD theory takes exception to their statement that “all adaptations are domain-specific, and operate and solve problems only within narrow aspects of life.” This statement clarifies that the only kind of adaptations evolutionary psychologists are looking for are local and narrow. What about more basic adaptations to the problem of survival on our particular planet? How do they classify evolutionary mechanisms in the brain that enable any earthly creature, human or otherwise, to seek out life sustaining resources and avoid life-threatening ones, the drives to acquire and defend?

At some very early point in time such basic adaptations must have evolved. And, according to RD theory, equally basic adaptations (the drive to bond and to comprehend) were made relatively recently in connection with the evolution of H. sapiens. For humans all other narrow and domain-specific adaptations would be means to the fulfillment of our basic four adaptations, our ultimate motives. RD theory supports these points with a significant amount of evidence. The implicit reliance of evolutionary psychology scholars on just the underlying drives to acquire and defend (the Spencerian error) inevitably pushes them into making deductive statements that are hard to defend with solid evidence. I will cite a few examples:

From page 120:

“Another surprising finding in this area is that criminals are not so different from other men. All men (criminal or not) are more of less the same. The ultimate reason why men do what they do whether they be criminals, musicians, painters, writers, or scientists—is to impress women so that they will sleep with them. Men do everything they do in order to get laid.”

From page 168-9:

“Our enemies in the current “War on Terror” are very different. They aim to endanger as many lives as possible, including their own, and they do not seem to have clearly stated political goals… Many of these puzzles begin to make more sense when you look at the situation from the evolutionary psychological perspective. Maybe these devastating suicide bombings are not “terrorist” acts, as the term is usually used. Maybe they have nothing to do with Israel or the American and British troops. Maybe they’re all about sex, as everything else in life is.”

From page 143:

“[T]he underling motive of all human behavior is reproductive; reproductive success is the purpose of all biological existence, including humans.”

And a final quote from page 133 that puts just about everything under the sex drive:

“In reality, however, women do often say no to men. This is why men throughout history have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint portraits and cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them.”

It is clear that these writers give significant attention to sex, but what do they neglect? I have looked throughout the book without finding any discussions of such human emotions as empathy, compassion, love, guilt, curiosity, wonder or awe that the RD theory addresses and explains at length. These authors, rather strangely, do little even with the emotions of fear, terror or hatred, or even of greed or lust. They have little or no discussion of the findings from neuroscience or genetics or from paleontology or other specialists of deep human history. They do not draw on the work of institutional scholars or from systematic studies of historic human times. The field of evolutionary psychology deserves to be thanked for steering scholars of human behavior away from the blind spots of the standard social science model, but they seem to have stuck themselves with equally handicapping assumptions. In this regard they are ignoring the lead of their own eminent scholar, Steven Pinker, who, as cited in Being Human on page 40, wrote in How the Mind Works, “Intelligence is the pursuit of goals in the face of obstacles… The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain’s highest-level goals… Emotion triggers the cascade of subgoals and sub-subgoals that we call thinking and action.”

I will illustrate this point by a final example regarding monogamy and polygamy. Miller and Kanazawa, along with many other evolutionary psychologists, claim that humans are naturally polygamous. In contrast RD theory holds that only the elite class in human societies have practiced polygamy as a norm, while all other contemporary humans practice monogamy as the norm, even among present and past hunter-gatherer societies. This factual question is obviously in doubt and probably needs more research to resolve. But Miller and Kanazawa inadvertently provide us with one clue as to how their assumptions seemingly distort their reasoning in this regard.

Quoting from page 86:

“It turns out that the clear evidence of our ancestors’ polygamy is embodied in each of us. Both among primate and nonprimate species, the species-typical degree of polygamy (how polygamous members of a given species are on average) highly correlates with the degree of sexual dimorphism in size (the extent to which males of a species are larger than females). The more polygamous the species, the greater the size disparity between the sexes. For example, among the completely monogamous gibbons, there is no sexual dimorphism in size; both by height and by weight males are about the same size as females. In contrast, among the extremely polygamous gorillas, males are 1.3 times as large by height and twice as large by weight as females. On this scale, humans are somewhere in the middle, but closer to the gibbons’ end than that of the gorillas. Typically, human males are 1.1 times as large by height and 1.2 times as large by weight as human females. This suggests that, throughout evolutionary history, humans have been mildly polygamous, not as polygamous as gorillas but not completely monogamous like gibbons either. This is how we know that humans are naturally polygamous.”

I have trouble following their reasoning in this quotation. Using their numbers, monogamous gibbons would be 1.0 on the monogamy scale (1.0 ht.+1.0 wt./2=1.0). The polygamous gorillas would be 1.65 on this same scale (1.3 ht.+2.0 wt./2=1.65). Finally humans would be 1.15 on this same scale (1.1 ht.+1.2 wt./2=1.15). In fact, I cite this evidence about dimorphism in Being Human (Pg. 123) and conclude that humans are much closer to gibbons than to gorillas and can fairly be classified as naturally monogamous. While some evolutionary psychologists might well acknowledge that Miller and Kanazawa had simply make a human error and had also made some of their statements too extreme, I believe they would have a harder time denying that their model of man does not posit any independent drives to bond and to comprehend as being as basic to our natures as the drives to acquire and defend. This same issue arose regarding the integrative book of evolutionary psychologist David Geary, as cited in Chapter 12, page 427, of Being Human. This difference between the two theories does lend itself to conclusive testing.

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Book Review: The Stuff of Thought

Posted: December 7, 2007

I recently finished reading Steven Pinker’s new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature. Having read this book, I do not think there is much more to be said about the nature of language as a fascinating, powerful, complex and flexible tool for reaching human goals. It offers a synthesis of the work of many scholars; linguists, philosophers and psychologists. In my opinion it supercedes all prior theories on this subject. Beautifully written as well as funny, it even connects solidly with RD Theory.

It makes an essential distinction between thoughts and words/sentences. For Pinker, thoughts are elemental, innate concepts that predate language. They are basic senses of space, time, objects (animate and inanimate), action (intended and unintended), and hence causation. As Pinker sums it up on page 232:

“Kant was surely right that our minds “cleave the air” with concepts of substance, space, time and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: noun, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law…. Yet when examined through the window of language, these concepts turn out to be quite unlike the best guesses about the nature of space, time and causality in Kant’s day. They are digital where the world is analogue, austere and schematic where the world is rich and textured, vague even when we crave precision and parochial to human goals and interests even when we ought to seek the view from nowhere.”

The book provides depth in understanding the pivotal role of language in human evolution. It reveals the quirks and limitations of language as a way to comprehend the world, while it also explains the basis for the amazing strength of our languages in helping us steer our lives successfully. Language is always in this sense subjective even as it strives for scientific objectivity. He highlights the capacity of language for evolving further in capturing the essence of new phenomenon, of new complexities, mostly by using the tools of metaphor and new combinations.

Its subtitle is revealing about its solid connection to RD Theory. I found no points on which it was other than consistent with the RD Theory of Human Behavior. This is especially apparent in its treatment of language as a tool in handling social relationships, even in reconciling the tension between our elemental drive to acquire life-sustaining resources and our drive to sustain our bonds with others. In this regard he examines the nature of “polite” speech on pages 380-383.

“The politeness story gets more interesting… when we turn to the gestures of verbal deference… Commands and requests are among the most face-threatening speech acts, because they challenge the hearer’s autonomy… The speaker is ordering the hearer around.., something you don’t do to a stranger or a superior and might even think twice about dong with an intimate. So requests are often accompanied by various forms:

• Questioning rather than commanding: Will you lend me your car?
• Expressing pessimism: I don’t suppose you might close the window.
• Hedging the request: Close the door, if you can.
• Minimizing the imposition: I just want to borrow a little bit of paper.
• Hesitating: Can I, uh, borrow your bicycle?
• Acknowledging the impingement: I’m sure you’re busy, but…
• Apologizing: I’m sorry to bother you, but…
• Impersonalizing: Smoking is not permitted.
• Acknowledging a debt: I’d be eternally grateful if you would…”

What complex language skills! In RD terms Pinker is revealing that the energy behind our language skills comes from all four drives and the tension between them.

Pinker’s last chapter, “Escaping the Cave”, closes on an optimistic note. He is, of course, referring to Plato’s famous allegory of the prisoners in the cave.

“Captives are shackled in a grotto, their heads and bodies chained so that they can look only at the rear wall. The cave is a kind of movie theater out of The Flintstones, with a fire behind a balcony on which projectionists hold up cutouts and puppets, which cast moving shadows onto the wall. This movie is all that the prisoners know of the world… In one interpretation of the allegory, the cave is our skull, and our acquaintance with the world consists only of the shadowy representations our minds make available to us….

Though language exposes the walls of our cave, it also shows us how we can venture out of it, at least partway…When you combine two aptitudes—metaphor and compositionality–the language of thought can be pressed into service to conceive and express a ceaseless geyser of ideas. People can discover new metaphors in their effort to understand something and can combine them to form still newer and more complex metaphors and analogies… None of this, of course, comes easily to us. Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically liberal democracy… The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated formulations The view from language shows us the cave we inhabit and also the best way out of it.”

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