15 February 2001, 811 words
Given a choice, the average philosopher would far prefer to ask a good question that to discover a good answer. The reason for this is mostly ego: the philosophers who have posed baffling conundrums are better remembered that those who solved them. (For example, Zeno of Elea, whose paradox proved that Achilles could not outrun a tortoise, is a more familiar name than Democritus, whose concept of atoms resolved the paradox.)
But there is also an intellectual reason: asking good questions is often a more fruitful endeavour than finding answers, since the asking challenges how we view reality. Of course, it is most fruitful to pose the question and find the answer too, but that task usually falls to the scientists.
In his column of February 1 ("Crying time again and again"), Keith Smith posed some very basic questions about human nature. Keith's musings were inspired - to use a horribly inappropriate word - by Bhanwattie Gopaul, the pregnant woman who poisoned her two step-children and herself.
Knowing of my interest in mind matters, Keith expressed the wish that I would shed some light on the following conundrums about homo sapiens: Why have we not evolved to choose what is good for us? Why do we make emotional rather than rational choices? What is it about human beings that make them pursue courses that will obviously have unhappy consequences? Is it our lot to be seduced by our fantasies and, if so, why have we been so programmed?
The answer to the first question is easy. We have evolved to choose what is "good" for us. But "good" has a very specific meaning in evolutionary terms. First, what is good is whatever strategies are most effective in propagating our genes. This would include good attributes - in the moral sense - such as parental affection and altruism, as well as bad attributes, such as promiscuity and murder.
Secondly, we must bear in mind that these strategies were evolved within an ancestral environment which, even in the most primitive tribes of the New Guinea highlands or the South American rainforests or the African savannahs, no longer really exists. What that means is that we are in many ways maladapted to the world we have created. That is why we eat too much fatty foods and watch pornography and support the death penalty.
Keith's second question, as to why we make emotional rather than rational choices, reveals a misconception that has plagued Western thinking for centuries: that our emotions and our reason are not only dichotomous, but opposed. In fact, our emotions are a crucial part of our reasoning apparatus. It is our emotion circuits which tell our logic circuits how to prioritise when we reason. Without emotions, we could not make decisions or even scientific discoveries.
Our emotions lead us astray for two main reasons: first, our primal passions are ill-adapted to the social relations of the modern world; and, second, feelings have evolved as guarantors of sincerity and, that being the case, are credible precisely because they exert such powerful control over us.
These points also answer Keith's third question, as to why people make obviously bad romantic choices. The man or woman who is more passionate, and therefore less rational, seems to our prehistoric brains more sincere in their feelings for us. So, paradoxically, we tend to view such people as more reliable romantically.
Therefore our "fantasies", to come to Keith's fourth question, are fantasies only in the sense that they are now divorced from the reality that selected our brains, because that world no longer exists.
The most crucial question, however, was the one Keith never directly asked: how this woman could poison two small children like that? I have no specific answer, of course. Suffice to say that step-parenthood is the strongest risk factor for child abuse ever identified and a child is 40 to 100 times more likely to be killed by a step-parent than a biological parent. (These statistics explain why stories of cruel step-parents appear in many different cultures).
All this doesn't mean that step-parents are wickeder than other people. It means that children are extremely demanding creatures and biological parents are wired to make the sacrifices to meet those demands (affection, time, energy) because they have a genetic interest in their children's welfare.
Keith's final question was this: Why should humans be so constituted when, programmed differently, life would not only be more benign, but death would only come in accordance with the nature of time?
The answer is that neither evolution, time nor the universe have any morality, purpose or consciousness. These are entirely the purview of human beings who, having created a world that has superseded blind Nature, hold the responsibility for creating the conditions which promote a good that is defined by more than genetic self-interest.
Copyright ©2001 Kevin Baldeosingh