The Selfless Gene

The logic of selfish gene theory is impeccable, but its usual formulation leaves something to be desired in point of strict and literal accuracy. I propose to remedy that. No harm will be done to the theory thereby; we will merely clarify its exact import. First, some terminology: by “gene” I will mean a particular piece of matter that exists on an individual strand of DNA—a specific localized chemical lump. I will not mean the type of gene of which this is a particular instance: this is a general form that can be instantiated in many individual instances; it might be viewed as the information contained in the chemical instance or the general type of which there are many instances (my genes, your genes, etc.—construed as local particular lumps of matter in individual bodies). We might call these gene tokens as opposed to gene types. This distinction is vital to the point I want to make, because we might mean the token gene is selfish or the type gene is selfish. Is the gene token (that particular lump) selfish?

To answer this let’s consider an ordinary case of selfishness: a person who cares only for himself and no one else—he always comes first. Such a person might coexist with copies of himself—replicas, twins. Perhaps they have been created by cloning him; they are exactly like him, but they are not him (that individual). Let’s suppose he doesn’t give a damn about these copies; he cares only for himself. He would happily let them die if it suited his own selfish purposes. Now contrast this selfish person with another person who also has many copies, but he does care about them; he goes out of his way to help them out, share with them, even sacrifice himself for them. This person is selfless not selfish; he is an altruist not an egoist. But suppose he is indifferent to anyone who is not a copy of himself; he is selectively selfless. It would be wrong to call him selfish, but his selflessness is sharply limited to his doubles, duplicates, twins. His altruism is confined to a certain select group of individuals: these he promotes and supports, feeds and protects—though anyone else gets the cold shoulder. It is this individual who best represents the concept of the selfish gene not the outright selfish person. The gene token seeks the welfare and survival of its copies not itself alone; it will go when the body it is in disintegrates, and it knows it. But its replicas will live on—and that is its mission in life. It may even sacrifice itself for the sake of its copies—as when a mother gives food to its babies even at a considerable cost to herself. It produces as many copies as possible, so that its type survives, possibly immortally; but it itself will perish with the bodily vehicle in which it exists. The copies will exist even when the individual gene that made them has gone. This gene is not selfish in any reasonable sense—though we might say the gene type is selfish because it sees to it that this type will survive into the future.

We really have two questions: are gene tokens selfish and are gene types selfish. No to the former, and yes to the latter. It depends on what we are referring to. I rather think people generally mean the former, in which case they misspeak, because the tokens are selfless not selfish. The token is selfless in the way the individual animal is selfless: the mother is concerned to protect her offspring copies even when this goes against her own individual interests (she might die as they suckle at her teats). It would be strange to say she was selfish because her type is trying to protect that type; she is protecting her copies not herself, as opposed to being a type that is protecting itself. So, the so-called selfish gene is not really selfish but selfless—altruistic, other-interested. Our genes (individual tokens) are actually generous and other-directed, but only within the class of recipients limited to type-identity with them. They are like a person only altruistic within his tribe or family, only more strictly. The Selfish Gene could have been called The Selfless Gene and said essentially all the same things, reserving for a footnote the observation that gene types can be said to be selfish in an extended sense of “selfish” (we don’t say person types are selfish but only person tokens). Still less is the information inside a person itself selfish. It is really a lot simpler simply to say that genes (those bits of matter) are selfless, adding that their sole focus of altruistic interest is their own copies. They don’t survive bodily destruction, though their replicas do. They are not physically passed on, though physical entities just like them survive in future bodies. It is certainly not true that my token set of genes is literally made up of the same material entities that existed in my ancestors; what survives are just the old types, or the information they contain. As I say, this doesn’t detract from the correctness of selfish gene theory, though it does recommend changing the rhetoric slightly. And I think the book would have attracted a lot less misunderstanding if it had been called The Unselfish but Selective Gene.[1]

[1] For philosophers steeped in the type-token distinction in application to the mind-body problem this paper will be pretty straightforward, but that distinction is not always apparent to people less prone to logic-chopping. I have tried to make it as clear as possible, based on past experience. The logical point is simply that “x is a replica of y” doesn’t entail “x is (numerically) identical to y”—in fact the opposite is true.

Mathematical Logic

It has always been felt that logic and mathematics have a lot in common. This led to the idea that mathematics reduces to logic. I am going to argue that the converse is true: logic is basically mathematical; logic “reduces” (expands) to mathematics. It’s more complex than it looks in the textbooks. The first and vital point to get clear about is that logic is not concerned with language—words, symbols. It is concerned with thought—logical thought. If we imagine logical thought before language existed, logic is about that. There is no guarantee that the grammatical forms of language will correctly represent the structure of thought; indeed, that is unlikely to be true, given the prime purpose of spoken language, i.e., efficient communication. Logical thought (reasoning) takes place within the individual and has whatever complexity it needs. Logical concepts are not elements of speech. So, you need to open your mind to the possibility that logic de re is quite unlike the formulas you are familiar with from “symbolic logic” class (an oxymoron in my book). I am talking about conceptual logic—logic in the head. Be prepared, then, for some startling suggestions. Logic needs to be re-written from the ground up.[1]

My thesis then is that what we know as propositional and predicate calculus are species of arithmetic. This is easier to see for predicate logic because it is quantificational—it is about quantity, number. It is about “all” and “some”, or the concepts that underlie these words. These are part of a whole system of quantitative concepts corresponding to “a few”, “several”, “many”, “most”, “more”, “nearly all”, “innumerably many”, “infinitely many”, “one”, “two”, “twenty- seven”, and so on. These are all number words, words for counting, adding, etc. They answer the question “How many?”. It is to be noted that this quantificational logic is second-order: it concerns the number of things falling under a concept, as in “The concept dog has many things falling under it”. The thought is captured by that verbal formulation: we are thinking about concepts and assigning numbers to them. So, we are not doing the same thing in thought as we are when we ascribe a property to an object, as expressed by “That dog is brown”. This has long been recognized by philosophical logicians (or logical psychologists). The logical form of a quantificational thought is given by a property and a number: F (n)—e.g.,Dog (many). In predicate logic (quantification theory) we go up a level and think about concepts and their multiplicity; we don’t think about objects and their properties. Logic is meta.

But how does so-called propositional (or sentential) logic fit this description? In this logic we encounter the ideas of a sentence connective, a truth function, an operator on propositions. Natural language is taken very seriously as a guide to logical structure. There is scarcely a linguistic turn; the subject matter is already assumed to be linguistic (not that people are very clear what this means). How do these logical words and concepts assume a mathematical shape? The answer is not far to seek: “and” means “both”, to put it simply. The conjunction “p and q” means “Both p and q are true”; not one of them, or none, but both. This is a quantity word: the mind is working quantitatively when it thinks conjunctively—numerically, arithmetically. If both are true, then not just one is true—truth here requires a number of separate truths. If the conjunction is long, it will require that the corresponding number of propositions be true. The word “and” works like the word “plus”: it adds to the number of conjuncts. So, conjunctions in thought are mathematically conceived; you can’t form them unless you have some basic mathematical competence. Conjunction is often compared to universal quantification and the comparison is apt; but “all” is a number word, and so conjunction is a mathematical concept too, perhaps the simplest one. Disjunction works similarly: “or” means “at least one of the disjoined propositions is true”. It doesn’t have to be all disjuncts, so long as it is some; one will do. All this we grasp when we use the word “or”. We are thinking quantificationally. Hence “or” is often compared to “some”, aptly enough. Propositional logic is thus a species of quantificational logic, as complex and mathematical as it is. Moreover, it refers to propositions, so it is second-order, meta. But what about “not”? That little word has always been a thorn in the side of philosophers of logic (negative facts anyone?); it seems like a thing apart, curious in its connotation. What is this “not-ness”? It doesn’t yield easily to quantificational analysis—where is the “some” and “all”? What does “Not-p” mean? What do I mean when say that snow is not black? I suggest that I mean something like this: “There is no fact corresponding to the proposition that snow is black”, or “None of the facts in the world is the (putative) fact that snow is black”. It is a negative quantifier like “no one”. We could paraphrase our target sentence as “Nothing fits the description ‘black snow’”; or again, “There is no object such that it is both snow and black”. Thus, “not” is a simple word with a complex meaning; it takes a bit of brains to comprehend (animals are probably not up to it). You see why I said logical thought may not be properly reflected in ordinary language? The negative thought is a convoluted thought raising conceptual puzzles. In it the number zero presumably has its beginnings. It goes along with the word “false”: we can equally say “It is false that snow is black”, which is also second-order and meta. To think negatively is to entertain a counterfactual state of affairs and repudiate it as actual. In a way it lies at the very heart of logic, because logic is about necessity and possibility. The concept of possibility is itself tacitly quantificational and hence mathematical: “In some possible world, p”. We can naturally say “In hundreds of possible worlds, p” or “In no possible world, p”. Modal logic is likewise mathematical in character. Logic with negation is also logic with quantification. Similarly for tense logic in which we have quantification over times. All of these are mathematical, though primitively so (actually not so primitive). The logical mind is at bottom a mathematical mind. We would do well to render it more perspicuously in mathematical terms, thereby revealing its affinity with other types of mathematics. It is a kind of pre-school arithmetic.

I end with identity. Logic is sometimes said to include identity, and not without reason because identity is implicit in it. How does identity fit the mathematical analysis? As follows: to say that Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus is to say that Hesperus and Phosphorus are one. There are not two objects here but one object. We thought there were two (or more) and now we learn there is just the one. We counted wrong, as it turns out: if you put Hesperus and Phosphorus together in the same room, you find only one object there; there is one less object in the world than you supposed. In this thought we find the roots of the idea that a perceived plurality might reduce to an objective unity. Identity forces us to think numerically. It is an essentially mathematical concept. Accordingly, even elementary logic (with or without identity) is shot through with mathematical notions, though not particularly advanced ones; we might as well declare it a branch of mathematics. But remember it is not the symbolism that makes it mathematical but the underlying thought content. Mathematical logic is not a branch of logic but its very nature.[2]

[1] Compare my paper “Mathematical Ethics”.

[2] There is an irony in this in that the formulas of symbolic logic were supposed to lay bare the structure of logical thought, but actually it is the structure of logical thought that reveals the real content of those formulas. The thought is mathematical upon closer analysis, and this constitutes the meaning of the symbolic system. The hidden logical form of the formulas is given by the mathematical analysis of the underlying thought. Logic as we have it is a kind of baby math.

A Puzzle about Pornography

Sex and food are clearly powerful forces in the psychic life of human beings. The question may be raised as to which is more powerful (is there a power imbalance?). But there is a curious asymmetry between them: we like to watch pornography but not its culinary equivalent. We like sex porn but food porn not so much. You never hear about people with a food porn addiction. Why is this? People like to watch other people having sex, but not other people eating. People don’t watch food porn videos when they feel hungry—why not? Why do people like watching sex porn when they feel horny? Isn’t it just as pointless as watching people eat when you feel hungry? Isn’t it irrational? The case is like imagination: people regularly have sexual fantasies, but it is not normal to have recurrent eating fantasies. Sexual fantasies are felt as gratifying, but not food fantasies. Teenagers don’t fantasize about chowing down all day. And people like pornography even when sexually active; but they don’t go in for food porn when well-fed. What need is satisfied by sexual images that is not satisfied by gustatory images? Why are there no magazines specializing in pictures of delicious meals? Why is a nude a lot more stimulating than a still life of a plate of food?

A variety of answers suggest themselves. Is it because pornography breaks a taboo but food images don’t? Is it the thrill of violating a taboo? It is true that we see naked food all the time but not naked bodies, and that it is regarded as taboo to want to see the latter. What if we inverted the two? Suppose people were general nudists but food is kept under wraps: you never see people eating food, but you constantly see them naked and fornicating. Would we then revel in food porn? Hardly. Pictures of food don’t have the power of pictures of naked bodies: food going into the mouth is not like the penis going into the vagina (etc.). The two types of “penetration” are not equivalent. Also, it would be breaking a taboo to watch film of people excreting, but hardly anyone would be enthusiastic about that. Taboo-breaking is neither necessary nor sufficient. What about the idea that sex is (partly) visual but eating isn’t? This sounds on the right track: the visual plays a role in actual sex, but not so much in eating. We are stimulated by the look of a naked body but not by the look of a ham sandwich. But is it true that vision plays no significant part in the pleasure of eating? That sounds wrong; it plays some part. And isn’t sex in the dark or blind sex pretty exciting too? Yet we don’t thrill to a purely auditory representation of a sex act. It isn’t that the sense of sight is absent from the food case but essential in the sex case. However, what is true is that sex is typically private and eating is not; and vision is what reveals the private most forcefully, as in voyeurism. Is it that sex porn satisfies our curiosity about this private matter, while food porn would do nothing analogous because eating is public? If we invert the two, the asymmetry seems to fade away: if all sex were public all the time, so that we were inundated with the stuff, we might lose our interest in porn; but if eating were always done privately, away from prying eyes, we might find some frisson in seeing images of it. It’s a question of privacy and curiosity. Yet we don’t have a comparable interest in toilet activity and it is also private; and I doubt there would be much of a market for food porn once the initial novelty wore off (how many times can you watch a man eating a hamburger?). The visual element seems part of the appeal of pornography, and lack of appeal of the food counterpart, but we have not yet identified the crucial difference. It begins to seem quite puzzling.

The puzzle deepens when we recall that food and sex are not just analogous but also connected. People seem to enjoy coupling the two (while coupling) and food-sex pornography is apparently quite popular. Yet no one is interested in pure food porn (except the odd gastronomic weirdo): people don’t want to salivate to the image of a roast chicken or a serving of sushi, no matter how much they may enjoy eating these things. Watching people eat is just not arousing or fascinating or exciting. It is the sex part of food-sex porn that gets people’s juices flowing not the food part. At this point we might be tempted to wax metaphysical: pornography is all about the human condition, death, embodiment, the soul. I don’t think this is completely wrong: thoughts of our animal nature, our talent for creative ideas, our strange juxtaposition of the godly and the goofy, our understanding of interpersonal relations, our grasp of the phenomenon of common knowledge, the mystery of reproduction, civilization and its discontents—all these may come into play. But they omit the primordial character of the depicted sex act—what really sets it apart viscerally. And here I want to mention an obvious fact: the genitals are on full display in all their anatomical glory. And the genitals are of enormous interest to us, because they are the organs of reproduction; the genes have programmed us to be obsessed with the genitals. Their future depends on them. The genitals are objects of endless fascination because of their biological centrality. If we had no interest in them, reproduction would grind to a halt (under normal conditions). I would bet that if you showed a video of the rear end of a female ape in heat to a male ape you would get a reaction. Copulation is genital, trivially. So, pornography is popular because of an ancient biological imperative: genital awareness, genital competence. Sexual selection is part of this: the genitals need to be seen to be present and healthy. Nothing like this holds in the case of food—the female is not going to reproduce with food! Genital know-how is what pornography efficiently enables, and that is useful knowledge to have. Genital curiosity is built into the genes and pornography satisfies this curiosity. A taste for porn is therefore innate and unavoidable. One might even conjecture that pornography works as a learning tool for the human species (think of the wall porn in old Pompei). If we combine this with the other suggestions mooted above, we can see why sex porn has a special interest not shared by food porn. We have no particular interest in plumbing the depths of the mouth and stomach, but the genitals are another ball of wax. We need to keep track of them in sexual encounters, hence the visual element, and their general hiddenness and privacy deprives us of ready access to their anatomy. Pornography enables us to remedy these difficulties. We can simulate in our minds the act depicted, which can then be applied in real life; it is a skill that has to be learned. That is the deep evolutionary meaning of pornography. Puzzle resolved.[1]

[1] I have relegated to a footnote one theory strangely popular these days, namely that the appeal of porn resides in its depiction of women as abused and degraded. This is not plausible as a general theory of the appeal of porn, though some porn no doubt trades on this deplorable proclivity. Obviously, much porn has nothing to do with it. Porn comes in many varieties, though the common factor is the genitals, one way or another. The genes program interest in the genitals and pornography caters to this instinctive interest.

Food and Language

The central place of food in animal life is undeniable.[1] An animal is a food machine. The reason is fundamental: animals need energy to survive and food is the source of energy (it would be different if they could just get charged up like an electric car). It is fair to say that animals are obsessed with food: for themselves and their offspring, mainly. Starvation is not on the menu. They are designed to obtain and consume food. They know their way around food. Many suffer early deaths for lack of it. They communicate about food: in hunting and food-seeking, in learning about it, in sharing or not sharing it. If they could talk like us, they would surely talk about food constantly. We are animals (not plants, rocks, or gods), so we share this obsession: we need food as badly as other animals. We are also speakers. Go back to our early days as a species when we were still on the inarticulate side: chronically short of food, squabbling about it, eagerly consuming it. We were a cooperative social species for whom the food problem was very real (still is for some). Imagine that spoken language was just getting started: what would we talk about? Food, of course—food, glorious (but scarce) food. We would all be Billy Bunters with his “tuck” obsession. Our first tentative language-game would be food-oriented. We would be talkative foodies. This would help us in our hunting and gathering, in our food preparation, in our feasting (or lack thereof). Let’s be honest: we would talk about food a hell of a lot. Talking is energy-consuming, so you are not going to do it if energy is in short supply; but talking about food is talking about energy and how to obtain it, so you would let the talk flow. You would be a natural-born food-talker: a food critic, a food savant, a food fanatic. You would talk about food from dawn till dusk—even over dinner! Here’s what you wouldn’t talk about: sense-data or Platonic universals or material particulars in space and time. Your ontology would be a culinary ontology, which is quite enough to be going on with. Your tools are also mainly food-involving: tools for hunting, cutting, dining with. Fire is mainly used for cooking. Family meals are the center of social life. Your speech acts revolve around the food arena—sharing, requesting, praising, wondering aloud where your next meal is coming from. As time passes, you branch out a bit: you are not only interested in food talk—you are also partial to some mating conversation or family dramas or even discussions of what the Sun is. But you began with food; that’s where your linguistic resources were forged. It therefore seeps into your more general chatter. You use food analogies, food metaphors, food paradigms, food conceptual schemes, food methodologies. For that is the basis from which your language developed—and your thought too. For example, you needed to distinguish food objects from non-food objects, the edible from the inedible; this led you to the concept of a material object in general. You may also start to wonder about the non-digestive organs of the body and differentiate them from the digestive organs. You get beyond the narrow ontology of food proper.

Suppose that sometime later you even start to ponder what we would now call your mind, including your senses. There’s a reality there, you feel, but how to talk about it? You naturally turn to your tried-and-true food language and its conceptual underpinnings: consumption, digestion, etc. You might then start to talk of your mind (though you don’t use that term) as if it is like your stomach and appended organs: perceiving is like consuming, reasoning is like digestion, knowledge is like satiation, memory is like a full larder. Yes, that’s it, you think, no need to invent some newfangled conceptual-linguistic scheme. Thus, you speak of food for thought, indigestible lessons, a healthy intellectual diet, vomitous propositional content. The senses are clearly food-oriented—good at detecting and tracking food, as well as evaluating it—so they have a lot to do with food. The brain is like the stomach as an ingestive organ that processes and transforms what is fed into it. The mind thus becomes modelled on the body, specifically the food organs. In time, some clever cognitive scientist starts referring to various “mental modules” analogous to physical organs of the body–the food module along with the reproduction module and the aggression module. He claims that the food mental module was the first to evolve and that it led to the other two: that is, it is cognitively fundamental. The cognitive mind in general is run on food-representing computations and suchlike things. We are still anchored to those early adventures in food cognition and food speech. And it is true that food naturally radiates outwards, requiring competence in object tracking, inference from evidence, fire management, utensil production, communal dining, fair shares, moral rights, laws governing the proper control of food distribution, and so on. You can’t just be focused on food itself; you need knowledge of the whole matrix in which it is naturally embedded. There is even food science, food medicine, food culture, food ethics, food politics, food art, the foody lifestyle, food disorders and phobias, and food snobbery. It’s a big field, conceptually rich, but all stemming from those early days of anxiously scrambling to put food on the table (an anxiety that has never left us). In the beginning was the meal (deeds were meal-directed).

A well-fed naturalistic ethicist might venture the hypothesis that our ethics is rooted in food ethics: altruistic sharing, natural eating rights, duties to the starving, promises about when lunch will be served, admonitions against stealing food from others. And it is perfectly true that a pride of lions, say, is sorely in need of ethical instruction when jostling for a bite of a freshly killed carcass (greedy buggers). The political theorist might likewise insist that distributive justice primordially requires that food be distributed according to certain abstract principles of fairness, with all other cases ultimately reducing to the food case. Capitalism might be defined as accumulating all the food you can lay your hands on in a free market, including the means of food production; at any rate, this is the basic case. Charities will plead that famine is the worst evil to befall man. Philosophers of physics, not to be left out, will contend that physics is founded on a bedrock of concepts that go back to the hunting and gathering age when we had to chase big lumps of matter through the jungle and then chop them into small pieces (this leading to ancient atomism). What is mass, after all, other than the size of your helping? At any rate, our conceptual scheme and spoken language have a history, and what kicked them off was an obsession with food—this being what led to our species supremacy and the very existence of physicists. We must thank God for giving us a brain that enabled us to solve the food problem—next gravity! A brain that can perform as well as ours in the food department has essentially all it needs to achieve greater things. Even mathematics was invented to do agriculture and count herds. (Is it an accident that a circle is the shape of a pie? I should think not.) Food is at the root of it all (plus some), as a matter of biological fact. That is a truth recognized by our most respected religions: the apple in the Garden of Eden, food rituals, food taboos, religious feast days, the last supper, fasts, and so on. I conjecture that religion began in food-related contexts and then expanded out from there—no doubt anxiety about food fueled early religious practices. Food crops up everywhere in human and animal life; it is part of our natural history (as Wittgenstein would say), a major part. It deserves more recognition in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology.[2]

[1] See my “Evolution by Nutritional Selection”.

[2] A key theoretical tool should be evolutionary derivation not just conceptual analysis and family resemblance: how did some existing adaptation begin and how did it develop over time? This would be a truly biological (naturalistic) philosophy. Of course, it involves expanding biology beyond its narrow professional boundaries. Bio-philosophy will take in food and its conceptual expression. It beats sex and war (with which it is strongly connected).