Taki's Magazine

Who Are We?

2009-05-07T14:06:16Z

The human conceit that we are the masters of our own destinies may be one of those hard-wired illusions which served an adaptive function in the distant past. Whatever the evolutionary truth of it, despite the fact that Calvinism, Islam, and modern science lean against the position that our will is free, we do live as if control is ours. But this intuition lies at the heart of one of the most pernicious mythologies of the modern age, that the human species is self-creating to such an extent that we have a Promethean capacity to reshape the very roots of our nature. Would that we had the will, up would be down and down would be up!

Such faith is not warranted by observation of nature, where we see regularities and ordered structure. If not for nature’s permanence of law it seems unlikely that the relatively modest mental faculties of man would have been able to stumble upon the truths of modern science. During the first flower of the scientific age it was taken as a given that our species was an animal subject to these laws, endowed with dispositions as inevitable as that of the dog to smell, the cat to stalk, and the bird to sing. It was no coincidence that the second half of R. A. Fisher’s magisterial The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection was given over to humanity. But science is a human endeavor, a creature of history, and the abominations of the Nazi regime cast a pall over attempts to interpret the patterns of our own species as we would count the number of bristles on the fruit fly. Nevertheless, though science is a human endeavor it is also fundamentally ahistorical and has the ability to tear itself away from the shackles of fashion and ideology and bear witness to truth.

Over the past generation the house of cards which was the “Blank Slate” consensus has been collapsing before the findings of current science. With hindsight the reality that our species has a deep and invariant nature is no surprise. Were the civilizations of the New World which Europeans stumbled upon centuries ago fundamentally unintelligible despite their utter isolation from the cultural currents of the Old World? Of course not. The only reason that the savagery of the Aztec civilization was of note, with its bloody gods, is that outsiders saw in the Aztecs a face of their own darker selves, not incomprehensible aliens. Language, religion, architecture, hierarchy, the list of human universals is endless. The very structure of the human mind drives us toward familiar heights and depths.

But hardware is useless without software. A number of unfortunate “natural experiments” have confirmed that human children need linguistic interaction and input during a “critical period” to fully develop our natural competency. Just as the flow of a river is guided by the topography of the valley, so the expression of our human nature is contingent upon the environmental input of human society. Humans are not born, they are raised. Our genetic endowments are the necessary principal, but environmental richness serves as the compounding dynamic which allows us to grow our investment and fulfill our potential.

The constraints of human nature are essential to understanding how societies flourish. We are not necessarily consciously aware of these constraints or their interlocking dependencies. This may explain the disasters of many “planned” societies, from the tragic Utopians of the Burned-over District to the mass catastrophes of 20th century communism. Societies are organic entities scaffolded by latent variables, and naturally some of those variables will have a biological underpinning. To rationally recreate human societies from the ground up presupposes that human nature is but amorphous and formless clay to be re-molded by the social engineer. Not so, it has structure and unfolds of its own will.

Genetics may not only explain human similarity, the profound intelligibility of human to human, but also our differences. This reality is likely one of the impulses that drives many to deny that our genetic endowments have any relation to who we are. But the data can be ignored only so long. Less than 10 years ago the psychologist Judith Richard Harris published a book, The Nurture Assumption, in which she reviewed the copious literature that points to the likelihood that few differences in personality and disposition have anything to do with parental environment. So how is it then that parents and children resemble each other? They share genes! In fact, the non-genetic component of variation remains a mystery to this day, though Harris argues that the influence is that of peer culture, socialization among age cohorts. The implication here is that the control parents have over the outcomes of their offspring are not direct, but mediated through the social environments which they select for their children.

Culture therefore matters in a profound way, but its power cannot be understood without keeping in mind the role that genetic endowments play in shaping the arc of individual development. Genes may explain the variation within the population, but that variation can be understood only in the context of a the environmental background.

Consider what it might mean to be a “problem child” in Mormon culture. Individuals with a common genetic makeup may naturally be more problematic in a quantitative sense because of the lack of impulse control among both Mormons and non-Mormons, but the nature of antisocial actions may differ qualitatively across the two sets of individuals. If individual differences due to genetics are the principle, the value of the compounding dynamic due to environment is defined by the environment. That is, the nature of the society in which an individual develops and expresses their own predispositions.

Our genes matter, as does the environment in which those genes express. Humans are defined by a wide range of universal and invariant characters; deep commonalities in our hardware which allow us to communicate across the most alien of cultural chasms. But the species is also defined by a rich array of diversity of disposition, some of which is rooted in simple but regular modifications of that same hardware. Not only may the hardware differ, but the performance of the machine is contingent upon the software. The world is not black and white. Culture can gainsay and modulate the expression of our biological nature, but it cannot turn the world upside down, only tilt it on the margins. Sweet cannot be bitter through force of will, and the basic parameters of family, faith and nation are only so flexible. The universe of preferences is not flat, individuals and societies flourish when we ascend those peaks which both nature & nurture drive us toward. Nature’s points are finite, but nevertheless incredibly subtle and rich. We would be wise not to neglect the wisdom of ages that it reflects.

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How the Jews Got Their Smarts (and Other Adventures in Biohistory)

2009-02-23T06:16:29Z

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending examine the interaction between civilization and evolution, and in the process smash to pieces the Blank Slate hypothesis.

150 years ago Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species. Origin was not revolutionary because it proposed that lineages changed over time; the idea was in the air of the age, and evolutionary theories have an ancient pedigree, dating back to antiquity. No, what made Origin a sensation was that Charles Darwin assaulted the evolutionary question with an encyclopedic array of data making the case for descent with modification as an empirical fact, and introduced the process of natural selection as a compelling motive engine.

Darwin’s framework pointed the way for natural historians to move on from being describers to predictors. To this day, the ideas outlined in Darwin’s voluminous oeuvre influence evolutionary biologists, and his hypotheses are fruitful grounds from which formal theoreticians and empirical researchers launch their endeavors.

Origin explored some questions which were relevant to the natural history of our own species, but Descent of Man fully confronted the implications of the human animal shaped by nature. The intellectual reverberations of the tumult sparked by Charles Darwin’s unabashed naturalism echo down to our own age, as we have reassessed our position in the cosmos, with some arguing that the evolutionary paradigm completes the Copernican revolution whereby the human story became a sidelight on nature’s canvas. From the initial controversy evolutionary theory was assumed to have relevance for humanity. Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and R. A. Fisher pushed forward the Darwinian paradigm with a particular focus on human variation and evolution. While the first half of R. A. Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection is devoted to a mathematical model of evolutionary process, the second half probes the course of human history and its biological potentialities. Humanity was not an afterthought for Fisher and many of his contemporaries. On the contrary, they lived during the high tide of eugenics, a discipline which viewed itself as an applied field that naturally arose out of implications of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

Then came Adolf Hitler. There is no need for an epilogue of this era, humans soon became marginalized in the study of evolution, unless they were safely driven back into the deep past so as to have little relevance for the present. Human evolutionary biology became a matter of bones, not blood. Researchers in the age of molecular genetics fanned out across numerous “model organisms,” from the fly and mouse to the nematode, in the quest to understand the science of the gene. Great scholarship this might be, but it lacks something in catching the attention of the public.

But the same molecular methods which pushed aside thoughts of human evolution in the wake of the discovery of DNA by James Watson & Francis Crick ultimately led us back to Homo sapiens. While ethical constraints prevent scholars from engaging in experiments on humans and forced them to rely on pedigrees, molecular data is subject to no such limitations. Because of biomedical applications molecular analysis of human genetic variation has been at the forefront of research activity, resulting in funding for “Big Science” such as the Human Genome Project. In genomics, the mapping and analysis of the entire genetic code of organisms, humans are no longer an afterthought. It is arguable that over the last five years we have obtained more insight into the nature of the human evolutionary past than we were able to comprehend over the last 150 years.

As the data has crested the need for a deeper theoretical understanding of what it means has become critical. Though computers may help in mining data, the ultimate judgments of value and recognition of deep patterns remain a domain where humans reign supreme. In The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending attempt to do just that. Through the welter of biostatistical data Cochran & Harpending see a vindication of the theoretical insights of Charles Darwin and R. A. Fisher.

While computational geneticists live in a world dominated by bytes, The 10,000 Year Explosion synthesizes seemingly disparate fields so as to generate a narrative of more insight than each part alone. With the long exile of biology from the human sciences there are many weeds to clear out, but the fallow period has left the soil fertile. The 10,000 Year Explosion starts with a set of facts derived from traditional historical disciplines, narrative history to paleoanthropology, and integrates them into a solid base of theoretical models supported by decades of research in animal breeding and population genetics, and finally sifts the resulting hybrid models through the filter of genomics. After converging upon a few likely probabilities they begin to turn the cranks on the machine to generate inferences and plausibilities in the hypothetico-deductive tradition of science.

The overarching insight of the book is that contrary to popular belief, the rise of “civilization” did not result in the extinction of humans as animals subject to biological evolution and the emergence of a species which had untethered itself from the truisms of nature. In fact as evident in the subheading Cochran & Harpending argue that contrary to the conventional wisdom civilization has increased the rate of evolutionary change. There is no mystery if you assume that evolutionary change is somehow related to the change in a population’s environment, and human culture can be considered our species’ environment. At its most simple level all that is required for evolution are changes in the frequencies of genetic variants over time; this may be prevented by selective forces which constrain variation, but constancy has not been a feature of human history over the past 10,000 years. Add to this Cochran & Harpending’s insight that larger populations have more variation, like a more diverse palette for a painter, and one can see how the creative energies of evolution might be unleashed among on humans.

Over the past 10 years these a priori possibilities have been given plausibility by a series of papers which have examined the map of human genetic variation through combination of more powerful sequencing and robust computational analysis. In short, the results imply that the genome of the human species have been reshaped by natural selection within the past 400 generations, about 10,000 years.

A few specific examples clarify and extend the theoretical insights which serve as the preamble to The 10,000 Year Explosion. To many of us, the Neolithic Revolution, with the concomitant rise of agriculture and village life, might seem the first step on the long road out of Nature’s domain, but Cochran & Harpending argue that on the contrary this transition from the hunter-gatherer status quo resulted in a new bout of selective events and a radical shift in our species’ ecological niche. From the standpoint of today, both hunter-gatherer and agricultural society seem nasty, brutish, and short; but we shouldn’t forget that these two civilizations differed from one another is fundamental ways. First and foremost, the diet of farmers was less diversified than that of hunters & gatherers, who depended on a wide range of nutritional sources at any given time. Though grain provides sufficient calories for basic sustenance, there is a great deal of evidence that the spread of farming resulted in an increased misery index on the part of the average human because of the poverty of nutrients. Additionally, while the diet of farmers became progressively more monotonous, the diseases that afflict farmers became more virulent. It turns out that the environment for the pathogens that prey upon humans are the humans themselves, so with the greater density of living which accompanied agriculture, plague became the handmaid of human life. It is no surprise that immunity related regions of the genome are among those most subject to evolutionary pressures according to geneticists, and that hunter-gatherer populations often suffer increased mortality when faced with contact by settled populations.

The argument in The 10,000 Year Explosion is that culture did not just accelerate evolution, but that evolution can also accelerate cultural change. I have alluded to one aspect above, it seems entirely likely that the majority of the ancestry in the New World would not be of European provenance if not for the fact that the native populations were utterly defenseless against Eurasian pathogens. In contrast, in Africa and in Asia European colonialism did not result in population replacement, while in Australia it did, again likely for reasons of disease.

A more intriguing and less obvious candidate to illuminate the interplay of biology & culture takes us further back in history. Today about 50% of the world’s population speaks Indo-European languages, from India to England. These are languages whose affinities are clear, and linguistic methods that bear some resemblance to evolutionary techniques suggest that the common ancestor flourished on the order of 5 to 7 thousand years ago. The question is: how did it come to be that disparate populations came to speak such similar languages? Cochran & Harpending offer a biological hypothesis—that the original Indo-Europeans were the first people with the genetic mutation that allows adults to digest lactose sugars in milk. It turns out that dairying results in five times as much caloric output per unit of land as raising cattle for meat, so the economic logic for turning to dairy when ecological circumstances make that optimal is clear. But for many populations this is not an option because consumption of raw milk is not physiologically possible as an adult, at least to the point where one extracts sufficient nutritive value. The genetic data tell us that somewhere in Central Eurasia 7,000 years ago there lived an individual who carried a mutation which allowed them to digest milk as an adult, and that this mutation swept all across Western Eurasia. Simultaneously, there are hints that contemporaneously the Indo-European speaking peoples spread West and South, bringing with them the culture of cattle and cart. What this specific example illustrates is the co-evolutionary dynamic of human history, with changes in human ecology driven by cultural change leading to population increase and so driving further cultural and genetic diversification.

In the penultimate chapter, the authors show that the “The 10,000 Year Explosion” is not simply relevant to questions across the scale of thousands of years. In “Medieval Evolution: How the Ashkenazi Jews Got Their Smarts,” Cochran & Harpending wade into a topic which has piqued the interest of many thinkers across the generations, the possible reasons for the incredible contribution of Jews to modern intellectual production over the past 200 years. As usual the argument here is a synthetic one, drawing from both textual historical sources and population genetic theory. Surveying the ancient records Gregory Cochran notes that in the Classical world Jews did not have a reputation for cleverness, while at the same time in the medical literature contemporary Jews have a peculiar pattern of a high frequency of a variety of recessive diseases.

One of the insights of population genetics is that only a few conditions can result in a high frequency of extremely deleterious diseases. One way that one could obtain this state is through inbreeding and population bottleneck, where random forces overwhelm the ability of selection to “purify” the genome of deleterious alleles. Another is for positive selection to throw off deleterious byproducts because one gene generally is implicated in a larger number of biochemical processes. The latter dynamic is especially evident after bouts of recent selection, as over time natural selection tends to “perfect” adaptations. A range of genetic data implied to Cochran that contrary to conventional wisdom Jews were not particularly inbred, nor did they go through a population bottleneck. This naturally leads to the conclusion that the high frequency of recessive diseases is due to selection, and likely recent selection. As the ancient historical data do not imply that Jews during this period had a peculiar cognitive profile or suffered strange ailments, it would seem that the time frame implied that selection events might have occurred during the Middle Ages. While some scholars have thought that the rabbinical tradition explained Jewish scholarly attainment, Cochran shows that from a population genetic standpoint there were simply not enough rabbis for this to be a viable source of selective pressures. So theory compels the hypothesis to settle upon the likelihood that the peculiar Jewish cognitive profile emerged through selection on intelligence while Jews were merchants & money-lenders.

Got that? The hypothesis of the origins of Ashkenazi IQ illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology which Cochran & Harpending outline in The 10,000 Year Explosion. First, pile up an enormous stack of facts from an array of disciplines. Second, master theoretical evolutionary biology so that you have a machine to reprocess the facts and produce plausible descriptions and predictions. Third, comb the empirical genomic data to see if predictions and descriptions derived from theory & observation actually match what the empirical results are. Easy, no? The reality is that this is a peculiar skill set. Most historians don’t know the difference between mitochondria and microsatellites, while few geneticists are aware that Fiddler on the Roof took extreme liberties with the nature of Jewish life in Europe. How many people could offer an opinion on the functional genomics of lactase persistence and the validity of Marija Gimbutas or Colin Renfrew’s models for the origins of the Indo-Europeans?

But onward and upward. There was an age when chemists did not need to take a course in calculus in their education, while today one can not obtain a degree in biology with at least that minimal level of mathematical fluency. Disciplinary toolkits change and evolve, and The 10,000 Year Explosion is in some ways a preview of what is to come, as E. O. Wilson’s vision of consilience becomes more than just a vision.

These are not just academic questions. In Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity, Gary Naban reports that Navajo who received milk from the federal government in aid programs simply thew it away. The Navajo of course are not lactose tolerant. People differ, and they differ in large part because of the diversification of human cultures over the last 10,000 years. Sickle-cell anemia, blue eyes, the thick straight hair of East Asians, and lactose tolerance are just a few of the new traits which our species developed in the recent past. Cochran & Harpending would argue that these changes are almost certainly due to the fact that we humans altered our own environment and the resultant modulation of selection pressures.

Sometimes the consequences are unpredictable, if the theory of how Jews developed their cognitive profile is correct, it is obvious that this is not an adaption to winning the Nobel Prize in physics or economics! Rather, that is just a side-effect of selection for rapid abstraction among medieval money-lenders, just as a host of neurologically degenerative diseases also are. The shape of human variation is an essential background condition which we must take into account whenever we formulation public policy, from something as prosaic as food subsidy programs to more fraught topics such as differential academic performance of ethnic groups in diverse modern societies.

Newtonian mechanics resulted in a sea change in the efficiency of modern warfare, removing the guesswork from the parabola which defines the arc of a cannon ball, and the emergence of engineering as the dominant vocational background of successful military men such as Napoleon. To a great extent we live in the pre-Newtonian age when it comes to public policy, totally uniformed by the sciences of human nature, shooting blindly at targets and relying on guess work and horse sense. In the next few decades the type of thinking on display in The 10,000 Year Explosion will perhaps become relatively banal, and likely guide our expectations about the efficacy of public policy meant to shape the course of human events.

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Human input vs. human inputs

2009-01-22T05:07:51Z

I recently read Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century by Jeffry A. Frieden. As in many books in this genre the first age of globalization which ended in 1914 receives a great deal of treatment. This was a period of free movement of capital, goods and labor. Frieden observes that though there was agitation and organization against the power of international capital, the mobilization by native labor against immigrants was much more vociferous. The reason for this is quite obvious: immigrant laborers reduced the wages in the unskilled sector on the order of 10-15% in the United States, to as much as 50% in Argentina. The movement of labor and capital was sensitive to market conditions; if an economy faltered foreign investment would be reallocated, and immigrants streams which shift and reverse migration would ensue.

But this economical treatment often seems to make too great an equivalence between capital and labor. The world of high finance is fundamentally rooted in abstractions, while other human beings are as concrete as one can get. Most American who have credit cards don’t have an intuitive understanding of compounding interest (my friend Greg Cochran claims that surveys suggest 5% of Americans understand the power of compounding growth), but all aside from autistics have an intuitive grasp of human dynamics. Economists I’ve known object that there isn’t fundamentally any difference between new technologies making unskilled labor redundant and immigrants who are willing to accept a lower wage for the same task. But there is a fundamental difference, and that is that we humans view the acts of human agents in a very different manner from acts which are proximately non-human.

I am a rather absentminded person. If I walk down the street listening to the news on my iPod Shuffle I occasionally run into a tree branch. This causes pain, shock and some initial irritation. On the other hand, if someone hit me as I was walking down the street, the physical inputs might be the same, but the psychological reaction will be fundamentally different. Evolutionary psychologists and cognitive scientists have long argued that humans have different domain-specific competencies for various categories of phenomena (e.g., folk physics, folk psychology and folk biology). In plain English, we don’t model human relations as we model stationary rocks. The exceptions to this are autistic individuals, who do model humans as they model rocks. The likely existence of domain-specific competencies which are implicit and reflexive naturally results in large deviations from the rational actor models of human behavior. It is no wonder that where cognitive psychology ends and behavioral economics begins has more to do with subject matter than methodology.

Many economists rightly point out that assumptions of rationality are first-order approximations, deviations will naturally exist. But what if the terms here are inverted? What if the deviations are the human norm, while rationality is the atypical preserve of individuals gifted with natural general intelligence and a disinclination to follow their first impulse? In The Myth of the Rational Voter Bryan Caplan cites numerous studies which suggest that those with higher IQs are much closer to the rational actor than humans with normal endowments.

Despite the fact that the average human has strong cognitive biases and is only modestly gifted with the ability to conceive of the operation of compounding interest, human civilization does exist. We do create complex and creative societies. The sociality of our species is a conundrum to evolutionary biologists; standard bottom-up theories such as reciprocal altruism and kin selection do not seem to scale up appropriately. With options running out some are now looking to group-level dynamics as the possible explanation for why human societies can scale up. The possibility of group-level dynamics being tied to our innate competencies (in fact, likely various social intelligences were shaped by a co-evolutionary processes) means that viewing labor, which after all refers to the economic output of human beings, as an easily reducible unit in the international economic order might need to some rethinking.

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The Limits of Certitude

2009-01-12T21:14:27Z

Interacting with people in the sciences over my life one of the major issues I have noticed is an extreme hubris when it comes to their opinions in regards to non-scientific issues. Many individuals in the sciences consider all issues fundamentally scientific. This engenders a certitude when it comes to public policy; there are no opinions, there are true descriptions of reality and false ones. The underlying reason for this sort of outlook is obvious: science is an extremely powerful tool with which to model and predict phenomena of interest. But for those with a scientific background this is no abstract theory, it is a lived experience. Granted, the edges and frontiers of science are fraught with hundreds of false leads for every sliver of new insight, but the basic background assumptions which new scientific endeavors are predicated upon have been validated to a high level of precision. If the scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory can plan unmanned spacecraft trajectories to Mars with error on the order of meters, what is something as simple as humanity?

This is where history helps, the idea that science can easily tackle social problems is not new. In the wake of the incredible physical discoveries ushered in by Isaac Newton and his successors, in the 18th century social utopians naturally turned to rational and empirical methodologies to design a better society. The failures of Robert Owen were not out of the norm. While the utopians of the early 19th century looked to the physical sciences, those of the late 19th century lived in the wake of The Origin of the Species, a work which earned the admiration of Karl Marx and a range of Social Darwinists. The few successes, and many failures, of the “scientific” method in social “engineering” should instill in us a natural caution. The experimental data is in, and the theoretical models have not been fruitful.

The checkered history of scientism is not a weakness of the scientific methodology in social domains, but rather a function of the nature of human societies. This is clear even within the natural sciences. One of my professors, an evolutionary ecologist by training, told me once about a graduate level course in which he was enrolled that included a physics student. At the end of the term when they handed in the results of their research project he noticed that the physicist’s report was far thicker than one would have expected. It turned out that a physics graduate student was not habituated toward the enormous errors which are the norm in statistical ecology; he spent dozens of pages hypothesizing the exact sources of error where the other students simply accepted as normal a large amount of “noise.” In a deep philosophical sense one might contend that all of biology is reducible to physics, but the reason for dividing these disciplines is that the heuristics and frameworks which are fruitful in physics are not always useful in biology.

Our modern world in which we are embedded is to a large extent an outgrowth of the ingenuity of scientific engineering. The computer on which I am typing this post has more power than the whole air traffic control system of the United States in the 1980s. The saturation of cell phones and iPods subtly change expectations and the nature of human experience. The recourse to Google has also shifted the nature of returns to erudition. But many of these technological changes are extensions upon physical science, arguably the most precise and powerful of the sciences. With the rise of personal genomics the biological sciences are now also surfing the wave of technological advance, but there is a qualitative difference between biology’s contingent qualified implications and the clean certitude of physics. Remember the end of infectious disease? Evolution is adaptive, and victory in one battle does not win the war. We will always have to revisit this war every few generations as the pathogens adapt to the new techniques. Contrast this with transportation, it isn’t as if the nature of friction changes to make our current jets less efficient in the future, all things equal. The complex dynamics of biology are different from those of much of physics; diffusion equations are helpful in both materials science and evolutionary genetics, but the nature of the utility is not interchangeable.

Just as on a fundamental level biology is reducible to physics, so psychology is reducible to biology, and sociology and economics are reducible to psychology. Though I am one who believes that this unity of nature is real and deeply significant, it is important to recall the differences in the utility of theoretical frameworks across the various disciplines. Newtonian Mechanics is an imperfect approximation, superseded in the 20th century, but its imperfection is of a qualitatively different degree than that of the rational actor model in economics. While Newtonian Mechanics is wrong only on the margins of the human scale of existence, some scholars have made the respectable argument that the rational actor model does not explain most human behavior! Like the life sciences the social sciences are noisy and must make recourse to abstruse statistical tools, unlike biology there are obvious ethical boundaries as to the reach of experimentation.

All these limits to the power of knowledge, and its precision, is an argument against theory and for experience. Societies are complex, and no human truly understands them on any deep level. It is likely that there are many latent functions or variables which we do not discern. Even today most social scientists are at a loss to explain the cross-cultural rise and subsequent decline in crime over the last two generations in developed nations. The most radical of the Enlightenment philosophers saw much that was “useless” in human culture which detracted from “utility.” This is not an original viewpoint, the Chinese philosopher Mozi expressed the same sentiment when noting the plethora of customs and traditions which scaffolded the society of his day. It is perhaps notable that the philosophical school which emerged victorious out of the great debates of Mozi’s era, the Confucians, accepted that rites were an essential aspect of human existence, and served to underpin a social-political system which persisted for 2,000 years. The rise of functionalists such as Émile Durkheim offered a utilitarian rationale for rites, but perhaps one might be thankful that most humans do not require a reasoned justification for every single act.

This is not to say that theory has no utility, or never will have utility, in the domains of the human sciences. On the contrary, I have hopes that we are living on the precipice of a new age of integrative social science which combines the insights of psychology, the biological sciences and economics. But the theories that we have now, in particular those which are still in early stages of gestation, should be treated with caution and skepticism, as is the idealized stance of a scientist to new ideas. We can always rebuild a bridge which collapses, but who will be there to rebuild society if it collapses?

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