One economist in an unusual situation showed how the physical fallacy does not depend on any unique historical circumstance but easily arises from human psychology. He watched the entire syndrome emerge before his eyes when he spent time in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp. Every month the prisoners received identical packages from the Red Cross. A few prisoners circulated through the camp, trading and lending chocolates, cigarettes, and other commodities among prisoners who valued some items more than others or who had used up their own rations before the end of the month. The middlemen made a small profit from each transaction, and as a result they were deeply resented—a microcosm of the tragedy of the middleman minority. The economist wrote: “[The middleman’s] function, and his hard work in bringing buyer and seller together, were ignored; profits were not regarded as a reward for labour, but as the result of sharp practises. Despite the fact that his very existence was proof to the contrary, the middleman was held to be redundant.”50
The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for example, would give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics in any high school or college curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable, because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions, these tradeoffs cannot responsibly be avoided.
“OUR NATURE IS an illimitable space through which the intelligence moves without coming to an end,” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens in 1951.51 The limitlessness of intelligence comes from the power of a combinatorial system. Just as a few notes can combine into any melody and a few characters can combine into any printed text, a few ideas—PERSON, PLACE, THING, CAUSE, CHANGE, MOVE, AND, OR, NOT—can combine into an illimitable space of thoughts.52 The ability to conceive an unlimited number of new combinations of ideas is the powerhouse of human intelligence and a key to our success as a species. Tens of thousands of years ago our ancestors conceived new sequences of actions that could drive game, extract a poison, treat an illness, or secure an alliance. The modern mind can conceive of a substance as a combination of atoms, the plan for a living thing as the combination of DNA nucleotides, and a relationship among quantities as a combination of mathematical symbols. Language, itself a combinatorial system, allows us to share these intellectual fruits.
The combinatorial powers of the human mind can help explain a paradox about the place of our species on the planet. Two hundred years ago the economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) called attention to two enduring features of human nature. One is that “food is necessary for the existence of man.” The other is that “the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.” He famously deduced:
The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.
Malthus depressingly concluded that an increasing proportion of humanity would starve, and that efforts to aid them would only lead to more misery because the poor would breed children doomed to hunger in their turn. Many recent prophets of gloom reiterated his argument. In 1967 William and Paul Paddock wrote a book called Famine 1975! and in 1970 the biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, predicted that sixty-five million Americans and four billion other people would starve to death in the 1980s. In 1972 a group of big thinkers known as the Club of Rome predicted that either natural resources would suffer from catastrophic declines in the ensuing decades or that the world would choke in pollutants.
The Malthusian predictions of the 1970s have been disconfirmed. Ehrlich was wrong both about the four billion victims of starvation and about declining resources. In 1980 he bet the economist Julian Simon that five strategic metals would become increasingly scarce by the end of the decade and would thus rise in price. He lost five out of five bets. The famines and shortages never happened, despite increases both in the number of people on Earth (now six billion and counting) and in the amount of energy and resources consumed by each one.53 Horrific famines still occur, of course, but not because of a worldwide discrepancy between the number of mouths and the amount of food. The economist Amartya Sen has shown that they can almost always be traced to short-lived conditions or to political and military upheavals that prevent food from reaching the people who need it.54
The state of our planet is a vital concern, and we need the clearest possible understanding of where the problems lie so as not to misdirect our efforts. The repeated failure of simple Malthusian thinking shows that it cannot be the best way to analyze environmental challenges. Still, Malthus’s logic seems impeccable. Where did it go wrong?
The immediate problem with Malthusian prophecies is that they underestimate the effects of technological change in increasing the resources that support a comfortable life.55 In the twentieth century food supplies increased exponentially, not linearly. Farmers grew more crops on a given plot of land. Processors transformed more of the crops into edible food. Trucks, ships, and planes got the food to more people before it spoiled or was eaten by pests. Reserves of oil and minerals increased, rather than decreased, because engineers could find more of them and figure out new ways to get at them.
Many people are reluctant to grant technology this seemingly miraculous role. A technology booster sounds too much like the earnest voiceover in a campy futuristic exhibit at the world’s fair. Technology may have bought us a temporary reprieve, one might think, but it is not a source of inexhaustible magic. It cannot refute the laws of mathematics, which pit exponential population growth against finite, or at best arithmetically increasing, resources. Optimism would seem to require a faith that the circle can be squared.
But recently the economist Paul Romer has invoked the combinatorial nature of cognitive information processing to show how the circle might be squared after all.56 He begins by pointing out that human material existence is limited by ideas, not by stuff. People don’t need coal or copper wire or paper per se; they need ways to heat their homes, communicate with other people, and store information. Those needs don’t have to be satisfied by increasing the availability of physical resources. They can be satisfied by using new ideas—recipes, designs, or techniques—to rearrange existing resources to yield more of what we want. For example, petroleum used to be just a contaminant of water wells; then it became a source of fuel, replacing the declining supply of whale oil. Sand was once used to make glass; now it is used to make microchips and optical fiber.
Romer’s second point is that ideas are what economists call “nonrival goods.” Rival goods, such as food, fuel, and tools, are made of matter and energy. If one person uses them, others cannot, as we recognize in the saying “You can’t eat your cake and have it.” But ideas are made of information, which can be duplicated at negligible cost. A recipe for bread, a blueprint for a building, a technique for growing rice, a formula for a drug, a useful scientific law, or a computer program can be given away without anything being subtracted from the giver.
The seemingly magical proliferation of nonrival goods has recently confronted us with new problems concerning intellectual property, as we try to adapt a legal system that was based on owning stuff to the problem of owning information—such as musical recordings—that can easily be shared over the Internet.
The power of nonrival goods may have been a presence throughout human evolutionary history. The anthropologists John Tooby and Irven De-Vore have argued that millions of years ago our ancestors occupied the “cognitive niche” in the world’s ecosystem. By evolving mental computations that can model the causal texture of the environment, hominids could play out scenarios in their mind’s eye and figure out new ways of exploiting the rocks, plants, and animals around them. Human practical intelligence may have co-evolved with language (which allows know-how to be shared at low cost) and with social cognition (which allows people to cooperate without being cheated), yielding a species that literally lives by the power of ideas.
Romer points out that the combinatorial process of creating new ideas can circumvent the logic of Malthus:
Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply.57
For example, a hundred chemical elements, combined serially four at a time and in ten different proportions, can yield 330 billion compounds. If scientists evaluated them at a rate of a thousand a day, it would take them a million years to work through the possibilities. The number of ways of assembling instructions into computer programs or parts into machines is equally mind-boggling. At least in principle, the exponential power of human cognition works on the same scale as the growth of the human population, and we can resolve the paradox of the Malthusian disaster that never happened. None of this licenses complacency about our use of natural resources, of course. The fact that the space of possible ideas is staggeringly large does not mean that the solution to a given problem lies in that space or that we will find it by the time we need it. It only means that our understanding of humans’ relation to the material world has to acknowledge not just our bodies and our resources but also our minds.
THE TRUISM THAT all good things come with costs as well as benefits applies in full to the combinatorial powers of the human mind. If the mind is a biological organ rather than a window onto reality, there should be truths that are literally inconceivable, and limits to how well we can ever grasp the discoveries of science.
The possibility that we might come to the end of our cognitive rope has been brought home by modern physics. We have every reason to believe that the best theories in physics are true, but they present us with a picture of reality that makes no sense to the intuitions about space, time, and matter that evolved in the brains of middle-sized primates. The strange ideas of physics—for instance, that time came into existence with the Big Bang, that the universe is curved in the fourth dimension and possibly finite, and that a particle may act like a wave—just make our heads hurt the more we ponder them. It’s impossible to stop thinking thoughts that are literally incoherent, such as “What was it like before the Big Bang?” or “What lies beyond the edge of the universe?” or “How does the damn particle manage to pass through two slits at the same time?” Even the physicists who discovered the nature of reality claim not to understand their theories. Murray Gell-Mann described quantum mechanics as “that mysterious, confusing discipline which none of us really understands but which we know how to use.”58 Richard Feynman wrote, “I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics…. Do not keep asking yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’… Nobody knows how it can be like that.”59 In another interview, he added, “If you think you understand quantum theory, you don’t understand quantum theory!”60
Our intuitions about life and mind, like our intuitions about matter and space, may have run up against a strange world forged by our best science. We have seen how the concept of life as a magical spirit united with our bodies doesn’t get along with our understanding of the mind as the activity of a gradually developing brain. Other intuitions about the mind find themselves just as flat-footed in pursuit of the advancing frontier of cognitive neuroscience. We have every reason to believe that consciousness and decision making arise from the electrochemical activity of neural networks in the brain. But how moving molecules should throw off subjective feelings (as opposed to mere intelligent computations) and how they bring about choices that we freely make (as opposed to behavior that is caused) remain deep enigmas to our Pleistocene psyches.
These puzzles have an infuriatingly holistic quality to them. Consciousness and free will seem to suffuse the neurobiological phenomena at every level, and cannot be pinpointed to any combination or interaction among parts. The best analyses from our combinatorial intellects provide no hooks on which we can hang these strange entities, and thinkers seem condemned either to denying their existence or to wallowing in mysticism. For better or worse, our world might always contain a wisp of mystery, and our descendants might endlessly ponder the age-old conundrums of religion and philosophy, which ultimately hinge on concepts of matter and mind.61 Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary contains the following entry:
Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.
Chapter 14
The Many Roots of Our Suffering
THE FIRST EDITION of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene contained a foreword by the biologist who originated some of its key ideas, Robert Trivers. He closed with a flourish:
Darwinian social theory gives us a glimpse of an underlying symmetry and logic in social relationships which, when more fully comprehended by ourselves, should revitalize our political understanding and provide the intellectual support for a science and medicine of psychology. In the process it should also give us a deeper understanding of the many roots of our suffering.1
These were arresting claims for a book on biology, but Trivers knew he was onto something. Social psychology, the science of how people behave toward one another, is often a mishmash of interesting phenomena that are “explained” by giving them fancy names. Missing is the rich deductive structure of other sciences, in which a few deep principles can generate a wealth of subtle predictions—the kind of theory that scientists praise as “beautiful” or “elegant.” Trivers derived the first theory in social psychology that deserves to be called elegant. He showed that a deceptively simple principle—follow the genes—can explain the logic of each of the major kinds of human relationships: how we feel toward our parents, our children, our siblings, our lovers, our friends, and ourselves.2 But Trivers knew that the theory did something else as well. It offered a scientific explanation for the tragedy of the human condition.
“Nature is a hanging judge,” goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can entertain.
But some of the most painful shocks come from the social world—from the manipulations and betrayals of other people. According to the fable, a scorpion asked a frog to carry him across a river, reassuring the frog that he wouldn’t sting him because if he did, he would drown too. Halfway across, the scorpion did sting him, and when the sinking frog asked why, the scorpion replied, “It’s in my nature.”
Technically speaking, a scorpion with this nature could not have evolved, but Trivers has explained why it sometimes seems as if human nature is like the fabled scorpion nature, condemned to apparently pointless conflict.
It’s no mystery why organisms sometimes harm one another. Evolution has no conscience, and if one creature hurts another to benefit itself, such as by eating, parasitizing, intimidating, or cuckolding it, its descendants will come to predominate, complete with those nasty habits. All this is familiar from the vernacular sense of “Darwinian” as a synonym for “ruthless” and from Tennyson’s depiction of nature as red in tooth and claw. If that were all there was to the evolution of the human condition, we would have to agree with the rock song: Life sucks, then you die.
But of course life doesn’t always suck. Many creatures cooperate, nurture, and make peace, and humans in particular find comfort and joy in their families, friends, and communities. This, too, should be familiar to readers of The Selfish Gene and the other books on the evolution of altruism that have appeared in the years since.3 There are several reasons why organisms may evolve a willingness to do good deeds. They may help other creatures while pursuing their own interests, say, when they form a herd that confuses predators or live off each other’s by-products. This is called mutualism, symbiosis, or cooperation. Among humans, friends who have common tastes, hobbies, or enemies are a kind of symbiont pair. The two parents of a brood of children are an even better example. Their genes are tied up in the same package, their children, so what is good for one is good for the other, and each has an interest in keeping the other alive and healthy. These shared interests set the stage for companionate love and marital love to evolve.