Chapter 22 Chapter 11 Synthetic Theory of Evolution-2

Oparin's theory appeared in his 1936 book "The Origin of Life" (Oparin, English translation: 1938).He agreed with Haldane's point of view: the original earth was a barren land with no free oxygen in the atmosphere.If oxygen were already present, it would destroy the chemical conditions necessary for the emergence of life.By viewing oxygen as a byproduct of life, it is possible to support the claim that the evolution of life occurs only once in a planet's history.Obalin believed that Earth was initially surrounded by a reducing atmosphere containing hydrocarbons and ammonia.Chemical reactions in these gases produced complex organic molecules, which dissolved in the oceans, creating a rich "primordial soup."In the primordial soup, compounds are synthesized again to form multimolecular open systems or aggregates, which are small liquid droplets with a defined structure that can absorb substances from their surroundings.This is when natural selection kicks in, allowing only those structurally more stable aggregates to survive and weeding out the less stable ones.More successful structures become "lifelike," an intermediate state before the emergence of true life in the form of first cells.Still, the final stage of the process is by far the most speculative part of the theory.

O'Palin's theory has gained prominence in the West not primarily because of its dialectical origins, but because many imaginative biologists have moved from simple materialism to a more holistic view of life (the view that the whole The behavior of an organism cannot be explained in terms of its constituent parts alone; see Allen, 1975a).Experimental testing of certain stages of the process also showed promise in the period following World War II.The most famous demonstration was the experiment done by Stanley Miller (Miller, 1953), in which an electric spark irradiated a sample of the reduced atmosphere envisaged by Obalin, producing amino acids, which are the basis of proteins complex compounds.What the possible later states in the process are has been debated.The most recent idea is that soil has the right properties to induce aggregation of molecules absorbed on its surface.Some geneticists have disputed O'Palin's gradual model, arguing that the emergence of the first genes must have been a pivotal breakthrough in the emergence of life.At this point, the chemical structure of DNA in genes is known, and we have a better idea of ​​the level of complexity that DNA must have.However, it has been popular to believe that a self-replicating system may be built up gradually, and to believe in the alternative, that there is a "one-step" process, then we are back in a situation where it must have happened through a lot of steps. Accidental collisions of small molecules produce complex structures.

Whether the emergence of the first life forms was gradual or sudden, most biologists in the 1950s believed that the end products could not be the synthesis of various elements, because it would take a long time.The most convincing example is monkeys and typists, monkeys have to go through a lot of trial and error to ensure that through repeated random combinations of activities, they can type meaningful sentences.According to another interpretation, however, chemical evolution can be seen as bypassing the slowness inherent in a system based purely on trial and error.Organizational ratios do not come from continual haphazard synthesis, once a level of organization is reached, it remains so, laying the groundwork for the next stage of the process.New evidence from geology has shown that the development of life did not have to take as long as it was once thought.The earliest primitive [life] forms arose very early in Earth's history, long before the sudden "burst" that gave rise to higher types, at the beginning of the Cambrian period.

Early Darwinists had realized that their evidence for Precambrian life, the so-called Eozo?n canadense, was not credible (see Chapter 7).For a long time, it was indeed unclear where the advanced forms of the Cambrian came from, until modern geologists discovered true microfossils, the microscopic remnants of living cells that appeared before Early Cambrian period.Remnants of bacteria-like organisms have been found in sedimentary rocks dating back 3 billion years (Schopf, 1978).In strata of a slightly later period, stromatolites fossils have been found.Stromatolite contains blue-green algae deposits distributed in layers, and stromatolites can still be found in high-saline seas.The oldest microfossils covering three-quarters of Earth's history suggest that life arose when conditions were just right on the planet's surface.The problem now is to explain why, after the first appearance of living cells, there was a long period of stabilization, whereas multicellular organisms formed rather abruptly in the period just before the Cambrian (Gonld, 1977c, 1980b) .

human evolution After entering the 20th century, great progress has been made in another aspect involved in the theory of evolution, that is, our views on how humans evolve.Darwin once suspected that our ancestors were separated from apes by an upright posture.Walking on two legs freed the hands to make tools, which in turn stimulated the development of human intelligence.However, this insight was largely ignored in the late 19th century, as people rushed to theorize that brain expansion was the driving force behind human evolution.At that time, human beings were still regarded as the ultimate goal of natural processes (Bowler, 1986).Some people even think that our ancestors turned to walking on open grasslands is a product of human intelligence development, and it is precisely because of the development of intelligence that our ancestors realized the benefits of getting out of the forest (GESmith, 1924).It was not until the modern synthesis shook the rationality of the non-Darwinian theory of evolution on which this teleological view of human origin was based that it made this view of human origin untenable.

When human fossils were finally unearthed, they were found to be inconsistent with our preconceived notions of ancestry (for some important discoveries, see Leakey and Goodall, 1969; Leakey and Prost, 1971; Reader, 1981). Already in the 1860s Huxley had denied that Neanderthals could have been the link between apes and modern humans (Chapter 8).In the late 1800s, many more specimens of this type were found, and many authorities began to ignore Huxley's warnings and regard Neanderthals as early hominids. In 1891, the Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugene Dubois discovered the skull and thigh bones of a more primitive human in Java.Haeckel once claimed that the birthplace of human beings was Asia, not Africa, and it was under the influence of this view that Dubois went to the East Indies. The "Javanese" confirmed Haeckel and Darwin's prediction that humans were walking upright long before they acquired modern brain sizes, a point that, of course, was once again ignored by proponents of the "brain first" theory.Dubois called the new species he had discovered Pithecanthropus erectus, a term he borrowed from Haeckel, who of course readily acknowledged the discovery.By 1900, in most people's minds, human evolution was a linear process, from apes, through Homo erectus and Neanderthals, to modern humans.

In the early 20th century, this simple linear model gave way to a more complex theory of progress that could overcome the difficulties posed by fossils.At this time, Marcelyn Boule (Boule, English translation, 1923) and Arthur Keith (1915) suggested that Neanderthals were too ape-like to be the ancestors of modern humans: Difficulty accomplished in as short a time as the archaeological record suggests (Hammond, 1982).Instead, Neanderthals are seen as an offshoot, independent and parallel to human progress, that was extinct by our more advanced ancestors.Human evolution is a branching rather than a linear process—a seemingly modern idea adopted by progressivism, which holds that all branches are driven by the same tendencies.Youren believes that in the process of producing human beings, nature "tried" various scenarios.

The Piltdown Man scam further supports this model. In 1912, amateur geologist Charles Dawson discovered human remains in a gravel riverbed in the Piltdown area of ​​Sussex.Among them was a large cranium and a mandible that was indistinguishable from that of an ape.The place where the mandible meets the cranium is missing, but they are generally believed to belong to the same individual.Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum named the new species Eoanthropus dawso ni, and Woodward became a pioneer in reconstructing human evolution based on Piltdown's "Eoanthropus dawso ni."This finding seems to confirm that human development has several distinct branches.It also supports the view that the most important thing these branches illustrate is that the brain develops faster than the rest of the body.The deception was not debunked until 1953, when it was discovered that the aforementioned remains were pieced together from a human skull and an ape mandible (Weiner, 1955).Since then, a number of works have attempted to ascertain who was involved in the deception (eg, Millar, 1972; Blinderman, 1986).

The Piltdown Man was an anomaly long before the Piltdown Man deception was exposed. In the late 1920s, the Peking Man discovered in China showed that the types of Homo erectus had been distributed all over the world. Although Javanese and Peking Man were initially regarded as different species, at this time people knew that they belonged to the same species of Homo erectus. Two varieties of Homo erectus. In the evolution of modern Homo sapiens, Homo erectus appeared first.The findings recall what has been suggested in the past: that the brain developed later than the adoption of an upright posture, but the Javanese and Pekingese regions diverted attention from what modern paleontologists would later consider a major discovery. In 1924, anatomist Raymond Dart unearthed the skull of an immature ape in Tungus, South Africa, which he named Australopithecus africanus.He predicted that Australopithecus was the true ancestor of humans and claimed that although the creature had no larger brain than that of an ape, it already walked upright.Dart's idea was met with skepticism, and it wasn't until further discoveries by Robert Brum in the late 1930s that it was confirmed that Australopithecus was indeed bipedal.Even so, the prevailing thought at that time was the idea of ​​progress on the origin of human beings.Burum himself once stated that man is the ultimate goal of the evolutionary process arranged by God.The advent of modern synthesis eventually destroyed the old parallelism of progress and modern paleoanthropologists tried to understand the adaptive implications of the shift to bipedalism and subsequent increase in brain size, thus returning to some frameworks first proposed by Darwin .

In the 1950s, it was postulated that Homo erectus arose from the African species of Australopithecus, which in turn gave rise to Homo sapiens.Later discoveries revealed that the process was much more complex.Several different species of Australopithecus coexisted in Africa for a long time until they died out. In 1961, Mary Leakey discovered an even older branch of the human line, Homo habilis, which lived earlier than most of the australopithecines.It is now believed that the earlier Australopithecus afarensis (Australopit hecus afarensis, also known as Lucy) was the common ancestor, and it was here that humans separated from the later Australopithecus (Johanson and Edey, 1981).Paleoanthropologists initially thought that the main divergence of the ape and ape lineages occurred 15 million years ago, but recent evidence from molecular biology suggests that the divergence was much later (Gribben and Cherfas, 1982; For modern advances, see Lewin, 1984).While the details are debated, human evolution, as Darwin envisioned, was an irregularly branching process.

The latest findings confirm that acquiring an upright posture was the first breakthrough in human evolution, but there is debate about what motivated this evolution.The motivating factor is obviously the change of climate in Africa, which leads to the disappearance of jungles and the emergence of large grasslands or savannahs; the descendants of those ape-men chose the upright posture and began to settle in the new environment. Darwin himself once suggested that the hands were freed, Perhaps one of the adaptive advantages is to make tools, thus facilitating the effect of selection on upright posture.Until recently, this view has been popular. The discovery of "Lucy" overturns this interpretation, because there is no evidence of tool use in A. afarensis (Johanson and Edey, 1981).Another trait trend in human evolution that has to be explained is the regression of canine teeth, which is presumed to be the result of changes in food composition.Perhaps bipedalism provided the opportunity to carry food by hand, and with this development came a way of life in which family members collected food around the perimeter of their temporary shelter (Lovejoy, 1981).Until later, a branch of Australopithecus began to use tools, which led to the evolution of capable humans, and the establishment of intelligence became the most critical survival factor developed by natural selection. According to many authorities, human evolution has undergone a change in the entire human race.In recent years, new "intermittent" evolutionary models have been applied to humans (see Chapter 12; Stanley, 1981; Eldredge and Tattersall, 1982).According to this interpretation, widespread species tend to remain fairly stable over extended periods of time, and the fossil record of great apes supports this view.It has been suggested that when a small population is isolated from its parent species, changes occur rapidly and new species may emerge as a result.The parent species remains the same, it just "splits" a new species, after which the two species may coexist for some time. Implications of Modern Darwinism: Sociobiology The biologists who created the modern synthesis were quite aware of the deeper implications of what they were doing.They do not wish to revive the brutal implications of social Darwinism, but they are convinced that evolution provides the framework for a new worldview that is about to replace traditional religion as the foundation of philosophy and morality.It is fair to say that the power to establish a new evolutionary ethic has not won widespread support, which has something to do with the lackluster humanism of the postwar period.Applying the principles of Darwinism to human beings is the more common way, and for some this brings back old fears that what the movement conveys is traditional ideology (Kay e, 1986) .Some scholars who study animal behavior believe that aggression is an established instinct and that aggression must also exist in humans.More recently, sociobiology has attempted to explain the evolution of all behavioral forms in terms of the natural selection of individuals.Attempts to extend this approach to humans have revived social scientists' longstanding dissatisfaction with biological determinism. Among the founders of modern synthesis, Julian Huxley and George Gaylord Simpson did the most to convert the new Darwinism into a general worldview.Huxley's "The Evolution of Behavior" (Huxley, 1953) and Simpson's "The Meaning of Evolution" (Simpson, 1949), obviously tried to simplify the technical details of the neo-Darwinian theory, and expressed the understanding of nature and life from a broader perspective. view of purpose.They adopted a philosophy of positivism, which held that science was the only source of knowledge, and they saw evolution as the new foundation of ethics, replacing the transcendental values ​​derived from religion.Both authors sought to move away from a mechanistic view of science by emphasizing the creative and optimistic aspects of the development of life within a Darwinian framework.They also acknowledge that attempts to explain society from the perspective of human biology are too simplistic and no longer convincing.It is important to realize that the emergence of humans is not preordained, as Darwinian evolution is not teleological; but the hope is that the evolutionary process itself will teach us how best to meet the challenges of the future.Humanity has become the master of life on Earth and is now taking control of its own evolutionary destiny.In fact, human beings can control the future of all life, and the measure of human success is the degree to which human beings have exploited nature's creative heritage.Huxley believed that evolution is a natural process of progress, in which more advanced life forms appear one after another; the ability to continuously increase beyond the limitations of the environment has become the standard for measuring progress.The free realization of life's potential is therefore the highest good.Simpson was very skeptical of the idea of ​​progress, but he still believed that man was the life form with the greatest potential to master his environment.The drive to know becomes a moral value, since some may use knowledge for his own benefit, but he is now obliged to know for the benefit of all life forms. Not all modern evolutionists accept agnostic or humanist views.Some have attempted to combine an evolutionary view with an explicitly religious system, preserving traditional spiritual values ​​through a reinterpretation of scientific knowledge.The most famous work in this area is that of Pierre Theia Chardin [that is, Deiljin] in his "Human Phenomena" (de Chardin, 1959).Although Taiia has experience in paleontology, he is a Catholic priest, and the church does not allow him to express his thoughts during his lifetime.In order to achieve the reconciliation of evolution and religion, he regards the development of life as a universal process of spiritualization and continuous improvement.The tendency to produce minds has been greatly accelerated by the development towards "humanization" (that is, production of humans).Unfortunately, the tendency towards psychic unity will culminate in "Terminal", the formation of the psychic resulting from the synthesis of all human minds into a single superhuman entity.This philosophy has evoked mixed reactions.Julian Huxley was so impressed by this philosophy that he wrote a preface to the English edition of The Human Phenomena, while other scientists have strongly criticized Taiia for taking evolution out of context (e.g., Medawar, 1961).Many theologians also doubt whether prophecies about evolution and man's transcendent goals are Christian (Hanson, 1970). The combination of Huxley and Taiia shows that the goals of evolutionary humanism and evolutionary mysticism are not very different.They all had to find some purpose in evolution, even if they disagreed about whether the purpose should be seen as an extension of traditional spiritual values, or as a new and purely naturalistic source of meaning in life. There is controversy.The problem with both is that Darwinism doesn't really guarantee progress, at least it's hard to be sure (Thoday, 1962; Gouge, 1967; Simpson, 1973).This is especially detrimental to Taiia's system, which assumes that evolutionary trends have a definite purpose, which is not Darwinian.Huxley explained progress in a less rigorous way, and his view was more consistent with the opportunistic view of natural selection, and he also had to suggest that the seemingly lack of purpose of selection by random variation, in fact, we can learn from its end products Find meaning.Ethics derived from the theory of evolution have attracted criticism from many (eg, Flew, 1967; Greene, 1981).The final and perhaps deadliest objection to this approach is to argue that evolutionists have misinterpreted the meaning of the universe, that they are deluding themselves that what they get from nature is the bias they ascribe to nature.The principles they established were either too abstract, or too weakly attached to the logic of scientific evolution, to be justified by their arguments as moral arguments.In the end, nature ensures the success of those who do it—a conclusion that is easily reminiscent of the original, very conservative forms of Social Darwinism. Critics will say that this danger is evident in some of the developments associated with modern Darwinism.One development continued to link the idea of ​​heredity of character with eugenics.The creation of population genetics shattered some of the simplistic ideas advanced by early eugenicists (see Chapter 10), but population genetics does not necessarily refute the assumption that human nature is primarily determined by heredity. R. S. Fisher was deeply involved in the eugenics movement. In his work on the genetic theory of selection, he devoted a chapter to discussing social issues.Although Julian Huxley insisted that social change was a prerequisite for the biological development of man, he also supported eugenics and saw eugenics as part of an important program for the advancement of the race.There has been controversy about the extent to which genetic factors determine intelligence, especially when defining a certain group as an inferior race or class, the debate is even more intense (Deutsch, 1968; Kamin, 1972; Clarke and Clarke, 1974; Evans and Waites, 1981).However, these quarrels are not directly related to the theory of evolution, and some modern evolutionists also oppose human genetic determinism (Gould, 1981).An earlier era, there was no necessary connection between the theory of evolution and the theory of heredity, although Darwinism also had a bias on this issue. More directly related to selection theory is the so-called anthropology of aggression, which argues that evolutionary mechanisms have endowed aggressive instincts in all living things, including humans.This view was first proposed by Keith (1949), and was developed by Conrad Lorenz, the founder of modern behavioral science (the study of animal behavior) (Lorenz, English translation, 1966).Lorenz confirmed the existence of aggression in many animals, and suggested that it would be foolish to think that only humans do not possess a similar instinct.Robert Ardrey (1966) suggested that territorial protection is a more basic instinct.Because territory is key to food availability and successful mating, "occupation" determines many behaviors of animals.Adley claims that there is no reason to think that human intelligence can free man from the same tendencies by which our individual behavior and our penchant for grand law warfare are explained.Desmond Morris (Morris, 1967) also expressed the same view in a book, he believed that aggression comes from our "murder ape" ancestral instinct. Social scientists coming out of the more liberal schools of the mid-20th century objected to attacks on anthropology.Their calls for reform are based on the idea that aggression is not instinctive but a product of a deteriorating social environment.More naturalists have begun to question aggressive tendencies as closer observations show that great apes are not, in fact, aggressive animals.There is no evidence that man's early evolution encouraged aggressive instincts, because modern hunter-gatherer tribes do not engage in war with neighboring tribes (Leakey and Lewin, 1978).Although observations of some animal behavior support an anthropology of aggression, this anthropology does not lead to the more sophisticated Darwinism developed by modern synthesis.Those who have this view of nature are clearly motivated by their desire to justify a society based on competitive individualism.A stronger argument has now emerged in favor of biological determinism; this argument has greater scientific credibility because it rests on the more organized application of selection theory to animal behavior, which is how modern sociobiology was shaped. The initial questions that led to the formation of sociobiology centered on the altruistic behavior that exists in some animals.If we think of natural selection as acting primarily through competition among individuals, it is difficult to see how an instinct could have arisen in an organism to sacrifice itself for others.Without resorting to Lamarckism, it is impossible to think that this instinct arises from animals learning to help each other.Darwinian explanations require that this behavior embodies some sort of reproductive advantage, and the most obvious solution is to assume that the level of selection can be transferred to groups rather than individuals.If mutual cooperation among individuals makes the group as a whole more likely to succeed, surely this instinct must be established by substituting groups which possess the useful behavior for those which do not.Sociobiology disputes this notion of "group selection" and seeks plausible explanations for altruistic behavior through a more careful analysis of the outcomes of individual reproduction.So sociobiology proposes to explain the most complex behavior in terms of the most basic Darwinian point of view. Darwin himself always believed that selection acts at the individual level (Ruse, 1980).He had, of course, experienced some difficulty in studying the sterile hierarchies that exist in Hymenoptera, such as ants, bees, wasps, etc.—groups that often include highly specialized and sterile workers and soldiers.These worker insects devote their entire lives to helping other individuals reproduce, showing extreme altruism.Darwin noted that selection, acting on fertile individuals, can develop specific traits in related sterile individuals.In insect colonies, all individuals are born to queens, and selection can favor queens whose reproductive patterns include producing sterile offspring that help the colony survive.Because at this time Darwin believed that selection acts on groups, so he was forced to support a concept of group selection.The question of altruistic behavior has been largely ignored until the advent of modern synthesis.The debate that gave rise to sociobiology was initiated by V. C. Wayne-Edwards (Edwands, 1962), who argued that group selection could be used to explain many aspects of animal behavior.Led by G. C. Williams (Williams, 1966), many naturalists cast doubt on Wayne-Edwards' ideas and wondered why Darwin had been trying to limit selection to the individual level.Group selection is problematic in part because it is difficult to identify genuine altruistic behavior.It may seem altruistic for an animal to make a warning call to a fellow predator as it approaches, but the animal may have wished to slip through the chaos it had created more quickly.Even when confronted with genuine altruism, explanations based on group selection show weakness, and the idea of ​​individual selection can always undermine the idea of ​​group selection because individual selection works in favor of animals that "trick" other animals .Thus, an individual gains an advantage over his peers by refusing to engage in reciprocal altruistic behavior with them, and its behavior spreads through the group, thereby clearing away the altruistic instinct. W.P. Hamilton pioneered one of the most important concepts in sociobiology (Homilton, 1964): the idea of ​​"pro-selection".This idea is based on clarifying what Darwin recognized, namely, that individuals can influence the process of selection not only by their own reproduction, but also by helping their genetic relatives reproduce.Because the kin carries some of its own genes, their success will ensure that the nulliparous have some representation in the next generation.Thus, some apparent altruistic behaviors can be explained in terms of individual selection, which promotes the individual's instinct to help blood relatives in situations where they themselves cannot reproduce.Hamilton showed that Darwin did not have to think that sterile insects were an exception, because Hymenoptera had an unusual pattern of reproduction that could be explained by individual selection.Males are derived from unfertilized eggs, and as a result, in females, sisters are more closely related than mothers are to daughters.Pro-selection promotes the development of a class of sterile females, because the best way for a female to have more genetic representation in her offspring is to help her fertile sisters, not to have daughters of her own. The technique applied here replaces the concept of a struggle for survival with a concept of selection based solely on the individual having more genetic representation in the next generation.Selection would promote instincts in this direction, since individuals with such instincts are, by definition, more likely to successfully pass on their genes.This idea inspired Richard Dawkins (Dawkins, 1976) to propose that genes are really the basic unit of selection, so that the development of organisms is to meet the requirements of "selfish genes".Organisms are simply the pathways genes use to reproduce themselves, and those genes that correspond to the instinct for reproductive success necessarily dominate the population as a whole.Regardless of the dangers of anthropomorphizing genes, Dawkins speaks of the "success" and "failure" of genes replicating themselves in races, using words only to simplify the description of an entirely mechanical process.In any case, some naturalists feel that his views confuse the fact that it is organisms, not genes, that face their environment and engage in the struggle for survival and reproduction.Dawkins has now responded to people's criticisms (Dawkin, 1982) by arguing that we should take a broader view of the factors that lead to successful reproduction. New approaches to the study of behavior have exposed weaknesses inherent in the old thinking that natural selection must make aggressive instincts automatic in living organisms.This is illustrated by the views of John Maynard Smith (Smith, 1982), who applied game theory to the study of how choices act on different kinds of behaviour.To give a simple example, imagine the two most extreme behaviors, which we can set as "eagle type" and "dove type" respectively.Eagles are aggressive and will always clash with their neighbors over resources such as food or mates, without regard for the risks involved.Doves avoid disputes under any circumstances.Obviously, a colony composed entirely of doves is unstable, because once an eagle is introduced by mutation, it will bully its peers in order to monopolize resources and immediately occupy a dominant position in the colony.The hawk-like trait would then spread through natural selection.Paradoxically, a population composed entirely of hawks would also show instability, so that a single dove introduced by mutation would in fact predominate.This is because the eagle-type aggressive instincts cause them to often get scarred in order to snatch undeserved resources.The dove type avoids this risk, so in the long run, the dove type has a better life than the hawk type.The eagle type and the dove type form the "evolutionary stable strategy" of the group according to a specific ratio.Selection is not actually selecting for aggressive traits, but trying to maintain a balance of different traits in the population. Clearly, according to the conventional wisdom, natural selection would favor instincts with adaptive advantages, but sociobiology extends selection to the behavioral realm of reproduction, not survival.In his classic treatise (Wilson, 1975), Edward O. Wilson used this technique to explain in detail the behavioral differences between males and females of various species.Because males and females invest differently in rearing their offspring, their reproductive behavior will serve different purposes if they seek to maximize the transmission of their genetic traits to the next generation.In higher animals, females devote a lot of energy to reproduction, while males readily produce sperm.So the male's interest is in increasing the number of matings through aggressive behavior, in this case each time allowing the female to raise the offspring.Instead, a female must carefully choose the most suitable father for the few offspring she can support.In some species, the male's attitude is more responsible if it is vital that he helps raise the offspring -- if his offspring are in danger, he will never walk away to "have fun."To account for a particular species' adaptation to its own patterns (on the basis that the forces of individual choice can promote instincts for reproductive success), sociobiologists predict behaviors that should be expected.Extensive studies in the field have shown that many animal species behave very well in line with this prediction. The success of sociobiology in explaining animal behavior in particular led Wilson to think that standing in the same light might explain some of human nature (Wilson, 1978).The prohibition of incest in almost all societies may arise from an instinct developed to avoid the biological dangers of inbreeding.More controversially, the fundamental differences in female and male behavior may arise from the very same evolutionary forces affecting animal species.According to Wilson, any society that tries to conceal the fact that our genes biologically determine our gender attitudes is doomed to fail.He concedes that biological instincts do not govern humans as strictly as they govern other animals, but he maintains that the genetic basis of our behavior is strong enough to limit the extent of social development (see also Lumsden and Wilson, 1981). Sociobiology's strong repercussions for including people have led some critics to think that the whole sociobiological view is nothing more than a continuation of the social Darwinian view (for critiques of sociobiology, see Sahlins, 1976; Mont agu ，ed.，1980；Rose et al.，1984；又见Rose的答复，1979b，1982，以及Caplan所编的论著，1978)。社会科学家的愤怒属于预料之中；他们的观点所依据的假设是，决定行为的是社会环境，而不是生物的遗传。他们之所以急于宣称人类不受制于遗传决定论，是因为他们想把研究动物的社会生物学贬斥为被传统观念引入歧途的科学。因为社会生物学家是根据个体竞争来描绘自然界，人们谴责他试图为维护种族主义、个人英雄主义和性别歧视奠定基础。作为答复，有必要指出，不管社会生物学在应用人时应该有什么限定，但是它相当成功地解释了动物行为的神秘方面。一些赞成将社会生物学视为〖HTH〗生物学〖HTSS〗的进化论者则赞同我们应对社会生物学在人类的应用方面持怀疑态度，因为人类大脑的复杂性使大脑不太容易受本能的支配（比如，Gould，1977c）。我们没有先验的理由期望我们的本性不控制我们的任何行为；事实上，我们不可能不受我们过去进化历程的支配。需要做的是以开明的态度来思考我们究竟在多大程度上受本能的支配（Midgley，1978；Konner，1982）。达尔文主义也许受到过资本主义意识形态的启发，但是已经证明达尔文主义是成功的科学。有些人之所以认为生物学意义上的达尔文主义错了，是因为他们憎恨对达尔文主义的可能运用，这暴露出他们本身就缺乏客观的态度。 在生物决定论问题上，社会生物学提出的问题原则上有些直率，没有考虑到困难的是在实际中难以分清到底是遗传还是环境塑造了人的品性。如果我们在一定程度上〖HTH〗是〖HTSS 〗受本能的制约，我们就应该意识到，事实上，我们也许能够通过教育的力量，来消弱这些本能的影响。但是威尔逊(Wilson，1978）又一次提出了一个深层次的问题：进化论能否提供一个世界观，该世界观坚实的足以作为新伦理学的基础。在某些方面，他发展了一种论点，即自然界的产物必然是好的，而且应该体现在我们社会的目标中（见Greene，1981）。如果社会生物学使我们不再相信上帝，那么进化论本身就必须告诉我们生活的目的和行为的方式。但是进化却受基因差异成功的盲目驱使，意识的产生只是提高行为复杂度过程中的一个偶发事件。很多人觉得进化论作为一门科学或许是成功的，但是进化论承担不了说明超结构的重任。如果进化过程没有明确的目标，那么只要我们无论如何都拥有自由意志，我们就不能用进化论来指导道德行为。了解我们的过去的确很有意思，如果这有助于提醒我们注意改革进程中的困难，那么知道过去甚至还有实用价值。但是，问题是，是否应该根据我们的进化历程，来决定是否应当尝试某种变革。如果达尔文主义接近真理，那么宇宙还没有向它的产物，即我们人类，昭示未来的道路该怎么走。即使在进化论中存在道德信息，从这种信息中我们所获悉的也只不过是不要从我们自身之外寻求指导。我们每个人不管是否掌握进化的知识，都应该从自己的意识出发，去寻找道德价值的源泉。