The Giving Tree Problem

Pols1150 taught me a lot about society. It confirmed for me that there is a standard of social justice that societies should uphold. It also taught me that societies should not trash property rights on the path to social justice, as economic freedoms are as important to a prosperous society as civil and social freedoms.

A good start.

But what about me? What do I do?

Jason Brennan endeavored to address these questions in his lectures on Peter Singer and sweatshop exploitation. The answers, predictably, were ambivalent:

• You should give to charity (if you can), but don't let the market die, because it is good.
• You should oppose poor working conditions in the third world, but watch out that, in doing so, you don't nip impoverished peoples' chance at prosperity in the bud

Qualified, "it depends" answers like these are unsatisfying. It is not that I can't deal with ambiguity. It's just that, between the time the sun comes up and goes down, I will have done X, Y, and Z, and I want XYZ to be moral actions. My economic prosperity means nothing to me if morally corrupt.

It comes down to what I call the Giving Tree problem.

Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree (recorded read-a-loud embedded above) can be interpreted in any of a thousand different ways. The basic story is this: a tree loves a boy, and a boy loves a tree. The boy derives great satisfaction from playing with/on the tree. When the boy grows up, he asks the tree for money, and the tree gives him its apples to sell. As an older adult, the tree generously gives the man his branches to build a house. Finally, as an older man, the tree gives its trunk to the man when he requests a boat in which to sail away. Finally, the man sits on the stump of the tree, and the tree is happy ("but not really"). A bittersweet ending.

From the looks of it, the tree and boy's relationship is a positive-sum interaction. The boy gets the materials it needs, while the tree derives satisfaction from helping the boy it so loves. It's that one line -- "And the tree was happy, but not really" -- that gives the story away. As much as the tree loves the boy, the relationship does not live up to a standard of mutualism. Instead, it is parasitic. The boy leeches on the tree, and the tree, though reluctant to admit it, is sapped of happiness (PUN INTENDED). Strangely enough, the parasitic actor doesn't turn out happy, either. When asking the tree for a boat, the man says, "I am too old and too sad to play. I need a boat to take me far away from here."

This comprises the Giving Tree problem. Thinkers like Peter Singer encourage individuals to be trees, giving of themselves indefinitely, at least within their means. Singer would never expect the tree to do away with its trunk, but he would probably approve of the tree giving away a good number of its branches.

Alternatively, thinkers like Ayn Rand would scoff at the idea of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. Ayn Rand would probably side with the boy, who seems to have an enterprising spirit and who productively milks the tree for all it is worth. Nonetheless, Rand would probably scold the boy for asking the tree to sacrifice for make sacrifices for him. As we know, she has a low tolerance for "moochers." She would applaud him for playing the market well, though.

In practice -- that is, in the book -- neither of these strategies work out. The boy and tree are coiled together in a rope gone slack. Neither prospers. Clearly, if this is the case, neither an exaggerated version of Singer's philosophy nor an embellished Randian ideology is moral.

So what is the lesson from this story?

I think it is this: do not be a parasite, and do not be a parasite's host. There is a medium somewhere between Rand's and Singer's philosophies that places a premium on RESPECT. This middle ground advises that I adhere to both positive and negative versions of the Golden Rule (i.e. both "do to others what you would like to be done to you" and "do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you"). If I treat others as moral equals, it seems I should be OK (morally speaking).

Jason Brennan has said a few times that he lacks egalitarian intuitions. I agree with him in that I lack normative egalitarian beliefs. I do, however, have the empirical egalitarian belief that all humans -- myself included -- deserve the same, basic allotment of respect.

I don't know how this political science course will/has affect/ed the way I conduct myself. I think, however, that any net influence it has had or will have on my present and future prosperity, moral and material, is positive.

The End of the Journey

One of the original purposes of this blog was to find areas of understanding and overlap between the study of biology and the study of human actions and society. One of my big ideas was to draw parallels between the ways different societies are run and the way groups form in nature. Concentrating on the evolution of multicellular bodies, I began looking at intra-organismal policing mechanisms and different ways of ensuring harmony within the body. I then sought to use this as a lens with which to view our own society, asking myself where I saw similar themes- what was different and what was decidedly the same.

Along the way there were roadblocks and frustrations. Despite seeing a veritable glut of similarities and links between these two fields, the potential for abuse was too great. As I noted in my post about the faux pas of social science, biology is all too often applied superficially to explain things we see in society. The most egregious mistakes were often cases of using biology to back a political agenda, citing some trivial fact and claiming biology as proof of an entirely unrelated concept (eg see David Brooks' article). Yet, the misuse of biology to describe society manifested itself in subtler forms as well.

Stimulated by my work in multicellularity, I soon began looking at the evolutionary concept of levels of selection, seeking to understand the conflicts which can occur between individuals and wholes in the formation of a group. In biology, levels-of-selection ways of thinking are crucial to dispelling myths about group selection and understanding the conflicts and policing mechanisms which occur in evolutionary transitions, like the advent of multicellularity. In the spirit of my original goals, I soon tried to apply such thinking to human society, but in doing so ignored a very important, fundamental difference. While nested groupings in nature, such as the organization of genes into chromosomes, chromosomes into nuclei, and cells into bodies, are all necessarily products of evolution, the human societies which we see today are not. Evolution undoubtedly played a role in crafting the societies which have emerged, played out through the evolution of our very brains and the emotions like empathy and morality it produces. Yet, it is not reasonable to look at different types of societies, whether they be conceptions of social justice or systems of free market democracy, and to look at how evolution has shaped them. For this, we have the study of memetics, which I believe will boom in coming years as neuroscience advances and we begin to understand the proximate mechanisms of memory and learning.

Cells do not simply decide to organize themselves into bodies. A wide range of literature in the past fifteen years has begun to address this issue, and there are several main problems to be overcome in the construction of a multicellular body. Not all cells in a body will pass their genes to the next generation. Think of your arm cells for example. What makes them satisfied with your gonads getting exclusive access to the next generation? In the case of animals, this problem has been solved largely through reduction of intra-organismal variation- your arm is okay with your gonads doing all of the long-term reproducing because the genes in your arm and your gonads are ideally identical. In other taxonomic groups besides animals (yes, many other groups exist, like slime molds, chromalveolates and fungi to superficially name a few) this problem has been remedied in very different ways. For example, slime molds are made up of many multicellular individuals aggregating into slithering sluglike forms (they actually do look like slugs, it's very cool). If two of these slugs cross paths, they can mix and reform, with the two emerging slugs having possibly traded segments, or else even have 'stolen' parts from one another. These slime molds really challenge our notions of what it means to be an individual, and the policing mechanisms which have arisen in these slugs differ greatly from those found in our own bodies.

But to return to human societies, people can simply decide to form social groups, there is no conclusive evidence to date that free market democracy is a direct result of evolutionary transitions involving natural selection. As such, these societies do not necessarily operate on the same principles as biological groupings and are not always subject to the same constraints. So how is it anything but glaringly superficial to equate human society with cell society? The parallels between our communities and those found in other parts of nature are truly great, but we must be diligent not to make comparisons where there truly are none, and not to get carried away in our thought experiments.

If anything, maybe it will be useful to recognize precisely this point, that human society does not necessarily need to adhere to the rules of biology. Animal populations which exceed their carrying capacity will crash, and for every animal over this capacity the population will crash by roughly twice this number. However, people (I hope) don't need natural selection to keep our populations in check. We don't need to wait until human populations naturally stabilize (as suggested recently by Mark Koyama) in order to realize that we face an impending problem. Culture gives us the ability to cut off these problems before nature makes us learn the hard way.

Economic growth has undoubtedly led to prosperity, allowing the poor to access a growing array of commodities and raising the living standard so that the lower economic classes of society can live far better lives than Charlemagne ever aspired to. But are there natural limits to this growth, and if not, is there reason to impose them? If there do in the end exist meaningful ways of finding overlap between science and the study of economy and society, then perhaps this is a direction worth venturing towards. If not, then at least the semester-long search for such consilience has been eye opening for one young scholar at Brown University.

The (Potentially) Calamitous Case of the Crickets of Kauai

Field crickets in Kauai are facing a bit of a crisis. Flesh-eating maggots (Ormia ochracea) have invaded the Hawaiian island, and they have begun devouring the crickets -- from inside out. The maggots are only able to locate and parasitize those male crickets that sing to attract females. They cannot find silent crickets.

Imagine you are a male cricket. You are obviously very concerned about your own fate and the fate of your (future or present) offspring. (You are a cricket, mind you, so you probably aren't tremendously concerned about the fate of Uncle Jiminy or his offspring). What do you do? If you keep rubbing your wings together and calling attention to yourself, you'll end up infested and childless! On the other hand, if you stay quiet, you won't become infected, but you greatly diminish your chances of finding a mate. What decision do you make?

You don't decide! (You're a cricket, remember?) Instead, over many generations, the differential survival and reproduction of you and your conspecifics yield an optimal mating strategy. In this case, natural selection has started to weed out singers in favor of mutes. Male crickets with noiseless, female-style wings have become more abundant in the island population.

So now it comes down to a race. If the noiseless crickets can successfully elude the parasites, the parasitic species will go extinct, and the crickets will be left to prosper. On the other hand, the mute crickets may not be able to procreate, and they might go extinct before the population of parasites has kicked the bucket.

The end of this story has not yet been told. For us, the result is not terribly consequential. The lessons embedded within this story are the true take-aways for us humans.

In previous posts, Norian has pointed out that overpopulation is a human dilemma similar to that faced by the crickets (and, for that matter, by the parasites). I think Norian's premise is pretty solid: in a world of finite resources, the current rates of population growth and food/good consumption are simply unsustainable over the long haul. Some might debate what "the long haul" actually means, but the idea of a limit to human prosperity on Earth is ultimately unshakeable.

So, like the crickets, the current course of action -- the status quo -- is a path to the grave. The human alternative -- global fertility police enforcement -- is like the male crickets' alternative -- mute wings -- in that the benefits come at some cost, namely, reduced procreation.

But there are some fundamental differences between the case of Kauai and the case of people. (I have hinted at some of these above in bolded print.)

1. Humans tend to care for other people. Sure, we're not as altruistic-acting as termites, but Americans, for instance, really don't want to see Africans die, and they often spend a great deal of money trying to make sure that doesn't happen. They aren't callous to the suffering of others.
2. For the above reason, we don't want the struggle for existence that would select for certain traits that would help us fix our problems. Struggle for existence = poverty, starvation, disease, and death. Not good. Let's not go there.
3. Unlike field crickets, humans can make decisions, even at the level of nations (though with decreasing effectiveness as we scale up the size of the decision-making bodies). Humans don't have to wait for natural selection to produce favorable results for the species. They can use cognition and communication to cooperate to achieve their ends.

Humans have foresight, empathy, and agency that field crickets do not. Humans can act to steer clear of catastrophes (like maggots) under favorable circumstances.

The current condition of the species is not ideal for cooperation to curb overpopulation. As Norian observed, an outright global population police is probably not a viable option due to a conflict of interest between baby-loving individuals and the baby-loathing groups of which they are a part. In spite of human "altruism," people prioritize themselves and their kids over all else, just like the crickets. So what should be the course of action? How can we harness self-interest for common benefit?

I'm a fan of the "nudging" idea, a concept from the field of behavioral economics. An example of nudging is allowing people to smoke at any age, but requiring them to go through lots of paperwork to get approval. Nudges discourage rather than prohibit less-than-optimal behaviors. In the case of overpopulation, governments might find success in subsidizing abortions and contraceptives while taxing people for having more than X # of children. These initiatives would be easier to implement and enforce than any anti-birth global task force. Also, nudging laws would hopefully allow people to maintain more of their freedom than authoritarian, hegemonic population control.

One final point:

As Norian emphasized, a number of people say that the population will equilibrate on its own. This is a true statement. Norian is right to question whether equilibrium population will be one favorable to human life. Twelve billion people? Really? Is that good for everyone?

I want to propose an alternative equilibrium: 0. No people left. That's equilibrium, too, and about 90% of the species that have ever lived are extinct. Now's not the time for hubris. We don't want this to happen to us. We shouldn't rest on the laurels of equilibrium as an excuse not to think about serious, life-threatening phenomena. The only way to ensure our future prosperity is to look at ourselves in the context history and the context of our earthly and cosmological environments.