Turtles All the Way Up
The idea that living beings have no free will might sound scientific today, but it remains as dogmatic as it has always been.
After spending most of the twentieth century watching birds, the Harvard ornithologist and evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr concluded that they were rote little machines. He wrote in 1988 that birds and other animals are no more purposeful than computers: they behave as they’re programmed to. If you’ve ever seen a bird, you might find that surprising: they certainly look purposeful as they seek out unsuspecting rodents to swoop down upon, ferry worms to their irksome offspring, and produce miniature versions of the Beijing Olympic stadium.
Even more remarkable than Mayr’s claim itself is the fact that it purports to represent a scientific view of things. For one thing, programmed by whom? Mayr’s answer was that birds and other creatures were programmed by natural selection via genetics: natural selection favors genetic “behavior program[s]” that maximize fitness, for instance by ensuring an “instantaneous correct reaction to a potential food source, to a potential enemy, or to a potential mate.” Mayr didn’t justify his belief in behavior programs other than by claiming that this was the only legitimate possibility: the alternatives were “supernaturalistic.” He wasn’t even going to “waste time showing how wrong” they were. Mayr’s genetic behavior program, in other words, was axiomatic; we might call it a dogma.
Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientiest and primatologist at Stanford, carries the argument further in his new book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. It’s not just other animals that are deterministic machines, he says, but humans. Embracing a scientific worldview, for Sapolsky, means accepting that there’s no free will. Every development, including every action of living beings, follows inexorably from the previous state of things: “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” People cling to their cherished idea of free will with “ferocious tenacity” (presumably they can’t help themselves), but he hopes to shake their faith.
Sapolsky is ecumenical about the causes determining human behavior. Like Mayr, he considers evolution the underlying process—“humans were sculpted by evolution over millions of years”—but he emphasizes that long-term evolutionary processes are inseparable from short-term causes, including neurons, genes, epigenetics, the womb, the environment, ecology, hormones, smells, history, culture, “the sort of people you come from,” and “how you were mothered within minutes of birth.” No doubt there could be plenty more—economics, for instance, or the obstetrical resident who handed you to your mother—but anyhow the whole smorgasbord comes together to fix human behavior absolutely, leaving “not a single crack of daylight” for agency to sneak through. Not only are we “not captains of our ships,” he writes, “our ships never had captains. Fuck. That really blows.” (This gives a taste of Sapolsky’s late-night-dorm-room literary style.)
How does he know? Because of science. Sapolsky tells us that “the science of human behavior shows” it to be deterministic. But none of the scientific evidence he offers turns out to demonstrate this. He describes psychological studies revealing changes in people’s electroencephalograms (EEGs) taking place milliseconds before they were aware of making a decision, but he dismisses these—reasonably enough—as “irrelevant.” He presents other studies demonstrating that people can be subconsciously manipulated; that hormones, cultural beliefs, and moral values influence behavior; and that maturation, aging, and experience induce alterations in people’s brains and bodies with corresponding behavioral changes. After each discussion he asks, “Does this disprove free will?” and responds—again reasonably—with “nah,” “nope,” “certainly not,” and “obviously not.” Readers might wonder, equally reasonably, why they’ve slogged through all this irrelevant nonevidence.