The Evolution of Conscience
Posted 02 June 2010 by DominicI recently returned from an amazing conference on the Evolution of Conscience in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The idea that conscience might be an evolved trait was originally proposed by Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871), in which he suggested a conscience gave humans a crucial moral compass to navigate our complex social world (as in H.L. Mencken’s notion that “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking”). If Darwin was right, conscience is just a product of natural selection like eyes and ears. It appears that the gathering in Santa Fe, 140 years on, was the first ever conference to focus on the origins and role of conscience in human evolution.
The meeting was organized by anthropologist Christopher Boehm, biologist Jeffery Schloss and archeological anthropologist Paul Wason (with terrific help from Lilija Oleaga), and attended by a remarkable group of people representing numerous disciplines including theology, philosophy, primatology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and evolution. The gathering was threatened by Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano and generously funded by the Templeton Foundation.
The conference showed that conscience is a tricky concept that means rather different things in different disciplines. Evolutionary psychologist Dan Fessler, for example, argued that there is no such thing as “conscience” per se, but rather a collection of evolved traits and emotions that collectively lead to adaptive cognition and behavior (in the right context), but colloquially lumped together as conscience. It also highlighted numerous ways in which conscience could and should be studied, from phylogenetic history (Jonathan Turner), to primatology (Frans de Waal), ethnography (Polly Weissner), experimentals (Dan Fessler), to neuroscience (Kent Kiehl), and mathematical models (Jessica Flack), among several others.
My own interest in conscience is that it appears to offer a rival alternative to the Supernatural Punishment Hypothesis. If conscience provides us with a self-judging “inner voice” that steers us through the minefield of our socially transparent world, then why would we need a supernatural actor to keep us on the straight and narrow? I will tackle this problem in an upcoming article, but the crux of my argument is that: (1) an “inner voice” requires theory of mind and language, and may thus merely be another form of “supernatural agent”; and (2) they are not necessarily mutually exclusive—perhaps the evolutionarily ancient cognitive architecture of conscience is the vehicle by which religion gains traction in altering our beliefs and behavior. The interaction of religion and conscience may be the critical problem to explore.
The evolution of conscience conference in Santa Fe was one of those meetings that just worked brilliantly because of its sheer novelty, interdisciplinarity, free-thinking, and small group format. The discussions chewed up our preexisting assumptions about conscience and spat out not a consensus, but some consilience. The conference will lead on to a conference proceedings setting out that state of the art on what we know about how the conscience may have evolved, its evolutionary function, and its foundational importance for human morality and religion.
July 7th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
i love this idea, especially in regards to the supernatural as i am a theologian in the progressive camp that sees more as you do. and am working on future models of church. would love to connect over skype sometime?
November 28th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
This in particular is creative and suggestive: (1) an “inner voice” requires theory of mind and language, and may thus merely be another form of “supernatural agent”; and (2) they are not necessarily mutually exclusive—perhaps the evolutionarily ancient cognitive architecture of conscience is the vehicle by which religion gains traction in altering our beliefs and behavior.
Here are a few comments born of my extensive interest in SPT.
(1) It appears that basic repetitive behaviors of a mental sort might get inner voices started without TOM and mentalese, and perhaps without TOM or mentalese. Inner voices, ie some set of species of the genus, appear to function by conditioning of the self in ways familiar from behaviorism. Eg after doing something one immediately regrets one might respond ‘No! No! No!’ As written it takes shape as an English word and exclamation point, but the associated conditioning might have developmental origins that are independent of TOM. Don’t mistake my meaning. I doubt it–developmental problems with inner speech have been identified as significant in children with autism, who have TOM-related problems (see Whitehouse 2006, Child Psych & Psych), which I take it supports your hypothesis–but the alternative must be ruled out. So to what implicit empirical support for the claim ‘an inner voice requires theory of mind and language’ are you appealing–or is your argument a conceptual one?
(2) I tried to answer that question myself but not much available empirical literature on the development of inner speech, from what I could quickly find. See Flavell 1997, Development of Children’s Knowledge about Inner Speech. From abstract: “Study 1 showed that, in contrast to 6-to7-year-olds and adults, 4-year-olds usually did not infer that a person silently engaged in such intrinsically verbal mental activities as reading, counting, or recalling items from a shopping list was saying things to herself. They also tended to deny that covert speech is a possible human activity. Study 2 demonstrated that 4-and 5 year-olds are much poorer than adults at detecting their own inner speech.”
I suppose if we knew at what developmental points children freely deployed concepts like SPIRIT or SOUL, we could correlate this with developmental data about the ways children conceive of the metaphysics of their inner voice. Has anyone experimented *directly* on inner voices in ways that fix the intuitive metaphysics of them? Perhaps you could draw on the literature about imaginary friends.
(3) You say that the inner voice is a form of supernatural agent. What is the identity or ‘form of’ claim? Are you saying that the inner voice is conceived by the agent as (numerically?) identical with a spirit insider herself who is not her, is identical with a spirit inside herself who is her, or are you not making any claim about the agent’s intuitive metaphysics being such as to imply that the inner voice is a supernatural agent? Perhaps there’s relevant research here on how individuals manifesting multiple personalities conceive of those inner voices as or not as SNAs. However that works out, perhaps you could explain what you mean by ‘form of’ and whether the relationship that describes has been shown to exist.
(4) You write, “they are not necessarily mutually exclusive—perhaps the evolutionarily ancient cognitive architecture of conscience is the vehicle by which religion gains traction in altering our beliefs and behavior.” Happy to grant the first modal claim (not necessarily mutually exclusive) as true. For the sake of argument, strip the second modal claim of the operator ‘perhaps’ and the claim is interesting. But is it falsifiable? If so, what do you mean by ‘gains traction’–that, in their own developmental origins, religions used the cognitive architecture of conscience to produce cognition of, in particular, SNAs? Intriguing idea.