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. ****. 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.
It’s because the many factors influencing behavior, Sapolsky thinks, place the burden of proof on defenders of human agency. It’s they who need to show that neurons are “completely uninfluenced” by any external factors and that “some behavior just happened out of thin air.” But why must human behavior be either deterministic or impervious to any influence? Sapolsky doesn’t explain; he takes as given that to show any influence at all is to show a determining influence. Similarly, he writes that we have “no control” over our biology, culture, or environment. Sure, we don’t control these things, but there’s an important difference between not controlling something and having no effect on it, or at least so anyone with teenagers is inclined to hope. Biology isn’t insulated from behavior any more than behavior is from biology. As Sapolsky himself points out, virtually everything a person does has an effect on their physiology. And a wealth of empirical evidence from Aristotle to Oprah suggests that people can indeed have cultural influence.
Sapolsky’s confidence is also unshaken by the various scientific fields that study unpredictability, irreducibility, or indeterminacy in physical systems. Chaos theory studies unpredictable systems, like the weather, but unpredictable doesn’t necessarily mean indeterminate; complex systems theory studies emergent phenomena that can’t be reduced to their component parts, like traffic or slime molds, but Sapolsky says these have no “centralized authority” capable of having a will
; and quantum indeterminacy doesn’t “bubble up” to influence behavior. Since unpredictability isn’t the same as indeterminacy, he’s also unfazed by scientists’ lack of success in predicting human behavior, and even cheerfully affirms that they’ll never be successful at it. That’s no reason to doubt the “deterministic gears grinding underneath.”
In an apocryphal tale, an “old woman” accosted William James to offer the pragmatist her unpragmatic opinion that the world rested on a stack of turtles going “all the way down.” Usually she has served—as hypothetical old women will—to personify stubborn unreason. In James’s own version, it was actually a pile of rocks, not turtles, and he never claimed to have met the woman himself: she was already a cliché by the time he invoked her in 1882, a staple of American popular writing on science and belief. She had appeared as early as the 1830s in various literary reviews as a foil for writers pressing a modern, Newtonian worldview.
The rocks became turtles after the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor published a comparison of “World-Tortoise” cosmologies, including native North American and Indian versions, in his books Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865) and Primitive Culture (1871), describing the course of cultural progress from savagery to civilization. Following this cameo, the World-Tortoise came to epitomize backward belief systems, and some writers began combining it with the older stack-of-rocks idea to get an infinite regress of turtles.
For instance, in 1905 a Christian Scientist in Washington, D.C., offered examples of heathen ignorance including the view of a fabricated “Richmond negro preacher” that the world stood on “turtles all the way down.”
In a disarming twist, Sapolsky takes the old woman’s side. He might be the world’s first actual believer in stacked turtles. Like the other writers in this tradition, he casts worldviews other than his own as preposterous—only now it’s those who don’t subscribe to stacked-turtle-ism who are irrational. “It actually is much more ridiculous and nonsensical,” he writes, “to believe that somewhere down there, there’s a turtle floating in the air.” He characterizes ideas about human agency as “magical,” “absurd,” “mystical gibberish,” “nonsense,” and full of “fairy dust.”
Sapolsky’s turtles are of course metaphorical; they stand for deterministic causes, and by “a turtle floating in the air” he means a magical event. We must accept a strictly causal chain extending back to the beginning of time or acknowledge that we believe in miracles. But why are these our only choices? And are they really so different? Wouldn’t a chain of deterministic causes imply a miracle of some sort at the beginning—the old infinite regress problem rearing its domed shell again?
This, in fact, was what determinism originally implied: an omnipotent, divine creator behind the world-machine. Although it has a scientific sound today, the idea of living beings as deterministic machines didn’t originate with natural selection; it came into evolutionary biology by way of a theological tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, according to which the programmer was an omniscient deity. The determinism of today’s devoted sect of scientists, philosophers, and popular science writers—however incongruous it might seem—grew out of a creed whose adherents believed in a supernatural God with a monopoly on causal power.
The originator of modern scientific determinism was the French mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and statesman Pierre-Simon Laplace, who in 1814 wrote triumphantly that science had at last eradicated the belief in miracles from the minds of “enlightened men.” Each state of the universe, he announced, was fixed by the previous one and determined the subsequent one.
A long tradition of denying miracles was already in place by then, but it wasn’t a scientific tradition, at least in the first instance; the original miracle deniers were Protestants. “Magicians and enchanters have always been famous for miracles, and miracles of an astonishing description have given support to idolatry,” warned John Calvin. Rejecting floating turtles doesn’t necessarily make you a scientific rationalist; in some contexts, it might mean you’re a Calvinist. So might denying the existence of free will and claiming that every human fate is predestined. In fact, here’s a quiz: Which of the following passages are by Robert Sapolsky and which by John Calvin?
1. “The power of free will is not to be considered in any of those desires which proceed more from instinct than mental deliberation.”
2. “From this it is erroneously inferred…that there is some power of free will.”
3. “You are privileged…to cloak yourself with myths of freely willed choices.”
4. “Whatever happens in the universe was destined to happen.”
(Answers at end of article)
Laplace’s starting point was Isaac Newton, who in the 1713 second edition of his Principia proclaimed “that the true God is a Living, Intelligent and Powerful Being…. He is Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient.” God controlled everything in Newton’s universe. All its parts were God’s “Creatures subordinate to him, and subservient to his Will.” In the words of Newton’s friend and translator, the Anglican philosopher Samuel Clarke, the world operated “by the continual uninterrupted exercise of [God’s] power and government,” and there were “no powers of nature at all that can do anything of themselves.” Newton’s world-machinery functioned only through God’s immediate presence in each part and would otherwise grind to a halt.
Nicknamed the “French Newton” by the popular press, Laplace showed Newtonian tendencies not only in his system of celestial mechanics but also in some of the theological ideas he attached to it. In his cosmology, as in Newton’s, nothing enjoyed its own power to act. Laplace extended his strict determinism even to minor and insignificant events, which he said resulted from the law-governed order of things “as necessarily as the revolutions of the sun,” and to apparent acts of will and free choice, which were nothing but “illusion[s] of the mind.”
Laplace imagined an infinite intelligence that could comprehend all the interacting forces in the universe. For such a being nothing would be uncertain, “and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.” The human mind could gain but a “feeble idea” of such an intelligence. The closest we could come, Laplace thought, was through astronomy and mathematics, which would lead the mind “back continually to the vast intelligence…from which it will always remain infinitely removed.”
This suggestion of an omniscient being might seem surprising coming from Laplace, who is often invoked as an early champion of atheism. But while he left behind the Catholic orthodoxy in which he grew up, he consistently expressed belief in a supreme power behind natural processes, referring to a divine intelligence in his published writings and to God in private letters. According to an often told story, Napoleon asked Laplace why he made no mention of God in his work on celestial mechanics, and Laplace replied that he had “no need of that hypothesis.” The anecdote, a favorite of popular science writers, seems to have originated with Napoleon’s doctor François Carlo Antommarchi. But the astronomer William Herschel, who witnessed the exchange, said Laplace merely meant that “a chain of natural causes” could account for the “wonderful system” of the heavens. God’s existence wasn’t in question.
This is consistent with what Laplace himself wrote: the supreme intelligence might have worked entirely through material causes, with no need for direct supernatural action of the sort Newton invoked. If Laplace said he had no need of a particular theological hypothesis, it was likely Newton’s idea of constant divine intervention in nature that he rejected, not God’s presence behind the world-machine. In fact, Laplace boasted about his own findings regarding the stability of the solar system that if Newton could have known of them, they would have confirmed his belief in a providential Creator.
In short, the deterministic mechanism of the world, in Laplace’s science, was the manifestation of an omnipotent force: a total consolidation of power. It left no room for contingency, uncertainty, or even minor assertions of choice or will, which were all figments of human ignorance, illusion, and folly. Early in his book, Sapolsky says he won’t be considering “theologically based Judeo-Christian views” about free will and determinism, yet his own view has deep roots in a form of Judeo-Christian absolutism.
Sapolsky tells the story of Phineas Gage, who suffered a metal rod through the brain while working on a construction site in Vermont in 1848 and was never quite the same afterward. He offers Gage as evidence that people’s personalities depend on their “material brains,” which he thinks poses a challenge to anyone who wants to defend the idea of free will. But why should the fact that humans and their brains are made of material parts mean there’s no such thing as human agency? There’s a good answer, but it’s historical rather than scientific: because determinism retains crucial elements of the theology from which it arose, according to which the material world was a passive artifact lacking any agency of its own.
Like scientific determinism more generally, the idea of living beings as rote machines also originated in an older theological tradition: the argument from design. Authors of arguments from design said they could prove the existence of God by showing that natural things, especially living ones, were complex machines and must therefore have a designer. The tradition originated in the mid-seventeenth century, but William Paley, an Anglican philosopher and Christian apologist, gave the idea its most familiar expression in his book Natural Theology (1802), a huge best seller. Paley said living things revealed the existence of God the way a watch reveals the existence of a watchmaker. “In crossing a heath,” he wrote, “suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there.” He might reply that it could have been there forever. “But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground.” Aha! He could hardly give the same answer; someone must have made the watch and left it there.
People found this argument irresistibly persuasive. But is a living thing really like a watch? They’re both complex systems of interacting parts. But what if the watch had yelped and scuttled away, as many living things will do when you trip over them? Paley’s argument relied on a peculiar notion of living things as passive, inert. It might seem strange that Mayr, a twentieth-century biologist, shared this counterintuitive idea of living beings with Paley, an eighteenth-century theologian. But stranger yet, modern biology largely absorbed Paley’s model of organisms.
It wasn’t so much Charles Darwin himself who absorbed it, although he was deeply marked by Paley’s work, which he studied at Cambridge. “In order to pass the B.A. examination,” he later recalled, “it was…necessary to get up Paley’s Evidences of Christianity…. I am convinced that I could have written out the whole of the Evidences with perfect correctness.” One indication of the impression Paley made was Darwin’s inner struggle regarding the workings of the eye. Comparing eyes to lens instruments was a staple of arguments from design. You can’t have a lens instrument without an instrument maker, went the reasoning—a microscope doesn’t put itself together from parts—and likewise, you can’t have an eye without a divine optician. Paley wrote that eyes were “so exquisite in their contrivance” that on their own they constituted proof that could “never be got rid of.” Darwin certainly had trouble getting rid of it. “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,” he confessed to his friend and ally, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray.
Yet Darwin did manage to distinguish eyes from artificial optical devices. He based his evolutionary explanation of the eye on an active capacity specific to living things: the sensitivity of the optic nerve to light. The eye, he said, began as a sensitive optic nerve beneath a layer of transparent tissue, then formed gradually over “millions on millions of years” through natural selection. Still, Darwin allowed a bit of Paley to seep in: he described natural selection as
a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully selecting each alteration which…may in any way, or in any degree, tend to produce a distincter image.
Such passages led both Gray and another friend, the geologist Charles Lyell, to feel that Darwin was “deifying” natural selection.
Despite such seemingly deistic moments in his writings, Darwin took a great interest in the capacity of animals to be their own creators, transforming themselves, one another, and their environment, and so influencing the course of evolution. An example is his idea of “use and disuse”: animals strengthen and enhance their body parts by using them, or weaken them by declining to use them, then pass these changes on to their offspring. Another example is his theory of sexual selection, in which animals shape their descendants by choosing mates according to their various standards of beauty. Darwin also became less religious over the course of his life. In his autobiography, intended only for family and close friends, he called himself an “Agnostic” and wrote that his “disbelief” in the Christian faith and a personal God had come upon him gradually “but was at last complete.”
After Darwin’s death, however, his most influential followers insisted on the passivity of organisms at the hands of natural selection, and ultimately at the hands of a divine presence behind evolution. In effect, these neo-Darwinian evolutionary theorists imported the absolute power of God into the determining force of natural selection. The principal author of this revised Darwinism was August Weismann, a doctor and zoology professor at the University of Freiburg. Weismann rejected Darwin’s theory of use and disuse, insisting that organisms could never pass on to their offspring any of the changes they underwent in their lifetimes. He also assured his readers that his science assumed a “Universal Cause” or “Final Cause” operating “behind” the mechanism of the universe and was therefore “absolutely opposed” to materialism. All “directive power” lay with this remote divine presence and none with the evolving beings themselves.
This interpretation rendered living beings not just powerless to influence the course of evolution but passive even at the level of behavior. One of Weismann’s followers was the ornithologist Erwin Stresemann, who was also Mayr’s mentor at the University of Berlin during the 1920s. In Stresemann’s view, “An animal does not act for itself, but under a higher commission: animal non agit, sed agitur [an animal does not act, but is acted upon].” Mayr learned Weismannism at his mentor’s knee. The idea that animals were passive machines, having come to him in the doctoral equivalent of his mother’s milk, remained so powerful that almost a century of experience in ornithology—including extensive research on birds learning from experience, exhibiting spatial and temporal intelligence, constructing and using tools, communicating through song, and understanding abstract concepts such as “same” and “different”—did nothing to shake it. Several decades on, if Sapolsky’s latest book is any indication, the dogma seems stronger than ever.
Sapolsky has a humanitarian purpose: he wants us not to blame anyone for anything they’ve done, since they had no choice. Accordingly he advocates reforming the criminal justice system to eliminate retributive punishment. A handful of philosophers and neuroscientists have made the same argument, and Sapolsky cites them, but he doesn’t mention the extensive literature that rejects retributive theories without treating humans as deterministic. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria wrote that the purpose of punishment should never be “to torment a sensible being,” which was useless and inconsistent with justice, but should solely be to prevent further crimes in whatever way would cause the least distress to the criminal. Or, as the twentieth-century English legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart put it, no moral alchemy can transmute the imposition of suffering into good. You don’t need to deny that criminals have free will to oppose retribution as a goal of criminal justice.
In fact, you might think that treating criminals humanely means acknowledging that they retain a fundamental human agency. The English philosopher P.F. Strawson wrote that if we give up a sense of agency in other people, we lose any basis for feelings of love, gratitude, affection, respect, or esteem. Others have placed the recognition of personhood and agency at the crux of humanitarian thinking. According to the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, fostering human agency should be the core purpose of economic development. He writes that it would be “a very restricted view of…personhood” to see people simply “as entities that experience and have well-being.” Instead we must see people “as responsible persons: not only are we well or ill, but also we act or refuse to act, and can choose to act one way rather than another.”
Sapolsky’s solution to the problem of what to do with those convicted of crimes is radically at odds with this definition of humanitarian policy. He recommends that society regard them as the passive objects of their fate and commit them to a medical-style “quarantine.” He gives few details, but does mention a familiar array of practices, from physically confining people to requiring them to register with the local police and wear tracking bracelets. It’s hard to see how this would be better than, or even very different from, being punished in the existing system.
Although Sapolsky doesn’t consider the arguments that medical models of criminal justice objectify and dehumanize people, he does acknowledge a problem many have raised: quarantines, unlike most prison sentences, are of indefinite duration. Who gets to decide when they end? He seems unconcerned about the totalitarian risks of a system of indefinite imprisonment, writing that the constraining measures would always be the minimum necessary for public safety. And anyway, don’t worry, once people realize there’s no free will, they won’t “be recoiling from this constrained person as a loathsome, blameworthy criminal anymore,” so the constraints will be imposed with a smile.
Sapolsky, like others who favor criminal justice reform, admires Norway’s prison system, in which prisoners live in residences that resemble college dorms and enjoy a great deal of freedom to move around, pursue various kinds of projects, and live their lives as normally as possible. It’s a commendable system, but a bad example for Sapolsky, since it’s founded on a principle of enhancing prisoners’ agency. Are Høidal, the founding warden of Halden, Norway’s model maximum-security prison, says the goal is to promote prisoners’ “freedom of choice” and foster people’s “own efforts to change their criminal behavioral patterns.”
Finally, unsurprisingly, Sapolsky’s reductive model of human beings carries the same implications as others of its kind. It relegates people to categories by class, biology, and cultural stereotype: the college graduate versus the garbage collector, those with one “flavor” of genes versus those with another, the person from “individualist” America versus the person from a “collectivist” East Asian culture that emphasizes “conformity.” Sapolsky is careful to stress that no single factor—genetic, environmental, cultural, familial—determines these categories, but he’s equally emphatic that the sum of factors fixes them utterly: the garbage collector can’t help but be a garbage collector, nor the conformist East Asian person a conformist. Sapolsky speaks this “incredibly important point” ex cathedra in the name of science, even though, “yeah, no single result or scientific discipline” demonstrates it: “Put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.” Now, is that scientific? To claim that lots of failures to prove something add up to a definitive proof?
Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. To misrepresent it as a scientific question is a prime example of scientism—extending the claims of science beyond its bounds. Here’s another from Sapolsky’s final chapter: “What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning.” This might sound like the opposite of saying that science shows there’s a divine intelligence behind the world-machine, but it’s the direct descendant of that earlier claim, and comes to the same evacuation of meaning and agency from the mortal world. This isn’t a scientific proposition. It remains what it has been from the beginning: a theology.
The first giant tortoise that Darwin saw when he traveled to the Galapagos Islands with the HMS Beagle in autumn 1835 was eating a piece of cactus; it stared at him and “stalked away,” while a second one hissed and drew in its head. Fascinated by the enormous, ancient creatures, he followed them and studied their habits. “The tortoise is very fond of water,” he reported, “drinking large quantities, and wallowing in the mud.” Darwin was especially impressed by the tortoises’ ability to travel great distances from the lower parts of the island up to the fresh water sources. They traveled “by night and day,” and could journey eight miles in just two or three days. They created “broad and well-beaten paths,” which were what had led the first Spanish colonists to the watering holes. Upon arriving at the springs, he beheld a “curious spectacle”: “Many of these huge creatures, one set eagerly travelling onwards with outstretched necks, and another set returning, after having drunk their fill.”
In this as in Darwin’s other observations, he describes living beings behaving with purpose, agency, and meaning; indeed, reclaiming those capacities from a divine creator. It’s turtles all the way up.
Answers: Calvin, Calvin, Sapolsky, Sapolsky.
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