The Robot’s Rebellion attempts to reconcile a
scientific commitment to Darwinism with the commonsense view that we are freely
deliberating agents who are in charge of and responsible for at least some of their
actions. As such, it is valuable reading for anyone interested in the nature
and evolution of human mind, culture, and behavior. Though written by a professional
psychologist, it is of interest not only for psychologists, but also for students
and researchers from fields like anthropology, biology, philosophy, or cognitive
science, and it should be accessible to well-educated laymen, too. It is
written clearly and engagingly, unfamiliar technical jargon is introduced
carefully, and Stanovich does a great job in taking the reader on a guided tour
through some of the most fascinating research psychology, cognitive science, and
evolutionary biology have brought forward during the past forty years.

During the twentieth century Darwinism has
eaten its way voraciously through scientific disciplines of all sorts, giving
rise lately to such fields as evolutionary economics, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary
epistemology, or evolutionary medicine. Initially the social sciences seemed to
stand out as a last hold of resistance against a universal Darwinism, but nowadays
there is little doubt, at least in academic circles, that human mind, culture, and
behavior are also amendable to evolutionary explanations. When science tells us
that our mind, behavior, and culture–and with it everything we value about ourselves,
our relations to our friends and families, our society etc.–are explainable in
terms of genes, processes of DNA-splitting, random mutation and recombination,
and things like that, one feels a strong urge to ask: But what about us?
If Darwinism conquers the social sciences, we seem to go piggy-back on our genes,
brains and bodies, being unable to get off, so that we do and want only what they
do and want. What role do we play in our lifes? Is there anything left
that we are in charge of? Stanovich’s The Robot’s Rebellion promises
to answer these questions–in a way that allows us to find ‘meaning in the age
of Darwin’, as its subtitle has it.

According to Stanovich, we are robots
created by our genes to protect them and to promote their survival. He borrows
this metaphor from the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins who, in his 1976 book The
Selfish Gene, famously argued that the beneficiaries of natural selection
are not individuals or groups of individuals, but genes, and that we are there for
their preservation only–we are our gene’s "survival machines" (p.
20). Stanovich claims that evolution has hardwired in our brains what he calls
the TASS, The Autonomous Set of Systems: a set of fast, mandatory,
informationally encapsulated, and domain specific behavior-triggering psychological
mechanisms. We are robots in the sense that large parts of our behavior are controlled
by these Darwinian ‘modules’ that (metaphorically speaking) have been designed
by evolution in order for us to take care of our genes. Usually, TASS serves our
interests by serving our gene’s interests, but if our and our genes’ goals
diverge, Stanovich argues, TASS will not care for us, but for our genes. However,
we are able to rebel against this tyranny of our genes.

As the adaptive problems we had to solve in
order to be good survival machines for our genes became more complex, our genes
could no longer rely on hardwired ‘modules’ for the guidance of our behavior, but
had to implement more flexible mechanisms. That is why we are also equipped
with a domain general, all-purpose ‘analytic system’ that allows us to deal
with environmental challenges too complex to be dealt with in the
stimulus-response manner characteristic of TASS. The analytic system is the key
to our rebellion because it allows us to recognize cases in which TASS prompts behavior
that we, upon reflection, realize is not what we really want. Having
realized this, we must then overrule TASS and instead behave in a way that benefits
us, not our genes. We must use our empirical knowledge about the functioning of
our brain and its evolutionary history and about the goals served by its psychological
mechanisms to structure, or re-structure, our behavior in a such way that we do
what we want, not what our genes want us to want.

Here is a simple example. Our current
ecological environment differs massively from the selective environment of our
ancestors in which the psychological mechanisms that make up much of our mind/brain
originally evolved. Since we thus rely on ‘stone age minds’ to handle the modern
world of the twenty-first century, much of our behavior is likely to be maladaptive.
Our preference for sweet and fat food, for instance, is the result of an evolutionary
mechanism for optimizing energy intake, which made sense in our ancestors’ environment
but which is obviously maladaptive in an environment in which one can get
donuts and burgers on every corner. In such cases, TASS-prompted behavior is
bad for us, and we have to use our analytic system to overrule it in favor of behavior
that benefits us. If we do not want to consume with one burger more fat than we
need in a whole day, we must overrule our built-in desire for fat and replace
it by a desire that really serves us – e.g., the desire for a healthy
body and a long life.

There is a further problem, however. It may
sound plausible that in order to do what is good for us we need to
pursue our goals, in contrast to our genes’ goals. But are our goals necessarily
good for us? A drug addict may want to go on taking drugs, but that doesn’t mean
taking drugs is good for her. To overrule TASS-prompted behavior by rational
reflection of one’s beliefs and desires is one thing, but we must also ensure that
our beliefs and desires lead to behavior that is truly good for us. As Stanovich
puts it, the problem is that genes are not the only replicators that use us to
maximize their replicative success. Memes, just like genes, can also make
us behave in a way that benefits their propagation. Dawkins
coined the term ‘meme’ to denote an analogue to the gene as the biological unit
of inheritance. His idea is that culture evolves in a process of variation and
descent with modification exactly analogous to biological evolution. Memes, pieces
of cultural information, are cultural replicators just as much as genes
are biological replicators, and transmission to as many individuals as
possible is a meme’s first and foremost goal. Since the memes which enter into our
belief- and desire-forming processes care more for their propagation than for
us, pursuing our goals instead of our genes’ goals might only get us out of
the frying pan into the fire, for we may end up serving our memes’ interests.

We must ensure that our goals are good
for us and that we do not have them only because they contain successful memes.
I want another piece of triple fudge chocolate cake, but should I want
to want another piece? Do I only have the wish, or is it a good wish for me
to have? If I care for my interests, then upon reflection I should
realize that I should not want to want another piece. This process of higher-order
rational reflection of our beliefs and desires, in combination with our capacity
to overrule TASS, is what makes a successful rebellion possible. Once the genes
had to equip us with an all-purpose analytic system to cope with more complex environmental
challenges, we gained real autonomy: we can now rationally evaluate our beliefs
and desires, making sure they are good for us, and we can favor behavior that benefits
us over behavior that benefits our genes only. The truth of universal Darwinism
notwithstanding, we can be freely deliberating agents that do what they do
because they have the beliefs and desires they have, and that are not mere survival
machines made for the preservation of genes and memes.

The Robot’s Rebellion was badly
needed. Evolutionary theory is one of the most successful and best confirmed scientific
theories, but even some of its most ardent defenders feel that it leaves something
out, some sort of meaning, or purpose, some role for us as self-conscious subjects,
and this is why many are skeptical about, if not hostile to, the idea of universal
Darwinism. It was thus important that someone explain that and why life is not
over for us if universal Darwinism is true, and The Robot’s Rebellion does
it with remarkable clarity and vigor.

The book’s main virtue is Stanovich’s
ability to bring together the results of some of the most interesting research in
psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary
biology during the past four decades and to use this material to construct an
overall account of our mind’s role in shaping our behavior. Alas, the book’s main virtue is
also its main problem: it is a hodgepodge of interesting suggestions, innovative
ideas and fascinating speculations, but sometimes the arguments seem to
have been forgotten amidst all the thought-provoking intermingling of ideas. The
individual components–Dawkins’ gene-centered perspective on evolution,
Evolutionary psychology’s idea that past adaptations can be maladaptive in our
modern environment, analyses of failures of rationality in the heuristics and
biases tradition of Kahneman and Tversky, or the idea of memes as cultural
replicators–are well-argued. The problem is the overall package, which sometimes
sounds like an instance of the ‘mere storytelling’ that evolutionary theorists
are often accused of: Stanovich’s account sounds plausible, but it is unclear
which arguments connect the various components not only to a plausible, but
also to a well-argued, substantiated and maybe even testable whole.

For instance, I agree that TASS-prompted behavior,
from our point of view, often leads to suboptimal results, and I also agree that
when subjected to various tests of rationality, we quite often exhibit irrational
behavior. However, I am not sure the latter can be explained by the former. According
to Stanovich, we respond suboptimally in tests of rationality because we act in
accordance with TASS, rather than overruling it by means of our analytic system.
But in typical cases of failure of rationality–if I violate the transitivity principle,
fail on the Wason selection task or the Linda problem, prefer a policy with no
deductible and a cost of $80 a month over a policy with a $400 yearly
deductible and a cost of $40 per month, or a lottery with eight winning tickets
and 92 blanks over one with one winning ticket and nine blanks (Stanovich’s examples)–in
what sense does my behavior benefit my genes? It is obvious how my genes
benefited from my preference for fat in our ancestors’ environment. But under
what circumstances would it help my genes that I violate the transitivity principle
(i.e. prefer A over C, A over B and B over C) or fail on the Linda task (i.e. judge
a conjunction to be more probable than either conjunct)? Another problem seems
to be the following: One of Stanovich’s main points is that we must use our analytic
system to overrule TASS. Yet, if I want to stop judging a conjunction to
be more probable than either conjunct, taking a class in probability theory will
help, only exercising my analytical skills won’t (imagine a statistics instructor
telling his students: "All you have to do to pass this class is to
exercise your analytical skills!").

This is not to say that Stanovich’s account,
in these and other cases, is false. It’s just that one would want to
hear more in some places about exactly how the parts of Stanovich’s interdisciplinary
puzzle are supposed to fit together. These, however, are details that can be
resolved by further research in an area to which Stanovich has made a valuable
and impressive contribution and that certainly do not affect the overall merit of
The Robot’s Rebellion.

© 2006 Sven Walter

Sven Walter, Ph.D., University of Bielefeld, Germany

Categories: Philosophical, Genetics