Other Topics Relevant to Bioepistemic Evolution

Humor
Ethics
Lectures
How to Help
Links to Internet Sites
Miscellaneous

Besides sexuality, "The Architecture of Thought" applies the ideas of bioepistemic evolution to two other areas, namely, humor and ethics. The two extracts on this page are rewritten from early drafts of the first sections of chapters 11 and 12, which cover these topics. Neither extract should be taken as definitive statement and readers interested in any detail on these topics should consult the full, published work.

Humor is perceived as originating in a learning mechanism that links incongruity with pleasure. There are strong reasons to think that the brains of men and animals have a general class of incongruity detectors, one being the motion detectors attached the visual receptors. The theory of humor developed here links these to pleasure centres and so produces a learning mechanism, as well as pleasure in play and curiosity.

The analysis of ethics is directed toward developing scientific methodology as an ethic. It takes ethical systems to be the rules that the elite members of a culture or subculture form to guide their members and/or control the actions of their subordinates. On this basis, it sees professional groups as subcultures and the methodologies they adopt to be treated as such systems of rules. It also notes that such rules are applied differentially to elite and subordinate members of the group. Popper's logic of science emerges from this discussion as a systems of rules for forming the most valid possible knowledge. Hence, his methodology has an evolutionary structure to bring it into confomrity with other systems of evolution that also generate knowledge. It is also argued that any knowledge formed according to subcultural rules constitutes a further level of knowledge, level4 knowledge.

For the full argument, readers will need to access the book.

Humor

I began my analysis of humor by recognizing the inadequacy of sex as a social glue. Human sexuality is thought to further the evolution of social knowledge by keeping mating pairs together and the mating pair is a human social group. However, sex alone is inadequate to explain human social organization because it is a one on one activity and cannot account for the formation of larger social groups - some other social phenomenon is needed. The aim of the humor chapter is to explain why this is so, why it seems to be the phenomenon of humor that fills this role for humans and to examine its bioepistemic structure and origins.

However, since the publication of The Architecture of Thought, I have come to think about evolving systems not just in terms of the "glue" that holds them together but in terms of the process of boundary formation that delimits an evolving system and differentiates it from other, competing evolving systems. Today, it is the boundary formation process in social evolution, even more than the social glue function, that drives my analysis of humor.

Humor is particularly suited to playing this role in social groups and, as I now see, is the only known boundary forming mechanism (or IFF system) that triggers from socially encoded knowledge, rather than from genetically encoded knowledge. On this basis, it was the evolution of humor and the humor/laughter dialogue that enabled humans to evolve such large social knowledge sets. These matters are discussed in the humor file.

Ethics

Chapter 12 deals with the subject of ethics and treats them as systems of rules formed by human cultures and human subcultures.

All the greatest works of science and many, but not all, of those in philosophy are rational documents embodying fine, if often intangible, qualities of sincerity, reasonableness, truthfulness, logic, depth and clarity of argument. The present work aspires to those very qualities and yet, in a curious irony, sides with the irrational side of philosophy and denies that these qualities are an ultimate foundation for knowledge. Any charge of hypocrisy is denied - one can reject rationality as the foundation for knowledge, while still giving it an important place in scientific thought and philosophy.

And reject it one must, because science itself has thrown the fundamental inconsistency of evolution into the heart of scientific philosophy. Evolution theory holds that all people, scientists and philosophers included, are products of evolution and raises questions about why they should display these fine qualities that do not seem to enhance their biological fitness. Evolutionary theory seems to predict that humans, scientists or otherwise, should care about victory not reason.

The original aim behind this work's reconstruction of evolutionary theory was to resolve this contradiction, to close the loop of science and its philosophy by finding the place in the evolutionary milieu where rationality and other high human qualities would emerge. In this chapter they appear again, not as the foundation of all knowledge but as ethical systems, as sets of behavioural rules that are part of knowledge.

People conform to many sets of rules, there are rules for queuing in supermarkets, driving on roads, wearing lipstick or forming sentences. These rules emerge from the dialectic of control between the elite and the masses and are part of level3 knowledge so that the philosophy of ethics can be seen as a branch of social epistemology. It immediately follows that no ethic can be a foundation for epistemology in general but that, in principle, epistemology can be a foundation for ethics and, inasmuch as rationality is an ethic, epistemology can be a foundation for rationality.

The failure to recognise subsidiary relationship of ethics to epistemology has meant that the philosophy of ethics has faced many problems analogous to those that faced epistemology and were summarised in chapter1. Kant's critique of reason tried to justify rationality by applying rational rules but the infinite regression into which this line of thought descended was inevitable. Much philosophical debate about the foundations of ethics is similarly flawed, because rationality is an example of an ethic; using it to try to provide some general foundation for ethics, leads to similar infinite regressions.

Understanding the origin of ethics is, as Wilson (1998) makes clear, a critical problem in appreciating the emergence of social structures from evolution. The solution is the same as that with epistemology, to recognise that ethical codes are products of evolution and deeply embedded in our evolutionary heritage. This point is supported by modern research, for example, Cosmides and Tooby (1992) reviewed the way human thinking is optimised, not for rationality, but for the detection of cheating, the breaking of rules - a conclusion implicitly showing the widespread presence of social rules as guiding forces in our evolution. Many other thinkers, including Darwin, came to similar conclusions so that the problem of ethics reduces to the problem of describing :-

. How evolution in general, and human groups in particular, produce codes of behaviour.

. How successful codes come to be selected.

. Why, once selected, codes can become stable and last for many generations.

The sociobiological position is quite compatible with theorising from sociology. For example, Giddens (1976) New Rules of Sociological Method notes that society is structured through three forms of interaction, communication (or language), power and morality. He gives a table from which the following is adapted. (The adaptations are that the table has been rotated and interactions of sexuality and humor added.)

INTERACTION	(MODALITY)	STRUCTURE
Communication	Interpretative scheme	Signification
Power	Facility	Domination
Morality	Norm	Legitimation
Sexuality	Attraction	Copulation/Pairing
humor	Jokes/Laughter	Social Groups

As a sociologist, Giddens would have been mainly concerned with communication, power and morality. Sex and humor reflect the interests of this work and operate on a more personal level without directly influencing formal organisations. (This author is open to suggestions about other forms of interaction.) Political theorists would argue that power is the most fundamental form, with communication and morality being implementations of it but evolutionary theory makes sexuality fundamental, followed by power. Sexuality, power, communication and humor have all been discussed so it seems that the present discussion can be completed with a discussion of morality, a synonym for ethics.

This chapter will try to show how and why ethical codes emerge during the development of a culture and why some of them become established. A number of new insights will arise from this study. In general, the concept of level4 knowledge will be identified with subcultural knowledge separated from the main culture by a system of ethical rules. Science and its methodology are the main concern at level4 and will appear as an example of a knowledge set separated by rules specific to the subculture that is professional science. Some political implications of these processes will be discussed, particularly its relationship with democracy.

This discussion is encumbered by two meanings for the words "culture" and "subculture." A culture may be either a long-lived social group or the knowledge set associated with it. A subculture is either a subset of a larger social group, or that subset of social knowledge associated with that subgroup. Where these words are used, the context should make the meaning clear.

Lectures

The author is available for lectures on various topics from this site. Fees will depend on the nature and size of the audience, please enquire; contact information is available on the copyright page. Topics offered are

Generalised Forms of Evolutionary Theory and Bioepistemic Evolution
The Structure of Human Sexuality
The Nature and Origins of humor

If delivered alone, either the second or third lecture will include a brief summary of the ideas in the first.

How to Help

I hope readers will agree that this work offers new insights into human origins. However, although I am now in print with the essential "Architecture", there are a number of avenues that still need pursuing. I will follow those avenues but the work would be helped by financial backing. If you know funding agencies that might be willing to support freelance studies, contact me.

I would also benefit from institutional affiliation and facilities, although I am very cautious about the terms institutes tend to expect. Nonetheless, I am open to discussion about basing the work in a suitable institute. If you represent one that might be appropriate, preferably in Britain, contact me.

Most importantly, you can help this work by letting me know what you think about it. There will be parts of it you don't understand, or which are wrong, mis-typed or just boring. Tell me about these parts. I may not agree, but I may well and, even if I do not, I will look at the section. Knowing there is an issue is the first step to improvement, so e-mail me at the address on the copyright page.

Web Sites

The internet offers many sites on aspects of sexuality, far too many for this study to review. For serious sites try

The World Association for Sexology, which has a links page or

Prof. Erwin Haeberle's site. Haeberle is a world famous sexologist at the Humboldt University in Berlin; he maintains a very large site, that includes many links organized by subject.

John Garrett Jones is a bisexual writer whose ebook, Coming Clean about Bisexuality: a male perspective. can be downloaded without charge or restriction. He is working as an individual but he writes well, with erudition and frankness and without lewdness.

There is a little-known site called Rafiki about the evolution of the genetic code. I disagree with some of its front page claims but the content is another matter - it seems original, intellectually challenging and possibly important. If you are into evolutionary theory, take a look.

Finally, if you are interested in the discussion of scientific deception that originally motivated my study, much of it is available at A Habit of Lies: How Scientists Cheat.

Miscellaneous

Nothing here for now.

© This page is the "Other Topics" page from the site sexandphilosophy.co.uk, all of which is copyright to the author, Dr. John A. Hewitt.

Last modified 15 January 2006