Subject: 
            [evol-psych] Is, ought, and Bill Hamilton
       Date: 
            Thu, 14 Feb 2002 17:28:16 +0000
      From: 
            Andrew Brown 
        To: 
            "Larry Arnhart" , [email protected]
 References: 
            1




The second volume of Bill Hamilton's collected papers is out, as
Warren Sarle noticed on the list; but it has been remarkably unreviewed.
This is, I think, because of the book's enthusiastic advocacy of
infanticide as the least worst or perhaps the only way to avert a
genetic catastrophe in the future [1].

This throws into very high relief the relationship between "is" and
"ought" in a Darwinian world: there are various questions of fact -- was he
right to believe that human genetic competence was threatened by
modern medicine? Was he right to suppose that mothers would suffer
less if their "defective" children (his favoured term) were killed
before they could smile than if they grew old enough to bond?

There are also questions of value: suppose that the human race is
evolving to the point where most of us can't survive without modern
medicine; is this such a terrible fate that really drastic measures
are justified to avert it?

One can see that disagreement with his facts and his values are
logically separable, but if you take a broadly utilitarian calculus
then the measures he thought should be taken or, as Brecht would have
it, die Massnahmen, flow more or less straight for the facts and
certainly become less shocking than the probable alternatives.

However, I don't want to start another thrash about values. I'm
interested here in one particular set of his facts: he thought that
the widespread use of caesarian births was relaxing a natural
selective pressure for women to have large pelvic cavities, so that,
when civilisation finally collapsed (as he seems to have thought
inevitable) huge numbers of women would die agonisingly in childbirth
becasue they had inherited genes for narrow hips which, without
caesarians, would have been eliminated from the gene pool. I was
curious about this, because, as far as I knew, the decline in maternal
mortality had more to do with antisepsis and the prevention of
puerperal fever than anything else. So I asked a historian friend, who
looked it up, and came back with the unexpected news that maternal
mortality rate seems to have fallen steadily in the pre-antiseptic
era.

The figures, for London, of burials for women who died of "childbed" as
a proportion of baptisms between 1657 and 1830 have been analysed into
50-year chunks, roughly, and they look like this (deaths / baptisms)

21   / 1000
14.5 / 1000
11.4 / 1000
9.2  / 1000

(from "English population history from famiy reconstruction. Cambridge,
1997, p308)

My question for the biologists on the list is whether this is the kind
of pattern and rate of change you would expect to see when genes for
narrow hips are being selected out of the population? That's one of
the the only three explanations that I can think of for the trend: the
others are steadily increasing urban malnutrition making for lower
birth-weight babies. (There was certainly increased alcohol
consumption in the eighteenth century, which would have that effect)
and a gradual increase in standards of midwifery and hygeine. Of
course, you could have interactions of these factors: the poor have
smaller babies becasue of the gin epidemic, and the rich die less
often because they give birth in cleaner rooms. The exact fit of
causes is probably impossible to reconstruct. But would this data fit
a simple selectionist model?

 --
 
Andrew Brown
Phone +44 (0)1799-516812
Fax   +44 (0)1799-500726
What I do: http://www.darwinwars.com

References - since this is shocking

[1] NGR vol2, page xlvii "I predict that in two generations the damage
being done to the human genome by the ante-and post-natal life-saving
efforts of modern medicine will be obvious to all ... (p xlviii) The
possibility of non-self-limiting breakdown will hold with respect to
potential epidemic disease agents. to potential physical disruptions
(sudden climate change, asteroid impact and the like) and with respect
to the sheer physical inabilities of everyday life.
(p xlix) No religion, I am glad to say has ... tried to teach me that
a doe rabbit is hellbound because she eats the runt of her litter. Let
us allow human trials of a like _natural_ philosophy, where if
anythign there is s much more joy to be gained by it. The idea is
emphatically not cruel in any ordinary sense of the word."

Plenty more in the body of the book. I have only been quoting from
his preface.