Natural Selection and the Invisible Hand

   

Invisible path to Oxford, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

     My sound ecology project led me to study animal sound communication, from three points of view: the modern science of behavioral ecology; indigenous ecological knowledges; and poetics, including zoomusicology. Zoomusicologists are especially interested in birdsong, from an aesthetic point of view. Sound functions for indigenous peoples as an indicator of nature: weather and climate, for example, and the locations and activities of animals, as well as spirit-persons. Behavioral ecologists study sound communication as part of the science of animal behavior: they are interested in understanding how, what, and why animals (and plants) signal information to one another by means of sound. Music may be understood as a special form of communication among human animals. Of course, compared with other animal sound communication, human music is thought to be complex in structure, to have aesthetic qualities, and to operate as part of the cultural matrix—that is, it varies among different peoples, it is learned and transmitted from one group and generation to the next, it is creative, and so on, making it different in degree (if not in kind) from the croaks of frogs and the chirps of crickets. And yet, I’ve wondered whether insights from the study of animal sound communication have bearing on music and sustainability, on the one hand, and on the place of sound and music in the contemporary environmental and cultural crisis, on the other.

     In reviewing the literature of behavioral ecology, I found that explanations of animal sound communication were based in the neo-Darwinian paradigm of fitness combined with modern gene theory. That is, individual animals communicated (in sound and by other means) in a struggle for survival with the result that those better adapted to their ecological niche would have the best chance of living longer, mating more often, and contributing their genetic inheritance to the ongoing gene pool of their species. Those better adapted exhibited advantageous variations compared with other members of their species: bigger, stronger, “smarter,” more flexible, and so on; or in the realm of sound communication they could vocalize louder, or longer, or in a more elaborate way, or more often, or when there was less interference from other sounds. As Darwin’s theory of natural selection proposed, then, the animals who were better at vocalizing (all other things equal) would gradually comprise a greater percentage of their species, and over very long (geological) periods of time, would “transmute” (or mutate) into new species. 

     One of the things that struck me immediately about Darwin’s theory of natural selection was that its evolutionary algorithm operated like Adam Smith’s "invisible hand." In both, individuals acting in their self interest—that is, selfishly—were said to produce an overall outcome for the common, or public, good: whether for the better adaptation of a species, or the benefit of society (the market economy, with opportunities and benefits for more individuals). Darwin himself credited the genesis of natural selection to his reading of Malthus on population: “In October 1838 I happened to read . . . Malthus . . . and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.” 

    But recently in reading Silvan Schweber’s detailed examination of Darwin’s reading during the period that led up to his eureka moment, I found confirmation that Smith's "invisible hand" had also been an influence. With natural selection, as in the free market, there was no external intervention or regulation; things were said to work out for the best naturally, and of their own accord, as if guided by an invisible hand. Also, in reading Stephen Jay Gould’s summary of Darwin’s “middle road” the other day, I ran across a similar reaction to Darwin’s theory from none other than Karl Marx. Writing to Engels shortly after reading Darwin, Marx put it this way: “It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘invention,’ and the Malthusian ’struggle for existence.’” Nature, in other words, operated in the plant and animal kingdoms as the free market did in the sphere of human economics.

     Gould himself had come to the same conclusion after reading Schweber’s 1977 essay. He wrote, “I believe the theory of natural selection should be viewed as an extended analogy—whether conscious or unconscious on Darwin’s part I do not know—to the laissez faire economics of Adam Smith. The essence of Smith’s argument is a paradox of sorts: if you want an ordered economy providing maximum benefits to all, then let individuals compete and struggle for their own advantages. The result, after appropriate sorting and elimination of the inefficient, will be a stable and harmonious polity. Apparent order arises naturally from the struggle among individuals, not from predestined principles or higher control." Gould was quick to demur from Smith's classical economic theory: laissez-faire economics leads to oligopoly and inequality, not a stable and harmonious society. 

     Gould also went on to point out that just because natural selection and laissez-faire economics were analogous, that in itself did not mean they were wrong. Even so, I believe there are reasons to be skeptical. For one thing, it is also possible that Marx was right, in that natural selection is anthropogenic, projecting our human understanding of behavior onto the animal kingdom because we have no alternative: we can’t comprehend what it is to be a nonhuman animal. And for another, as I learned just recently, from a 2011 essay by Peter Harrison in the history of ideas, Adam Smith didn’t mean what Marx, Schweber, Gould, and I thought he meant by the invisible hand. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” was understood, by Smith and others at the time he was writing, as deliberate intervention, “higher control” —in fact, it was taken to be the hand of God, hidden and invisible, yet working for the good of mankind. In other words, Smith’s free market was not free from the direction of God’s invisible hand. The irony is that Darwin’s natural selection was free from it. And so in this important aspect, Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the classical economic theory of Adam Smith are quite the opposite. Darwin himself would have liked to believe that God’s invisible hand was operating in the natural world, but could not bring himself to that faith, for various reasons that can be found in the voluminous literature about Darwin.

     Metaphors and analogies are necessary in scientific theories. Mathematical formulas represent ideas; Newton’s f=ma and Einstein’s e=mc squared are meaningless until the concepts are explained in words. “Relativity” is both a fact and a metaphor. Smith's "invisible hand" is a metaphor. In The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote that he used the phrase “struggle for existence” in a “large and metaphorical sense including the dependence of one being on another.” And this is to say that for Darwin the “struggle for life” involved not only selfishness, but also interdependence and cooperation, something that is sometimes forgotten by contemporary neo-Darwinians fixated on what Richard Dawkins famously called “selfish gene theory.” Interdependence, after all, is the cornerstone principle of ecological science—the study of the relationships among organisms and to their environments—and one of the four principles of an ecological approach to musical and cultural sustainability. 

Biodiversity, the Sound Commons, and the Great Chain of Being

    One of the pillars of the argument for a sound commons is biodiversity. It is in a commonwealth of sound, with every living being communicating in their acoustic niche, that biodiversity is best expressed and maintained. Biodiversity is so well entrenched an idea within ecological theory and environmentalist thought that it comes as a surprise to learn that the word itself, derived from the phrase biological diversity, was coined only about 25 years ago, in 1985.[1] It is usually understood to mean life forms in all their variety. It has become axiomatic that biodiversity is an index to ecosystem health; the greater the diversity, the healthier the ecosystem. This holistic approach to biological variation also provides a rationale for conservation.

One kind of diversity

    I am curious about the rapid acceptance of this concept despite its imprecise character. Where, after all, is biodiversity located? We hear of biodiverse ecosystems, or biodiverse communities, or biodiverse species, or of a biodiversity of species traits and functions, or of biodiversity at the gene level. In fact, biodiversity embraces all levels and puts them in a “full hierarchy of variation."[2] But then, how to measure biodiversity, and how to maintain it overall, becomes more difficult. At what level of the hierarchy should the conservationist, who does not have unlimited powers or resources, intervene? Besides, interventions at one level may have unintended and harmful consequences at another. But leaving these problems aside for the moment, why has the idea of biodiversity become so pervasive, and why has it been almost universally accepted, not only among ecologists, but also environmentalists and the general public?
    One of the reasons for biodiversity’s appeal is that it distills common sense: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Many baskets, more chances. “Hedge your bets.” That is, the idea behind biodiversity, the comparative advantage of many different investments, so to speak, rather than one single large investment, aids in successful adaptation and resilience against misfortune, whether, for example, in farming (mixed farming as opposed to monoculture) or in buying lottery tickets. The commonsense advantages of diversifying have been known for centuries, if not millennia.
    Another reason for biodiversity’s appeal is less obvious but no less powerful: its congruence with a very old and pervasive worldview in Euro-American thought, the great chain of being, turning on the twin concepts of plenitude (fullness, plenty) and continuity. Plentitude and continuity are at the heart of that metaphor which intellectual historian Arthur Lovejoy traced nearly a century ago in the William James Lectures at Harvard: “The result was the plan and structure of the world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late 18th century, many philosophers, most men of science, and, indeed, most educated men, were to accept without question—the conception of the universe as a Great Chain of Being, composed by an immense . . . number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents, which barely escape non-existence, through every possible grade . . . up to the highest possible creature. . . “[3]
    This worldview centered in a hierarchical chain of creation, with its roots in Plato, Aristotle, and particularly in Neoplatonism, bears an obvious resemblance to the “hierarchy of variation” in contemporary ecological thought, not only in terms of plenitude, continuity, and hierarchy, but also in its bias toward holism. Of course, the chain of being is also notably different from biodiversity in the sense that sitting atop the chain was the Creator. Nevertheless, the resemblance is so striking as to suggest an important reason for the rapid and general acceptance of biodiversity; if biodiversity somehow “seems right,” it is in part because of the residue of this once most powerful worldview.
    Are we dealing with mere resemblances, or was there a period in the history of Euro-American ideas when the great chain turned into biodiversity; and if the latter, how did that occur? Of course, certain underlying assumptions about the universe, that it is patterned and rational, as well as that its laws are humanly discoverable, helped. But I would suggest that as the great chain began to lose force in the late Enlightenment and early Romantic eras, it was gradually replaced by the ideas of diversity and the balance of nature; and that biodiversity was coined much later on to foreground the already-understood idea of biological diversity.
    We have already encountered ideas of “Nature’s economy” and balance in many earlier blog entries; suffice it to say here that Gilbert White was marveling, in his letters from Selborne in the 1770s, over plenitude and balance in nature—balance conceived not so much as equilibrium but as economy, of Nature taking care of its own. In other words, for White, Nature’s economy was an expression of the great chain, just as it was for natural historians such as Linnaeus. Although for White, a cleric, God was at the head of the chain, a Creator is not a requirement for the concept. Natural theology in the early 19th century was an attempt to reconcile those incongruities. Darwin himself wrestled with that problem, of course, as did many scientists in the mid-19th century. Notable among them in the US were Louis Agassiz (who would not abandon the idea of God at the head and separate creations to explain the variety in nature) and Asa Gray (who eventually came around to the more secular view). Even the naturalist Thoreau embraced Darwin’s idea of evolution. Upon examination, Darwin’s idea of evolution retains the concepts of plenitude and continuity.
     What about diversity? Again, Lovejoy is helpful. He broadly characterizes the Enlightenment as a period in Euro-American intellectual history when classic ideals prevailed, “controlled by the assumption that, in each phase of his activity, man should conform as nearly as possible to a standard conceived as universal, uncomplicated, immutable, uniform for every rational being."[4] The single classic ideal began to be displaced, in the late eighteenth century, by diversity. Again, Lovejoy: “It came to be believed not only that in many, or in all, phases of human life there are diverse excellences, but that diversity itself is of the essence of excellence; and that in art, in particular, the objective is neither the attainment of some single ideal perfection of form in a small number of fixed genres nor the gratification of that least common denominator of aesthetic susceptibility which is shared by all mankind and all ages, but rather the fullest possible expression of the abundance of differentness that there is, actually and potentially, in nature and human nature, and – for the function of the artist in relation to his public – the invocation of capacities for understanding, sympathy, enjoyment, which are as yet latent in most men, and perhaps never capable of universalization. And these assumptions, though assuredly not the only important, are one of the common, factors in a number of otherwise diverse tendencies which, by one or another critic or historian, have been termed ‘Romantic’. . .”[5]
    Lovejoy is writing here chiefly in reference to art, not science; but we must remember that the divisions between the two were not so great in the eighteenth century as they are today. In short, although biodiversity and the acoustic niche hypothesis are current, they are an expression of very old and pervasive ideas about nature in Euro-American intellectual history, plenitude and continuity; and on such a foundation do they rest—a foundation that is under a twin challenge. One challenge comes from ecologists, who no longer believe in Nature’s economy or a balance of nature, but who nevertheless retain a belief in interdependence and biodiversity. Are those beliefs incompatible? And a second challenge comes from those deconstructionists who hold that the Romantic idea of nature is only that—an idea, and that it must be abandoned if we are to achieve a postmodern ecology worth wanting. We shall see.

Notes

1. "Biodiversity," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/biodiversity/
2. Ibid.
3. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Harvard University Press, 1964 [1933]), p. 59.
4. Ibid., p. 292.
5. Ibid., p. 293.

Photograph: Crowd listening at a festival, 2010, Bangor, Maine. Photo by Jeff Todd Titon.

The real early music

Ethnomusicologists a generation before me discredited evolutionary theories of music's origin, but acoustic ecology gives us new insights into this major question. The evolutionary theories were regarded as too speculative, theory without fact. Besides, the racist odor of cultural evolutionism and social darwinism hung over the project. Finding music's origins, and reconstructing an original musical language (following the spectacular success of linguistics, which had postulated a proto-Indo-European language) was the project that both constructed and doomed comparative musicology. As of the 1950s the successor discipline, ethnomusicology, had a different project: ethnographic studies of music-making among contemporary human groups, from which comparative analysis might proceed on a sounder basis at a later date. Twenty years later, ethnomusicologists in the United States had become more interested in how people experience music, and what music means to people, than in musical transcription and comparative analysis of structure and function. Only a very few ethnomusicologists were asking questions about music's origin in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet by the 1990s cognitive scientists were pursuing these questions, again by means of evolutionary theory, which was making a comeback. Conferencing with one another and publishing scholarly articles, out of which a few popular books have emerged, they have made it possible to be taken seriously when speculating on early music--the real early music. But in light of acoustic ecology, their pursuit appears too narrowly focused on music rather than on sound, too beholden to analogies between music and language, too Eurocentric, too human-centric. In this pursuit I find that it is more helpful to think in terms of the niche that human sounds occupy in the overall soundscape, and the acoustic interdependence of their sounds with the sounds of the natural world. A few ethnomusicologists--notably Steve Feld, Tony Seeger, and Marina Roseman--have pursued acoustic ecology among the Kaluli, Suya, and Temiar peoples. We can learn from them.