The Neo-Darwinian Anarchist and the Feral Child

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By Steve Masterson

David Baake, in his article, ‘Darwinian Ararchism’, (on both the science section of www.anarchistnews.org and at www.fuckauthority.org) shockingly to me, embraces the right-wing science movements of genetic determinism and evolutionary psychology. Most of his notes refer positively to one book, ‘The Blank Slate’, by the notorious mass-media appreciated, right-winger Steven Pinker.

Baake has produced numerous thoughtful articles that reveal him to be a great humanist, balanced in thought on issues of freedom, imperialism and democracy; and tolerant and sensitive to other views wider than his own brand of anarchism. However, he is now stepping so wide into the arms of others, that he is unwittingly in the enemy camp when it comes to grasping the essence of what it means to be human and the nature-nurture debate. It is because of my high respect for his previous writings and his own potential that I am replying.

He begins correctly in stating that any revolutionary movement “must root its theories in a scientifically accurate understanding of human nature.” But then wildly attacks the widely held Anarchist traditional view (and Marxist too) that, “the utopian theory of human nature .. that all human beings are good but are corrupted by society .. is no longer tenable”, due to scientific advancements.

Firstly the thoughtful left would never use the term “good”, as it is both unscientific and begets the idea of “evil”. As most readers will be aware there has been a century-plus nature-nurture debate as to what it is that makes us human and what we are: the left talking of the domination of nurture and the right-wing the domination of nature. So we would argue the reason there is much petty crime in poor neighbourhoods is to do with poverty and inequality; with lack of education or work and not much in the way of stable or loving upbringing. The right would argue that they are poor due to bad breeding and that more police and heavier sentencing is needed for the ‘evil poor’, who have an eye on ‘their’ wealth.

A modern expression of the nature-nurture debate is the environment v. genetic debate in which the mass media are forever promoting the so-called newly discovered gene, which determines that one is likely to be a thief, or a good lover, a murderer, friendly, virile, cooperative, selfish, etc. The right-wing, rich and mass media hail Richard Dawkins’ recent book, ‘The Selfish Gene’, as it reinforces their justification that human nature is normally greedily competitive, violent and war-mongering – and therefore capitalism is the perfect type of system for humans, forever and ever.

Baake, after 3 quotes from Pinker, writes;

“In our evolutionary past, genes that caused individuals to think rationally in the pursuit of their self-interests survived into future generations because they helped their carriers survive and procreate, while genes for irrationality did not survive because they prevented their carriers from prospering and procreating. Genes that caused individuals to cooperate with fellow human beings, treat others decently, and care about friends and family members became prominent because people who cooperated, shared ideas, and worked together to acquire food and defend against mutual enemies had a better chance of surviving than individuals who lived as solitary hermits. Genes that caused individuals to create beautiful art would flourish for the same reason that genes for beautiful tails flourish in peacocks: they help their carriers attract mates. Anarchists should certainly welcome these findings, and incorporate them into our social theory.”

Baake then goes further,

“.. certain individuals have an innate genetic tendency to engage in violent antisocial, or psychopathic behaviour, including both rape and murder. According to Pinker: ‘Convicted murderers and other volent, antisocial people are likely to have smaller and less active prefrontal cortex’ ..”

What eugenic psycho-babble!! That is exactly what the English said about the Irish in the last century, even showing comparative pictures in London newspapers of the Irish receding forehead versus the English. It is what the European invaders said about the Australian Aborigines, and it was one excuse they used to exterminate every single Aborigine in Tasmania. The Nazis even showed cinema footage to millions, showing Jews all having rat-like noses, heads and even ways of walking. This is the road neo-darwinism is on, alas, dragging poor Baake along too – well for the moment.

The first replicating, metabolising cell evolved about 4 billion years ago, multiplied and spread around earth creating our oxygen atmosphere for 3 billion years; the first multi-cellular life appeared only 1 bya; the first simplest animals, sponges, about 0.6 bya; primates only 0.065 bya; and merely 0.007 bya, a mere 7 million years ago, certain troops (or a troop) of apes were forced to stand up, become bipedal and leave the dense jungle. Being weaker, slower and smaller than other apes, these bipedal apes were forced to travel away from forests and jungles, and managed to survive in a rich assortment of unfamiliar environments, some difficult, some easy, along the eastern coast of Africa, changing themselves as they developed new multi-abilities along their way. The march to modern humans had begun – there was no turning back. Of course the reason they survived and flourished was the need to defend themselves collectively as never before, to more equitably than previously share food I harder times, food scavanged and or dug up as they travelled – indeed, they were the first primitve hunter-gatherers – the cradle of humanity – at the beginning a new way of life, that went on for 6 – 7 million years until only 10,000 years, or so, ago.

The development of complex human language and consciousness, self and other awareness, memory, foresight; the ability for abstraction, generalisation, to symbolise and analogise – are very important, and usually it is the larger human brain that the mass media and indeed many scientists usually talk about and emphasise. But this can lead down an idealist road, ‘I think, therfore I am’. It is better to start not with an idea, but where an idea comes from, which is human need (beginning usually unconsciously with irritability), be it an apple, a cuddle, mutual-grooming or water or the need for defence or to understand something. A much better way to understand our origins, our being, our future is to grasp the significance of sensuous social activity. What makes us human is conscious agreement to cooperate in action and learn together; we are thinking bodies interacting with nature to live; and such proto-human or human activities are how our neurons grow numerically and thicken – as our muscle cells do with exercise.

To date, throughout the scientific history of attempts to understand human evolution, of what it was that made us human, and which aspects made the most important contributions – there has been a false debate. Some scientists put the brain’s growth and neural development as primary; many others stress the erect gait of troops of advanced apes moving from forests onto grasslands, freeing the hands with opposable thumbs which became ever-more skilled; or making and using tools; some emphasise culture or labour; others stress cooperation and social organisation; still others emphasize forethought, recall, memory, ie, abstraction from the ‘prison of immediate experience’; some indicate human relations and love or caring; some focus on learning, consciousness, mimicry or language – all giving a wide and varied hierarchy of their own ‘favoured’ aspects. In truth, this hierarchy-game becomes quite sterile once we identify our most essential human qualities, especially how they work together and in which ways. (ps – this is the research I am engaged in at present – ie, the spiral of human development – steve5masterson at yahoo.co.uk).

However, we can prove right here and now that environment and nurture count for 100% of what it means to be human. And we will also demonstrate that our genes are also 100% human, but that our humaness here is only potential. The neurosciences, biology, anatomy, genetics, are of little relevance unless understood in connection with scientific observation of human social life. Unfortunately the social sciences or sociology affect how we see or understand ourselves and so these sciences are heavily interfered with by the powers that be, who have great self-interest in promoting a particular view of human nature.

As such, comparative studies of chimpanzees especially, and other primates, in both their real social life habitat and in experiments of enculturation, that is, attempts to teach them human language, concepts and behaviour – are therefore all very important.

However, the most powerful evidence comes from the opposite of the enculturation of chimps, from comparative studies of discovered feral or wild children. It should be noted that many people when they first begin to understand the reality of feral children, have a variety of very strong uncomfortable feelings. Further, it should also be noted that the mass media tend to downplay, ignore or sometimes momentarily sensationalise the phenomenon, for very good reasons. The following paragraph is my own short definition of a ‘feral child’ currently available on Wikipedia.

>> A feral child (feral, i.e., "wild" or undomesticated) is a human child who, from a very young age, has lived in isolation from human contact and has no (or little) experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language. Feral children are extremely rare and can be brought up by animals, confined by humans (often parents) or live in the wild in isolation. Throughout the world, just over a hundred incidences of the phenomenon have been reported. They are thus considered very interesting case studies from a sociological perspective. When completely brought up by animals the feral child copies and behaves (within physical limits) almost 100% like that particular animal-carer, including its variety of instincts, fear or indifference to humans, etc. Children with some human experience before isolation from humans can be much easier to rehabilitate after ‘discovery’. <<

However, a much better website to study is at www.feralchildren.com where there are over 100 stories of feral children. One particular scientific observation was of two wolf-girls, Kamala and Amala, discovered in the Indian jungle near Calcutta in 1920. The detailed Diaries of Rev. Singh over 9 years are of an objective, persistent and very humane attempt to humanly enculture Kamala (Amala died after one year) – it is a powerful story and a definitely needs to be read by David Baake.

It would have been impossible for Kamala and Amala to develop any meaningful language between themselves in one generation. They had the neuron-power and voice-box to potentially speak, they had the potential to become human, but as the diaries make clear, not one ounce of being human was present in either of them when first discovered living with the wolves. Human affection, love, skills, habits and culture are living products culturally passed on, via an apprenticeship of sorts, by upbringing and nurture, through 7 million years of first primitve hunter-gathering and then more and more advanced hunter-gathering that was overtaken only about 10 thousand years ago by the Agricultural Revolution, by settlement, by the ownership and fencing of land and crucially the amassing of goods and property – which nomadic hunter-gatherers could not do. It also represented the beginning of systematic and institutionalised inhumanity. Indeed, Marx was wrong and class struggle, significant as it is, is not the all-embracing struggle of struggles, defining human history. The all-embracing struggle began seriously with the emergence, ownership and mass-accumulation of land and property and was of humanity against inhumanity.

Since some apes were forced out of deep jungle early humans developed language skills, forced by the need for more complex communation and collaborative activity in a wide variety of situations. The language and skills were handed down, ie. they taught and learnt from each new generation, historically connected to each other. Each generation adding a little and now and again a lot, to skills and language. It began with body language, mimicry and grunts (as social interaction observations of chimps reveal today), and they became increasingly skilled at telling stories and making agreement to do this or that. Slowly, over millions of years, necessity and natural selection forced the development of the larynx, mouth chamber and tongue and lip flexibility, which allowed the pronunciation of not just verbs and grunts, but the harder consonants, when the growth of a vocabulary and grammer could develop. Basically those best equipped to communicate and make more and more complex and effective agreements and plans of collective action were the likely ones to survive, and so both genetically and more importantly through apprenticeship and culture, were able to pass on their abilities. Read - http://www.case.edu/artsci/cogs/donald_articles.html - the first article in this list of articles by Merlin Donald is very useful in this respect.

Young human children are taught to stand, walk and run on two legs - they cannot even stand up without humans around to copy from or help them. Children brought up by animals actually reflect the ways and means of their ‘educators’, their upbringing. The wolf-girls behaved to all intents like wolves. The gazelle-boy loved to make giant leaps when walking after being ‘discovered’, for which he had his tendons cruelly cut to stop him doing this. Kamala and even little Amala could run on all-fours faster than other children. Kamala when howling every night like a wolf seemed to have a greater vocal flexibility and a little tonal variation, a little beyond that of a wolf (due to a more advanced voice box) but in all effect, it was the howling of a wolf needing wolf company, not human qualities at work. The key here is learning, nurturing – it is that which makes us human – actual social-human relationships, conscious agreement in working together to survive and flourish. We consciously agree to act together and learn from our cooperation – and we do it outside of instinct, we have escaped that prison of immediate experience, and have considerable recall and memory of the past, and a formidable forethought, which allows us to plan ahead together and solve complex problems as we survive and/or flourish.

Back to Baake who, totally hypnotised by Pinker, writes,

“.. there is a direct correlation between the physiological functioning of the brain, and the manifestation of violent, anti-social, psychopathic behavior. Pinker continues to suggest that there are two different types of psychopaths: ‘One kind consists of people who are genetically predisposed to psychopathy regardless of how they grow up. The other kind is made up of people who are predisposed to psychopathy only in certain circumstances, namely when they perceive themselves to be competitively disadvantaged in society and find themselves at home in a group of other antisocial peers.’ ”

Mental institutions are crammed with people nurtured in capitalist society, with systematic alienation and atomisation of each other from the other, a society instilling distrust, envy, hate, between one and the next. Earning a living is not conscious agreement to work together of free will, but an inhumane enforced wage-labour to profit others, under the guise or mist of free choice. Any investigation of people in mental institutions shows people who have real problems with ‘normal’ human relations, and it is not surprising that research into their upbringing and backgrounds overwhelmingingly demonstrate nurturing problems and/or poverty. This system instils in us that happiness is accumulating money and wealth, is selfish competition against each other; is I, I, I; and me, me, me; is the fetishisation of and frantically consuming more and more commodities, even those we do not need at all – all these at all times grotesquely distort genuine human social relations, our humanity.

Our feelings for each other, genuine human relations, love and care, trust and respect for and from the other – the things we humans, the more humanised (though we are all still alienated) of us that is, is what we humans value and crave the most. In a twisted way, even the rich put human relations as important; they want to be looked up to and respected, or feared, but they also get a sick pleasure of looking down, they are nurtured to behave inhumanely, and when their power and welath is threatened, it is very brutally inhumane – rooted, as mentioned before in the accumulation of wealth and ownership of land and businesses.

Here is how Baake puts it:

“… there are some people who will be psychopathic no matter what, even if they are born into peace and prosperity. On the face of it, this seems to be something that Anarchists instinctively understand, even if some of us would rather not admit it: how else could we explain the actions of presidents, kings, CEO’s, and other tyrants who are born into privileged circumstances and still commit acts of unspeakable evil?”

Ha! – good old ‘evil’ had to emerge sometime in this logic. The inhuman suffering and murdrous acts caused by the rich and powerful are taught, drilled-in, learnt in their current lives from their own nurturing and inhuman cultures. Anyone who knows of the brutality and hierarchy of private and boarding schools will understand why this is an essential part of their training – the same goes for the training of the military and especially for the officers. And further, the hypocritical upper-classes who promote heredity, nature and genes to lower classes; know full-well the importance of ‘good’ nurturing – which is why they pay vast amounts for private, expensive education, personal tutorials and expensive hobbies for their own children. As a class, they are consciously trained to defend their own class interests, ruthlessly when needed. Baake’s idea that being ‘born into priviliged circumstances’ should somehow negate the nurture argument, demonstrates that he thinks a ‘priviliged’ upbringing would somehow make someone more humane if the nurture argument was dominant.

Human nature, like everything else, is not a fixed entity, but of all things it is human beings that have proven to be such a revolutionary species, constantly transforming the world around us in an evolutionary moment, growing in population, our technology now making leaps and bounds in particular with IT, and we too are evolving at an ever-faster rate. My own thoughts on this are that we will only become fully human as a species when human society is consciously humanised by ourselves – and this is fairly imminent in this era, unless we destroy ourselves first: another real possibility.

Baake’s idea of a fixed ‘universal human nature’ (from where did this phrase arrive – Pinker maybe?) confirms even more that he is lining up with the enemy in this field. Under his heading of ‘Transcending Human Nature’, he states that “extremely dangerous in modern society is .. our universal human nature [which] by some innate tendency has run amuck .. [with] overpopulation and violence .. the two most basic human urges [are] to engage in sex and the urge to engage in aggression or violence..”

Our enemy is not our ‘universal’ or unchanging human nature, that we now have to somehow transcend. The enemy is the antihuman character of capital and the enslavement or wage-slavery by a few over the many. These are the anti-human forces now driving our world to environmental, economic, biochemical and nuclear catastrophe, to a new world war. Our task is the self development and self education of ordinary people, is building an anti-hierarchical network and movement that can destroy the state and power of the rich and suppress their counter-revoutionary attempts. Our task is to build a cooperative society in which all we humans are “free” to chose what we do.

Controlling population and emphasising the selfish and violent character of our fixed evil human nature are concepts that persistenly come from the right. To finish things off, Baake talks of the urgent need now for ‘social mechanisms’, ‘the task for Anarchists is to educate people’, ‘to establish moral accountability’ to ‘transcend the trap of human nature we will have to establish cultural traditions and social institutions which promote sublimation of potentiallly destructive human urges..”

David, I am thinking about your potential. I know you may think you are misrepresented and misunderstood here, but your argument for social institutions and social mechanisms to control the evilness in human nature is a dangerous road to begin walking. And I genuinely hope you do not think it patronising in mentioning that the wide response from other writers to your recent mid-teen writings have perhaps turned your head, have made you believe you can comment freely on subjects you know little about. Can I suggest for your late teens that you study, study and study more, go experience the movement in Caracus for a year or two, as I truly believe you could become part of a higher synthesis in revolutionary humanist thought in the next period. A suggested start is:

Hilary Rose, Steven Rose, Charles Jencks, ‘Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology’ Harmony (2000)

Graham Sewell, ‘Yabba-Dabba-Doo! Evolutionary Psychology and the Rise of Flintstone Psychological Thinking …’ Human Relations, Vol 57 (2005)

Richard Leakey, ‘The Origin of Humankind’, Weidenfeld (1994)

Steven Rose, ‘The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, Mending & Manipulating the Mind’ Vintage (2006)