Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
RIANE: That depends on whether we take the dominator or the partnership route. But I'm convinced that if we take the dominator route, there won't be much in the way of any kind of human consciousness in a hundred years, because chances are that we won't be here.
If we do take the partnership route, I see a tremendous growth of empathy in both women and men. Even in women in the dominator model it's very selective. We've been permitted empathy for those around us, but we're not permitted any action to follow that empathy. So what good does it do?
I see a society where doing good will not be an insult, as it is now, as in the pejorative "do gooder" or "bleeding-heart." I see a world where the most highly valued work will have the consciousness of caring.
Marx spoke of the alienation of labor. I speak of the alienation of caring labor, which is the work that's traditionally been relegated to women and to volunteers, and has not been paid or has been paid very poorly. So I think we'll become much more conscious of what's really valuable.
I think that our consciousness will not make the artificial distinction between spirituality and nature, with the male being associated with the spirit and woman being associated with nature. We will also have gotten over our ridiculous love affair with technologies of destruction, which is inherent in the dominator system, because here the technological emphasis has to be on technologies that make it possible to more efficiently dominate--be it the new technologies of mind control, be it weaponry, or be it exploitative technologies.
I think we'll become conscious that women's issues are not secondary or peripheral, but rather the most critical issues. Take population, for example. That's a women's issue, an issue of reproductive freedom, of access to birth control technologies. Even more important, it's an issue of life choices for women other than breeders of sons for men.
If you look at the most overpopulated, poorest, and most violent regions in the world today, the Middle East, Latin America, or parts of Africa and Asia, you see there the dominator configuration. So with a new partnership consciousness we will be able to see reality far more clearly. I think that we'll be much saner.
RMN: Do you see man/woman teams presiding in future governments? Can you give us a historical perspective on this? What effects do you think this would have on areas such as ecology, nationalism, and the distribution of wealth, for example?
RIANE: I love your question, and I could spend a day on it. I think that one thing that we're beginning to see is that we've been taught to think of leadership as power over. And now we're beginning to understand, even in the corporate sector, that a really good leader is a person who inspires people, who can get from them their highest productivity, their highest creativity.
Women have been used to doing this, because that's part of the training we get for child rearing. So I think that the role of women in leadership is indispensable. And I think that it will affect everything!
Take, for example, ecology. Men are socialized in the dominator system not to clean up after themselves. So that's exactly what they've done with nuclear waste, they've just put it out there with no notion of what in the world to do with it. Women would never do this because, you see, a man is brought up in the dominator system to think there's always going to be someone to clean up after him--namely a woman.
DJB: How have your personal relationships, particularly your marriage, inspired your theories of global evolution?
RIANE: I really want to honor David here. Without his partnership, I couldn't have done it. It's just that simple. He has been my friend, my mentor, my sounding board. He has sometimes critiqued me, made me worry about what I was doing, and he always gave me tremendous amounts of information. Above all, he gave me tremendous amounts of support.
DAVID L: From my point of view, it's been extremely important to me to interact with a woman who is able to love me as I'm able to love her on some basis of equality. Rather than have the old superior-inferior relationship, which many men and women have. It takes up so much of a lifetime, so many marriages, and so many affairs these days to work through all these difficulties of the dominator-dominated patterning that's built into us. It's just wonderful to me to reach a stage in life where all that, at least, is in the past. But of most importance to me is the intellectual advantage. I often think I was tremendously fortunate to happen to link up with a woman so important in making this breakthrough we've been talking about. Women are making this breakthrough and they've begun to see out beyond this cage that every male is still encased in, almost without exception.
I feel fortunate in that I happened to link up with a woman at the forefront in her time in getting outside that cage and seeing it for what it was and is.
You see, Riane took these insights, added to them, and built them into this forceful new theoretical framework. It hangs together as a theory of cultural evolution, of historical development, and as a weltanschauung or world-view; once you've grasped it, you can actually re-evaluate the whole of your intellectual experience. You can turn your head clear around and for the first time see life and it's possibilities in a balanced perspective.
In my own intellectual development, five systems of thought have been important to my mental growth. The first was the Christian mythos. The second was the Freudian. The third was the Marxian. The fourth was the field theoretical perspective of Kurt Lewin and the fifth has been systems science. Each reoriented my whole intellectual universe. But the sixth was Riane's perspective, and I now find it by far the most useful because it embraces more than any other, more questions, and corrects the imbalances of these perspectives. I feel it's very much a weltanschauung for the twenty-first century.
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Replicating Genes
with Robert Trivers
Are social behaviors genetically inheritable? Do they evolve through time like physical characteristics? The science of sociobiology has developed in order to study these questions. In the controversial field of sociobiology, there is no one as controversial as Robert Trivers, for he has certainly been the most daring in applying the "selfish gene" theory of sociobiology to human behavior and psychology. Recognized as one of the world's most eminent sociobiologists, Robert Trivers was born in 1943 in Washington D.C. to a Foreign Service Officer and a poet, as the second of seven children. His early academic interests ("after the Bible, " he clarifies) included astronomy and mathematics. He earned his B.A. from Harvard in U.S. History in 1965. Then he wrote and illustrated children 's books for two years before returning to Harvard, where he studied biology, and received his Ph.D. in 1972. He taught at Harvard until 1978, and after that at the UC Santa Cruz, where he continues to teach to this day. In May 1979 he joined the Black Panther Party, and has been referred to by his colleague Burney Le Boeufas "the blackest white man I know. "
Dr. Trivers is perhaps most famous for his theory of reciprocal altruism, which is a model for explaining and predicting altruism in animals precisely based on return-effect or chances of reciprocity. He has also written papers on parental investment and sexual selection, sex ratio theory, parent-offspring conflict and the social behavior of lizards and insects. He is the author of
Social Evolution
, a fascinating sociobiological textbook which was published in 1985 by Benjamin-Cummings of Menlo Park. He spends a good deal of time in Jamaica with his children, and has described himself as "Jamaican in my soul or spirit. " He is currently working on the evolution of "selfish genes " and resulting intra-genomic conflict, the effects of blood parasites on sexual selection in Anolis lizards, and deceit and self-deception. We met Bob on the evening of January 18th, 1 989 at the Woodshed, a country bar in Felton, California. Bob spoke to us about his theory reciprocal altruism, selfish genes, the evolution of sex, and muses with us on how and why consciousness evolved. There is a wild unpredictable quality to Bob's personality. He seems untamed and street-wise in a rather charming sort of way.
DJB
DJB: Bob, what was it that originally spawned your interest in biology and the evolution of social behavior?
ROBERT: When I graduated from college I was offered a job writing, and later illustrating children's books for part of a curriculum. The curriculum was called "Man: A Course of Study," and was meant to be the new social science, analogous to the new math, and the new physics. Since I didn't know anything about humans, they asked me to work on some animal material that they wanted to include in the course. I also didn't know anything about animals but they cared less about getting that stuff accurate.
So my first exposure to animal behavior came through this job, and I was impressed with two things. One, by watching movies of baboons, I was impressed by how psychologically similar they seemed to ourselves, and that any explanation therefore of our own psyche would have to include arguments that could apply to baboons as well. And the second thing was I learned about the concept of evolution through natural selection. So within about six months of graduating from college, I had had my life turned around. I had never had biology before, never had chemistry, and I became convinced that the basis for a scientific theory of psychology lay in animal behavior and evolutionary theory. So I threw myself into it.
DJB: Can you briefly describe your theory of reciprocal altruism?
ROBERT: Reciprocal altruism is very, very simple and encompassed in the folk saying, "You scratch my back, I'11 scratch yours." It simply posits that organisms, besides humans, or in addition to humans, are capable of trading altruistic acts over a period of time, in which each individual is sensitive to the tendency of the other individual to be reciprocal, or perhaps not to be reciprocal, or as I put it, to cheat on the relationship. So the theory of reciprocal altruism applied to humans says that traits like friendship did not evolve before reciprocal altruism as a prerequisite, but evolved after reciprocal altruism as a way of motivating and shaping our reciprocal relationships.
RMN: According to the theory of natural selection, species evolve to adapt to the local environment to align with the forces of the external world. For example, the Spots on the heads of gull chicks will co-evolve with the parental ability to recognize them. Have you considered the possibility that this process may operate both ways; i.e., that the environment may also adapt to conform with the needs of the organism it is nurturing and does natural selection support the idea of evolution as a co-creative transaction between the organism and the environment?
ROBERT: I have considerable difficulty with that notion, except in the sense that you probably don't mean it: that the environment consists of other living creatures, and so the environment and the species we're considering both evolve. The species we're thinking about imagining is selected by the environment it lives in, but the environment it lives in is itself made up of living organisms which are being selected by reference to their environments, which include the species we're imagining. But, if you ask can I see how the environment would evolve to nurture the species, I'm dubious.
DJB: What percentage of human behavior do you think is genetically hard-wired and what percentage of human behavior do you think is due to environmental learning, and what evidence can you call upon to support your viewpoint?
ROBERT: I don't think your question really permits any kind of precise answer. I think it's inherently impossible to assign a percentage to environment and a percentage to genetic influences. The only way you could do that would be to specify the full range of environmental contingencies, and the full range of genetic contingencies, and that seems like a hopeless way to operate. For example, traits like two legs and five toes on each leg are "hard-wired" genetically, but we can always produce an intervention in early embryology which will interrupt the natural train of events, and result in someone with no limbs, or with an unusual number of digits. So, if we include that environmental range, then the percentage of genetic determination drops below a hundred percent. I don't see any way to state how much of human behavior is genetically hard-wired, whatever that precisely means, or how much is environmentally determined.
DJB: Bob, you wrote the introduction to Richard Dawkins' book
The Selfish Gene
, the first place I ever heard of the concept of memes-that is, non-genetic clusters of information that replicate themselves from brain to brain much as genes do from body to body, and appear to evolve through a process akin to natural selection. In light of this theory, can you explain why some people forfeit opportunities for genetic reproduction in order to propagate memes-many artists and scientists, for example, never have children--and do you think it's possible that the goal of evolution is not really genetic replication, but rather information replication?