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Review of Keith E. Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding

meaning in the age of Darwin.
ISBN 0-226-77089-3.

Reviewed by Ronald de Sousa

[Final draft of the text published in Literary Review of Canada, September 2004, pp. 5-7,
as "Two-Track Minds: How rational thinking keeps us from being enslaved by our genes"]

In Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, the Catholic blames the Pope for his excessive progeny. The Protestant
congratulates himself on being free to put, instead, a little rubber thing on the end of his John Thomas. That, he
declares, is what being a Protestant is all about.

The Pope is right about the little rubber things: they are against Nature. Often, however, going against nature is
what rationality is all about. That, stripped of theology, is a good first approximation to the message of Keith
Stanovich’s lucid and passionate book.

On the uncompromisingly ‘gene-centric’ view of neo-Darwinian theory advanced in Richard Dawkins’s

1976 The Selfish Gene, we are, like other animals, robotic vehicles of genes, designed for their efficient
replication. Human culture in all its splendour is just part of our gene-copying equipment. Its elements are
‘memes’ (Dawkins’s clever coinage, assonant with ‘genes’, connoting both memory and the French word for
‘same’). Memes, too, are a kind of viral replicator, lodging in minds and propagating by social contagion.

Dawkins’s work outraged social scientists, who saw in it a triple threat: biological imperialism invaded their turf;
substituted simplistic genetic determinism for human complexity; and reduced culture itself to the colonization
of minds by mindless parasites. Some biologists, such as Richard Lewontin, with a hefty cabal of right-thinking
left-wingers calling themselves ‘Science for the People’, attacked what they saw as a resurgence of social
Darwinism that would buttress capitalism, racism and sexism by showing these to be ineluctably ingrained in
human nature. Other biologists have offered to reconstruct viable notions of ‘group selection’ that would
counteract selfish genes and account more plausibly for altruistic impulses. Still others have urged that the role
of genes is a good deal more complicated than appeared in Dawkins’s original popularization, and that genes are
probably not the only biological replicators.

These multiple assaults, while complicating our understanding of the mechanisms underlying genetics, have not
shaken the Neo-Darwinian edifice. What alters its implications is the way Stanovich, Canada Research Professor
of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, complements it with the results of recent research
into the way we think and reason. The result forms an ambitious and compelling updating of the ancient
characterization of human beings as rational animals.

Natural selection has bequeathed us, of necessity, only what has been reliably transmitted from ancestral bodies
to our own. Mainly, though not exclusively, that means genes, which can be regarded as having programmed in
us, in addition to relatively inflexible or ‘short-leash’ behaviour patterns, more malleable or ‘long-leashed’
goals. These last include, in the case of sexually reproducing animals, self-preservation, mating, and perhaps
even inquisitiveness and a preference for believing truths over falsehoods. These goals present themselves to us,
the vehicles, as intrinsically worth pursuing. But that appearance is just an artifact of their designers’ cunning.
(When you send underlings on a dodgy mission, it is often better not to explain what you are after, lest they
question your motives. Far better to get them to think they’re pursuing their own ends.) Our goals are shaped by
the genes’ need to be replicated; and from that perspective, our most basic desires, with their compelling
appearance of intrinsic worth, are merely instrumentally useful to the genes.

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Some of the vehicle’s wants, such as self-preservation, serve the vehicle as well as the genes. For the pursuit of
these ‘long-leashed’ goals, natural selection has elaborated a new system of cognitive capacities, working on
different, ‘analytic’ principles, which enable us to devise more complicated strategies. This analytic system has
evolved ‘in addition to... rather than as a replacement for short-leash [control].... that earlier evolutionary
adaptation has installed in the brain.’ (13).

In short, humans have two-track minds. This adds immensely to the ingenuity with which we engineer means to
our ends: we can survive in a greater range of environments than any other living thing. By the same token,
however, the two systems can conflict—as when we experience intense fear of something that we know is
harmless. That experience of conflict alerts us to the fact that our best individual interests may diverge from the
best interests of the genes which it was our function to transmit. That is what launched the robot on the path to
rebellion: ‘Humans turn out to be the only animals to whom it has occurred to ask: “best for whom?”.’
(p.13). The cognitive powers that were supposed to make us more efficient in the service of our [genetic]
masters can now be used against them.

But now we come across another ‘truly creepy’ fact (173): the building blocks of the analytic system—the
instrument of our rebellion—are themselves replicators, blindly bent on their own propagation. Memes can be
‘even nastier than genes’ (193). They lodge in individual minds and use them for their own ends, as viruses use
their host.

This ‘epidemiological’ perspective on culture can seem deeply disturbing. It ‘inverts the way we think about
beliefs....The question is not how ... people acquire beliefs … but how ... beliefs acquire people.’ (176) The
reason this is creepy is that common sense assumes that ideas spread because people choose them for good
reasons: we desire the beautiful and believe the truth. But in fact, as Stanovich observes, that assumption ‘has
trouble accounting for ideas that are beautiful or true but not popular, and ideas that are popular but neither true
nor beautiful.’ (176).

How then can we make our thoughts and our goals truly our own? There is a ‘devilish recursiveness[1] in the
whole idea of meme evaluation’, for ‘science and rationality are themselves memeplexes—co-adapted sets of
interlocking memes.’ (180). In response, Stanovich favours a picture attributed to Otto Neurath by the
philosopher Willard V. Quine. In this image, the totality of our beliefs keeps us afloat on the sea of life as in a
ship, some of whose planks may be rotten. We can never dock the ship on dry land, so we must ever be mending
some planks while standing on others, which might themselves be rotten. Still, the ship keeps sailing. Principles
of rationality guide us in stepping gingerly from plank to plank.

But what guarantees the validity of our so-called rational principles? Stanovich takes the reader on a masterly
tour of a massive accumulation of research conducted over the past three or four decades into the way we
‘naturally’ think and reason. The upshot of this research is that normal intelligent people systematically fail to
find the correct solution to a wide variety of relatively simple problems. Here is a example:

You are shown four cards. Here is what you know: every card has on one side either just one vowel or just one
consonant; on the other side, each card bears either just one odd number, or one even number. The cards you see
show A, 4, 7, and N. You must verify that If any card has a vowel on one side, it has an odd number on the
other. Which cards must you turn over to make sure the statement is true?

It has been repeatedly shown that nearly three quarters of respondents get this wrong. People, it seems, are
systematically irrational. Against this, some contend that the inference strategies we actually use have been
refined over the course of hominid evolution to yield the best overall rate of success in the long run. Natural
selection never had occasion to select for skill at cards, for example; but compare what happens when we are
presented with the following:

You are a bouncer, charged with verifying that If any person is drinking beer, that person has a valid ID showing
them to be of drinking age. Whose drinks and whose ID must you check?

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Almost no one gets this one wrong. Yet it is precisely equivalent to the previous problem. The explanation
favoured by evolutionary psychologists is that natural selection has made us adept at specific tasks, not at
universally applicable logic. In this case, the task is detecting cheaters. Drinking beer without ID counts as
cheating. We know at once anyone drinking coke isn’t cheating, and that anyone possessing a valid ID can drink
what they please. We check just the others—those that correspond to the first two cards in the previous game.

That is one of many defenses mounted by self-appointed champions of human rationality. In books such as Gerd
Gigerenzer’s (2000) Adaptive Thinking, they insist that if we formulate problems more appropriately to real-life
situations, people will do just fine.

Stanovich labels this the ‘Panglossian’ view, after the character in Candide, Voltaire’s satire on Leibniz. That
philosopher held that God chose to create the best of all possible worlds. This view is officially known as
‘optimism’, which is odd, since few thoughts could be more depressing than the notion that the world as we
know it could never be improved on. Stanovich advocates the ‘meliorist’ view that striving to become more
rational is both possible and worth the effort. Even if we had no evidence from psychology laboratories, the
meliorist view is irresistible in the light of the long list of catastrophes caused by human irrationality or
‘dysrationalia’: ‘people choose less effective medical treatments; people fail to accurately assess risks in their
environment; information is misused in legal proceedings; parents fail to vaccinate their children ... billions of
dollars are wasted on quack medical remedies....’ (149) In these and many other ways, people can ‘be smart but
act dumb.’ (150).

Rational thinking was invented only a few thousand years ago. No wonder, then, that it is difficult to do and
relatively slow. In contrast, evolution had millions of years to hone fast and efficient strategies controlled by the
automatic systems (which, it should be noted, also come to include many learned skills: driving a car, for
example, is mostly done without the laborious, explicit reasoning required while learning.) Acting quickly on the
basis of a rough appraisal of one’s urgent plight is often more effective than time-consuming calculations. But
science and technology depend essentially on painstaking mathematical and logical thinking. Their power
derives precisely from the fact that they are applicable across domains of thought and action.

II

To this whole story, there may seem to be a devastating objection. If ‘rebelling’ against nature makes sense, one
must assume that Nature has goals. The Vatican knows what Nature intends, of course, and so does the airplane
passenger in the Gardner Rea cartoon who, refusing a drink, admonishes: ‘I don’t think Nature intended us to
drink while flying.’ But for the rest of us, isn’t the question of what Nature intends just pre-scientific rubbish, on
a par with questions about the giant turtle that supports the Earth? In the light of modern science, Nature is
devoid of intentions, goals, or values. Nature is just the result of the great interplay of chance with mathematical
and physical necessity.

Stanovich does not address this, but it is, of course, strictly true. We can no longer believe, with Aristotle, that
what actually happens affords sufficient evidence of what was meant to happen. In our post-Darwinian world,
Nature’s intentions can’t be read off from what is statistically normal. For if all our ancestors had been perfectly
‘normal’, functioning as most others functioned, we would remain single-celled organisms, like our distant,
perfectly adapted cousins the bacteria. Every biological innovator on the way to homo sapiens was a freak of
nature.

Yet it seems absurd to deny that the heart functions to circulate the blood, not to produce rhythmic sounds for
doctors to listen to. Contemporary philosophers have reconstructed a coherent way of understanding that
difference. Roughly, the idea is that a natural function can be identified with those effects, among all those
produced in the past, that made the organ in question more ‘fit,’ or likely to get reproduced. Thus the circulation
of the blood, but probably not the production of rhythmic sounds, is why we have hearts.

This refurbished conception of natural function differs in several respects from the Aristotelian one it has
replaced. The crucial shift is that from the fact that some effect is a natural function, one cannot infer that it is a
Good Thing. ‘Good for whom?’, we must now remember to ask. To mention a hotly debated example: there
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should be nothing shocking in the possibility that rape might be ‘functional’ in the biological sense. The mistake
is to suppose that being functional would make it good. Some natural functions are desirable, others deplorable.
We get to pick and choose. When Nature’s aims conflict with our own, it is time to rebel.

Such considerations may not stifle the protest: if something is as bad as rape, then surely it can’t be good for the
species. And if it’s not good for the species it would have been eliminated by natural selection.

But that objection compounds three mistakes. First, some cases of natural selection can actually lead to
extinction: the classic example is the Irish Elk, in whom the ever-larger antlers preferred by the females
eventually became too gigantic to live with. A second mistake stems from the assumption that evolution selects
what is good for the species. This requires a process known as ‘group selection’, which has been championed by
a number of biologists, (notably Elliott Sober and David Wilson in their 1998 book Unto Others), but it remains
controversial and at best is probably very rare. Thirdly, whether selection favours groups, species or genes, it
cannot favour individuals as such. The reason is that despite the currency of phrases like ‘survival of the fittest’
and ‘sexual reproduction’, no sexual individuals ever survive or reproduce themselves. Only unicellular
organisms do that. What sex produces is always absolutely novel. Therefore it is not an option to say that genes
have the function of making individuals, as eggs make chickens. For nothing can have the proper function of
replicating of what is never replicated.

Yet it is individuals that we care about, not whatever replicators they were designed to serve. This seems
reasonable, because only individuals feel pleasure and pain. Therefore only individuals, in the final analysis, are
worth caring about. Some have taken this to imply that we should take consciousness to be the mark of the
human. Stanovich rejects this view: ‘human uniqueness and worth ... derive from ... a cognitive feature that
relates more to rationality than to consciousness.’ (213). But this is an obscure doctrine, for two reasons. First, it
is enormously difficult to specify what is meant by ‘consciousness’. Understood as a mere quality of experience,
consciousness is probably indeed an ‘epiphenomenon’ (a philosopher’s word for an effect that causes no further
effects of its own). No one has ever convincingly explained the function of consciousness. But that doesn’t mean
consciousness is of no value. On the contrary: the best things in life, the things we love for their own sake,
have value but not instrumental utility. Functions, by contrast, have just instrumental utility. The question ‘What
is X good for?’ presupposes that there is some other thing, Y, that X is ‘good for’. By contrast, what matters
most to us may not be good for anything else, or serve any function outside itself. Perhaps, then, consciousness
matters supremely precisely because it has no function.

The second problem with declaring the primacy of rationality over consciousness is that ‘consciousness’ also
commonly refers to our capacity for ‘second order’ reflection on our first-order beliefs and desires. In that sense,
consciousness is inseparable from rationality. Becoming critical of our first order desires and beliefs—which for
Stanovich is precisely what distinguishes rational beings—therefore supposes that we have become aware of
them. Only then can we embark on the critical examination of beliefs and desires.

That endeavour—the Neurathian project of rationality—turns out to be the back door that opens into nothing
less than the whole of philosophy as it has been practiced since Plato: the critical search for reliable methods of
inference and inquiry, for hidden presuppositions, and for meaningful life goals compatible with our capabilities.
As Stanovich is well aware, this involves a good deal more than putting the vehicles’ interests—those of
individual humans—ahead of those of the replicators. It means balancing individual interests against those of the
different and often conflicting nested communities to which each individual belongs. And it should mean
noticing, he points out, that the Market in all its efficiency responds exclusively to ‘desires connected to dollars’
(257): ‘How much each person gets desires satisfied is irrelevant to market optimization.’ (259), which ‘makes a
mockery of our belief in equal human worth.’ (260).

In embarking on the quest for rationality, we might do well to adopt the slogan that nothing is sacred—even the
Market. But that slogan, while threatening many forms of tyranny, will not fix any positive goals to guide us
through the recursive maze of meme-evaluation. We are always still at sea, but now at least we know that we
are.

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In some stories by Jorge Luis Borges, we are plunged into a radically unfamiliar world, where lottery outcomes
comprise all possible life events, or a library contains all possible books. By the end, it dawns on the reader that
the real world is actually equivalent to the strange world of the story: our destinies are pervaded by chance, and
finding the book that reveals the secrets of nature is no easier than trying to pierce those secrets in the laboratory.
This book may have a similar effect on the reader. A fantastic story of robots controlled by two species of alien
masters turns out to be nothing but the plain truth about our own familiar world. But having once been seen in
such a light, that world will never seem the same again.

Ronald de Sousa teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto. His latest book, Évolution et Rationalité, is to
be published by Presses Universitaires de France in September.

**FOOTNOTES**

[1]: A recursive process is one that applies to itself without end. A good example of recursiveness is (Douglas)
Hofstadter's Law: Everything takes longer than you think even taking into account Hofstadter's Law.

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