When it comes to gun violence, we seem stuck in a tragically repeating cycle, worthy of the movie Groundhog Day: following the latest horrifying example of mass-murderous gun violence, outraged citizens—at least, some of us—clamor for gun control, after which the mega-powerful gun lobby (or simply, political fears of that lobby), carry the day and nothing is done.
Like many of my fellow outraged citizens, I cannot help tempering my anger with the cynical certainty that in the aftermath of the Tucson tragedy, once again, nothing will be done. But for better or worse, I’d like to contribute an argument for gun control that derives from biology (of all things) and that so far as I know hasn’t yet been considered.
The idea, in brief, is that we need gun control because as a result of our biological evolution, we human beings are unprepared to deal effectively with the death-dealing technology that our cultural evolution has created.
Think of it as The Hare and The Tortoise, with the tortoise being biological evolution, and the hare, cultural evolution. Like all other living creatures, we evolve at a slow, Darwinian, tortoise-pace, but simultaneously, we have subjected ourselves to a very rapid, Lamarckian, hare’s-pace when it comes to our cultural and technological creations. The two are wildly out of synch, and therein lies much of our trouble.
About 50 years ago, Konrad Z. Lorenz pointed out a powerful irony in his book King Solomon’s Ring: Animals such as wolves, whose biology includes potentially lethal equipment, tend not to kill other members of their species, whereas others, such as doves, which lack murderous weaponry, also lack inhibitions against conspecific killing. As a result, it is safer to keep two male wolves together in an enclosure than two male doves in a small cage: the latter, because they are not equipped with mortal weapons and hence, also lack biologically built-in restraints concerning their use, are especially likely to fight to the death.
We now know that Lorenz was somewhat mistaken. Wolves do sometimes kill each other, but his general point nonetheless holds. Animals such as rattlesnakes, with the capacity for intraspecies mayhem, settle their disputes non-lethally. Natural selection, dealing with all that lethality, promoted fitness-maintaining alternatives to balance their dangers.
Human beings are more like doves than like wolves … and that’s the problem! A naked, unarmed, untrained human being would find it very difficult to kill another person, and so, not surprisingly, we are not endowed by natural selection with means of restraining death-dealing equipment. After all, our teeth are almost useless, our jaws don’t protrude, our fingernails are almost laughable and we don’t even have venom.
Yet in a mere few thousand years—a drop in the bucket in terms of biological evolution—we have culturally evolved from bare anatomy to rocks and clubs, to spears and blowguns, bows and arrows, rifles and machine guns, missiles and nuclear weapons. Because these developed so quickly, our biology didn’t have a chance to catch up (we are essentially the same biological creatures that we were before all of our lethal inventions). Today, as a result, we are confronted with technology that has endowed us with teeth that greatly exceed those of wolves, but without the wolf’s built-in inhibitions. We are threatened, not by the instincts we possess, but by those we lack.
The real danger of guns is that they are force-multipliers, by a factor verging on one million. This enables us to do things by the mere squeezing of a trigger (a fraction of an ounce of pressure), that are almost literally new to that biological creature, Homo sapiens. If we were dealing here only with traits that we had evolved biologically, as are wolves or rattlesnakes, our inner hare and tortoise would likely be much better synchronized. Instead, we are grotesquely and dangerously out of our element, apes wielding AK-47s.
We need help.
We can’t do anything about our biological evolution, and after all, it is our cultural evolution that got us into this mess. It must be our culture—in this case, enlightened law-making—that gets us out. If only.
20 Responses to A Biological Case for Gun Control
nsmyth - January 15, 2011 at 9:52 pm
Hello again.
I am trying very hard to see what role the references to evolution are playing in this argument. We need gun control laws: no argument here. But is the argument something like “when human beings invent or propogate abilities/powers that are beyond the abilities natural selection has bestowed on them, cultural sanctions must arise to limit those abilities/powers”?
Without a premise like this, the references to evolution are entirely superfluous. But even this premise itself is quite strange. I mean, we are “out of our element” when we travel to the moon, yet presumably you are not advocating laws preventing any government or individual from trying to get to the moon.
How about: guns are responsible for colossal harm, and harm is something laws must seek to limit when possible. Ergo, gun control laws.
I ask the same question I asked of your previous essay: why do you feel that references to evolutionary science are necessary in the moral/ethical domain? In this case, as in the previous case, “biology” is almost entirely irrelevant.
jffoster - January 15, 2011 at 11:36 pm
Guns are no more “responsible” for colossal harm than are automobiles. They are instruments, not agents. But I generally agree with nysmyth that biology is irrelevant. If anything, Barash makes a case for requiring everybody to pack a gun, i.e. be armed with lethal equipment!
barbarapiper - January 16, 2011 at 2:03 pm
Prof. Barash is simply trying to entertain here. He’s obviously not making an argument. If he were, he’d be proposing the elimination of all potentially lethal weapons, from knives to nuclear, rather than guns, which do a small percentage of the lethal violence even in our country.
Our willingness to kill one another in creative ways is indeed a fact of staggering proportions, but when you eliminate guns you still have extraordinary disparities in the distribution of wealth – which is more closely associated with murder rates than gun control laws – drug policies, refusal to provide adequate birth control choices, promotion of nutritional options that lead to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc. Want to kill thousands of people? Easy: ban the use of U.S. foreign aid for “family planning” and watch innocent victims die of AIDS. Gun violence is dramatic, frightening, and often senseless. Ban guns, sure. But don’t imagine that you’ve solved the evolutionary dilemma. If you believe that biology is destiny, you have a long road to travel before you eliminate all of the ways our bodies drive us to kill one another.
fizmath - January 16, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Would restrictions on gun ownership also apply to governments or do they get to retain their monopoly on killing?
dpbarash - January 16, 2011 at 3:43 pm
I most assuredly do not believe that biology is destiny, nor that it yields ethical insights, any more than understanding the biology of cholera tells us whether to do anything about it. But just as knowing that cholera is caused by a bacterium, spread by infected water, etc. gives us the opportunity to deal with it more effectively, I argue that understanding some of the natural history that underlies gun violence may encourage people to deal with it intelligently and free of pre-existing ideology.
barbarapiper - January 16, 2011 at 4:06 pm
But Prof. Barash, your cholera example underscores the impression that you apparently DO believe that biology is destiny. Cholera biology confronting human biology yields sickness and sometimes death for humans. If “the opportunity to deal with it more effectively” means to prevent the confrontation and/or respond in a way that maximizes the potential for human survivability, you are pointing to the biologically coded drive of humans to survive. If “the opportunity to deal with it more effectively” is written from the bacterial point of view, you refer to the biologically coded drive of bacteria to survive. In what sense is this case of cholera-invading-humans NOT biology-as-destiny?
Your glib comment that biology does not yield ethical insights is trite: biology doesn’t yield rhyming couplets either. So what? That’s not what we critique when we point to the poverty of sociobiological road maps for future cultural decisions.
You may find it interesting to speculate on the natural history that underlies gun violence, but by separating out guns from other forms of lethal violence you simply trivialize the issue and over-simplify it.
nsmyth - January 16, 2011 at 4:29 pm
I argue that understanding some of the natural history that underlies gun violence may encourage people to deal with it intelligently and free of pre-existing ideology.
In what way is your story about gun violence a story of “natural history”? Firearms are (as you note in your post) clearly a kind of cultural/technological development. There is no “natural history of firearms”. Firearms were invented in a cultural context, and proliferated because they make their bearers much more powerful, and thus able to achieve his or her aims. The history of guns is part of the history of power.
Tacking this story on to an evolutionary tale where we are (allegedly, controversially) imbued with dove-like propensity to attack one another achieves nothing, especially because human beings are clearly far more complex creatures than apes or doves. IF we have definite natural dispositions, they are clearly complex mixes of altruism and egoism, of violence and pacifism. In absolutely no way are we “apes with AK-47s”.
You must know these things, so I continue to be suspicious of the underlying motives involved in including such stories in discussions of broader ethical issues. Why not just, you know, do ethics?
barbarapiper - January 16, 2011 at 6:58 pm
@nsmyth:
Nice post, well stated. Thanks.
wbgleason - January 16, 2011 at 7:37 pm
Barash and Ruse are both making a similar argument coming from different directions. For Barash it is evolution and for Ruse the mean streak in human nature comes from original sin. My grandfather, an immigrant Irish plumber with no formal education, put it another way: “People are no damned good.”
And so we have a social contract to have rules and regs to keep the most egregious people in line and maybe even off the street if their behavior is too dangerous to society.
I think my grandfather’s observation, perhaps with “some” in the front, is accurate. Arguing about why this is seems pointless.
Bill Gleason
dpbarash - January 16, 2011 at 11:22 pm
In my opinion, a crucial part of human natural history involves a key disparity between biological and cultural evolution, the former proceeding very slowly and the latter, extremely rapid by comparison. This disconnect, I believe, underlies much of the difficulty and danger we face when we confront technology for which our biology has not prepared us. I reject the idea that we are inherently bad (or good); rather, we are confused and tragically ineffective when it comes to dealing with certain phenomena: guns, nuclear weapons, our new-found ability to destroy whole ecosystems, to reproduce without “natural” constraints, and so forth. To my mind, it is worse than nonsensical – indeed, it is downright irresponsible – to claim that our biology is irrelevant in such cases, when it is precisely the disconnect between our culture and our biology that has created much of the problem.
livefreeordie2 - January 17, 2011 at 6:12 am
Although I’m not completely sure, I’m going to assume that the original blog posting and Barash’s subsequent comments are not meant to be tongue-in-cheek. The basic contention, then, is that “we human beings are unprepared to deal effectively with the death-dealing technology that our cultural evolution has created.” I think that might be true for some folks. Automobiles kill ~50,000 people per year in this country alone. Even bicycles kill close to 1000 people every year. There are those who commit suicide by overdosing on medication and children who drown in the bathtub. If you are going to suggest that people should not be allowed to have guns because they do harm, even though they also do good, then consistency demands that you demand the same for vehicles and airplanes and medications and even bathtubs. If the harm done so outweighs the good done by the deadly technologies we are incapable of handling, then they should all be removed.
Actually, though, you have made the case for the second amendment. People have a right to defend themselves, both from others and from a government gone wrong. Guns are the great equalizer because you are quite wrong about one thing. There are humans who, quite naked and otherwise unarmed, can kill another human being using hands or feet or any of the other deadly tools each of us is born with. There is no reason why a 90 pound woman should not be able to defend herself against a 220 pound man wishing to do her harm.
Our biology is what it is. Unlike wolves and doves, we manufacture firearms. But also unlike wolves and doves, we build hospitals, including veterinary hospitals to care for sick wolves and doves. We have lots and lots of average people and some brilliant people. . .and some horribly crazy people. Living in a free country has risks and one of those risks is that someone can go nuts and commit terrible crimes. If it wasn’t a gun it could have been a truck. Or a fire bomb. We cannot restrict the rights of all the people because we know that inevitably, some will do horrible things.
vivienct - January 17, 2011 at 8:33 am
I don’t buy the evolutionary argument at all — it includes an overreach on natural selection. There is no evidence that natural selection works at the level of the individual, and it is individuals who are being weeded out in the caged example. If in fact the doves are polygamous, and killing the other male leads the victor to more offspring and there is no advantage to more males in occupying the niche, natural selection will neutrally of ethics lead to more within species killing. That is why probably 8% of us now carry the Ghengis Khan gene.
The idea that biological evolution will eventually lead to less violent behavior either builds a morality into evolution’s “goals” (and evolution is goal-free!) or presumes that survival of the most individuals in a species is advantageous for the species. More individuals leads to scarcer resources for all.
Last, an examination of animal behavior reveals a fair amount of within-species violence and killing, from baby birds pushing siblings from the nest (no talons and teeth needed), to males killing other males’ offspring, to herds and packs ousting usually “teen” males, to Jane Goodall’s warlike and cannibalistic apes.
The evolutionary pseudoargument here has no teeth (or bullets).
barbarapiper - January 17, 2011 at 9:51 am
“To my mind, it is worse than nonsensical – indeed, it is downright irresponsible – to claim that our biology is irrelevant in such cases, when it is precisely the disconnect between our culture and our biology that has created much of the problem.”
This might come as a surprise to the Semai, or to members of many other cultures.
betterschools - January 17, 2011 at 11:36 am
This is an interesting overlay to what seems like an a priori emotionally driven judgment. I am reminded of Vonnegut’s government leaders who, upon learning that scientists had cloned humans by mixing shaved arm hair with chicken soup, outlawed chicken soup.
Mr. Barash would be informed, first by having someone help him conduct a thorough conceptual analysis on the notion of force multipliers, then by carefully determining how his prescriptive principle would universalize. It’s not a pretty picture. I was under the impression that one’s ability to tease out the implications of principles was an admissions requirement to the academy.
frank_forman - January 17, 2011 at 12:41 pm
We already have gun control! What you want is *more* gun control. I saw no argument for that. For all you know, our biology could well dictate less gun control than our culture (government) is now imposing on us.
It is typical of liberals to make a case for *some* and think they have made a case for *more.* At least the Pope believes in mathematics (rhythm method), as Mr. Mencken noted 70-80 years ago, but not physics (condoms) or chemistry (birth control pills).
Theoretical question, when you say, “Natural selection, dealing with all that lethality, promoted fitness-maintaining alternatives to balance their dangers,” aren’t you invoking teleology or at least group selection a la David Sloan Wilson and (more lately) Edward Osborne Wilson?
deepwater - January 17, 2011 at 3:33 pm
Sounds like most of these respondents are “packin’” Hopefully, less “crazy” people will continue use words instead of bullets. It would seem logical to me that in order to protect myself from government tyranny I need to have my own nuclear arsenal….”the right to bear nukes.”
balfson - January 18, 2011 at 11:48 am
This serves as a reminder that even accomplished intellectuals have emotionally-driven thought processes and are capable of arriving at foolish conclusions.
Apparently, it was lost on many people that, of all of the people involved in the incident in Tucson, only one person ran towards the gunfire. He never unholstered his concealed handgun, but he did help detain the shooter. Do you honestly believe the others present were more in favor of “peace” than the soul volunteer, the only person that chose to put himself in danger to stop the violence? Would he have been as brave if he hadn’t been “packin’?” How do you explain that no onle else attempted to stop the gunman until his gun was empty?
As vivienct has so clearly explained above, your underlying assumptions about evolution and biology in this post are not well-founded. I’d venture, too, that your estimate of when man first used clubs is off by a factor closer to 100 than 10.
Finally, although evolutionary psychology can offer valuable insights in a “macro” sense, it cannot be seen as a major factor in any act or group of acts. To suggest that it can justify political action is religious zealotry, and I suspect that you would admit that freely.
jamie1269 - January 20, 2011 at 7:44 pm
There is an evolutionary aspect to gun control or rather gun access. Those who own guns (and their family members) are by far, the subgroup at highest risk for gun violence (suicide/accident/homicide). Could this be natural selection?
balfson - January 22, 2011 at 8:14 am
To understand why the statistic jamie1269 cites is misleading, read http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.fourexamples.asp#times.
jamie1269 - January 22, 2011 at 9:36 am
Balfson: I admit I’m not familiar with your website. Also, I have a bias toward more scholarly sources. See the peer reviewed ‘American journal of epidemiology’ article on the subject: http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/160/10/929