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Will Ayn Rand’s Conjectures on Evolution Be Proven Right?

By Vinay Kolhatkar

May 31, 2020

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On the subject of evolution, Rand was cautious, caveating her speculations.

Ayn Rand was definitive on virtually anything she opined on. An academic abundance of caution was not her style; she was much more likely to be accused of “sweeping generalizations.”

Yet, on the subject of evolution, Rand was cautious, caveating her speculations.
 
In her 1973 article entitled “The Missing Link,” reprinted in Philosophy: Who Needs It? Rand prognosticates:

I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. But a certain hypothesis has haunted me for years; I want to stress that it is only [a] hypothesis. There is an enormous breach of continuity between nature and man’s consciousness, in its distinctive characteristic: his conceptual faculty. It is as if, after aeons of physiological development, the evolutionary process altered its course, and the higher stages of development focused primarily on the consciousness of living species, not their bodies. (Emphasis mine)

But the development of a man’s consciousness is volitional: no matter what the innate degree of intelligence he must develop it, he must learn how to use it, he must become human by choice. What if he does not choose to? Then he becomes a transitional phenomenon—a desperate creature that struggles frantically against his own nature, longing for effortless “safety” of an animal’s consciousness, which he cannot recapture, and rebelling against a human consciousness, which he is afraid to achieve.

Her long-time associate Nathaniel Branden noted:

I remember being astonished to hear her say one day, “After all, the theory of evolution is only a hypothesis.” I asked her, “You mean you seriously doubt that more complex life forms—including humans—evolved from less complex life forms?” She shrugged and responded, “I’m really not prepared to say,” or words to that effect. I do not mean to imply that she wanted to substitute for the theory of evolution the religious belief that we are all God’s creation; but there was definitely something about the concept of evolution that made her uncomfortable.

To Branden, Rand’s restraint seemed unreasonable. Yet, Rand’s instinctive prognosis could prove closer to the truth than previously thought.

 

The Evolution of the “Big-Brained Hominid”

Is evolution merely a hypothesis?

That human big-brained hominids evolved from apes is now without scientific contest.

No. That human big-brained hominids evolved from apes is now without scientific contest.

As anthropologist Tom Gundling says: “Anthropologists are unified in the broad facts surrounding early human evolution.”[1] Contention now only revolves around taxonomy, and whether bipedalism or the emergence of large brains is crucial to the branching of the human lineage from the primates. All rational doubt has been laid to rest with the emergence of DNA techniques and further fossil discoveries. There is no such thing as a “missing link”—this is merely a media creation, perhaps stemming from organized religion’s hostility to evolution.

“Larger brains provide more neural substrate for brain function”[2] and “our brain’s morphology and its size are defining features of Homo sapiens and other hominin fossil species.”[3]

The adult human brain contains about 100 billion neurons. It’s about three times larger than the brains of other primates. However, while a large brain provided an adaptive mechanism to survive the Savannah in the drying of Africa, the brain is the most expensive organ in the human body in terms of its metabolic needs, and these needs are unceasing. The bipedal pelvis could not constrain a developing fetus for the necessary 18 months.

As evolutionary anthropologists Neubauer and Hublin note: “The neonatal brain must fit through the maternal pelvis during birth and prenatal brain growth is, therefore, obstetrically constrained. Furthermore, the brain is an energetically expensive tissue and developmental strategies must ensure that the developing brain receives sufficient energy.”[4] Consequently, the human baby is far more helpless at birth than any of its hominid cousins.

A nurturing society, which also eases the demands on the mother, interacts with the infant; its brain grows with this interaction. Infants who are left in the wild, but survive with a pack of animals, could be developmentally stunted for life. Actualization of human attributes begins at conception, and continues at a fast rate into childhood, but especially quick is the growth of the brain immediately after birth once the neonatal obstetric constraint on brain growth is removed.

Homo sapiens are big-brained hominids. And they have always lived in societies to survive and adapt. We use the terms “rational animal” and “social animal” to denote this.

Is this account of evolution a checkmate for Rand’s prognosis?

No, because human exceptionalism in terms of cognitive capacity, language, creativity, and reasoning warrants a better explanation.

 

The Linguistic “Evolution” of Introspective Ability

All mammalian brains acquire and interpret sensory input. But the modern human brain also almost incessantly assesses its prospects, by forming an identity, remembering crucial elements of its past, and making calculations about its future. Even more crucially, the process of the brain under conscious control, i.e., the mind, can rewire neural circuitry (“neuroplasticity”). How this property arose is not yet fully mapped.

In 1976, however, Princeton University psychologist Julian Jaynes published “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” (“OC”), a jaw-dropping theory of how introspective ability developed, most likely (first) in ancient Greece and Mesopotamia.

By far the most controversial part of the “bicameral mind” theory was that humans, perhaps as recently as 3,200 years ago, were driven around by “commanding voices” in their head—from one chamber of the brain to the other (hence “bicameral”). Such voices of authority (such as dead relatives or kings)—edicts acquired early in life—replayed audibly without a recognition that it’s their own playbook for life. With continuing advancement of language and writing, it became common for humans to be able to conceptualize using language. One such concept was the idea of “I,” an analog of one’s identity, narrating to itself its life story in linear time, projecting its own future, and thus being able to reflect on choices before committing to an action. This is free will in operation, created entirely lexically.

Jaynes’s theory, drawn, in part, from meticulously digging around large tracts of archaeological data, has not been disproved.

There are, nevertheless, several positive reasons why it needs to be taken seriously. Firstly, it implies that earlier mentalities form the chain of “missing” links that fill the colossal gap of conceptual capacity between primates and us.

To Enlightenment thinkers, the theory supplies, without an atheist’s disdain accompanying it, a secular account of the ubiquitous prevalence of religion with a neurological, testable model.

It also explains the sweeping prevalence on the planet of previously-unexplained phenomena like hypnotism (where subjects obey a “voice”), the hearing of voices attributed to the label schizophrenia, auditory and visual hallucinations of normal people under extreme stress, idolatry (which is prevalent even amongst the highly educated in certain countries), ancestral worship among remote tribes, children with imaginary playmates, and the physiological changes that accompany spirit possession and speaking in tongues (and perhaps the effectiveness of V2K technology).

In her journal entries, Rand had speculated:

We may still be in evolution, as a species, and living side by side with some ‘missing links.’ We do not know to what extent the majority of men are now rational.

 

If true, the modern human is anatomically a Homo sapiens, but metaphorically (if not genetically), a new subspecies, separated by time rather than geography.

New developments in psychological research should make us entertain the possibility that Homo sapiens, which paleontology contends arose 160,000 years ago, could not introspect until recently. If true, the modern human is anatomically a Homo sapiens, but metaphorically (if not genetically), a new subspecies, separated by time rather than geography.

The subspecies is worthy of a new name—I would call it “Psychological Organism.”

If this recent divergence is not true, the modern human is still a unique organism whose brain shape was evolving between 35,000 to 100,000 years ago. Neubauer, Hublin, and Gunz note that there is “accumulating archeological and paleoanthropological evidence demonstrating that Homo sapiens is an evolving species with deep African roots and long-lasting gradual changes in behavioral modernity, brain organization, and potentially brain function.”

 

Reconciling Free Will with Evolution

Long-time Ayn Rand supporter, philosopher Tibor Machan, admitted[5] that “Rand hasn’t directly addressed how evolutionary biology could be made compatible with free will and morality,”

Rand’s discomfort with evolution may have stemmed from the foresight that evolution could be used as ammunition against free will.

However, I would contend that we can reconcile evolutionary biology with free will, thus:

Modern humans acquire, through an interaction of culture and genes (gene-culture coevolution):

  1. A recognition of a continuous identity (for coherence);
  2. An autobiographical memory of significant personal events set in linear time;
  3. A personality, which includes traits, attributes, dispositions—some genetic, some self-created, and standing orders (or the ethic) as a guide to choices; and
  4. A reflective self-consciousness, which is, in effect, an awareness of the fact that we are aware of ourselves and our actions, and thus can contemplate their aftereffects.

Thus, while humans are not born with a blank slate (tabula rasa) in that they have genetic predispositions, instincts, needs, and potentialities, they have:

  1. An ability to override or withstand instincts with deliberations (short-term free will); and
  2. Neuroplasticity, the ability of our mind to rewire our brain, physically and functionally, throughout our life. This rewiring includes the ability to affect the subconscious and change the standing orders the brain feeds the mind, i.e., long-term free will.

 

Rand’s Conjectures Seem Reasonable Today

Tibor Machan also adds that “most evolutionary biologists deny free will,” or “like Steven Pinker, give up on morality in a way consistent with, and drawing on, science.”

But not all modern neuroscience is reductionist.

Tel Aviv University neurologist Jean Askenasy teamed up with colleague and philosopher Joseph Lehmann to suggest:

Consciousness influences brain neuroplasticity both during wakefulness as well as sleep in a top-down way. This means that consciousness really activates synaptic flow and changes brain structures and functional organization. The dynamic impact of consciousness on brain never stops despite the relative stationary structure of the brain. Such a process can be a target for medical intervention, e.g., by cognitive training.[6]

And, in a nod to the growing field of gene-culture coevolution, neuroscientist Michael Persinger notes in Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes’s Bicameral Theory Revisited:

There have been approximately 15 million changes in our species’ genome since our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. There are human accelerated regions in the genome with genes known to be involved in transcriptional regulation and neurodevelopment. They are expressed within brain structures that would have allowed precisely the types of phenomena that Jaynes predicted had occurred around 3,500 years ago. Related genes, attributed to religious beliefs, are found on the same chromosome (for example, chromosome 10) as propensities for specific forms of epilepsy (partial, with auditory features) and schizophrenia.

Even genetically, not just metaphorically, we may well be a new subspecies.

Unlike Rand though, Jaynes wasn’t analyzing an “anti-conceptual mentality.” He was detailing humankind’s emergence from a pre-conceptual mentality, and laying down a theory of how, when, and where it occurred.

Jaynes explains hypnosis, schizophrenia, idolatry, and spirit possession as “vestiges” of the bicameral mentality—that goes a long way toward explaining the irrationality around us. His account of older civilization’s longing for oracles and “voices” that told people what to do, and of the depth of the belief worldwide that the dead speak to us, and, the ubiquity of theism and the belief in the supernatural even today, parallels Rand’s phraseology—the “longing for effortless “safety” of an animal’s consciousness, which he cannot recapture.”

Not all modern neuroscience is reductionist.

Science Digest asserted that Jaynes, if proved correct on ancient human mentality and the profound, pioneering liberation of the Greek revolution in thinking, could become the “Darwin of the mind.”

However, the controversial hypothesis that a self-reflective, self-narrating consciousness is not a permanent biological outcome but arises lexically and culturally in a learning process, is not unique to Jaynes. Other scholars before and after Jaynes, such as Russian psychologist Vygotsky, have championed the thesis that an introspective mental space is created lexically (refer Ch.6 in DC, and “Language Required for Consciousness”). Philosopher Christopher Gauker (University of Cincinnati) also postulates that language is a prerequisite to all conceptual thought—indeed, he contends that it is the means by which conceptual thought becomes possible.

Such a “scientific” understanding should be the foundation of all rational philosophy.

Nevertheless, whether or not Rand’s conjectures are proven right one day, we should seek a deeper comprehension of how self-reflective consciousness arose in human history, how it arises in children, and how such mental processes give rise to free will, morality, neuroplasticity, and self-actualization.

Such a “scientific” understanding should be the foundation of all rational philosophy.

 

Notes:

  1. The term “hominin” is used to denote the group consisting of modern humans, extinct human species (including Neanderthals) and immediate ancestors. The term “hominid” formerly denoted what hominin now means, but the current usage of the term “hominid” (to which this essay subscribes) includes all modern and extinct Great Apes (humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans plus all their immediate ancestors).
  2. Philosopher Daniel Dennett likens the bicameral mind theory to having only your software upgraded (as against a change in the neural hardware), which, he contends, can sometimes make discontinuous leaps of improvement.
  3. David Martel Johnson, Professor of Philosophy, York University, says of Jaynes’s theory:

    4. I believe Jaynes is justified when he insists that the Greek revolution in thinking did not amount to a mere change of emphasis or of subject matter, or a tidying up of certain previously loose ends, but was nothing less than the development of a whole new mental faculty or organ.

  4. See also Does Objectivism Have a Rendezvous with Evolution?, and “The bicameral mind” 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis.

 

This essay benefited from comments made on an earlier draft by Chris Matthew Sciabarra.

 
Footnotes:

[1] Tom Gundling, Stand and Be Counted: The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, Hist. Phil. Life Sei., 34 (2012), 185-210, p 207

[2] Neubauer and Hublin, The Evolution of Human Brain Development, Evol Biol (2012) 39:568–586 DOI 10.1007/s11692-011-9156-1, p 568

[3] ibid

[4] Ibid p 569

[5] Tibor Machan, Ayn Rand (Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers; 2nd Ed. Dec 2000), pp. 142-43.

[6] Jean Askenasy and Joseph Lehmann, “Consciousness, Brain and Neuroplasticity” Frontiers in Psychology,  10 July 2013 doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00412
 
 

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