Evolution and Normativity 205biological imperatives, it struck many as a stretch to extend the thesis to humans.
On the one hand, this seems like a very non-Darwinian move to make since one of
Darwin’s major insights was to show the extent to which human beings were one
with the other animals. On the other hand, the extrapolation of sociobiological
insights to human activities faced some formidable challenges. For starters, the
controlled experiments that were possible in principle with non-human animals
were not available for the study of human beings. Thus, the contributions of
genetics to human behavior could not easily be separated from the contributions
of the environment. The sometimes bitter and acrimonious debate about the
heritability of I.Q. and its significance for racial differences in humans is just
one testament to this difficulty. Secondly, even if the genetic factors could be
differentiated from the environmental factors, the fact is that a significant part of
the environment of human beings is cultural rather than physical. We don’t yet
have a sufficiently rich understanding of human cultures to be able to identify and
isolate what may or may not be the relevant variables that affect the acquisition
and development of human behavioral repertoires.
So, where do we stand? From a Darwinian perspective, the capacity for the
ability to recognize moral norms and to act on them is a phenotypic trait that was
not present in our remote ancestors. It must, therefore, have evolved. Can we say
more? Is it possible to ‘derive’ moral lessons or moral imperatives from the facts
of evolutionary history? Here the message is mixed. Some say yes, others say
no. When so many eminent scholars are in radical disagreement with one another
we begin to suspect either that there are hidden agendas afoot or that there are
several distinct questions that are being confounded. It is to the untangling of the
distinct threads in this conversation that we now turn.
2.1 Two programs and two distinctions
EEM versus EET recast
Serious consideration of evolutionary epistemologies began with Donald Camp-
bell’s contribution to the Library of Living Philosopher’s volume on Karl Popper
[Campbell, 1974]. There were, to be sure, 19thcentury predecessors but it was
Campbell’s seminal piece that made a strong case for taking an evolutionary ap-
proach to epistemology seriously. Both Campbell and Popper endorsed a view that
saw the evolution of biological organisms and biological systems as on a continuum
with the growth of human knowledge. I have argued elsewhere that this is a mis-
take. Instead, I proposed that there are two distinct but interrelated programs that
seek to exploit biological and evolutionary considerations in an understanding of
animal and human knowledge. I dubbed these two programsEEM(Evolution of
Epistemic Mechanisms) andEET(Evolution of Epistemic Theses) [Bradie, 1986].
InThe Secret Chain, I argued that there was a parallel between evolution-
ary ethics and evolutionary epistemology. I introduced a parallel distinction for
programs in evolutionary ethics which I labeledEMM(for “Evolution of Moral