Ronald Bailey’s Takedown of Ishmael
Like Ronald Bailey, I occasionally receive e-mails from people urging me to read Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. The short version is I’ve read it and Quinn doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Bailey has written a lengthy look at some of the problems with the book, and does a nice job of puncturing an argument specific to Quinn as well as demolishing an argument advanced by a surprisingly large number of people despite it being patently false.
First, there is the question of what Quinn calls “Takers” (my usual response to people who e-mail me about Quinn is to say that I am proud to call myself a Taker given Quinn’s usage of the word). Bailey writes,
Our supposedly enlightened gorilla calls civilized humanity the “Takers,” in contrast to the remaining bands of hunter-gatherers, whom he christens the “Leavers.” Modern civilization, he argues, has violated what he calls the “peace-keeping law,” which mandates that “you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food.” Ishmael illustrates this alleged “law” by claiming, “the lion that comes across a herd of gazelles doesn’t massacre them, as an enemy would. It kills one, not to satisfy its hatred of gazelles but to satisfy its hunger.” He’s implying that lions and other species are “prudent predators,” that is, they are careful to preserve a breeding population of its prey species in order to insure the survival of its own species.
But as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has pointed out, the concept of prudent predators is evolutionarily incoherent. Such an arrangement could not remain stable, because a single mutant that became a selfish exploiter would quickly outbreed the “prudent” members of its species. In other words, genetic evolution cannot confer this type of foresight on species—short-term advantage will always out-compete long-term prudence.
Or to put it a slightly different way, the reason that lions don’t slaughter the entire herd is not that lions don’t want to, but rather that gazelles have evolved (and continue to evolve) to make it very difficult for them to do so. Nature’s an arms race, not a planning committee.
Bailey also ridicules a claim that is repeated not only by marginal figures like Quinn, but also by rather mainstream advocates of the view that there are too many people on our planet. This is the claim that, just like other animals, human populations increase proportionate to available food supply. Under this view, it is silly to try to increase crop yields or net available food, since the more food a group of human beings has access too, the larger its numbers will grow.
And yet, as Bailey points out, today the parts of the world with the highest levels of calorie consumption have the lowest population growth rates, while those with the lowest levels of calorie consumption have the highest population growth rates. Both of these situations are simply untenable if human population inevitably increases whenever available food increases.
The reason this is the case, however, is that human beings are not like deer or other animals, and can choose to have values other than simply maximizing their numbers. What has clearly happened in the developed world, for example, is that as those societies have become wealthier people have put a premium on access to luxury goods for both themselves and their fewer children.
Source:
Malthusian twaddle. Ronald Bailey, Reason, July 23, 2003.
The Ronald Bailey’s Takedown of Ishmael by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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