Christopher Shea on Patricia Churchland.
“It all changed when I learned about the prairie voles,” she says—surely not a phrase John Rawls ever uttered.
She told the story at the natural-history museum, in late March. Montane voles and prairie voles are so similar “that naifs like me can’t tell them apart,” she told a standing-room-only audience (younger and hipper than the museum’s usual patrons—the word “neuroscience” these days is like catnip). But prairie voles mate for life, and montane voles do not. Among prairie voles, the males not only share parenting duties, they will even lick and nurture pups that aren’t their own. By contrast, male montane voles do not actively parent even their own offspring. What accounts for the difference? Researchers have found that the prairie voles, the sociable ones, have greater numbers of oxytocin receptors in certain regions of the brain. (And prairie voles that have had their oxytocin receptors blocked will not pair-bond.)
Prairie voles. Oxytocin receptors. It’s not…this person is kind and generous while that person is cruel and ruthless. It’s oxytocin receptors. It is disconcerting. Shakespeare and Austen suddenly seem beside the point.
“As a philosopher, I was stunned,” Churchland said, archly. “I thought that monogamous pair-bonding was something one determined for oneself, with a high level of consideration and maybe some Kantian reasoning thrown in. It turns out it is mediated by biology in a very real way.”
Kant and Austen turn out to be beside the point.
Comments
37 responses to “Twentieth Century Vole”
One day they’ll find a satisfying neurophysiological explanation for why some people like Jane Austen.
“It’s not…this person is kind and generous while that person is cruel and ruthless. It’s oxytocin receptors.”
Same as it ever was.
What is your point, Ophelia? I feel I must be missing something.
-CM
I don’t really have one, Christopher. Just felt like excerpting a bit of the CHE piece.
Ben – it has to do with economy. She does more with less. That interests me.
That the distribution of oxytocin receptors influences an animal’s behavior is not especially surprising. The interesting question, if we may be adaptationist, is what niche factors select for such different behaviors in closely related species. How is it an evolutionarily stable strategy for montane voles to be such pricks?
Isn’t this a bit like a believer saying ‘without god, it’s all meaningless!’? To which a reply might be, it’s not more meaningless than it was before. Same here, if it’s Oxcytocin and not categorical imperative, doesn’t mean it stops morality. Or we could quote Feynman (sp?) when he pointed out that a better understanding of the universe doesn’t detract from one’s wonder, but adds to it.
Of course, I may have totally missed your point Ophelia. You’re a fair bit more nuanced than this little yobbo. :)
I thought that was a very interesting article. And the point to me was how ingrained our belief of the body and soul as separate things. Churchland is a neuroscientist/philosopher who was already convince that the mind is influenced by body yet couldn’t make the leap intuitively that our minds all due to chemical reactions.
A moose once bit my sister…..
A moose once bit my sister…..
Is that a Scotish mouse? Sort of like a cow is a koo in Scotland.
It was a mooose! It bit ma sister on the lug!
cass_m (#7), it’s harder for some than others, though. In my case I don’t see it as either/or. Explanations are a matter of levels, chosen for convenience. I don’t need to descend to the electrochemical level to explain that I’m going to the store to buy milk and paper towels unless something goes terribly wrong or I’m conducting a scientific experiment. The supposed contradictions between scientific and mundane (once known as “naive”) realism are…..not. They blend easily. Monogamy as a matter of belief and as a matter of receptors just doesn’t look like a difficult problem. Can’t the chair be made of wood and plant cells and molecules and so on and on and….?
Mediated, but not controlled.
And, of course, if there were a god and it meant for humans to pair-bond for life, then our oxytocin receptors would be set on full phaser. There’d be no need for divorce courts, internet dating, or “massage” parlors.
@ernie The voles just demonstrated how much of what we think of as conscious choices (monogamy) may not be as under our control as we thought. The crux of her paper is that ethics can come from neighbours as easily as from professional philosophers because people think in terms of social mores rather than abstracts. We just don’t think that deeply about most stuff, including how intertwined our mind and brain actually are.
It’s controlled, but not by our thoughts. Our thoughts express our control, the part available to us, and we can do research to make more of it available as explanation.
I guess control is a loaded term. There is control distributed around the organism. I wouldn’t say thoughts are in charge. The explainers don’t run things.
I’m not quite satisfied.
…as a philosopher…
If you feel you miss Ophelia’s point, you should allow your curiousness lead you to do some more reading.
If you lack a good starting point, let me suggest a search phrase : Knockout mice, maternal care.
I would expect it to be equally challenging to our “intuitions”, that assumed profound, possibly complex and “deeply felt” emotions very likely is shared with other animals (at a very fundamentally level). Especially that such emotions can be “switched off” (physically or chemically).
Churchland is BTW a very interesting thinker. Here is another (highly reccomended) blogger’s take at another of her hypotheses: http://wiringthebrain.blogspot.com/2011/06/where-do-morals-come-from.html
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
It’s an interesting example, but 1) humans aren’t voles (in case you didn’t notice); and 2) surely it’s not as simple as oxytocin receptors alone? I suspect it would be a much more complex dynamic at work, including environmental factors, as someone commented above. And with humans, cultural and social factors would surely come into play, perhaps even epigenetically. Maybe reading Kant and Austen can switch on our oxytocin receptors . . . now there’s a thought.
Hehehe Ophelia, hi. This
made me lol especially hard, maybe I’m in a funny mood like that, dunno. Prompted my first post here. Just saying I like to hang out here coz weather here’s way cool.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single vole in possession of oxytocin, must be in want of a pair-bond.
On a more serious note: in prairie voles, pair-bonding is also associated with high levels of aggression by male voles towards intruders. Whilst one should always be careful about transferring evidence from other creatures to humans, it does raise the interesting question of whether societies that promote traditional conservative lifelong pair-bonding might have higher levels of violence.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter if culture is neurochemically determined, unless you’re the kind of person who thinks that other people ought to be injected with drugs to make them behave the way you’d like.
Human brains made of matter shock!
Emotions and thoughts are real physical/chemical processes- news at 11!
My favourite neuroscience joke: two students are in love. One of them comes back from a lecture and says “Apparently the emotion of love is mediated by hormones and signalling molecules such as oxytocin”. And the other one says “See, I told you love was real”.
In other news, it’s not… this person can walk while that person cannot. It’s legs.
To me, it would be much more counterintuitive to think that they weren’t shared (not in some lofty, conscious form, but as you say, at a fundamental level). It seems a bit silly to assume that people who don’t share your intuition must be ignorant of the research. (It’s not like this is a particularly new idea.)
Churchland’s book is a good and thoughtful one.
What it shows *me* at least (and I’ve been a fan of the Churchlands’ work for quite a while now – ever since reading _The Computational Brain_ and _On the Contrary_) is how small differeneces – at least to us – at one level can lead to drastically different outcomes. There are, of course, lots of examples of this in the strictly biological realm, but a psuchbiological one is quite interesting. Needless to say, a lot of work has to be done before the lesson for humans directly can be learned, but a start is a start.
@#8. A carnivorous moose – wow! now that’s a rarity. Or is your sister composed of a high amount of vegetable matter (as I once thought my cousin was)? Could explain it maybe……
@Emily:
Maybe, but I find they both make my whole brain switch off instead…especially Kant
Jeez…I guess in future I should keep the random musings to myself.
I’m with Charles Sullivan on this one. I’m not satisfied. There is too much biology, not enough ethics, in Pat Churchland’s approach. I haven’t had the chance to read the book yet, though I’ve got it, but there is an important difference between voles and humans, in that, oxytocin and pair-bonding or not, information such as this can be taken into account when making choices — which is why I have a problem with Sam Harris’s “You do not choose what you choose”. Perhaps we cannot override the effect of brain chemicals altogether, but Dawkins’ idea that we can strive against the selfish replicators is an important one. There is still a gap between “is” and “ought”. This becomes very clear towards the end of Shea’s article when the question of “objective” values is raised. While allowing that context can make a difference — well, of course it can! — Churchland still holds that there are objective values. But what she cannot show, I think, is that what contemporary moral philosophy has been seeking is exceptionless rules. Certainly, Roman Catholic natural law ethics thinks it has achieved this, but I challenge Churchland to find the quest for exceptionless rules at the heart of contemporary moral philosophy. Why should she think this, and who did she have in mind?
Oh yes …, and, Ophelia — why do you think we keep coming back to Butterflies and Wheels? We want to listen in to your random musings. They have legs!
My money’s always been on vole culture and religion as the main determinants of their reproductive behaviour. I’ve never been big on vole free will, though.
Seriously, I don’t think neurochemistry makes literature or philosophy obsolete. We just need frequent updates to both by writers who can incorporate our increasing understanding of human nature. Perhaps less about “free will” and more about how we can bring better models into our thinking to make wiser life choices.
@ windy
….It’s not a very new one, but I suspect many of the previous versions of the idea are varieties of anthropomorphisms more or less decoupled from observations and experimental work.
The Francionish and Singerish varieties……
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
After reading a bit of invertebrate porn that P.Z. Myers put up, where sex was accomplished by the male spooning his stuff into the appropriate orifice in the female, my initial reaction was “Why would anyone want to do that? That doesn’t seem like much fun.” But, come to think of it, what we do is pretty ridiculous too. The most important thing in the world, the focus of all our songs and stories, is matching just one of our funny-looking appendages with precisely the appropriate opening, exactly like every other mammal. Let’s hear it for human exceptionalism!
How do you figure?
Just, lots of “yeah, so?” comments.
Meh, I’d say post them anyway.