Evil Genes

by Barbara Oakley

  It's customary for those in Western societies to point fingers at their own undeniable problems in leadership and its corruption, malfeasance, incompetence, and malign intent. But these problems truly pale in comparison to those under Mao's China. In fact, the unfettered political structure of the Communist Party allowed Mao to give full play to every Machiavellian trait in his disordered psyche, feeding his innate sexual, sadistic, and narcissistic proclivities while allowing him to rise to the top. Once at the top, he could write and rewrite rules for his own personal benefit. This in turn provided him with vast powers to implement his dysfunctional pet projects and to give full vent to his paranoid ideas, exposing millions to the consequences of his pathologies.

  But today, Mao's personal characteristics and his active role in the deaths of millions have been suppressed in China through the self-serving dictates of his successors. The benevolent image he cunningly portrayed to his people lives on: his portrait still dominates Tiananmen Square in Beijing and the shrine containing his corpse is an object of pilgrimage. Mao's photos are used as charms by street vendors and as icons in the homes of peasants. “I can't pin down why it is I worship Chairman Mao so much,” taxi driver Ma Junjing says. “But if the Chairman were alive today and called on us youth to go to war, I'd be the first to register.”106

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  a.A very rare and expensive pu'er is said to be made from the droppings of worms that eat stored pu'er tea bricks. You can enjoy this delicacy with “drunken shrimp”—shrimp that have been doused in alcohol to relax them before they are served, live, in a squirming bowl at your table. A friend helpfully peeled and impaled one for me on a fork the first time I ever tried this delicacy. Just as I raised the fork to my mouth, the shell-less creature managed to leap off the tines and back into the serving bowl. Still, I'd rate the taste of preternaturally raw shrimp above that of stewed donkey meat, another northern Chinese treat, which I think is pretty much on par with rat's ass.

  b.There is little doubt that an abusive father could have contributed to any genetic predisposition Mao might have had for a personality disorder. Yet it should be remembered that many children of problematic fathers grow up without anything like Mao's dysfunctional, deeply sinister personality. For example, Abraham Lincoln's relationship with his father was also “strained by a fundamental conflict.” As with Mao's father, Tom Lincoln often beat his son for neglecting his farm work by reading and for other infractions. Despite Lincoln's beatings and hardships as a youngster (unlike Mao, from an early age, Lincoln had no mother to rely on), as an adult Lincoln was so sensitive and caring that he once disappeared from a large group he was riding with to help two baby birds he had noticed were blown from their nest. “‘In many things,’ remembered Mary Owens, a woman Lincoln courted, ‘he was sensitive almost to a fault.’” But Lincoln's extensive problems in adulthood with depression were very likely exacerbated by his early traumatic experiences with his father as well as his mother's early death.

  c.It is worth noting that Zizhen's shock at seeing Mao probably related to the fact that Mao invited her specifically without letting her know she was going to see him, despite the fact that Mao knew she was in an extremely fragile emotional state. (Zizhen had already relapsed after merely hearing Mao's voice on the radio.) Zizhen suffered a full-blown breakdown as a consequence of her last meeting with Mao, becoming unable to even recognize her own daughter and drooling in her madness. She never fully recovered.

  d.Mao would later find that these concepts were intimately related to Marx's concept of dialectical materialism. This Marxist interpretation of reality views matter as the sole subject of change and all change as the product of a constant conflict between opposites. The conflict arises from the internal contradictions inherent in all events, ideas, and movements. The fundamentally contradictory basis of this philosophy allowed Mao to fiendishly change his ideological campaigns “to accommodate his political needs, to change direction at will, and to lure real or presumed opponents into exposing their views, the better to strike them down.” Such a philosophy also explains how Mao could provide lip service to his followers that told them to think for themselves and not to follow blindly, while also requiring uniformity of thought.

  e.Paranoid behavior appears to be affiliated with the neurotransmitter dopamine. People with psychotic—that is, paranoid and hallucinatory—tendencies seem to show increased activation in the right hemisphere of the brain. Increased levels of right hemisphere activation have also been found in healthy people with high levels of paranormal beliefs or in people who report mystical experiences. Creative individuals also show a similar pattern of brain activation.

  f.The idea that a personality disorder could grow from too much attention and adulation is a very old one—the Greeks dubbed it hubris, while Carl Jung called it inflation. Robert B. Millman, professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical School, has put a modern spin on the concept, calling it acquired situational narcissism. This is the type of narcissism that celebrities, for example, can develop after they've achieved success and are followed everywhere by fans and an entourage. Keeping in mind the physical changes in the brain that can occur from practicing a musical instrument or memorizing the streets of London, it's easy to suppose that acquired situational narcissism might actually be related to physical changes in the brain. It would be fun to stick some Oscar winners in a scanner to find out.

  “Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why you should.”

  —Anonymous

  The Web page of psychologist Linda Mealey rides ponderously in cyberspace—weighted down with listings of dozens of awards, journal papers, presentations, and reviews. Often, professors ease off teaching once the gravitas of international renown sets in, but Mealey apparently made her own rules. While serving as president of the International Society for Human Ethology, for example, she kept up not only with her extensive scholarship but raised the professional bar still higher with her teaching standards. “I will go over rough drafts in detail if you wish to turn them in,” she notes in one of her class syllabi, conveniently downloadable from her site. She is asking for an extra burden most professors would refuse.

  The Web page is a bit old-fashioned as Web design goes—but then, since its first deployment in 1990, the Web itself has evolved more quickly than anyone might have thought possible. Still, despite, or perhaps because, of the quaintness, Mealey's Web page communicates boundless energy. A banner scrolls enthusiastically across the bottom of the page: See Announcements for Information about My New Book!!!!!!! (The book itself, Sex Differences: Developmental and Evolutionary Strategies, provides a tour de force evolutionary explanation of differences between the sexes.) To the right, the Web page shows a dour image of a beetle-browed Darwin. On the left is a photograph of Linda herself, with flashing dark eyes and a mischievous smile.

  The Web page is that of a woman with enormous gifts and plans. But a closer look shows something askew. It's not just that the style of the Web page is quaintly obsolete—other issues are also oddly out of sync. The list of publications in Mealey's curriculum vitae, for example, show an explosion of work beginning in the late seventies—up to a dozen or more papers, book chapters, and book reviews each year, backed up with dozens of presentations given at all points of the compass—Salamanca, Perth, Montreal. For over two decades, the vita is swarming with productivity.

  And then, suddenly, nothing. Nada. Zip.

  At forty-six, Linda's brilliant life was cut short. But her remarkably prescient body of work remains, clearly outlining a perspective that has, over the past dozen years, helped reshape and inform dialogue about the origins of Machiavellian behavior.1

  For centuries, people have viewed psychopathy and related antisocial behavior as an emotional impairment or disorder. Mealey's contribution to research in this area, outlined in the fundamental paper “The Sociobiology of Sociopathy: An Integrated Evolutionary Model,” was to pull together in one massive review the many pieces
of evidence suggesting that psychopathic and Machiavellian behavior resulted from something quite different. Instead, she suggested, these were often viable personality traits flowing from the selective forces of evolution—hardly the result of a dysfunctional environment or an accident of biology.2 Reaching broadly across disciplines, Mealey knit together related ideas of researchers from a variety of disciplines, all pointing toward the fact that psychopaths or Machiavellians can obtain long-term benefits by acting in me-first fashion that hurts others. In fact, the more sinister among us can reproduce and live quite nicely by taking advantage of others, thereby perpetuating any genes that might have played a role in their Machiavellian characteristics. It might not be nice, for example, to steal food from your baby brother's mouth during a famine—but which of the two of you has a better chance of surviving? In a more pointed example, it might violate profound social mores to insinuate yourself into your neighbors’ life, and then rape their daughter. But even if you might be caught and killed, the pregnant girl could very well end up giving birth to a child who will possess your genes—the same genes that contributed strongly to your committing the deeply antisocial behavior involved in the rape in the first place. (If the girl was exceptionally kind and caring, her child would have an even better than usual chance of surviving. Kindhearted naivete puts one at risk of being taken advantage of by a psychopath, which is perhaps why sweet-tempered Laci Peterson, brutally murdered by her husband while eight months pregnant with their first child, had previously dated a man who eventually received a fifteen-year prison sentence for shooting another girlfriend in the back.)3

  Just as the cuckoo has found an evolutionary niche laying its eggs in the nests of other birds (taking advantage of their nurturing instincts), psychopaths and Machiavellians have found their evolutionary niche in taking advantage of the natural altruism of other humans.a.4 Such variation in human emotional outlook is bred into our very genes.

  Research has progressed since Mealey wrote her seminal paper in 1995. But the essential idea she reviewed and synthesized is unchanged—that is, congenitally deceptive individuals—cheaters—can thrive and reproduce in society. How much these cheaters succeed depends on how many of them there are. If their numbers are tiny, they can easily find victims to dupe, and so they thrive. If their numbers grow large, however, the surrounding population grows more wary. In this more savvy population, it's harder to find a gullible target, and so the duplicitous have a more difficult time being successful—and being able to reproduce successfully. Thus there are fewer cheaters in the subsequent generation. And so it goes in a seesaw of counterbalancing activities, much like a predator-prey relationship.

  TIT FOR TAT

  Over the past four decades, a great deal of research has centered on the concept of altruism—that is, the desire to help others without any expectation, or at least conscious expectation, of help in return. After all, a person can gain so much by simply being self-serving and greedy that it's tough to figure out how helpful people could have ever evolved. Any time and energy spent helping others’ genes takes away from one's own. To solve the conundrum of altruism's evolution, a number of different propositions have been put forward. Altruistic behavior toward your own relatives, for example, would obviously help preserve the same genes that run in you. Sexual selection might also play a role—a man or woman who behaved altruistically might be more attractive as a mate. Other possible reasons include growth in the neurological apparatus that allows us to acquire a conscience; the sheer reason involved in knowing that someone will probably help me later if I help him now; and religion or ethical philosophies, which often promote altruistic behavior.

  But there is yet another reason that altruism may have arisen. It may be related to a strange, semi-kind, semi-vindictive strategy known as reciprocal altruism (first proposed by groundbreaking biologist Robert Trivers in the early 1970s). This strategy alternately cajoles and browbeats people into forming a win-win way of working together. A memorable set of competitions organized over a quarter century ago by political science professor Robert Axelrod showcased just how successful the strategy could be.

  A version of the game “Prisoner's Dilemma” was used as the basis for Axelrod's competition. In Prisoner's Dilemma, two suspects are jailed separately and given a choice as to whether or not to squeal on their partner. If one partner gives in to the temptation, that partner goes free, and the other—the sucker—is left with an extended jail sentence. If neither partner squeals, however, both serve short jail sentences and then are set free. Obviously the best mutual strategy is to both stay silent and take the significantly reduced jail time. But a misjudgment of the partner's loyalty can prove devastating. What's a prisoner to do?

  Axelrod invited game theorists, computer scientists, psychologists, teenage game freaks, and the general public to submit strategies for winning an iterated version of Prisoner's Dilemma in a massive tournament. The submitted strategies were then played off against one another. One parameter that Axelrod was able to tweak in his simulations proved crucial—whether the players expected to meet again. (This was set up mathematically with a discount weighting factor, w, related to the relative importance of the next move.) Axelrod found that if the players did expect to meet again, they were much more likely to cooperate successfully than if they were dealing with an opponent they expected to meet only once.

  Long-term, the most consistent winning strategy turned out to be the simplest—“tit for tat.” Tit for tat starts out with a first move of cooperation. Then, after the other player makes a move, the strategy involves simply mimicking that move. If the other player defects, defection is in order; if the other player remains loyal, then both stay loyal. Perhaps most importantly, Axelrod's study (which became one of the most cited articles ever published in the journal Science) showed that nice guys with a willingness to retaliate when necessary can finish first.

  The mechanism that reinforces this strategy is becoming apparent in medical imaging related to our ability to form moral judgments. It turns out that if we intentionally violate a social norm, our amygdala (the “fight-or-flight” processor deep in the limbic system) becomes activated. If we accidentally transgress a social norm, however, our amygdala isn't activated. It's believed that the amygdala activation occurs as part of a punishment system that is a consequence of one's own immoral behavior. The expectation of a reward, on the other hand, is thought to bring positive feedback through the brain's natural reward system, the nucleus accumbens. It's easy to see how variations in these systems might be genetically based and thus subject to natural selection.5

  One can also imagine variants of tit for tat that involve deceit—people who signal they will remain cooperative but who then defect. Such cheaters often have fine-tuned abilities to hide their intentions, almost as if they were bred with such abilities. Indeed, a number of researchers have posited that the presence of cheaters among human populations has led to a sort of evolutionary arms race over time, “in which potential cooperators evolve fine-tuned sensitivities to likely evidence or cues of deception, while potential cheaters evolve equally fine-tuned abilities to hide those cues.”6

  But how applicable is the tit for tat strategy to real human dealings? As it turns out, very—it's just that we use our emotions to do our strategizing. President Lyndon Johnson, for example, was famous for the “Johnson treatment,” a mixture of flattery (that's the kind part of the tit for tat), pressure, and, when all else failed, threat of severe sanctions (those are the retaliation tactics), all of which won him high marks as a legislative leader and allowed him to pass much of his “Great Society” legislation.7 Sumo wrestlers sometimes allow opponents to beat them in bouts when they are comfortably ahead in their overall rankings—later, their opponents are quite likely to return the favor.8 Nomadic hunters worldwide generally share their kills within their group. But a lazy nomadic hunter could, unless retaliated against, constantly mooch off the kills of others.

  Axelrod's study s
parked evolutionary psychiatrist and psychologist Randolph Nesse to posit an evolutionary model focusing on the emotional behavior that underlies tit for tat. Nesse concluded that emotions such as those involved in kindness and retaliation strategies are “specialized modes of operation, shaped by natural selection, to adjust the physiological, psychological, and behavioral parameters of the organism in ways that increase its capacity and tendency to respond to the threats and opportunities characteristic of specific kinds of situations.”9 Basically, Nesse proposed that emotions can internally reward, punish, or motivate an individual to either perform or not perform certain types of social interactions and also communicate one's intentions to others.