Evil Genes

by Barbara Oakley

  Evolution involves a pattern of spreading into unfilled niches by using different strategies. People with different emotional makeups use different strategies, and so, in a sense, emotions themselves are subject to evolutionary pressures. Cooperative strategies, which are often beneficial only in the long-term, can coexist with alternate strategies based on cheating, deception, and “rational” short-term selfishness. Adrian Raine, whom you met earlier regarding his research on psychopathy, notes: “An essential component of [a] successful cheating strategy must be a gene machine that lacks a core moral sense. One way to create such a cheating machine would be to engineer individuals lacking the neural circuitry essential for moral feelings and behavior.”10 In the end, a mixture of different types of people—and different personality-related genes—fills out a population, with most people being largely cooperative. But a “frequency dependent” group of cheaters rides along. Indeed, some have proposed that the problem of detecting cheaters is what lies behind the dramatic leap of human intelligence.11 After all, being continually snookered doesn't usually lead to having a long, healthy life.

  Although tit for tat forms perhaps the optimal yin-yang set of strategies, people realize a variety of strategies by using the different emotions that are inherent in their personalities. Some people, such as psychopaths, are constant defectors. Others, like the kindly woman who won't divorce her husband even when he beats her, are congenital cooperators. Most people, however, have an emotional makeup that allows—or provokes—them to use both cooperation and retaliation strategies. Indeed, imaging results have shown that we feel disgust (as evidenced by significant activation of the anterior insula) when faced with the behavior of cheaters, and very real satisfaction (that is, activation of the caudate nucleus), when we punish those cheaters.12

  THROWING AWAY THE STEERING WHEEL

  There is another game that can enlighten our understanding of altruism and antisocial behavior—the game of “Chicken.”

  In this parental nightmare of a pastime, two drivers square off and make a run toward each other in souped-up cars. The first driver to swerve loses the game and also loses the respect of his adolescent peers. But if neither driver swerves, both drivers lose the game in catastrophic fashion.

  What's the best way to win such a game?

  In a book called The Strategy of Conflict, economist and game theorist Thomas Schelling suggested the ultimate winning strategy: in full view of the other driver, toss your steering wheel out the window. Once the other driver knows that you will never, ever swerve, he has every reason, at least if he's rational, to swerve himself.13 By eliminating all your other options, you've just won the game.

  How does this apply to real life? In straightforward fashion, it shows how successful seemingly irrational emotional strategies can be. For example, if you are known for losing it when hearing something you don't want to hear, or being ruthlessly vindictive when crossed, or going on the attack at even the slightest of imagined provocations, you've essentially torn off your steering wheel in front of those around you. Your own seemingly irrational behavior can work as a completely rational strategy for getting your own way. The only rule for such a strategy to be effective is that you must be known to have torn off your steering wheel. To truly coerce others into steering clear, your ruthlessness and combative nature should be complete and obvious—you must be regarded as being willing to pursue utterly vindictive strategies regardless of the consequences. The reputation you garner by possessing such traits can often provide enough advantages to make up for the occasional disadvantage.

  BLINK AND YOU'LL MISS IT—THE QUICKNESS OF EVOLUTION

  If Machiavellians exist and reproduce because sometimes those traits can be advantageous, you can't help but wonder—is the percentage of Machiavellians in modern society changing because our modern-day technological environment is very different from that of our nomadic and farmer ancestors? At first glance, you might think not. After all, evolutionary psychologists have long held that people's evolution took place at a tortoise's pace. If human genes are still nearly identical to a chimp's, and if it took 1.5 million years to evolve from the near-human Homo habilis to today's Homo “laptop,” people could hardly have been expected to change even a tiddle in the last ten thousand years, much less the last few hundred.

  That snail's pace perspective of human evolution has, however, changed dramatically. After all, virtually the only constant in human environments is change. Rains can stop falling, as with the once green Sahara, or their effects can increase greatly, as with the recent spate of floods in Bangladesh. Disease can reshape the genetics of an entire population, as when the black death killed a third of all Europeans and when smallpox decimated the indigenous population of the Americas. And, because ancient humans were capable travelers, they could find themselves, within the span of thirty to forty generations, having moved from a warm and humid to a dry and frigid environment. Those peoples with the natural genetic toolkit to help them adapt quickly to whatever they encounter could be expected to survive better than those without such a genetic knack.

  Archaeologists are now fairly confident that anatomically modern humans made their break from Africa some seventy thousand years ago, not long after the ability to speak had stabilized in a population that had originated from a bottleneck of a mere five thousand anatomically modern humans. The rapid development of speech may have given the critical edge that early humans needed to break through the menacing ring of other hominids that blocked Africa's exits. In the seventy millennia since that African breakout, humans worldwide have evolved dramatically, with variations in skin color being just the tip of the iceberg.

  American Indians, for example, have been found to have a genetic shift that allows for more effective use of the cellular heat engines known as mitochondria. This adapted the Indians to the cold and allowed them to more easily live in, and cross, the frigid regions of Siberia and Beringia on their way to the Americas.14 Tibetans and inhabitants of the Andes and high African plateaus have acquired differing suites of genetics that allow them to breathe more easily at high altitudes.

  The agricultural revolution, beginning some ten thousand years ago, has fueled even more extraordinary changes. Once we humans took charge of growing our own food, we didn't need such a razor-sharp ability to sniff out prey or poison. Consequently, we've begun to lose the genes that gave us olfactory abilities.b.15 And since we now don't generally forage among potentially dangerous plants, we are also losing the genes that detoxify natural plant poisons—a change that means some people can still quickly clear medications from their bodies, and others seem to have lost that ability.

  Even our brains are still continuing to evolve. Most people in Europe and East Asia carry an allele called “microcephalin,” which appears to have some relationship with cognition, and in any case, spread with contagious quickness after it first arose thirty-seven thousand years ago. Another allele related to cognition, a variant of ASPM, emerged only six thousand years ago but also appears to be spreading quickly.16 Perhaps, as David Sloan Wilson has pointed out, “rather than marvelling at the antiquity of our species, we should be asking what kinds of evolutionary change can be expected in 10, 100, or 1000 generations.”17

  Overall, we seem to be evolving rapidly—far more quickly than had been previously thought. Part of what may be allowing these changes to take place so speedily is the rapidly changing nature of some of the junk DNA. Rapid changes had been previously noted in those locations. That's part of why it was thought to be junk—because any old change could occur and it didn't matter.18 But now it appears that the ability to quickly change regulatory sequences is akin to being able to swap out a new motherboard on your computer—you can easily get an upgrade.

  BALDWINIAN EVOLUTION

  The laws of genetics state that physical changes you make in your body, such as pumping iron to get a sculpted physique or lying in a tanning booth to get toasted skin, are not passed on to your children. But there are
ways that physical changes you make in yourself and your environment can be passed down to your children. For example, some eight thousand years ago, a few groups of humans stumbled onto the trick of keeping cows, goats, and sheep around and drinking their rich, vitamin D–laden milk. This was terrific—except for one problem. Some humans suffer from ghastly, flatulent side effects when they drink milk because they have stopped producing the enzyme required to digest lactose once they become adults. This meant that those adults who had milk available and could drink it without side effects tended to be healthier—and have healthier kids. Thus people with milk-drinking genetics became far more common in societies where milk was an important food source. In Denmark, for example, a Neolithic dairy hotspot, 98 percent of all adults today can drink milk. In Zambia, however, where tsetse flies haven't allowed for widespread use of dairy cattle, virtually no one past infancy can drink milk.19

  Thus, a change in people's behavior made changes in the environment. These environmental changes in turn made changes in people's genes. This type of indirect evolution is called Baldwinian evolution, after American psychologist Mark Baldwin, who first proposed this concept as a variant of Darwinian evolution.20 There are many other examples of Baldwinian evolution. For example, slash-and-burn agriculture, along with animal husbandry, has allowed malarial mosquitoes to flourish in the new ponds and puddles that replaced the forests. This in turn allowed for rapid spread of a number of different genetic mutations that help humans to cope more easily with malaria. These mutations aren't entirely beneficial, as attested to by their role in causing various sickle-cell anemias and thalassaemias. These mutations would never have spread (been “selected for”) if it hadn't been for their beneficial effects in warding off the side effects of malaria.

  CAN CULTURE CREATE MACHIAVELLIANS?

  We've seen how a cultural change as seemingly simple as adoption of slash-and-burn farming methods can cause a widespread, unintended consequence—malaria—that alters people's genetics. This leads to a new question: could cultural changes cause increases or decreases in the numbers of Machiavellians in a society? More pointedly—can cultural practices cause an increase in frequency of some or many of the genes that underpin Machiavellian behavior?

  This is not an off-the-wall question. Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham has proposed that humans have tamed themselves over the past fifty thousand years, a process he feels is still at full throttle. Violent and aggressive males are, after all, more prone to dying young, leaving fewer offspring than their milder brothers. Wrangham sees the evidence for our domestication in our thinning skulls and smaller jaws and teeth.21 But Wrangham's thesis hinges on nuanced parsing of the word tame. Perhaps instead, in a yin-yang scenario, we are making ourselves less overtly physically aggressive while increasing the percentages of the more subtly aggressive traits of the successfully sinister.

  After all, was Mao tame?

  Prior to the advent of agriculture, human groups were small—perhaps made up of fifty or fewer, and perfectly capable of “voting with their feet” to escape unfair treatment. Psychopathic or self-serving Machiavellian behavior would be obvious in such a restricted environment and would be difficult to tolerate long-term. There is evidence that when such behavior arose in those small, ancestral nomadic groups, it was eliminated in straightforward fashion. Harvard anthropologist Jane Murphy, for example, notes that the Yupic-speaking Eskimos of northwest Alaska have a word, kunlangeta, which means “his mind knows what to do but he does not do it.” This word

  might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women—someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment. One Eskimo among the 499 on their island was called kunlangeta. When asked what would have happened to such a person traditionally, an Eskimo said that probably “somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.”22

  Murphy goes on to describe a similar word, arankan, used by the Yorubas of Africa. It is applied to a person who always goes his own way regardless of others, who is uncooperative, full of malice, and bullheaded. Interestingly, neither kunlangeta nor arankan were thought to be curable by native healers. Psychopathy is rare in those settings, notes psychologist David Cooke, who has studied psychopathy across cultures.23

  But what about more urban environments? Cooke's research has shown, surprisingly, that there are more psychopaths from Scotland in the prisons of England and Wales than there are in Scottish prisons. (Clearly, this is not to say that the Scottish are more given to psychopathy than anyone else.) Studies of migration records showed that many Scottish psychopaths had migrated to the more populated metropolitan areas of the south. Cooke hypothesized that, in the more crowded metropolitan areas, the psychopath could attack or steal with little danger that the victim would recognize or catch him. Additionally, the psychopath's impulsivity and need for stimulation could also play a role in propelling the move to the dazzling delights of the big city—he would have no affection for family and friends to keep him tethered back home. Densely populated areas, apparently, are the equivalent for psychopaths of ponds and puddles for malarial mosquitoes.

  We have agriculture to thank for those increased population densities. The first settled communities centered around farming began to gradually form about ten thousand years ago. With these settlements, the egalitarianism of the nomadic groups disappeared and a hierarchical society with chiefs and underlings took its place. Becoming more sedentary wasn't all peachy, either—one tradeoff for a steady food supply was that it made the settlements into honeypots for raiders. It also attracted vermin and allowed the newly compacted groups of people to serve more easily as disease reservoirs. (Indeed, since humans are the only natural host of poliovirus, the disease may have arisen and spread with the increased population densities of agriculture.) Settled community living also required new ways of interacting with one another. “Settlement,” notes science writer Nicholas Wade, “would have created a quite novel environment, to which people probably adapted by developing a different set of behaviors, including a range of intellectual skills for which there was no demand in hunter-gatherer societies.”24 Property, value, number, weight, measurement, quantification, commodity, money, capital, economy—all these, Wade goes on to note, are concepts that would rarely have been necessary to mobile foragers. It may well be that the modern mind has emerged in a gradual process, “operating in several phases and stages, and perhaps independently in different parts of the world.”25

  Agriculture not only allowed for exponential leaps in the numbers of people, it also provided for enormous increases in the potential of those in power to have sex and children. Recent studies have shown that a remarkable sixteen million men, one in every two hundred men worldwide alive today, are direct male descendents of thirteenth-century Genghis Khan—a nomad who commandeered virtually all the many sedentary peoples within his long reach. From the Great Khan's six Mongolian wives, as well as the many daughters of foreign rulers that he also took on as wives, and the great numbers of beautiful women he demanded as his due from conquered territories, the Great Khan is thought to have sired an enormous number of children, although the exact number is unknown. Genghis also brought his relatives to the party: “It's likely that some brothers and male cousins of Genghis Khan who shared his Y-chromosome enjoyed heightened reproductive success in his enormous wake,” notes controversial writer Steve Sailer, “rather like how it is said that some of the sex appeal of the rock band Led Zeppelin rubbed off on its lucky roadies.”26 The fact that so many men are direct male descendents of either the Great Khan or one of his near paternal ancestors indicates that virtually everyone on the Asian steppes is, through some line of descent, carrying the DNA of the Great Khan's family. Even Queen Elizabeth II is thought to be a descendent, through Mary of Teck and her Basarab dynasty ancestor
s. Physicist turned evolutionary theorist Gregory Cochran observes: “This disproves the theory of history promoted by Marx and Tolstoy that says only social forces matter, not individuals. This shows that one man can make a difference.”27 The difference, of course, lies not only in the virtually single-handed creation of a vast empire, but also in a genetic imprint that leaves competing males in the dust.

  Research on this type of genetic stamping is still in its infancy. Recently, for example, Giocangga, progenitor of China's Qing dynasty, has been found to be the probable ancestor of approximately 1.6 million men living today.28 The average man from Giocangga's era should have only about twenty living male descendents—which means that Giocangga has left a genetic imprint eighty thousand times larger than that of the typical man of his time. Geneticist Bryan Sykes notes, “Mini-Genghises were probably all over the place in medieval times.”29 Niall of the Nine Hostages, for example, an early medieval Irish king once thought to be apocryphal, is now understood to be a direct paternal ancestor of one in five men from northwest Ireland—and an ancestor to virtually every Irishman.

  These recent discoveries reinforce the findings of anthropologist Laura Betzig. Her 1986 Despotism and Differential Reproduction provides a cornucopia of evidence documenting the increased capacity of those with more power—and frequently, Machiavellian tendencies—to have offspring. The Guinness Book of World Records, for example, has long cited Ismail the Bloodthirsty as the most prolific man ever—siring 888 children. (In reality, the total was probably closer to three hundred.)30 In any case, Ismail was one of the greatest leaders in the history of Morocco. He was also a man of legendary cruelty who inflicted barbaric punishments on slaves and subjects alike, torturing and beheading on a whim.