Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

  44 Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö (New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1992), pp. xii-xiii.

  45 Ibid., p. 7.

  46 Ibid., p. 10.

  47 In 1995 Chagnon told Scientific American that because male aggression is esteemed in Yanomamö culture, aggression as a human trait is highly malleable and culturally influenced, an observation that might have been made by Stephen Jay Gould, considered by most sociobiologists to be Satan incarnate. “Steve Gould and I probably agree on a lot of things,” Chagnon surprisingly concluded. (John Horgan, “The New Social Darwinists,” Scientific American [October 1995], pp. 150–57.)

  48 Napoleon Chagnon, “The Myth of the Noble Savage: Lessons From the Yanomamö People of the Amazon,” paper presented at the Skeptics Society Conference on Evolutionary Psychology and Humanistic Ethics, March 30, 1996.

  49 Ibid. In light of his data on warriors who are rewarded with more wives, one questioner wondered what happens to the men who get no wives, and if this means that the Yanomamö are polygamous. Chagnon explained that, indeed, some Yanomamö men have no wives and that it is often they who are the causes of violence as they either resort to rape or stir up trouble with men who have more than one wife. But he added an important proviso that indicates, once again, Chagnon’s sensitivity to the nuances and complexities within all cultures, and the danger of gross generalizations based on binary logic: “Anthropologists tend to pigeonhole societies as monogamous or polygamous or polyandrous, as if these are three different kinds of societies. In fact, you have to look at marriage as a life-historical process in all societies. There are, for example, cases of monogamy in Yanomamö society. In fact, monogamy is the most common type of marriage. But there are also polyandrous families where one woman marries two men, who tend to be brothers. There are, in fact, examples of all three types of marriage arrangements in Yanomamö culture.”

  50 Interview with Kenneth Good, December 5, 2000. Columbia Pictures bought the rights to produce a dramatic film based on the book, and Good even received a phone call from actor Richard Gere, who was interested in playing him. That deal has since fallen through and others have shown interest in a film deal, but nothing has come of it to date.

  51 Good, Into the Heart, p. 115.

  52 Ibid., p. 116.

  53 Ibid.

  54 Chagnon, Yanomamö, p. 1.

  55 Interview with Jared Diamond, November 27, 2000.

  56 Shermer, The Borderlands of Science, pp. 241–61.

  57 B. S. Low, “Behavioral Ecology of Conservation in Traditional Societies,” Human Nature, vol. 7, no. 4 (1996), pp. 353–79. On the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, see G. P. Murdock and D. White, “Standard Cross-Cultural Sample,” Ethnology, vol. 8 (1969), pp. 329–69.

  58 Robert Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (New York: Free Press, 1992.).

  59 Shepard Krech, III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).

  60 On the overhunting hypothesis and debate, see G. S. Krantz, “Human Activities and Megafaunal Extinctions,” American Scientist, vol. 58 (1970), pp. 164–70; P. S. Martin and R. G. Klein, eds., Quaternary Extinctions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984); C. A. Reed, “Extinction of Mammalian Megafauna in the Old World Late Quaternary,” BioScience, vol. 20 (1970), pp. 284–88.

  The alternative explanation for the mass faunal extinction—that dramatic environmental changes at the end of the last ice age killed or weakened the herds—makes no sense in the larger context. The weather got warmer, not colder, and ice ages have come and gone before without triggering such mass die-offs. Why now? Overhunting remains the best explanation.

  61 Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 530.

  62 Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also Arther Ferrill, The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988).

  63 Keeley, War Before Civilization, pp. 64, 19, 50.

  64 LeBlanc, Constant Battles. The list of peaceful societies is not long: Copper Eskimo, Ingalik Eskimo, the Gebusi of lowland New Guinea, the African !Kung bushmen, the Mbuti Pygmies of Central Africa, the Semang of peninsular Malaysia, the South American Siriono of Amazonia, the Yahgan of Tierra del Fuego, the Warrau of the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela, and the Aborigines who lived along the west coast of Tasmania. However, LeBlanc notes that “some of these same ‘peaceful’ societies have extremely high homicide rates. Among the Copper Eskimo and the New Guinea Gebusi, for example, a third of all adult deaths were from homicide … . Which killing is considered a homicide and which killing is an act of warfare? Such questions and answers become somewhat fuzzy. So some of this so-called peacefulness is more dependent on the definition of homicide and warfare than on reality” (p. 202).

  65 Ibid., p. 125.

  66 Steven A. LeBlanc, Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999), p. 124.

  67 LeBlanc, Constant Battles, pp. 224–28.

  68 R. Cassels, “Faunal Extinction and Prehistoric Man in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands,” in Quaternary Extinctions, ed. P. S. Martin and R. G. Klein (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), pp. 741–67. Alfred W. Crosby, Germs, Seeds, and Animals: Studies in Ecological History (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

  69 See http://www.classicnote.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/grapeswrath/ for an excellent synopsis of the book with extensive commentary.

  70 Image from http://www.planetwaves.net/pogo.html.

  71 Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literacy Investigation, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1974–78).

  72 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, c. 430 B.C.E. Online at http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/prometheus.html.

  4. Master of My Fate

  1 See http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/hinckleytrial.html for a remarkably thorough analysis of the Hinckley case, including court documents from the trial, testimonies and depositions by Hinckley and the psychiatrists for both the defense and prosecution, and the judge’s decision.

  2 Tormenta: The Execution of Robert Francois Damiens, 1757. Available online at http://www.perno.com/european/docs/tormenta.htm.

  3 C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Macmillan, 1963). See also the moving film Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins as C. S. Lewis and Debra Winger as his wife, Joy.

  4 John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

  5 René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (trans. J. Veitch), Part I (London: Dent, 1649), p. 41.

  6 C. S. Lewis, Beyond Personality (New York: Macmillan, 1945).

  7 The complete story can be found online at http://www.ksu.edu/english/baker/english320/Maugham-AS.htm.

  8 Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814) (New York: Dover, 1951).

  9 Pope, An Essay on Man.

  10 See http://www.law.umke.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/hinckleytrial.html. All quotes and facts discussed within the section of this chapter on the Hinckley case are from this Web page. Additional citations are included in note 11.

  11 For additional information on the Hinckley case, see Lincoln Caplan, The Insanity Defense and Trial of John W Hinckley, Jr. (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1984); James W. Clarke, On Being Mad or Merely Angry: John W Hinckley, Jr., and Other Dangerous People (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Jack and Jo Ann Hinckley, Breaking Points (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Chosen Books, c. 1985); Peter Low, The Trial of John W Hinckley, Jr. (New York: Foundation Press, 1985); Professional Educational Group, Classics of the Courtroom: Vincent Fuller’s Summation in United States v. John Hinckley (1990); Rita J. Simon and David E. Aaronson, The Insanity Defense: A Critical Assessment of Law and P
olicy in the Post-Hinckley Era (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1988); Henry J. Steadman, Before and After Hinckley: Evaluating Insanity Defense Reform (New York: Guilford Press, 1993).

  12 See Martin Gardner’s excellent discussion of this issue in my interview of him. Michael Shermer, “The Annotated Gardner: An Interview with Martin Gardner—Founder of the Modern Skeptical Movement,” Skeptic, vol. 4, no. 1 (1997), pp. 56–60.

  13 Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (New York: William Morrow, 1983), pp. 272–75.

  14 Ibid., p. 115.

  15 Owen Flanagan, The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. 126–27.

  16 Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1994). The strongest case for the indeterminism argument was made by physicist Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Law of Physics (London: Penguin, 1991). See also Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  17 Daniel C. Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984).

  18 Roy F. Baumeister and Sara R. Wotman, Breaking Hearts: The Two Sides of Unrequited Love (New York: Guilford Press, 1992).

  19 G. Kreiman, 1. Fried, and C. Koch, “Single Neuron Correlates of Subjective Vision in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, no. 99 (2002), pp. 8378–83.

  20 Michael Shermer, “Demon-Haunted Brain,” Scientific American (March 2003), p. 32.

  21 Michael A. Persinger, Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs (New York: Praeger, 1987), and Persinger, “Paranormal and Religious Beliefs May Be Mediated Differently by Subcortical and Cortical Phenomenological Processes of the Temporal (Limbic) Lobes,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 76 (1993), pp. 247-51.

  22 Olaf S. Blanke, T. Ortigue, T. Landis, and M. Seeck, “Neuropsychology: Stimulating Illusory Own-body Perceptions,” Nature, vol. 419 (September 19, 2002), pp. 269-70.

  23 Andrew Newberg, Eugene D‘Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001).

  24 Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham, The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self (New York: Harmony Books, 2003).

  25 Ibid., pp. 224-26.

  26 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), p. 175.

  27 Per-Olof Astrand and Kaare Rodahl, Textbook of Work Physiology (New York: McGrawHill, 1986).

  28 Only half in jest I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a metagene gene—a gene that causes people to think that everything is in our genes. Here’s an evolutionary just-so story that critics of evolutionary psychology could have a field day with: people tend to view behavior as genetically caused because back in the Paleolithic era, those individuals who were more inclined to view behavior as genetically determined won more copulations and thus passed on their metagene genes through more offspring. Of course, Paleolithic cave persons knew nothing about genes, so we might postulate that they tended to view the actions of others as either largely capricious or largely determined. The latter would be high in metagene genes, and they, of course, would be better adapted and more successful because believing one lives in a deterministic world better allows one to determine cause and effect relationships, and that is what leads to enhanced survival and the propagation of one’s genes, including one’s metagenes.

  29 Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

  30 Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking. 2003).

  31 Ibid., p. 238.

  32 Ibid., p. 251.

  33 Michael Shermer, “The Chaos of History: On a Chaotic Model That Represents the Role of Contingency and Necessity in Historical Sequences,” Nonlinear Science Today, vol. 2, no. 4 (1993), pp. 1-13; Shermer, “Exorcising LaPlace’s Demon: Chaos and Antichaos, History and Metahistory,” History and Theory, vol. 34, no. 1 (1995), pp. 59-83; Shermer, “The Crooked Timber of History,” Complexity, vol. 2, no. 6 (1997), pp. 23-29.

  34 Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality (New York: Doubleday, 1994).

  35 William Ernest Henley, “Invictus,” in Modern British Poetry, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1920). Also available online at http://www.bartleby.com/103/7.html.

  5. Can We Be Good Without God?

  1 Quoted in an Associated Press release, 1999. Available online at http://zanazl.tripod.com/Columbine/Articles/KipKinkel.html.

  2 Janelle Brown, “Doom, Quake and Mass Murder: Gamers Search Their Souls After Discovering the Littleton Killers Were Part of Their Clan,” Salon.com (April 23, 1999). Online at http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/04/23/gamers/.

  3 Julian Whitaker, “Health & Healing,” 1999. Online at http://www.drwhitaker.com/wit_abouthh.php.

  4 Quoted in B. A. Robinson, “Why Did the Columbine Shooting Happen?” Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, 1999; updated December 3, 2001. Online at http://www.religioustolerance.org/sch_viox.htm.

  5 Quoted in an Associated Press release, 1999. Available online at http://zanazl.tripod.com/Columbine/Articles/KipKinkel.html. .

  6 See L. Chibbaro, Jr., “Young Gays Traumatized by Shooting,” Washington Blade, May 7, 1999.

  7 Quoted in Robinson, “Why Did the Columbine Shooting Happen?”

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ibid..

  10 Quoted in Jacob Weisberg, “What Do You Mean by ‘Violence’?” Slate.com (May 15, 1999). Online at http://slate.msn.corn/default.aspx?id=28168.

  11 The letter/speech is online at http://majoritywhip.house.gov/news.asp?formmode=SingleRelease&gcid=123.

  12 Quoted in a review of the PBS series Evolution, in which much was made of blaming the theory for human tragedies like Columbine, by Julie Salamon, “A Stark Explanation for Mankind from an Unlikely Rebel,” New York Times, September 24, 2001.

  13 Quoted in Andrea Szalanski, “Columbine Report to Vindicate Nonbelievers,” Secular Humanist Bulletin, vol. 16, no 2 (2000). Online at http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/shb/szalanski_16_2.htm.

  14 Wendy Murray Zoba, “Church, State, and Columbine,” Excerpted from Day of Reckoning (Brazos Press), Christianity Today, vol. 45, no. 5 (April 2, 2001), p. 54. Online at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/005/3.54.html.

  15 L. Stammer, “Anglican Leader Visits L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, May 25, 1996, pp. B1-3.

  16 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 132.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Ibid.

  19 In John Hick, The Existence of God (New York: Collier Books, 1964).

  20 J. Wiscombe, “‘I Don’t Do Therapy.’ Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the Country’s Top Female Radio Personality, Calls Herself a Prophet,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, January 18, 1998, p. 11.

  21 Laura Schlessinger, editorial, The Calgary Sun, September 9, 1997, p. 22.

  22 Laura Schlessinger, How Could You Do That?!: The Abdication of Character, Courage, and Conscience (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 9.

  23 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925) (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1943), pp. 267-68.

  24 Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (New York: Longman, 1981).

  25 Louis L. Snyder, ed., Hitler’s Third Reich: A Documentary History (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1981), p. 167.

  26 Ibid., p. 168.

  27 D. B. Barrett, G. T. Kurian, and T. M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  6. How We Are Moral