Moral Origins
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Another modern biologist, George Williams, provided another big reason that mutant genes that made for generosity outside the family wouldn’t stick around for very long.16 Free-riding genes—genes that send their bearers the opportunistic behavioral message “take from altruists but avoid giving”—should increase in frequency as they replace the genes of the altruistic “losers.” Still scratching their heads in many ways about this matter of our remarkable human generosity are scores or, more properly, thousands of evolutionary biologists, ethologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers, not to mention a wide array of evolutionary psychologists and a significant cohort of evolutionary economists. All continue to work on problems germane to the basic evolutionary puzzle of altruism and the closely associated problem of “free riders,” which together have been a major interest of the aforementioned academic industry for almost four decades. At this writing, at best the evolution of human generosity is only partly explained.17
THE MYSTERY OF EXTRAFAMILIAL GENEROSITY
Unfortunately, in the field of evolutionary biology “altruism” has become a technical term that, after almost half a century of intense debate, still remains to be used with total consistency.18 Sometimes, for instance, it means being genetically generous to anybody at all, including kin; sometimes it means being generous to people lacking any blood ties to the generous party. Because of the focus of this book, I will be relying on the latter meaning, using “altruism” and “extrafamilial generosity” as exact synonyms, while when costly help is given to relatives I will call this “nepotism.” The altruistic type of beneficence may refer either to acts of costly generosity toward specific unrelated individuals or to sacrifices of personal interests as the individual contributes to enterprises that benefit the community as a whole. Thus, altruism and the possibilities for human cooperation are intertwined, for altruistically generous individuals make for superior cooperation in groups that include nonkin.
In biological terms, then, when we speak of altruism, we’re speaking of behavioral tendencies that dispose people to give more than they receive in terms of acts that reduce relative fitness.19 Even if all of the underlying genetic selection explanations are not yet fully developed, the tangible behaviors are obvious enough. People predictably open their veins to anonymously give blood or open their wallets to help starving children in developing countries, and generous assistance following a natural disaster anywhere on the planet can be quite impressive. Therein lies the altruism puzzle: Why do so many members of a supposedly egoistic and nepotistic species in some contexts become quite giving to people they aren’t related to and sometimes don’t even know?
HOW “GOLDEN RULES” AMPLIFY OUR INNATE GENEROSITY
Even though common sense alone can tell us that our dispositions to extrafamilial generosity are significant, it’s equally obvious that this is rather negligible compared to our truly powerful dispositions to egoism and to nepotism. It also is apparent that these genetic dispositions don’t determine our actions. Rather, they set up the behaviors in question so that they will be exceptionally easy to learn.20 Thus, we must consider the interaction of genes and culture, and the influence of the social environment on how we behave should not be underestimated.21 For instance, actively preaching a “Do unto Others” ideology can powerfully reinforce the relatively modest innate tendencies that favor extrafamilial generosity and thereby enable groups to work better together.22 I will discuss my research findings in this area in Chapter 7, as well as in Chapter 12 toward the end of the book.
When individuals in a nomadic, egalitarian hunting band seek to promote generosity, they recognize that self and family will always come first and that therefore people will need some special “persuasion” to contribute robustly to the group as a whole. In short, band members understand that if they are to better reap the benefits of group cooperation, they’ll need to apply their local version of the Golden Rule manipulatively, as a refined type of social pressure designed to bring out the best in human nature.23
Keep in mind three things about classical hunter-gatherer bands. First, they always involve a mix of related and unrelated families.24 Second, they predictably cooperate in certain activities with no expectation of immediate or exact reciprocation.25 And third, they actively preach in favor of wider generosity within the group, precisely because human propensities to be selfish or nepotistic are so strong in our species.
In my research,26 I have found such strictures in favor of extrafamilial generosity to be both prominent and probably universal in these mobile band-level cultures—whose lifestyles are similar to those of the prehistoric foragers who basically had evolved our modern set of genes for us by 45,000 years ago. It would appear, then, that these strictures are fairly ancient. The people involved obviously know what they’re doing when they apply such pressure, and as an anthropologist I fully agree with the everyday intuitions of these socially manipulative hunter-gatherers. I, too, believe that our relatively modest propensities to engage in extrafamilial helping behavior can provide an important basis for human cooperation—and do so all the better if such propensities are being strengthened by prosocial socialization of children, by the application of positive social pressure on adults to behave with generosity, and by the discouragement (or elimination) of selfish bullies and cheaters, who hamper cooperation and also create conflict.
Of course, I have the anthropological advantage of knowing that in later, larger types of societies such as chiefdoms or early states, the same prosocial propensities can contribute to still greater community cooperation—and that today, as with both a ruthless Nazi Germany and Great Britain as Hitler’s wartime adversary, cohesive cooperativeness can at least approach the truly selfless, “eusocial” collaboration that takes place in anthills. In the case of these insects, however, the cooperating individuals tend to be close genetic relatives, so their apparently “selfless” contributions to group interests can be explained nepotistically by kin selection, combined with group selection.27 It is with the genetically “reckless” generosity of humans where generosity extends beyond nepotism to nonkin that the major evolutionary puzzle arises: How can such natural dispositions stay in place, especially if opportunistic free riders are poised to outcompete those who are extrafamilially generous?
CAN GROUP SELECTION SOLVE THE PUZZLE?
Darwin saw this problem very clearly, even though he couldn’t begin to fully anticipate the sophisticated modern population-genetics models that began to emerge in the 1930s, which resulted in systematic theories such as those of Hamilton and Williams, and eventually led to Edward O. Wilson’s global redefinition of human social biology in terms of the altruism paradox we’ve been discussing. A century earlier Darwin simply wondered how he could ever reconcile his new theory, which was so “individualistic,” with the fact that patriotic young men so willingly went to war to sacrifice their lives for their countrymen. They were sacrificing not only their lives but also the lives of their future progeny, who otherwise would be inheriting these generous tendencies. The great naturalist was confounded.
Darwin had in mind the fact that free-riding cowards would be avoiding these same risks and that their greater numbers of surviving offspring would be inheriting the same selfish tendencies. In short, following his theories, generously self-sacrificial patriotism should always be on the wane, while dispositions to hold back and stay safe should always be proliferating. This meant that over the long run any tendencies to sacrifice personal interests for the good of the group should be automatically suppressed by natural selection—yet in practice young men were going to war, and many were doing so eagerly.
Darwin did offer a possible solution to this puzzle. Here are his famous, often-quoted, somewhat convoluted words, taken from The Descent of Man:
It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in th
e standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over other tribes; and this would be natural selection.28
This brilliant piece of reasoning still haunts the large community of scholars who study human social evolution. Group selection theory was for a long time spurned by the great majority of biologists, although today it has found its place in multilevel selection approaches.29 E. O. Wilson led the earlier charge against naïve group selection theories, but today one explanation for either nepotism or altruism is that groups having more or better cooperators will outreproduce lesser groups. This level of explanation will not be prominent in the pages that follow, because the emphasis will be placed on collective punishment and free-rider suppression as these affect selection taking place between individuals within groups.
THE WORLD’S FIRST CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH
I’m confident in saying that Darwin strongly desired an explanation of conscience and morality in a full natural-history context, which would make explicit how such remarkable human capacities could have developed over time. This would have required him to specify the type of favorable environmental conditions that would have prevailed and which mechanisms of selection could have contributed to this historical evolutionary process of moral origins. But Darwin was not able to accomplish this, not because of any lack of insight or ambition, but because in his time he lacked the necessary data from primatology, paleoanthropology, cultural anthropology, and psychology, along with explanations of brain functions from cognitive neuroscience. All of these fields have either emerged since Darwin’s time or else have grown by leaps and bounds so that today we may finally have the scientific information needed to put together a plausible evolutionary scenario.
Darwin was not given to being reckless in reaching scientific conclusions, but we might ask why he didn’t at least speculate about the possible specifics of conscience origins. There are several answers, probably. First, the archaeological record of his time was woefully inadequate, comprising only a scattering of fossilized bones and a few stone tools our predecessors had left behind. Second, very little was known of brain functions relevant to our sense of right and wrong or of how African great apes—as potential “stand-ins” for our distant ancestors—behaved outside of zoos. Third, the science of ethnography was too nascent to systematically look for universals in social behavior that could then be tied to our biological nature.
What Darwin did about this last problem was quite remarkable. He initiated the first systematic research across cultures by writing to colonial administrators and missionaries all over the world to ask them whether indigenous people in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere blushed with shame.30 Having one’s face “color” for social reasons is unique to humans, and Darwin was interested in knowing whether morally based, shameful blushing was merely something that certain groups did because their local cultures led them in that direction or whether, as he suspected, there might well be a strong hereditary component. What his far-flung anthropological research project told him was that indigenous people everywhere did seem to blush with shame. And on this basis he could assume that, as an important aspect of our conscientious moral sense, human shame reactions surely had to have an innate basis.
This research project stands today as a true landmark in the anthropological science of human nature, and what it suggested more generally was that conscience and morality had to have evolved, in the biological sense of the word. Carrying this line of research forward, I shall show that the human conscience is no mere evolutionary side effect, as Darwin had to imply it was. Rather, it evolved for specific reasons having to do with the Pleistocene environments humans had to cope with prehistorically and, more specifically, with their growing ability to use group punishment to better their own social and subsistence lives and create more socially equalized societies.
SOCIAL SELECTION AS “PURPOSEFUL” NATURAL SELECTION
There are several ways that social preferences of humans can affect genetic outcomes.31 One is that as individuals people may choose others with good reputations as marriage partners or as partners in cooperation, which helps their fitness. The other is that entire groups may come down hard on disliked social deviants, which damages their fitness.32 My general evolutionary hypothesis will be that morality began with having a conscience and that conscience evolution began with systematic but initially nonmoralistic social control by groups. This involved punishment of individual “deviants” by angry bands of well-armed large-game hunters, and like the preaching in favor of generosity that followed, such punishment could be called “social selection” because the social preferences of group members and of groups as a whole were having systematic effects on gene pools.33
The punishing of deviants occurs because people feel individually threatened or dispossessed by social predators, but also, in a larger sense, because socially disruptive wrongdoers so obviously lessen a group’s ability to flourish through cooperation. Thus, this punitive side of social selection involves at least an immediate kind of “purpose” in the sense of large-brained humans actively and often quite insightfully seeking positive social goals or averting social disasters that can grow out of conflict. It’s no surprise that the genetic consequences, though unintended, go in the direction of fewer tendencies that make for social predation and more tendencies that make for social cooperation. Therefore, on an everyday basis group punishment can improve the immediate quality of group social life, even as over the generations it can gradually shape the genotype in similar directions.
That group members’ punitive actions can not only influence group life but also shape gene pools in similar directions is one major thesis of this book. Therefore, we must ask if some limited purposeful element is actually creeping into a biological evolutionary process that, in theory, is supposed to be operating “blindly.” That is, could social selection be introducing what might be called some “lower-level teleology” in the sense that some purposeful inputs could be influencing natural selection process?34 Such a theory modifies somewhat one of the most basic premises of modern Darwinism: that natural selection simply organizes itself, merely appears to be “solving problems,” and basically is blind.35 Thus, in the words of biologist Ernst Mayr, Darwinian selection is “teleonomic,” rather than teleological.36
Mayr was referring to natural selection as a basic overall process. Of course, two totally unambiguous and potent practical examples of purposeful selection would be animal breeders and modern genetic engineers. We must also include members of discredited eugenics movements, for the Nazis knew exactly what they were trying to accomplish. All three consciously want to tamper with gene pools, and they all have some insight into what they are attempting.
It’s with good reason that we don’t think of prehistoric hunter-gatherers as these kinds of active agents at all. Yet I shall propose that unwittingly their social intentions did affect gene pools in ways that were predictable, highly significant, and at least were guided by rather sophisticated immediate purposes that had to do with improving their quality of life. Prehistorically, I believe that this provided a special “focus” to the process of human social selection, a focus that derived from the very consistent practical purposes of the actors. They were moved to persuade people to behave more altruistically and also to deter the free riders in their midst, and both affected not only their immediate everyday life but also their gene pools long term.
A “NEW” WAY OF USING DARWIN
I follow Darwin in thinking that the analysis of evolutionary developments over time can produce powerful explanations, especially if it includes abundant naturalistic detail. However, such holistic natural-historical approaches appear to be
old-fashioned, for nowadays evolutionary research usually is done piecemeal, attacking one delimited problem at a time, and the modeling of behavior and its effects on gene pools is approached logically, in terms of “design” and “adaptation.” What has been set aside very often is an actual Darwinian analysis that focuses on the historical dimension.
In looking at the effects of social selection over scores of millennia, I will be developing a rather novel evolutionary scenario by today’s standards. My idea will be that prehistorically humans began to make use of social control so intensively that individuals who were better at inhibiting their own antisocial tendencies, either through fear of punishment or through absorbing and identifying with their group’s rules, gained superior fitness. By learning to internalize rules, humankind acquired a conscience, and initially this stemmed from the punitive type of social selection I mentioned previously, which also had the effect of strongly suppressing free riders. Later, I shall argue that a newly moralistic type of free-rider suppression also helped us evolve our quite remarkable capacity for extrafamilial generosity.
The next several chapters will concern the evolutionary background for these moral origins, including a realistic discussion of whether certain other animals may be on the road to morality, and a detailed description of the social behaviors of our very distant ancestors, who of course were apes, just as Darwin told us. In Chapter 4 I will also be reconstructing the behavior of the first fully “modern” humans, as of 45,000 years ago, for they are basically the end point for moral evolution in the biological sense. Today, even though we live in cities and write and read books about morality, our actual morals are little more than a continuation of theirs.