Over a decade ago, I touched upon this free-rider suppression effect in discussing Late Pleistocene possibilities for group selection to operate,53 but the idea deserves a much more extensive treatment. As modeled, these notorious classical freeloaders are “designed” to be efficient and insuperable predators in that they are innately prone to take advantage of their more generous peers by actively deceiving them or by failing to reciprocate by standing aside.54 It’s partly for this reason that the great majority of evolutionary scholars have been unwilling until quite recently to give any serious consideration to group selection theory.55
In evolutionary theorizing as in everyday life, if you happen to be investing your money with the likes of a Wall Street Ponzi-schemer like Bernie Madoff, the importance of free riders to your welfare, and to your overall fitness, can be enormous. With respect to Alexander’s selection-by-reputation hypothesis, we’ve just seen that it, too, is vulnerable to free riding if poseurs can simulate usefully attractive qualities of generosity.56 Likewise, in marital unions deceptive adulterous free riding (especially by females) can be a major obstacle to reciprocal altruism’s being balanced well enough to work very strongly. In any context of cooperation, a deceptive partner or even just a very lazy partner is problematic not only in an immediate sense but also with respect to your fitness. Indeed, individuals who are “designed” to take more than they give pose a major problem for modeling altruistic genes and their chances of reaching fixation in human gene pools.
I believe that this question of selfish free riders requires further and critical thought and, furthermore, that selfish intimidators are a seriously neglected type of free rider. There’s been what amounts to a single-minded focus on cheating, which has dominated free-rider theorizing ever since Williams and then Trivers made these antisocial defectors famous.57 In fact, in human evolution I believe the more potent free riders have been alpha-type bullies, who simply take what they want.58 A great deal of this book will be about bullies and what small groups of people do about them.
Basically the free riders identified by George Williams are selfish opportunists, tricksters who are evolved to exploit a generous individual’s vulnerability to their own genetic advantage. A bully can fulfill this role as well as or better than a cheater. Bullies obviously have no need for deception, for bald use of force (or the threat thereof) is their métier, and any decisively hierarchical species is subject to significant free riding of this type. This means that generally the selfish alpha-male types (and wherever they appear selfish alpha-type females as well) can be very big winners.59
High rank, if it can be freely expressed through selfishly aggressive dominance, pays very nicely in fitness, and those who lose out in this competition are not necessarily less physically powerful. They also are likely to be relatively generous, or tentative in asserting themselves, which makes it likely that a significant proportion of the victims of high-ranking aggressors will be altruists. As we’ll be seeing in Chapter 5, among our distant ape ancestors this bullying type of free riding was strongly in effect because basically this ancestor lived in social dominance hierarchies, not in egalitarian societies.60 With humans, however, things have been quite different.61
SOCIALLY NEUTRALIZING THE WOULD-BE BULLY
It’s here that my work on the evolution of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism comes in, namely, the emphasis on the active and potentially quite violent policing of alpha-male social predators by their own band-level communities. I’m speaking of large, well-unified coalitions of subordinates and their aggressive and effective control of selfish bullies, whose predatory free rides at the expense of less powerful or less selfish others could otherwise be easily taken by force. In the next chapter, we’ll see that 45,000 years ago very likely almost all the humans on this planet were practicing such egalitarianism.
Just as cheater detection and cheater avoidance by individuals can reduce the advantages of free-riding con artists,62 I’ve shown that humans’ collective antihierarchical sanctioning can behaviorally neutralize, and sometimes reproductively penalize, these otherwise unstoppable bullies.63 When such penalties come into play, this also intimidates other would-be dominators, and overall the winners are those who are less disposed to use power selfishly, including altruists whose competitive tendencies are tempered by generosity.
Let me preview something else, now, about these culturally modern predecessors of ours. Because of symbolic language, individuals were able to discuss with their peers the immediate and long-term damage that bullies—and also cheaters—could do to their own personal interests. They could discuss such problems in private until a powerful group consensus formed, and then they could either openly come out against such behavior by using social pressure and threat of punishment, or they could actively punish or even eliminate serious intimidators who insisted on being active.64 As a result, many potential bullies (also thieves, cheaters, and other freeloaders) could be routinely held down at the level of phenotype, while the genes of free riders who insisted on being active—those who failed to control their predatory tendencies—were seriously disadvantaged because ostracism, shunning, banishment, or execution could quickly come into play.
In the next chapter, we’ll see that with respect to hunter-gatherer capital punishment bullies appear to be singled out much more frequently than deceptive types of free riders like thieves or cheaters; in Chapter 7 we’ll see that there was a wide array of lesser sanctions that punished these same bullies but allowed them to reform. This, too, worked to the advantage of altruists because these genetically disposed, would-be free riders (not only bullies but also deceivers) were being “neutralized” at the level of phenotype.
In today’s hunter-gatherers, actually a number of factors combine to keep most of these innately predatory tendencies from being expressed. One is simply the ongoing conformist fear of social pressure and active punishment that Durkheim characterized so well for egalitarian bands, for our evolutionary consciences help us to anticipate such consequences and control ourselves. Furthermore, group members respond positively to group rules simply because these rules have been internalized—by anyone save for a psychopath. Obviously, such rule internalization is not enough to eliminate the free-rider problem—but we may assume that it helps substantially.
Thus, the combination of rule internalization and fear of punishment sees to it that most free-riding behavior is being nipped in the bud, in any egalitarian society. Now, think back to the Mbuti meat-cheater, Cephu, and let’s assume the man was not a serious psychopath. In spite of having a conscience and an awareness of consequences, he opportunistically broke a rule he was identified with when he thought he could get away with it and the prize was sufficient. In his case, it was delicious, abundant meat combined situationally with the cover of a dense tropical forest, and Cephu went right ahead and cheated—presumably because he thought the risk was very slight. As a means of sorting out useful from personally injurious actions, Cephu’s evolutionary conscience was wrong this time, and being aggressively shamed to a point of humiliation by most of his peers would not be forgotten; furthermore, banishment from the band constituted a future threat that could cost him and his kin personal hardship and loss of fitness.
Thus, as Colin Turnbull tells us, this cheating free rider was rendered unlikely to cheat again—and his band didn’t have to banish him or kill him to solve the problem. In fact, his genetic fitness remained largely unscathed even though he was, at heart, such an obvious (and arrogant) free rider. Cephu’s case is interesting because he was not just a cheater; he also had strong tendencies to aggrandize his own status and behave as an alpha male. The rest of the band made it clear that he could not act on these impulses and remain a member of the band.
Even though there’s a large psychological and ethological literature on cheaters and cheater detection, generally free-rider suppression with respect to aggressive bullies has not really been taken into account so far in the basic mathematical models that have a
nchored the study of human altruism.65 However, Ernst Fehr’s experimental evolutionary economics group in Zurich has discovered that with children participating in experiments in which lucrative offers are made and are either rejected or accepted, there’s a tendency to retaliate against those who make selfishly very low offers in order to avoid inequality among the subjects.66 This “inequality aversion” fits nicely with what I emphasized in Hierarchy in the Forest, namely, that human groups have been vigilantly egalitarian for tens of thousands of years because we have inherited tendencies from our ape ancestor to resent being dominated and being placed in a disadvantageously unequal position.67 In my opinion, further work in this area will be necessary if the important scientific puzzle of human generosity is to be fully addressed.
Generous altruists are vulnerable to cheaters who, in effect, are “designed” to take advantage of altruists.68 When it comes to bullies, they are designed to take selfish advantage not only of altruists but also of anyone else who cannot or will not stand up to them. The potential effects on human gene pools surely have been substantial. Both selfish bullying and selfish cheating can be considered free-riding propensities that are quite thoroughly suppressible at the level of phenotype, with some help from a multipurpose conscience which, as we shall see, most of the time, for most people, is quite effective at keeping us out of serious trouble socially. When the conscience isn’t up to the job, social pressure and then active punishment will phase in.69
Here’s my evolutionary hypothesis: when bullying is labeled socially as being deviant and is rather thoroughly suppressed at the level of phenotype, the selection agencies we reviewed earlier in this chapter, those that favor altruistic genes but are vulnerable to free riding, can come into play much more strongly. To nullify the potential gains of a would-be or actual bully, there’s obviously no detection problem, and if his conscience doesn’t restrain him, what it takes to hold him down is a firm resolve of other band members to keep him from asserting himself. They have to stand up to him, and if he doesn’t “get it,” then the next step for a desperately egalitarian band is to desert him or banish him if possible or do him in as a final solution.70
KALAHARI AND INUIT EXAMPLES
For the !Kung Bushmen, anthropologist Polly Wiessner reports that one of the most frequent reasons for talk that involved criticism was “big-shot” behavior, with several dozen cases she collected over several decades of fieldwork. The obvious effect was not only to nip any potentially serious domination attempts in the bud, but also to deter many likely dominators from even making such an initial move.71 Because selfish bullies cannot readily express themselves, this bodes well for the genes of the more generous or gentler souls who would otherwise be their victims. This benefit holds for the Bushmen today and as we’ll see it was true for culturally modern Africans 45,000 years ago.
Anthropologist Jean Briggs gives an account of how such subtle deterrence can have its effect on an Inuit individual (almost always a male) who is “gifted” with unusual propensities to self-aggrandize or selfishly dominate his fellows. The person in question was her adoptive father, Inuttiaq, and in the light of this discussion his personal success at self-control requires some scrutiny. According to Briggs, he had what we might call an exceptionally strong ego and emotionally he was far more intense than his fellows. In her field notes, Briggs’s very first description of him used the phrase “barbaric arrogance,” and her immediate response was one of fear. This reaction came early in her fieldwork when she needed to become an “adopted daughter” of someone in a small Utku band, and in her non-Eskimo eyes she found this particular “father-candidate” to be atypically unsmiling, hostile, and haughty. She says, “The predominant impression was of a harsh, vigorous, dominant man, highly self-dramatizing.”72
As for the Utku themselves, Inuttiaq’s self-assertion was expressed in ways that were in fact socially acceptable. For instance, he had an unusually aggressive manner of driving his dogs when they were pulling his sled. He also was unusually aggressive in joking with people, but nevertheless, in a society in which aggressive people were felt to be scary, Inuttiaq was basically well thought of because his self-control was so exemplary. Unlike the volatile ethnographer, whose social woes we’ll be meeting with in a later chapter, Inuttiaq never lost his temper.
Briggs applied her psychological expertise to this man, and on a troubled note she reports that he outdid other men and women in camp in brutalizing their tethered dogs. He also had violent fantasies that surfaced when he described to Briggs what he would like to do to outsiders (whites) who were more powerful than himself, fantasies that involved stabbing, whipping, and murder. Briggs also notes that if his fellows admired Inuttiaq for never losing his temper, they at the same time feared him for the same reason: “They said that a man who never lost his temper could kill if he became angry; so, I was told, people took care not to cross him, and I had the impression that Allaq, his wife, ran more quickly than other wives to do her husband’s bidding.”73
Was Inuttiaq aware of the tightrope he was walking with a people who were capable of doing away with someone who became unduly intimidating? Briggs thinks this was possible. For instance, Inuttiaq was given to far more aggressive joking than most, his unique specialty being to grab at the penises of younger males. He explained this by saying, “I’m joking; people joke a good deal. People who joke are not frightening.”74 This in a culture in which there were fears that a moody person might stab someone in the back while the two were out fishing and in which, before the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived, one man might suddenly slaughter another in order to take his wife.75
Seldom does an anthropologist assess an indigenous personality in such detail, so we are fortunate to have this description. The analysis rings true to ethnographic common sense. Apparently, Inuttiaq understood his own unusual dominance tendencies in the light of the strongly egalitarian ethos of those around him, and the multifunctional evolutionary conscience we will be discussing further in Chapter 5 enabled him to continually restrain himself. He was able to achieve this self-restraint because he shared the same internalized social values as his fellows, and because he was shrewd enough to understand when expressing his aggressions (as with his canine victims and when joking) would be acceptable, and when not.
Inuttiaq’s situation provides an example of how the threat of social disapproval and group sanctioning can keep a person who by nature is unusually aggressive and dominant so inhibited that if such dispositions might lead in the direction of becoming an opportunistically bullying free rider, they simply remain unenacted. My guess is that if an ascendant social position somehow became culturally acceptable among the egalitarian Utku, Inuttiaq the superficially docile good citizen might well have become more of a leader than he was. And had his social sensitivity and self-control been less, it’s conceivable that he might even have riskily tried to become something of a camp bully, in a group that was determined to stay egalitarian. Perhaps his exceptional ego would not have led to this, for his drive to dominance appears to me to have been not very extreme by Eskimo standards.
Unfortunately, I know of no other ethnographer who has provided such a detailed portrait of a man who by nature seems to be unusually assertive. Once in a while a really driven dominant Inuit male is able to play this role of intimidator or even despot for a time.76 All the Inuit are egalitarian; they favor a humble, generous type of person, and they hate and fear a selfish aggressor who violates their dearly held code of equality. When a man seems to be intent on such serious self-aggrandizement, eventually his peers will find a way to deal with the problem, and if he proves to be incapable of reform, the solution may be a final one.
A FAVORED HYPOTHESIS
Earlier in this chapter we considered a range of possible selection mechanisms that might be able to support extrafamilial generosity. Three of these evolutionary mechanisms can be greatly empowered by the substantial neutralization of two types of free-riding behavior, which take plac
e when potentially serious self-aggrandizers rein themselves in with the help of their consciences, or when selfish, aggressive cheaters like Cephu are actively put down.
Let’s begin with selection taking place at the between-group level. In thinking about how altruistic traits could be sustained by group selection, Richard D. Alexander flirted fairly seriously with this type of explanation, with prehistoric warfare77 as an enormous and acknowledged wild card—and obviously with the porosity of hunting bands being a drawback because this dilutes the effect.78 I have shared Alexander’s interest in this possibility, and recent work by Bowles79 has brought a new dimension to what has been a sometimes acerbic group selection debate.80 Indeed, the case for group selection as a factor in the evolution of altruism is becoming increasingly strong, and the arguments I’ll be making in this book about free-rider suppression will make it stronger still.
In my opinion reciprocal altruism must be largely set aside because it applies mainly to dyads, but it does encompass child-rearing partnerships, which usually are dyadic. This could account in part for the altruism found in foraging bands because breeding partners are seldom very closely related, even where cousin marriage is the ideal. And if we assume that most continuing marital relationships involve approximately equalized mutual inputs and benefits, this could be a positive factor in the selection of altruistic traits. However, cheater detection is crucial with respect to female adultery, and in hunting bands group suppression of such behavior is far from consistent and not necessarily very effective.
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