LETHAL SOCIAL CONTROL AT 45,000 BP
Much of this book is about how punitive social control, a harsh form of social selection indeed, has acted on human gene pools. I shall be proposing that aggressive (and originally nonmoral) social sanctioning shaped the earlier human genome to give us an evolutionary conscience, and that extensive curbing of free riders was another important effect. In turn, free-rider suppression opened the way for the evolution of altruism; this development will be explained in detail in chapters to come. These three developments, taken together, may be seen as the scientific story of moral origins.
Both punitive and positive social selection were closely involved with group political dynamics, and when band members started to form consensual moral opinions, and were systematically punishing deviant behaviors and rewarding prosocial behaviors, a novel and powerful new element was added to human evolutionary process. The ultimate result was the human nature we carry around with us today, which of course combines selfish egoism with nepotism but also includes enough sympathetic altruism to make a major difference socially.
The more Draconian the sanctioning actions of angry groups were, the stronger the force of punitive social selection would have been as it acted on prehistoric gene pools. Lethal attacks on disliked individuals by sizable coalitions can be projected back into the Late Pleistocene Epoch with great confidence, for as we’ll see in the next chapter, such killings had at least a significant precursor in the shared ancestor of humans and two of the African great apes. However, among today’s LPA hunter-gatherers it’s difficult to say, for at least two reasons, exactly how often they inflict capital punishment on one of their own. First, when an ethnographer visits a foraging society for a year or two, it’s extremely unlikely that a deviant’s being killed by the band will be witnessed or even be talked about—unless the right questions about remembered history are asked. Second, band executions that have taken place say a hundred years before or earlier may simply be lost to memory.
Here we’ll be surveying my entire coded sample of fifty LPA societies to get at least a partial idea of how often capital punishment has been taking place over the past century or so. But keep in mind that we’ll be seeing only the tip of an iceberg, not only because of the two reasons I just gave but also because most hunter-gatherer ethnographies, although obviously precious, are at the same time likely to be seriously incomplete with respect to capital punishment because indigenous people quickly learn that missionaries and colonial administrators view their executions of dangerous deviants as “murder.” As a result, they quickly learn to clam up, and often stop this practice.
TABLE I CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN FIFTY LPA FORAGING SOCIETIES*
Type of Deviance Specific Deviances Societies Reporting
Intimidation of group Intimidation through malicious sorcery 11
Repeated murder 5
Action otherwise as tyrant 3
Psychotic aggression 2
Cunning deviance Theft 1
Cheating (meat-sharing context) 1
Sexual transgression Incest 3
Adultery 2
Premarital sex 1
Miscellaneous Violation of taboo (endangering group) 5
Betrayal of group to outsiders 2
“Serious” or “shocking” transgression 2
Deviance unspecified 7
Total societies reporting capital punishment 24
*The above figures are derived from the author’s hunter-gather database.
Table I shows the basic patterns of active capital punishment (almost all of males, by males) that did emerge in spite of such seriously incomplete data. I should mention here that just a few bands had a formal system for deciding to eliminate a deviant, with a council of elders meeting to come up with a death sentence. More often the process was far less “structured,” which means that the entire band (including the females) would simply agree, informally, that a close relative of the deviant should do him in. The deviant was almost always a “he,” and there was a very good reason for his executioner, a well-armed hunter, being a close relative. This will be explained in Chapter 7.
This intensive survey of fifty LPA hunter-gatherers involved coding over two hundred ethnographic sources, and half of the time, surely for reasons that have just been explained, capital punishment wasn’t even mentioned. For almost half the societies, however, some instance of capital punishment was in fact reported, as seen in Table I, and often the ethnographers were in a position to specify the deviance patterns that brought it on.
Eventually, I will have coded at least three times as many of these societies, which will make such statistics less subject to the vagaries of sampling error. But these numbers do enable us to pick out one very salient pattern: half the people killed, almost all of them males, were intimidating their groups. This was done by greedily or maliciously using supernatural power to seriously threaten the welfare or lives of others; by being far too ready to kill, repeatedly, out of greed or anger; by otherwise managing to seriously dominate others; or (much more rarely) by being aggressively insane.
This main pattern fits with the previously emphasized fact that all LPA bands today are highly egalitarian in their social worldview, which means that groups quickly become angered when individuals given to domination (ones like the Pygmy Cephu) try to self-aggrandize. Except for the killing of psychotically aggressive men, all of these aggressive intimidators were considered to be morally deviant, and other research I have done, including that set forth in my book Hierarchy in the Forest,27 suggests that if small nonliterate groups are to keep in place the egalitarian political orders they so strongly prefer, they sometimes will be obliged to use capital punishment when a menacingly aggressive personality appears in their midst.
The choice is between suffering a determined tyrant or taking him out, and it’s precisely because people inherit varying dominance tendencies from their parents that in any small egalitarian society, eventually someone with proclivities to behave far too dominantly will show up, act on these propensities, and manage to get himself in serious trouble. This is either because he doesn’t have the ability to properly read the situation or because he lacks the capacity to restrain himself. The gender pattern is as follows: it is almost always a well-armed male hunter who tries to dominate his peers, but when a band coalesces to bring down such a tyrant, the females may be as active as the males in the political dynamics involved, and in one rare execution that was actively communal, they became physically involved.28
If we look now at the several low-frequency effects in Table I, we see that stealthily breaking rules to take advantage of others by cheating or theft are at least mentioned. With respect to free riding, this means that both intimidating and deceptive free riders can receive a death sentence, but keep in mind, here, that we are considering only reasons for capital punishment. Lesser sanctions, like ostracism, shaming, and expulsion from the group, are more likely for lesser crimes that do not necessarily threaten an entire group’s safety, autonomy, or welfare. In Chapter 7 I will present data on these lesser sanctions, which do not suffer so much from the incomplete data problems I have described with respect to capital punishment.
Being punished capitally will have varying but always deleterious effects on the reproductive success of the serious malefactors who are killed. This obviously precludes having further offspring, so if a man is executed while in his twenties or thirties, the fitness consequences are enormous. Furthermore, after his loss the offspring he’s already created will receive less parental support and their fitness (half of which is shared with the father) will suffer accordingly. Furthermore, he will not be around to help coresident closer kinsmen like siblings if they need it or to cooperate with them.
PUNITIVE SOCIAL SELECTION
As human gene pools evolved over evolutionary time, the effects of active group punishment on individual reproductive success could have been quite significant, and surely these widespread effects became increasingly influe
ntial as people gained stronger consciences and their group punishment increasingly became driven by moral outrage. Here we’re speaking not only about capital punishment but also about banishment and serious ostracism, which can interfere significantly with an individual’s gaining the benefits of cooperation. In addition, just acquiring a bad moral reputation surely would have made some people avoid such deviants in important choice situations such as marriage or in looking for subsistence partners.
All of these mechanisms entailed social selection in the sense that preferences shared by groups were affecting gene pools.29 More specifically, all involved negative preferences, and all disadvantaged the reproductive prospects of individuals prone to social deviance—or at least those who could not control their sexuality, greed, or inappropriate hunger for power. For such moralistic social selection to have been a significant factor in shaping human gene pools, probably it had to be operating for at least a thousand generations,30 which in long-lived humans comes to about 25,000 years. Thus, the period just before cultural modernity arrived could have figured importantly in moral origins—if this development took place at all quickly.
In the next chapter we will start at the beginning to consider in more detail the head starts that were provided by two distant but highly relevant ape ancestors, the Common Ancestor and Ancestral Pan, so as to discern how some special developments in the human line led us, but not chimpanzees or bonobos, to evolve a capacity for virtue—and shame.
RESURRECTING SOME
VENERABLE ANCESTORS
5
GETTING TO KNOW OUR NEXT OF KIN
Moral evolution can be defined most basically in the light of our uniquely human conscience functions and how they were able to evolve. But to fully understand how we acquired a shameful evolutionary conscience, we must go back millions of years to the ape ancestor that provided us with important building blocks,1 out of which somehow the moral life of humans was “constructed.”
Today, we’re beautifully poised to reconstruct many of these ancestral behavior patterns, but yesterday we weren’t. As recently as the 1980s, physical anthropologists around the world had differing and uncertain thoughts and theories about who our closest living primate relative might have been. For some, chimpanzees in Africa had something of an edge over that continent’s gorillas, whereas for most the Asian orangutan trailed far behind and the lesser apes and monkeys were pretty much disqualified.
This was sheer guesswork, but we could at least assume that some ancestor must have been knuckle-walking across the floors of African tropical forests and climbing tall trees to eat large quantities of fruit, and it made sense that this had to have been taking place tens of millions of years ago because we humans were so different from other primates in our cognitive abilities and our complex social life. That’s what everybody thought, and in much of this they were far from being correct.
Several decades after James Watson and Francis Crick had unraveled the basic mystery of DNA,2 laboratory geneticists were finally in a position to compare the genomes of humans and those of the three African great apes considered the most likely candidates for being our closest “cousins.” The genetic findings astonished the scientific world.3 It turned out that humans, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and also a slightly smaller African “chimpanzee” called the bonobo (Pan paniscus) all shared over 98 percent of their DNA—a far greater similarity than anyone had imagined. And gorillas were not far behind, even though humans and the two Pan species turned out to be even more similar than Pan and gorillas were. It followed that all four of us shared an ancestor more recent than anyone had suspected.
Such reckoning is done through a “molecular clock” analysis, and the estimates are reasonably precise because gene mutations accumulate at a fairly predictable rate and can be counted. Once one species branches into two, over time their genomes will increasingly differ, and when the genetic makeups of humans (Homo) and the pair of Pan species are compared, the finding is that these two lineages diverged merely about 5 to 7 million years ago (MYA). For purposes of streamlining, we’ll get rid of the “plus or minus” and call it 6 million years. We’ve had this figure available for two decades now, and an evolutionary time gap of merely 6 million years makes for a very close relative indeed—even though “Ancestral Pan” surely looked far more like an ape than a human.4
It was primatologist Richard Wrangham who in 1987 first identified and began to socially describe a somewhat older predecessor he called the “Common Ancestor.”5 This CA is the predecessor that the two Pan species and Homo share with gorillas (see Figure I), and in this case the molecular clock gives us an estimate of about 7 to 9 million years, which we’ll round off to 8 million years. With our two direct ape ancestors identified and placed in time through DNA analysis, we can begin to systematically reconstruct some (but not all) of their social behaviors—something that was all but unthinkable before Watson and Crick.
FIGURE I PHYLOGENETICS OF HUMAN ANCESTRY
This will be of critical importance to the analysis to come. First, it will enable us to identify ancient adaptations that fortuitously made it easier for the descending human lineage to develop a protoconscience. And building on this, with an increasingly developed sense of right and wrong, we can explain not only the origination of a fully moral way of life, but also the rise of selection forces that allowed us to become as altruistic as we are today. These developments were replete with feelings of shame and blushing, and as we know them today they involve an intensely moralistic interest in the behavior of other people. We just can’t help judging people, with shame and virtue on our minds.
If Ancestral Pan provided some behavioral building blocks, what about the physical nature of these ancient apes? We have yet to discover a skull or skeleton, or even a handful of teeth and bone fragments, for our immediate prehistoric predecessors inhabited humid equatorial zones where living things decayed or decomposed so quickly that fossilization very rarely took place. However, we are fortunate in that many important behavioral characteristics of these ancestors can be reconstructed, quite reliably, without our ever seeing a tooth or measuring a cranium. This is accomplished by looking for major behaviors that are shared unanimously by all the living descendants of the ancestor in question, and the methodology is called “behavioral phylogenetics.”6
This enables us to reconstruct an ancestor’s behaviors if and only if such behaviors remain present in all of its living descendants. It may seem remarkable that we can reliably discern behavior patterns so distant in time, but the conservative processes of natural selection are prone to follow a relatively straightforward and direct path as they keep a species in business over evolutionary time. Biologists call this “parsimony,” and they call these original, ancestral traits “primitive.”7 Thus, if all four descendant species tend to eat lots of plant foods, which they do, it’s parsimonious to assume that this primitive trait came straight down from the Common Ancestor—and that it continued to be useful in the changing environments that were experienced subsequently, or else it would have simply withered away.
In the social sphere, Wrangham identified several very basic social constants. He determined that all four of the Common Ancestor’s descendants live today in social groups with definite boundaries from other groups, so this pattern had to be primitive, meaning ancestral, and therefore today it is homologous, which means it is based on similar genes.8 Another homologous commonality was stalking and attacking other members of the same species, so we may assume that the CA was doing this at 8 MYA and that all four descendant species have been doing so ever since. In Demonic Males,9 which explores the roots of human violence, as a theorist Wrangham also considered the more recent ancestor that I’ve referred to as Ancestral Pan.10 Its primitive behaviors will figure importantly in our determining how a conscience came to evolve, and presently we’ll be reconstructing these behaviors in some detail.
I must quickly mention that our main interest will be in Ancestral Pan, an ape
that basically carried on with all the behaviors we can identify in the CA and added some more. As we’ll be seeing, once gorillas are removed from the ancestral equation—and this divergence took place about 6 MYA—some very significant behaviors can be added to Ancestral Pan’s reconstructible behaviors. But first I wish to extol the technical virtues of using homologous reasoning in evolutionary behavioral reconstructions.
THE ADVANTAGES OF TALKING ABOUT SHARED GENES
Using a natural-historical approach requires distinguishing carefully between behavioral similarities based on homology, which means shared genes, and those based upon analogy, which merely means similar functions. It’s important to differentiate between the two because in a pair of species that shares an extremely remote ancestor, totally different mechanisms may underlie superficially similar-looking behaviors that have converged. For example, when a territorial Norway rat instinctively attacks a nongroup member, this rat is programmed to react aggressively to any member of the same species that does not carry the odor of its own social community.11 It’s that simple. Even though chimpanzees also attack their neighbors on contact, they have far more “sophisticated” means of identifying them psychologically because they know where their territories are, and they know by sight that their neighbors are strangers.
What we have here is merely a case of analogy: a pair of similar-seeming behaviors, both making for strong group territoriality, are based on some very different underlying mechanisms and hence on disparate genes. This is a matter of convergent evolution, one of the marvels of natural selection. In my dry garden in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I remember vividly thinking that I was watching a new kind of hummingbird one day, as the needle-nosed creature flitted from flower to flower with the sometimes stationary poise of a helicopter, its wings whirring, when suddenly I realized that I was looking at a moth and that this hovering insect must have followed its own path in developing genes very different from those of a hummingbird, which nonetheless enabled it to sip nectar while stationary in midair.
Moral Origins Page 10
