Moral Origins

by Christopher Boehm

  At the same time, however, people who are embedded in these systems believe in taking care of each other as long as this makes sense by the rules they’ve invented. And the care foragers take of others seems to be nicely geared to the mechanical power of the three basic selection forces we’ve been discussing, as these favor, respectively, egoism, nepotism, and, at the end of the line but still very important, altruism. Charity may begin at home, but in a weaker form it extends to others in the group. And sometimes, as with modern blood banks, it can even be extended to total strangers.

  INTRODUCING SOCIAL SELECTION

  In 1987 Alexander was considering two theories to explain the altruism inherent in human systems of indirect reciprocity. We’ve already considered his views on prehistoric group selection, and we’ve also touched upon what in his mind seemed to be the more useful theory—social selection of the type that has been called “selection by reputation.”13 Such selection includes mating advantages and much more, and this selection-by-reputation approach of Alexander’s has stimulated some considerable further research, even though many biologists have remained enamored with reciprocal-altruism or, more recently, the one-shot, mutual-benefit models that were discussed in Chapter 3.

  Alexander’s original main premise was that a reputation for being altruistically generous might bring fitness benefits that could compensate the costs of such generosity if, when parents or individuals were making marriage choices, they were prone to favor “prospectives” who had a social track record of being unusually generous. For instance, a socially attractive, generous male may be more quickly accepted as a marriage partner, and then this prime early marriage gives him a fitness advantage compared to other males who have to marry later and not nearly as well. If this reputational benefit outweighs the costs of the generous behaviors that made for the superior reputation, such generosity can bring a net fitness benefit to the altruist and the altruism is nicely explained in terms of natural selection.

  Alexander’s insights about social selection in humans helped to stimulate “costly signaling” theory,14 which can apply to any species that has bisexual reproduction leading to mate choice. Other animals obviously don’t gossip about reputations, but sometimes in their mating patterns they may be genetically evolved to favor individuals who give off costly signals that correlate with being of high genetic quality as mates. If the male’s reproductive gains (namely, being chosen) exceed the reproductive costs (paying for the otherwise maladaptive signal), such signaling can be a significant aid to fitness for both choosers and the chosen.15

  The idea is that the cost of an unfakable signal of high quality, which again might involve unusually vigorous peacocks growing otherwise maladaptively outsized spotted tails, or a human hunter’s putting more effort into hunting and providing more meat for others, will be compensated as such worthy individuals gain preference as mates—which of course strongly improves their reproductive success. And as we’ve seen, the females who are better evolved to choose them will also be coming out ahead because the attractively colorful (or productively generous) males they prefer will be unusually fit, which helps the females’ fitness. Because there’s an escalating interaction between the evolving, discernible signs of quality and the evolving preferences of females who do the choosing, this provides the possibility of the “runaway” selection process that was touched upon earlier.

  Although runaway selection has been difficult to model mathematically, in theory the selection process involved could become quite powerful—particularly if natural selection is making other adjustments that are useful to fitness. For instance, a prime and unusually fit male peacock’s huge tail is obviously a liability in terms of predator evasion, and in reducing such risks, these big tails have evolved to reach their zenith during mating season but shrink for the rest of the year.16

  With such costly signaling, the potential problem of free riders remains. If signals indicating high quality as a breeding partner somehow can be faked by others who in fact lack the desirable but maladaptive traits, then the genuine costly traits will not be able to evolve because these free riders will be out in front. Thus, if a genetically inferior peacock could readily grow a tail as resplendent as a highly fit peacock, this sexual type of social selection wouldn’t work, and the entire pattern of having camouflage-friendly drab peahens choosing the best decorated, colorful (and most fit) males wouldn’t exist; both sexes would be drab, with coloration devoted entirely to camouflage.

  The same is true of empathetic altruism in humans. If such generosity could be readily faked, then selection by altruistic reputation simply wouldn’t work. However, in an intimate band of thirty that is constantly gossiping, it’s difficult to fake anything. Some people may try, but few are likely to succeed.

  THE SOCIAL BOOSTING OF ALTRUISM

  Even though Alexander’s assumptions about selection by reputation seem correct, for ethnographic examples in 1987 he was obliged to rely on just a few prominent studies of foragers like the Bushmen,17 for broader surveys of the type that archaeologists Lawrence Keeley and Robert Kelly18 began making in 1988 and 1995 were then a thing of the future. Fortunately, anthropologists like Frank Marlowe and Kim Hill are now working with really sizable general evolutionary databases for hunter-gatherers, and their analyses are helping scholars in other fields to consider the facts on a less “anecdotal” basis.19

  The substantial, highly specialized hunter-gatherer database I am developing at the Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California focuses just on social behavior of LPA foragers. When this systematic research on hunter-gatherer social behavior began over ten years ago, with substantial outside assistance from the John Templeton Foundation, the idea was to look for diversities and universals in moral behavior, conflict, and conflict resolution. The long-term objective was to categorize or “code” the social behaviors that were most relevant to evolutionary analyses of social ideology, social control, cooperation, and conflict so that interesting extant patterns might be discerned statistically and better prehistoric hypotheses developed.

  Because we’ll be examining these data in some detail, the coding system I developed needs some further explanation. For the past six years my research assistant has had memorized a five-page list of 232 varied and highly specific social coding categories, which range from “group member selected to assassinate culprit” to “sharing with kin” to “aid to nonrelatives favored.” She patiently goes through thousands of pages of hunter-gatherer field reports to identify descriptive paragraphs that are relevant to each of these 232 coding categories, and then she summarizes each chunk of data individually.

  Eventually, I hope that a searchable database can be made public to put all of this organized data at the electronic fingertips of scholars interested in social evolution, but this will require a large investment and for some time to come I will be obliged to analyze the data by hand, which is time consuming even though, for 50 out of a total of over 150 LPA societies, this vast information is now at least coded and summarized. If this coding weren’t done, the time needed to ask and answer precise questions of such a huge amount of data would be quite prohibitive, and the treatment we’re about to meet with would have been impracticable.

  A few years ago, inspired by both the late Donald T. Campbell’s psychological interest in altruism and prosocial preaching and Richard D. Alexander’s biological thoughts on selection by reputation,20 I decided it would be useful to investigate quantitatively the extent to which hunter-gatherers approve of generosity, especially extrafamilial generosity. The result has been that ten of the fifty LPA societies in this ever-growing coded sample have been used for intensive analysis here. These groups represent major world geographic regions and favor well-described hunter-gatherers who were relatively little affected by cultural contact before being studied. The idea was to see whether these “preaching” behaviors were widely mentioned for LPA foragers, and it turns out that both intrafamilial and extrafamilial gen
erosity are unambiguously espoused by all ten groups.

  This unanimity is of great interest. When Don Campbell and I taught a graduate seminar together at Northwestern in 1974, we discovered that among all six early civilizations, starting with Mesopotamia and Egypt, “official” preaching in favor of altruistic generosity was predictable and universal.21 If hunter-gatherers did the same, and did so universally, then this would be a likely candidate for being a human universal, which would suggest, in turn, that such preaching was closely tied to human nature—and that it might be important to evolutionary analyses.

  This recent analysis of ten foraging societies shows that generosity to nonkin is regularly mentioned indigenously as something that people in the band should practice, and there was no rocket science involved in assessing the coded materials. There are five coding categories that relate to generosity, and what was done, using whatever field reports existed for each society (there were between one and fourteen), was simply to count how many times people’s being in favor of such generosity was mentioned by ethnographers who lived with and studied these bands. The very strong patterns seen in Table II (next page) are typical of today’s LPA hunter-gatherers, so they can be projected backward in time for at least 45,000 years.

  All ten societies had at least one such mention of extrafamilial generosity’s being favored, but before we consider these numbers, we must keep in mind that many societies had only a few sources in the form of field reports; that for some societies, such as the Kalahari !Ko, multiple reports were published by the same ethnographer; and that some ethnographers are far more prone to focus on indigenous social attitudes than are others. Thus, the unanimity uncovered here is quite remarkable.

  We see, for instance, that the Netsilik in central northern Canada had twenty-six mentions in favor of extrafamilial generosity in eight ethnographies, whereas the Yahgan at the tip of South America had one mention in only three ethnographies. Given that in spite of inconsistent ethnographic coverage these prosocial preachings are unanimous, even a sample of ten out of fifty coded societies provides a firm basis for suggesting that today and yesterday altruism has been, and was, actively promoted—and amplified—among mobile, egalitarian hunter-gatherers everywhere. It’s also of interest that these “golden rule” preachings and statements are found not only in peaceful foraging societies, but also in highly warlike ones like the Andaman Islanders in Asia. Clearly, the roots of the preachings are ancient, and the central tendency is very strong, indeed.

  TABLE II ACTIVE FAVORING OF EXTRAFAMILIAL GENEROSITY*

  *This table was adapted from Boehm 2008b.

  It’s worth emphasizing that giving nepotistic aid to kin also was favored unanimously as an ode to family values. But what’s most important, here, is that aid to nonkin was explicitly advocated as a behavior that group members collectively favored and expected of individuals. Surely, such manipulative preaching was done for a practical purpose that we’ve met with already: it was to behaviorally amplify the sympathetically generous tendencies of group members.22 The larger purpose was to improve the overall quality of a social and economic lifestyle that depended very heavily on cooperative indirect reciprocity.

  The remaining items in this table, also unanimously subscribed to, demonstrate even more broadly that there’s a predictable human concern with generosity because this is essential to cooperation and sharing. Thus, this social amplification of altruism would seem to be deliberate, well-focused, and probably universal.23 Hunter-gatherers appreciate both cooperation and social harmony, and they understand that the general promotion of generosity will serve both of these causes.

  HOW ALTRUISTS ARE COMPENSATED

  We must look more deeply now into systems of indirect reciprocity to see exactly how altruists can be transformed genetically from losers into winners. In The Biology of Moral Systems, Alexander sees several ways that generous acts can be rewarded so that an altruist can be gaining more than is lost.24 First, he mentions outstanding altruists being formally rewarded, as when a modern war hero receives a Congressional Medal of Honor. As long as the award is not posthumous, this individual is likely to reap direct social benefits that will provide fitness advantages that may offset his risks. In a foraging band there are no governments giving out awards, of course, but a parallel might involve a well-appreciated man or woman who at personal hazard has saved another band member from a predator or snake, or perhaps a well-respected chosen group leader where this responsible role exists. In the case of a group leader, there may be some modest costs of energy or time, or some risks in trying to manage conflict, but there also are likely to be gains from having an enhanced reputation.

  Alexander proposes a second kind of popularity contest, in which individuals showing generosity in everyday life are favored as future associates in cooperation. This is the main basis for the selection by reputation we’ve been talking about, and it includes not only marrying to good advantage but also making other beneficial personal alliances, be they social, economic, or political. Thus, individuals with a track record of contributing generously in everyday life can be more attractive as future collaborators in a variety of partnership contexts, which means the resulting fitness advantages could be repaying what these altruists have lost by behaving so generously in the first place.

  There’s a third potential payoff for altruists. To the extent that these acts of generosity help one local group to flourish in competition with other local groups, Alexander seems to follow Darwin in thinking that altruistic genes might become better represented in future gene pools simply because groups with more altruists will prosper and grow in competition with other, less altruistic groups. The way he expresses this is that the altruists’ coresident altruistic relatives and all their altruistic descendants will profit because they are part of a group that can grow faster than other groups,25 and the wording suggests that he has both a kin selection and a group selection model in mind. But because the bands he is considering are now known to contain mostly unrelated families,26 the group selection model may be more appropriate.

  Alexander’s first two paths to altruism are based on individual preferences that lead to selection by reputation, whereas ultimately the last is based on how groups compete as units. All are subject to the free-rider problem because a “hero” could lie about his exploits or a selfish person could try to fake being altruistic and might be chosen preferentially by a potential spouse, and in this way either of them might reap rewards that boost personal relative fitness and make it possible for these free riders to outcompete the altruists. Any substantial degree of cheating can undermine either social selection or group selection and thereby make altruistic traits individually maladaptive. But fortunately, there appears to have been an effective and rather distinctively human cure for this free-rider problem.

  HOW SUPPRESSIBLE ARE FREE RIDERS?

  In evolutionary science, working hypotheses lie somewhere in between “educated guesses” that are made on a relatively shoot-from-the-hip basis and well-controlled laboratory experiments, such as those (in physics) that demonstrated the speed of light. In Chapter 4 my strong working hypothesis was that as they became culturally modern, the members of LPA foraging bands were keeping careful watch on other members as they gossiped confidentially to keep intimates informed about who was behaving well or badly, and that they could eventually arrive at a group consensus on this basis—and act on it to punish an identified deviant.

  As today, these band members had both the social insight to identify and even anticipate problems that threatened the welfare of everyone in the band, and the ability to deal with them directly and decisively before the good guys were individually taken advantage of—and before their cooperating bands were torn to shreds by conflicts started by the bad guys’ behavior. For instance, if powerful deviants who tried to gain unfair shares of large game seriously threatened a customary system of meat acquisition and sharing, which was vitally useful to all group members, the band’s response
could be still more dire than the Mbuti Pygmies’ obviously very angry reaction against Cephu, the arrogant meat-cheater who in effect stole from his group. Because bullying also is likely to stir stressful and disruptive conflict, group reactions to this forceful type of free riding would have been very well motivated, indeed.

  Prehistorically, as culturally modern hunter-gatherers, people’s goal would have been to protect themselves from the worst opportunists. As humans who like us generalized extremely well, these foragers surely understood two things. One was that over the long run predatory patterns of social deviance potentially threatened everybody, not just the current victim. The other was that there was security in numbers if they wished to use collective sanctions in coping with the problem. What they didn’t understand, and I emphasize this to make it clear that I am not reading enlightened and deliberate “purpose” into basic selection mechanisms, was that when such communal moralistic aggression was consistently and harshly targeted against the same types of deviants over thousands of generations, this would have a significant impact on gene pools.

  TABLE III SOCIAL PREDATORS*

  *The above figures are derived from the author’s hunter-gather database.