None of this chronology can be definite, but my sequential theory is that the first stage of moral evolution resulted in an evolutionary conscience, and once we became moral, two new patterns were able to develop. One was selection by reputation that favored altruists, and the other was a moralized version of free-rider suppression, which would have targeted not only bullies, but also thieves and cheaters. At that point, we may hypothesize that altruists were beginning to pair up assortatively with other altruists. And with the help of an evolving conscience, more sophisticated strategies of social control would have enabled people to reform those deviants who were more responsive to group rules and to group wishes, rather than injuring or killing them or banishing them.
Unless new evidence is found, by the time people became culturally modern our moral life was basically complete, as LPA hunter-gatherers know it today and for that matter as we ourselves know it today. We had both a sense of virtue and a sense of shameful culpritude, and we understood the importance of human generosity well enough to promulgate our predictable golden rules across the face of a then thinly populated planet. We were a people who in important ways had conquered our own abundant selfishness—even though that conquest required constant vigilance, and considerable active tweaking of the types we have spoken of.
THE EVOLUTION OF MORALS
12
WHAT, EXACTLY, ARE “MORAL ORIGINS”?
As we’ve seen, it’s all too human to be curious about beginnings. Indeed, it’s likely that somehow our brains were set up to think that way, for all humans seem to think about how we became so different from other animals in the important matter of morals. The intuitive philosopher in all of us just naturally wonders about how things got started, as opposed to assuming that somehow they must have been eternally in existence, and the answers human beings have come up with in the moral sphere are various, to say the least, as well as fascinating and often colorful.
For those who are theologically inclined, questions of moral origins may conjure up Adams and Eves who contemplate forbidden but inviting knowledgeable fruit hanging from readily accessible low branches in trees. Or there may be images of this same pair, fallen and shamefully hiding their newly private pudenda behind the plucked leaves of a nearby ficus, as seen in many Renaissance paintings. Long before such stories were written down, however, the entire world was dealing in oral traditions that perpetuated similar myths to satisfy similar human curiosities.
Anthropologists can assure us that today in virtually any ethnographically described nonliterate society, people will be thinking deeply about questions of origins—be they of the physical world, of people, or of morals—and that they’ll be encouraging rhetorically gifted specialists to tell them their origin stories from memory. The unusually imaginative and detailed myths of the Navajos testify to this, and just in the single Ichaa tale we heard not only about the earlier development of humans from mothlike entities, but about moral origins with respect to the incest taboo and how it came into being. That story was told by a gifted Navajo mythmaker named Slim Curly in the 1930s.
Naturally, this widespread human concern with origins is found among our LPA foragers, so it’s safe to say that this “around-the-campfire,” mythological approach extends far backward in time. The Garden of Eden story, Darwin’s personal interest in moral origins, and the very writing of this book would appear to have been culturally preadapted for us in the African New Stone Age, 45,000 years ago and more. The same ever-curious, problem-solving minds that make us ask exactly the same questions today have driven certain authors—including a number of the scientific writers we’re about to discuss—to write popular books having to do with moral origins.
Those earlier, oral-tradition mythologies suggest that first people—and subsequently their morals—were simply created out of whole cloth. The same reasoning is found in the formal religious belief systems that eventually followed—hence we have Adam and Eve as probably two of the more striking mythological figures ever to have emerged on an all-at-once basis. In contrast, the theory of natural selection brings us to a rather different kind of interpretation, for in comparison biological evolution is a process that builds gradualistically on its previous achievements—even when it’s punctuated.
The fact that gene mutations continually come into being is at least suggestive of unprecedented novelty, but mutant genes and random genetic drift are simply nature’s way of providing fodder for an overall Darwinian process that basically moves through time completely blindly and quite gradually, building on its own past precedents. For a biologist like Ernst Mayr, this ongoing process is by definition both dynamic and continuous at the same time.1 Nonetheless, when our common sense tells us an evolutionary event is both novel and important, we do tend to talk about origins. This was the case with Darwin, when in 1859 he entitled his first book On The Origin of Species. This remarkable naturalist obviously thought deeply about moral origins as well, even though his own high standards of scientific reasoning didn’t permit him to come up with even a tentative historical sequence in The Descent of Man.
Thus, “moral origins” is a venerable item in our scientific vocabulary, but we must keep in mind that the origins involved will have been based on preadaptations, and the mythmaker’s “whole cloth” idea must be set aside. Mutant genes surely were important, but basically nature has always liked to combine older building blocks with newer ones and then combine this product with still newer ones. That provides the continuity that Mayr spoke of.
I’ve suggested that moral origins took place gradually, over thousands of generations, through natural selection that gave us a conscience, including a sense of shame. Just like other selection events, this involved not only preadaptations but also, in all probability, significant environmental changes. My hypothesis has been that the immediate agency that created a shameful conscience was punitive social selection, so in fact there could have been two environments that helped to shape moral origins, depending on which of the three chronological hypotheses proposed in Chapter 6 was operative.
More at a distance was the changeable natural environment, which provided delicious, nutritious large ungulates to hunt, along with materials for fashioning some serious hunting weapons, plant foods to gather, water to drink, means of shelter, probably some curative herbs, and occasional periods of stress. It was the social environment, however, that provided the more immediate selection forces, and this social niche was in part created by humans themselves.2 The original, punitive type of social selection gave us a conscience, but by providing such efficient free-rider suppression, it later made it possible for altruistic traits to evolve as strongly as they have.
WHEN DID MORALS ORIGINATE?
With regard to explaining moral origins in a concrete way, philosopher Mary Midgley half a decade ago took a relatively pessimistic view in The Ethical Primate:
We can indeed wonder how and when our remote ancestors did actually come to be troubled with a conscience, how they became aware that they could make free choices, how they developed moral concerns to the extent that every human society now has them. But we are unlikely ever to have more than the faintest, most tantalizing indications about this strange process, indications which can mislead us as easily as they can help us. They are misleading not just because they are scanty, but because of our own remoteness. Even if we could somehow listen in at some crucial point and had help with the language—or proto-language—the situation would be so unimaginably strange to us that we would stand little chance of grasping it. So we have here a gap which we have to fill in, like other historical gaps, as best we can from indirect evidence, from what comes before and after, and from careful comparison with other species.3
I’m probably a bit more sanguine about making an evolutionary reconstruction of moral origins than Midgley is, but then I have spent the last decade immersed in data on chimpanzees, bonobos, and LPA hunter-gatherers, trying to make many of the kinds of comparisons and connections she calls fo
r. I also have recognized the barriers she identifies, and for that reason I have not attempted to describe the protoconscience beyond acknowledging its existence.
At the same time, I’ve been watching carefully to see what archaeologists were coming up with. Two studies by Mary Stiner that we encountered earlier have been critical to the more specific theories espoused in this book, and they were published within that same ten-year time frame. They told us that humans became dedicated large-game hunters a quarter of a million years ago and that their mode of butchery also changed in ways that could have been socially significant. It has been my view that if these various types of indirect evidence could be joined in a synthesis, and if relative plausibility was the scientific standard used to test the overall hypothesis, at least a substantial beginning could be made toward a fuller understanding of how we and we alone became moral.
I have tied moral origins to the major political transition of earlier humans from being a species that lived hierarchically to becoming one that became devoutly egalitarian. The theory I’ve proposed can be stated simply: what put this very decisive brand of egalitarianism so firmly in place was the ability of politically unified groups to “outlaw” and punish resented alpha-male behavior. The impact was profound, for this put an evolutionary premium on self-control and also began to suppress free riders in ways that were all but uniquely human.
What I cannot specify with current evidence is whether the humans who were just beginning to go after large ungulates were perhaps still nearly as hierarchical as their ape ancestor had been—or whether the transition to egalitarianism was already well under way. Aside from subordinate males wanting more personal autonomy or improved access to females for breeding, an additional factor, earlier on, might have been a desire to share more efficiently whatever carcasses were acquired and butchered, which included not only some megafauna but also, surely, smaller game like that hunted by Ancestral Pan.4
Whatever the earlier scenario, I have held that this overall political transition to egalitarianism could have been significantly accelerated, and made definitive and culturally institutionalized, at the point when humans were becoming active-pursuit hunters. Because variance reduction was so important to their nutrition, at that point they were obliged to live in bands with a fair number of other hunters, and somehow they had to efficiently share out the sizable but not enormous game they were killing, because as entire hunting teams they were routinely investing so much energy in its pursuit. These are hypotheses that have, I think, some specific empirical support—and also some general plausibility. But that is for the reader to judge.
We might also try to key such egalitarian developments to the crude archaeological evidence we have about brain size, for it’s at least logical that the larger the brain, the more that autonomy-loving subordinates could have been capable of effectively ganging up to improve their competitive position against high-ranking dominators in gaining meat—or females. But there’s no way at all of telling when brains became powerful enough socially to permit the creation of a decisive and stable egalitarian order.
I’ve suggested that archaic Homo sapiens might conceivably have already been fully egalitarian before a quarter of a million years ago, when intensive hunting began. If that were the case, we could turn things around and theorize that definitive egalitarianism paved the way for hunting, rather than vice versa. For moral origins, this is not important; what matters is that the strong social control that made earlier egalitarian orders possible led to the evolution of our human conscience.
What I feel most confident in hypothesizing is that from a quarter of a million years forward archaic humans in bands, with their obvious needs for efficient meat distribution, had a great deal to gain by being engaged in the same intensive, effective, general suppression of alpha-male behavior practiced today. This would have brought with it some really aggressive free-rider suppression, and in all probability it would have involved not only the many individuals who had stronger alpha tendencies, but also those with other antisocial proclivities like cheating or theft, which also would have seriously interfered with effectively equalized meat-sharing. Any such behavior would have aroused people’s ire in a multifamily band that was intent on sharing its favorite nourishment and was facing periodic but not calamitous scarcities that made such sharing very important.
At the beginning of what might be called the egalitarian transition, fear of receiving aggression would have been the primary and primitive (ancestral) psychological mechanism that drove the natural dominators to submit when their groups opposed them. And most likely the physical conflicts between resentful groups and their less restrained dominators would have been far more frequent than today, driving social selection strongly in favor of a conscience.
This conscience would have evolved as self-control based on rule internalization became more efficient, and evolving a degree of conscience that Mary Midgley or you or I would recognize surely involved changes to the brain. This process was likely to have taken at least 1,000 generations, depending on how strong the social selection was in its early and presumptively often quite brutal operation. That’s only 25,000 years, and probably a more reasonable figure would be 2,000 to 4,000 generations (50,000–100,000 years), but as we’ve seen, up to 8,000 generations could have been available with any of our three scenarios.
At the time that something close to a modern conscience would have evolved, and this would have included a shameful blushing response as well as emotionally identifying with rules, we may definitely speak in terms of moral origins. The point of comparison is the submissive, fear-based self-control of a domesticated dog or wolf or of a bonobo or chimpanzee. Once we’d acquired a full moral sense, which included thinking in terms of socially attractive virtue as well as shameful vice, gossiping accordingly about our fellows, and having a sense of our moral selves, the difference had become profound.
The following hypothesis is consistent with any of the three tentative sequences developed earlier in the book. First, it was angry, punitive social selection by groups that first gave us this physically evolved conscience. Second; it did so by making free-riding bullies and others who couldn’t control their antisocial impulses pay genetically for their “crimes,” and afterward similar forces, now endowed with morality, continued to vigorously suppress the behavior of would-be free riders—which made it much easier for altruistic traits to evolve genetically. This second phase of moral evolution might have begun at latest in the vicinity of 200,000 BP, but this is a guess. And because altruists not only were protected against free riding but also were pairing off with other altruists, the selection forces that genetically favored altruistic traits could have been powerful enough to require only a few thousand additional generations to make us fully as altruistic as we are today. Thus, by around 150,000 BP, when we may at least hypothesize that anatomically modern African humans were on the verge of cultural modernity, we could have been well on the way to becoming moral beings and to becoming significantly more altruistic than our more distant ancestors had been.
HOW “TRUE” IS THIS SCENARIO OVERALL?
That is the story of moral origins as I am able to piece it together with present information, and it differs radically from any that has been told before. Perhaps in rendering this account I have allowed myself to become rather venturesome as a scientist, done so because the questions being addressed are so humanly important and also so intrinsically fascinating. But that is difficult to say because the many-faceted, holistic scenario I have developed here is not easily tested on a scientific basis that includes clear-cut “falsification.”
Of course, many of the component hypotheses are readily subjected to scrutiny, such as the parsimony-based reconstruction of ancestral behaviors or the reconstruction of culturally modern behaviors in human foragers as of 45,000 years ago. There are many other areas where alternative approaches are possible, and these include the very definition of morality, the focus on shame, and the rather expan
sive definition I have used of the evolutionary conscience. However, if we consider the moral origins theory advanced in this book as a unified whole, the best way to test it is simply to judge its overall plausibility in comparison with other theories of moral evolution.5
MORAL ORIGINS THEORIES SINCE DARWIN
The scientific territory covered by moral origins is wide, just as it should be for such a large and relatively unexplored topic. However, my interest here does not extend to evolutionary ethics, as discussed by sociologist Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and others more recently.6 What the purview of this book does include is the mechanisms that have been active in the evolutionary development of shame, virtue, extrafamilial generosity, and moralistic group social control, and the task I set myself has been to write a pointedly historical natural history of moral origins, with full attention to details that include what preceded these origins and what happened to human social life afterward.
One interesting twist on the moral origins theme arrived over a century ago with Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals.7 This well-known writer followed Darwin in providing a philosopher’s version of moral origins with a strong evolutionary flavor, and his origins scenario was specific and, like mine, quite political, if rather fanciful. But basically the argument was more about questions of power, turn-the-other-cheek weakness, and anti-Christianity than about how morals came into being. In a sense, the power theme does link Nietzsche’s work with what I have done here, but the beauty of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is that the weak, in joining forces to control the strong, themselves become powerful.
As an archaeological treatise James Breasted’s The Dawn of Conscience sounds extremely promising in its title,8 but the idea seems to have been that to gain a purchase on moral evolution, we must turn merely to the ancient Egyptians. Darwin would not have agreed with this, nor do I. However, I do believe that Darwin would have heartily approved of Finnish sociologist Edward Westermarck’s monumentally documented The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,9 which was published before Breasted’s work and just a quarter of a century after Darwin’s death.
Moral Origins Page 34
