by Mark Pagel
The topics I shall consider in this book—cooperation, learning, identity, self-sacrifice, language, religion, consciousness, creativity, altruism, deception, greed, and self-interest—have all been studied before and all of us will be familiar with them, having used, experienced, or somehow “participated” in each of them most days of our lives. But if this idea of a cultural survival vehicle can help us to organize our thoughts about humans, it will also help us to see these familiar topics in new ways, and maybe even come up with new explanations for their existence or for why they take the forms they do.
A point that it is difficult to stress too much is that my attempts to understand our traits in Darwinian terms are not meant to promulgate any sort of morality based upon the notion of survival of the fittest. Evolutionists sometimes refer to the failure to distinguish “is” from “ought” as the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something has evolved doesn’t make it right, even if it has contributed in the past to our survival and reproduction. But if it has evolved for these reasons it is something we might wish to take seriously because it will lurk somewhere in our nature. Equally, to say we have an evolved social nature is not to suggest that our behaviors are determined by genes, but to say we have certain predilections and tendencies. In any given circumstance, the behaviors we produce are some result of genes and the environment of the actor. This is far from determinism, but still revealing of who we are and why we might have the tendencies to behave as we do.
The book is divided into four parts. The chapters of Part I try to answer the question of how our cultures have been able to organize us into the small, closely knit tribal groups that we are calling the cultural survival vehicles. They examine the tricks our cultures have used, what they have extracted from us, and what was in it for us. Part II investigates our cooperative cultural nature, examining the rules we have evolved for making cooperation work among unrelated individuals. This section recognizes that it is not enough to say that our allegiance to our cultures has evolved because they have returned great rewards throughout our history. The cooperative societies from which cultures are constructed are themselves fragile unless tightly controlled by social mechanisms that continue to make cooperation more profitable than unbridled self-interest. Part III examines how life in the presence of culture has sculpted our minds to use our social systems to our advantage. We expect a strong part of our nature to have been influenced by the rewards that come from steering just that little bit more of the cultural wealth our way. Part IV is about the modern dilemma of large nation-states. In countries such as China and India, over 1 billion people fall under the rule of a small elite, and in all of the major countries of the world millions are ruled by a few. That creates a dilemma for the thesis of this book: If humans have evolved a tribal nature that revolves around life in relatively small and exclusive cooperative social groups, how do we explain the enormous social groupings of the modern world—the observation that so many can be willingly led by so few?
PART I
MIND CONTROL,
PROTECTION, AND
PROSPERITY
* * *
Prologue
WHY IS IT THAT we can show such allegiance to the packets of information we call our cultures, and why has this been a rewarding rather than foolhardy and even dangerous thing to do throughout our evolutionary history? For many of us, a slight directed at our culture or even just a piece of cloth that represents it elicits emotions of defensiveness, confrontation, or even aggression. Where do these emotions come from and why do they arise so naturally? The argument of this Prologue—explored in the chapters of Part I—is that culture has worked by coming to exercise a form of mind control over us. We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and probably without even knowing it, in return for the protection and prosperity our cultures provide. This is why our cultural identity is so much like a trait that we might have acquired from genes—surprisingly stable and robust to outside influences, likely to be passed on to our children, and to theirs. For instance, asked which team they would support in a match against England, many Scottish soccer fans often reply, “anyone but England,” and this despite the fact that Scotland has been a member of the United Kingdom for over three hundred years (although the Scots might say it is because of those three hundred years).
There are other cases of animals’ minds and behaviors being taken over by an outside force. Evolutionary biologists have a field of study called “parasite manipulation of host behavior.” A science fiction writer might more engagingly call it invasion of the body snatchers. When dogs roam in packs they can be menacing and aggressive, but in many parts of East Africa a dog seen roaming on its own excites greater alarm because people know it is likely to carry the rabies virus. The virus manipulates the dog’s behavior to roam because a dog that does so is more likely to encounter an uninfected individual to bite. Similarly, there is a well-known fungus called Cordyceps that infects a species of carpenter ant. The fungus finds its way to the ant’s brain where it controls the ant like a puppeteer, getting it to climb to the top of blades of grass or small plants. Once there, the ant clamps its jaws shut and then dangles like a flag in the wind. Meanwhile, the fungus devours the ant from within and eventually erupts in its brain, flowering out of the top of its head, releasing spores to be carried off to infect some new ant or even some grazing animals. Tiny worms known as brain flukes can do the same.
Successful rabies virus, brain fluke, or fungus genes hijack another animal’s body or phenotype, including its brains and sensory organs, and use it to walk around, make decisions, and clamp jaws down on things. All of this is in service to the parasite’s interests rather than the host’s, which is normally killed anyway once it has served its purpose. We instinctively recoil at the specter of one of these parasites infecting us, but we equally instinctively recognize why they can exist. These parasites can live and evolve at our expense because they do not share the same route into the future as the rest of our genes. So long as one of these parasites can get itself transmitted into another body before you die, it will go on to live another day, and this means it can do with you more or less what it likes. The same principle explains why common viruses and diseases can prosper. Thankfully, it also tells us why extremely virulent diseases in general are rare. If you caught a virus that killed you before you could pass it on to someone else, your death would also be its death. This is why, terrifying as it is, the Ebola virus—which kills around 90 percent of its victims and frequently within twenty-four hours of symptoms appearing—is quite rare.
With the advent of culture, another sphere of evolving entities arose that does not share the same route into the future as our genes. This new sphere of evolution was the world of ideas. They are cultural replicators that exist by inhabiting our minds, and their “purpose” is to get us to transmit them to other minds. Richard Dawkins coined the term memes to describe these units of cultural evolution, which, like the biological brain parasites, will not necessarily evolve to have our interests in mind but theirs. Thus, when we recite advertising jingles or tell jokes, or can’t get a tune out of our heads, things that are of little or no value to us have somehow commandeered our brains and even acquired mouths and vocal cords to help them invade someone else’s mind. This is not to say that all elements of cultural evolution evolve to exploit us, or that all memes are viruses of our minds. Among the most common memes will be those that do us the most good. The success of ideas like how to build a better hand ax or spear, or how to navigate by the stars, skin a newly killed animal, fish, or tie a knot in a rope, comes from these being ideas we want to tell others.
Still, the sheer volume of possible memes tells us that competition among them for space in our minds has been intense. This raises the question of whether, just as we cannot defend ourselves against some biological viruses, we might often be at the beck and call of selfish memes that get us not just to sing a tune, but to behave in whatever ways they decree, and then like a
biological brain parasite dispense with us. The philosopher Daniel Dennett once quipped that perhaps “a scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.” Far-fetched? Maybe, but don’t forget that some medieval monk scribes devoted their lives to creating libraries full of copies of revered books, even if they didn’t go quite so far as replicating entire libraries. And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the memes are in control when hearing of yet another religious martyr who has sacrificed his or her life in the name of some religious cause. That act of martyrdom might be very effective at spreading a religious or political idea to others’ minds, or at killing minds the meme has not been able to infect, but it surely does nothing for the martyr. Or what of the Christian Stylites? These were the religious ascetics who in the early days of Christianity took up residence perched atop tall poles or pillars. What could have possessed them to do this? Some remained on these perches for years: even if this didn’t kill them, it is difficult to see how it could have promoted their reproductive success.
Ideas such as these, and others such as celibacy, drug taking, recklessness, birth control, or notions of courage and bravery, can enter into direct conflict with our genes, often damaging our ability to survive and reproduce. Add to these the many silly rituals and customs so common to cultural behavior, and we don’t have much encouragement that it is our genes that win against the cultural replicators. In fact, it has become something of a badge of the true believer among those who study memes that there is no reason to expect our genes to win—that there is no reason to expect, as the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson maintained, that our “genes hold culture on a leash.” It is the theme of films such as the Matrix and Terminator series, or the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, that the machines we create will ultimately take over and hold us (genes) on a leash. If we scoff at this, we need only think back to the “millennium bug” or the Y2K (year 2000) scare that engulfed the world at the turn of the millennium. Owing to the design of software systems that could not represent a year date beyond 1999, there was a widespread belief (meme!) that computer systems around the world would fail at midnight on the last day of that year. Billions of dollars were spent preparing for this eventuality. If this now seems a long way in the past, it is, but our dependency on machines has only grown since then.
Still, in spite of all this, and in spite of much of the hysteria that can surround the ideas of “exploitative” memes, there is a fundamental reason why we can expect ideas to be rare that directly hurt our chances for survival and reproduction, and for the same reason that brain flukes and rabies are rare. Daniel Dennett has said that “the haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.” Dennett is right; memes do depend upon reaching our minds, and they do structure our brains. I might hold the belief that there is only one true and just God. Once that idea has lodged in my mind, it might invite other beliefs such as that people who believe in other gods are a threat to me, and to my way of life. And this might make my mind vulnerable to the further idea or meme that people who stop believing in my god, or people who profess a belief in other gods, should be punished, maybe even killed. These memes are structuring my mind and working together to promote each other.
We know these things happen because we see people being killed for their religious beliefs all over the world. Even so, we shouldn’t take this restructuring to mean that our minds are passive in the face of ideas that might act against our good wishes. Our brains are the descendants of the brains of a long line of survivors, and we know this has given them certain predilections, abilities, and biases for dealing with our world. One of these is the ability to make decisions that promote or preserve our well-being. This can give us some hope that rogue and selfish memes that bring us harm can be kept in check. These cultural replicators must contend with the biological ones—our genes—that build the minds these memes need to inhabit. And indeed the memes that promote celibacy, suicidal acts, debilitating drug use, giving your life in battle, mindless sensation seeking, or endlessly playing computer games are not all that successful despite the attention they receive and the number of people they could “infect.”
None of this is to say that genes win, and memes lose, but that our genetic selves are not unquestioning havens for memes and their machinations. The invention of agriculture—a set of memes—beginning around 10,000 years ago is a particularly interesting example. Agriculture allows people to produce surplus food and thereby avoid starvation in times of drought or scarcity. Everywhere agriculture has been invented—and it has been invented many times independently around the world—population sizes have increased. But what makes agriculture interesting is that people’s health actually declined after it was introduced. Skeletons dug up from some of the first societies to acquire agriculture, for example in parts of Turkey and Egypt, show that people got smaller, their bones were less sturdy, they often had skeletal deformities from the hard labor of grinding corn, and they lived shorter lives. Does this mean that agriculture is a set of exploitative memes? Probably not. On average, people who adopted agriculture left more surviving offspring behind. Agriculture has been good for our genes, and this is almost certainly why it has all but replaced hunting-and-gathering all around the world. Natural selection does not maximize happiness or even well-being, but rather long-term reproductive success.
There is another reason we can expect to have good defenses against exploitative memes or ideas. Richard Dawkins and John Krebs pointed this out some years ago in the context of biological predators and their prey. It goes by the name “the life-dinner principle,” a variant of one of Aesop’s Fables. Aesop knew that when a fox chases a rabbit, the rabbit is running for its life but the fox is only chasing its dinner. This tells us that we can expect natural selection to act more strongly on rabbits to evade foxes than on foxes to catch rabbits. A fox that fails to catch a rabbit can look for another dinner. But there are no more lives for the rabbit that gets caught. An ant that evades a brain fluke saves its life, but the brain fluke can look for another ant to infect. People with psychological defenses against the idea of celibacy preserve their chances of reproducing, but celibacy as an idea can always seek out another mind to infect.
The life-dinner principle gives us a way to understand which of two sets of replicators is likely to “win” when one of them sets out to use the other for its own gain. Winning doesn’t necessarily mean driving the loser to extinction, just that on average the winner’s adaptations are not bested by the loser’s. One rough way to predict the winner in any given arms race is to ask if one side stands to lose more than the other. The life-dinner principle tells us to bet on the one winning which has most to lose if it doesn’t. Genes for running fast in rabbits have more to lose if they are not fast enough than genes for running fast do in foxes. A fox gene that is not fast enough to catch this particular rabbit can always seek out another. Genes in our bodies might have more to lose if manipulated by a celibacy or suicide meme than the meme has in failing to infect our minds. The memes can always find other brains.
Still, why don’t manipulative memes just win outright? They can always evolve new ways to exploit us faster than our genes can evolve psychological defenses to deflect them. But can they? The same could be said of most biological parasites and yet they don’t always win. For example, the rapid rate of evolution of the influenza virus is why you are advised to get vaccinated every year, but even if you don’t, there is a good chance you won’t be infected. In spite of their prodigious abilities to evolve, the viruses don’t always win because each of us carries inside our bodies a miniature Darwinian evolutionary system that is evolving in real time. This is our immune system, and it protects us by generating an effectively infinite variety of different immune cells, each one capable of recognizing a different kind of attacker. Natural selection acting inside our bodies favors those immune
cells good at defending us, encouraging more copies of them to be made, and allowing the others to fade away. This evolutionary process is going on inside all of us all of the time. It isn’t perfect, but it generally serves us well; and those of us with better immune system genes for producing this miniature evolving system will be more likely to survive and pass those genes on to our offspring.
We can imagine that our minds, like our bodies, have a built-in Darwinian “cognitive immune system,” its purpose being to protect us from damaging memes that arise spontaneously out of the torrent of idea evolution. Indeed, what could be more important to a species that has handed over much of its moment-to-moment decision making to its conscious mind, instead of relying on instincts or other hard-wired responses to threats from the “outside” world? Our bodily immune systems attack foreign invaders with specialist immune system cells called T-cells that attach themselves to the invader and then put up a chemical flag to warn of their presence. Analogously, our minds might have mechanisms for generating a variety of thoughts, hunches, and worries, each used to latch onto an idea (meme) and test it for its usefulness or suitability, attaching warning “thoughts” to some ideas or memes, disarming or rendering inert the really nasty ones. A natural selective process will mean that at any given moment your mind will be seething with a collection of conscious and subconscious thoughts that have proven the most effective in warding off the dangerous or harmful ones—they might even collectively define our “good judgment.” The system is not perfect, but just as with our immune system genes, those of us with genes that grant brains capable of forming good judgments will have been more likely to survive and pass them on to our children.
