Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind

by Mark Pagel

  Incidentally, this discussion of how languages adapt to our needs as speakers can help us to understand a proposal that has never caught on. Esperanto is a designed or made-up language that was proposed in the late nineteenth century as a politically neutral and easy-to-learn universal system of communication. But despite attracting a loyal band of followers, it has never become popular. One reason might be that it is not really politically neutral, with many of its words linked to or drawn from Indo-European languages and especially Latin and Greek forms: “yes” in Esperanto is jes, “hello” is saluton, and “no” is ne (which would be especially confusing to Greeks as ne [ναι] means “yes” in Greek). “Good morning” is Bonan matenon. A second reason is that Esperanto was probably never really necessary, especially now as English is used so widely, not to mention that adopting Esperanto meant giving up one’s own linguistic heritage. But the final and most interesting reason from the perspective of our discussion of how words evolve is that to succeed, Esperanto has to win in competition with other languages. But unlike these competitors, Esperanto is made up. It has not had to evolve to suit our minds and the ways we speak. There is reason, then, to suspect that it is not as “good” a language (not as easy to learn, use, or speak) as natural languages that have had to go through the sieving of cultural selection.

  If our natural languages can be so stable and easy to use as a result of their evolution, why are there so many around the world? There are about 7,000 different languages currently in use, and this is almost certainly far fewer than there were in our past. Even 7,000 is more different languages for a single species of mammal than there are mammal species. By comparison, all human beings share a more or less identical set of our other great digital system of inheritance, our genes. Why the difference? The Babel myth we saw earlier provides one explanation and yields the amusing irony that our many languages exist to stop us from communicating! In Chapter 1 we even saw that there might be a kernel of truth to this. Groups of people often change their languages as an act of asserting their social identities, or as a way to be different from others living nearby.

  But could there be another reason, one that is closer to the theme of the Babel story of restricting the flow of information? If our languages really do act as conduits of important social information, then it might be useful to protect this information from others, and especially so when they live nearby. Changing your language might be a way to avoid eavesdroppers who could be lurking in the bushes. The many different languages spoken in the tropics might come about because this is where people are the most tightly packed and have the greatest need to protect themselves.

  Speaking a different language has the additional value that it allows people quickly to identify others who are not members of their group. There is the poignant scene in the movie The Great Escape when the British and American prisoners of war have fled from their German captors and two of them find their way in disguise to a German railway station. A German officer at the station is suspicious but unable to identify them. Suddenly, he shouts out in German for everyone on the platform to get down. All of the German civilians immediately comply, exposing the fleeing prisoners, who are gunned down. Or listen to this passage from the Old Testament:

  The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivour of Ephraim said, “Let me go over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time. (Judges 12:5–6)

  Languages that have gone through large numbers of what we might think of as cultural splitting events or divorces in their past—where one group of speakers, for whatever set of reasons, divides into two—tend to accumulate more changes than languages whose history records fewer social upheavals. It is as if the many-times-divorced languages have suffered a series of distinct bursts of rapid change, each one an attempt to distinguish the language from the form it is separating from. One such divorce might have influenced the form of American English. American English drops the u compared to British English in words such as colour, behaviour, and honour. These changes didn’t arise haphazardly or over long periods of time. Rather, they were introduced overnight when the American educator and compiler of dictionaries Noah Webster (1758–1843) produced his American Dictionary of the English Language. In preparing that work he insisted that “as an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” To Webster at least, spellings of words as a way of marking out a distinct identity had been elevated in importance to the philosophical issues that lay behind the American War of Independence.

  LANGUAGE EXTINCTION

  WE STARTED this chapter by describing language as the most powerful, dangerous, and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It is also, perhaps, our most intimate of traits, being the voice of the “I” or “me” that defines our conscious self. It is the language of our thinking, and it is the code in which our memories are stored. So it is not surprising that one of the greatest personal losses a people can suffer is the loss of their native language. And yet, currently, somewhere around fifteen to thirty languages go extinct every year as small traditional societies dwindle in numbers, get overwhelmed by larger neighbors, and younger generations choose to learn the languages of larger and politically dominant societies. Whatever the true numbers, the rate of loss of languages greatly exceeds the loss of biological species as a proportion of their respective totals.

  Some projections say that only a handful of languages will see out this century. This raises the question of what language will win, if ever a single language should succeed all others on Earth. Currently, three languages are spoken by a far greater number of people than any of their competitors. Somewhere around 1.2 billion people speak Mandarin, followed by around 400 million each for Spanish and English; and these are closely followed by Bengali and Hindi. It is not that these languages are better than their rivals, it is that they have had the fortune of being linked to demographically prosperous cultures. On these counts Mandarin might look like the leader in the race to be the world’s language, but this ignores the fact that vastly more people learn English as a second language—including many people in China—than any other. Already it is apparent that if there is a worldwide lingua franca, it is English. Once, in Tanzania, I was stopped while attempting to speak Swahili to a local person who held up his hand and said, “My English is better than your Swahili.”

  Still, English itself might be transformed as it is bombarded by the influences of such large numbers of non-native English speakers who, when they use it, bring along their own accents, grammar, and words. On the other hand, English’s willingness to take in so-called foreign words has—for at least the millennium since the Norman conquest of the English in 1066 brought an influx of Norman French vocabulary into the English language—been the key to its adaptability. Just as we have seen how words must adapt to be competitive in the struggle to gain access to our minds, languages have to adapt as a whole to remain useful to their speakers, and those that do so will be the survivors. Self-appointed human “minders” in the form of reactionary grammarians, sticklers for spelling, or those who deliberately try to exclude some words and phrases (like the officials of the French ministry we saw in Chapter 1), will succeed in controlling the rate at which their languages naturally change, but in doing so might consign them to the backwaters of international communication. Already this might be happening to French and German. The alternative to this control is not the free-for-all that some might fear. If communication is important, languages will never change at rates that imperil the very reason for which they exist.

  CHAPTER 9

  Deception, Consciousness,

  and Truth

  That our minds mig
ht have evolved more to manipulate others

  and ourselves than to perceive the truth

  THE “I AND THOU”

  WE TAKE IT for granted that the most intelligent mind on Earth is designed to perceive the truth and act on it. But an evolutionary perspective tells us to expect that our minds have evolved to be good at promoting our survival and well-being and truth might only be part of what they use as their currency. In a brief passage from his Foreword to the first edition of Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene, Robert Trivers wrote that if deceit

  is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray—by the subtle signs of self-knowledge—the deception being practiced. Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution.

  Increasingly, cognitive science teaches us that our perceptions and memories are not just fallible; they are stories our brain concocts to prop up our egos, justify our decisions, and condone our actions. They are the stories we want to see and hear and they often bear little resemblance to what “really” happened. Julian Barnes quotes Stravinsky as saying, “I wonder if memory is true, and know that it cannot be, but one lives by memory nonetheless and not by truth.” If you doubt Stravinsky, gather together your family or a set of old friends and reminisce. You will be surprised, and possibly even distressed, to find out that not everyone agrees with your memories.

  For the religious philosopher Martin Buber, the “I and thou” expressed our relationship to the eternal thou or God, but we can easily imagine that “thou” to be our genes. They are the truly eternal players that our minds will have had to answer to, having been engaged in a struggle for survival since long before the continents separated into what we know as our modern Earth. If the last sixty years of experimental psychology, personality, evolutionary, and neurological studies have shown us anything, it is that the minds that have proven useful in that struggle are far more bewildering than we might have expected. For one, the inner “I” that you think you know so well probably doesn’t exist. It is an illusion, the construction of a mind that is in turn a construction of its genes, genes that have been selected to produce brains that further their ends. Those brains will use false beliefs, copying, lies, deception, self-deception, and just about anything else they can lay their neuronal hands on to promote our—and consequently their—survival and reproduction. The genes that create this mind sometimes don’t even agree among themselves how it should “feel,” and this can lead to internal conflicts. But a second reason is equally sobering: even if we pretend that some little homunculus exists in our heads, we will see it often acts without “us” even knowing, often only bothering to tell us of its decisions later.

  Indeed, the whole concept of personal identity is so tenuous that John Locke devoted an entire chapter to it in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke came to the startling conclusion that, apart from our memories, we cannot even be sure we are the same person we were in the past. But of course as Stravinsky reminds us, those memories are fallible. The unease or alarm such a thought can cause is only alarming so long as we cling to the reality of this “I” that we think exists inside us, rather than concentrating on what really matters to genes, which is to develop strategies that promote their survival.

  THE CO-EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENCE AND DECEPTION

  ON FEBRUARY 17, 2004, a man called Peter Bryan was granted temporary permission to leave the ward of his “low support accommodation” hostel in London. He went to a shop where he bought a claw hammer, a Stanley knife, and a screwdriver. Later that day he encountered a Mr. Brian Cherry, whom he battered to death with the hammer, then sawed off both his arms and left leg, and scooped his brains from his skull and ate them, but not until he had first fried them in butter. Peter Bryan was arrested, covered in blood, after Brian Cherry’s neighbors alerted the police. Earlier that day, before releasing Bryan, staff at the hostel had conducted an hour-long interview with him. The Times later reported that at that meeting staff described him as “calm and jovial,” and that there were “no concerns regarding his mental state.” The police doctor who examined Bryan after he had murdered and eaten Mr. Cherry said his mental condition “did not necessitate an urgent transfer to hospital.” Instead, he was remanded to Belmarsh Prison in London, where he assaulted staff and behaved “unpredictably.”

  By April of that year he was finally diagnosed as mentally ill and sent from Belmarsh to Broadmoor mental hospital in the countryside near London. Three days after arriving there, he was placed in a medium-security ward and left alone with other patients. Within a week, he assaulted a patient, Richard Loudwell, who later died of his injuries. When asked why he had assaulted Loudwell, Bryan said: “I wanted to kill and eat him. Cannibalism is natural… . If I was on the street, I’d go for someone bigger for a challenge.”

  (As an aside, cannibalism might indeed be “natural,” even if now taboo. Archaeologists working in northern Spain have unearthed twelve Neanderthal individuals, including both men and women. Their bones show cut and scrape marks consistent with being eaten—and probably by other Neanderthals. In his sixteenth-century essay “Of Cannibals,” Montaigne quotes a taunt from a prisoner to the tribespeople holding him captive and about to kill and eat him: “these muscles, this flesh and these veins are your own, poor fools that you are. You do not recognize that the substance of your ancestors’ limbs is still contained in them. Savour them well; you will find in them the taste of your own flesh.” Cannibalism was so prevalent among members of the Foré tribe of New Guinean highlanders right up through the early part of the twentieth century that entire villages came down with the debilitating and fatal brain disease kuru.

  Kuru is caused by a protein known as a prion that is found in brain tissue, and is similar to the brain-wasting dementia in humans known as Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. The disease is spread when an altered form of the prion in the brain tissue that someone consumes makes its way into that person’s brain, where it converts their prions to the altered and disease-causing form. About 40 percent of people worldwide carry a form of the prion gene that provides some protection against kurulike brain disease, suggesting it has been prevalent in our history. But so widespread and evidently long-standing was the practice of cannibalism among the Foré that a novel genetic variant of the prion protein which granted even further protection from developing kuru arose among those Foré who had been most exposed to eating human flesh.)

  Peter Bryan had been sent to the London hostel in 2002 after serving eight years for the violent murder of a shop assistant. Over the next year at the hostel, he threatened staff and other residents. In spite of this, after one of Bryan’s routine assessments his caseworker wrote that he was making “good progress” and “does not present any major risks.” Later enquiries into his case reported that it had been difficult for even experienced health professionals to detect just how dangerous Bryan was. The Times for September 3, 2009, reported what the health authority responsible for him had found:

  Peter Bryan clearly had a very severe and complex mental illness. In his lengthy contact with a range of services and a range of professionals, he was able to function at a high social level and did not display any of the typical behaviour or symptoms one would associate with a severe mental illness. We accept that elements of the care provided to Mr. Bryan could have been better but we also note that the independent report does not say the killing of Mr. Cherry could have been predicted.

  How could someone on the verge of bludgeoning a person to death, sawing off their limbs, and cooking and eating their brains be described as “calm and jovial,” “able to function at a high social level,” and not displaying behavior typical of severe mental illness? We should resist the temptation merely to blame incompetent social services staff o
r to pass this story off as a bizarre but rare misfortune. It could be either or both of those things. But Peter Bryan’s case forces us to accept the unsettling possibility that otherwise pathologically mad human beings have the capacity to deceive even those trained to spot abnormalities and to do so repeatedly over a number of years. This story is not an isolated one. Reports of serial killers, con artists, fraudsters, impostors, charlatans, and mountebanks whose acts, if not as gruesome as Peter Bryan’s, display the same sophisticated abilities to deceive others are never very far from the headlines.

  Bryan’s deceptiveness becomes less surprising when we recall that our large brains probably evolved in a social arms race with other brains in which increases in social intelligence in some were met by replies in others. Traits that allow you to outwit your neighbors in this social competition will grant benefits and quickly spread to your children, and then to theirs. This will have meant, among other things, developing the capacity to “get inside” our rivals’ minds, to try to anticipate what they might do next. It became necessary to have a “theory of mind”—a sense of knowing what you think another animal knows, and being aware that it is having similar thoughts about you. In these circumstances, one of the best ways to thwart someone else’s theory of (your) mind is to develop sophisticated abilities at deception. In fact, we have reason to expect that deception is a normal—in the sense of routine—feature of our societies. Our social organization, based on cooperation with people we are not related to, means that we engage in a nearly continuous stream of exchanges of favors, goods, and services. Successfully deceiving others can therefore produce a nearly continuous stream of rewards as we tip these exchanges in our favor, getting just that little bit more of our share of the benefits of cooperation from each of them.