Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  If we had those Cro-Magnon field notes, we would read that our hominid predecessors spent most of their minutes alive in the presence of other group members, living in close proximity in thirty-to seventy-five-person groups. Division of labor was pronounced: Females served as the primary gatherers of food and caretakers of infants during the extended period of immaturity, traveling less than males, who would have devoted much of their time to the tasks of hunting—flaking stones for weapons, carving spears, tracking game, sharing information about migration patterns and moments of prey vulnerability. Our Cro-Magnon writer, though, would have to have taken note of the relative similarity in size of females and males (the average difference in size between modern human males and females is about 15 percent; in the hominid species that preceded our immediate predecessor, males were about 50 percent bigger than females) and the competition between males for access to mates that would have produced this leveling off of size differences between the sexes.

  Several chapters would reveal the darker side of our hominid predecessors, and the origins of the disturbing tendencies of contemporary humans. Here the Cro-Magnon anthropologist would have ample data to write about the regularity of male-on-male violence. There would be extensive observations about warlike behavior, and raids on other groups that might give rise to murder and rape. The regularity of strategic infanticide would emerge as a theme.

  At the same time, our Cro-Magnon anthropologist would write specific chapters about social dimensions of the lives of our hominid predecessors that would illuminate the origins of emotions like embarrassment, compassion, love, and awe, and our early capacity for jen.

  TAKE CARE OR DIE

  The first chapter of the Cro-Magnon field notes would be devoted to the prevalence of caregiving, a hallmark feature of higher primates. As Frans de Waal has observed, chimpanzees and bonobos often become wildly distressed when witnessing harm to other group members. Chimps and bonobos routinely protect conspecifics born blind. They shift their play, resource allocations, and physical navigation of the environment when interacting with fellow primates crippled by physical abnormalities. They, like us, are attuned to harm and vulnerability, and tailor their actions accordingly.

  Caregiving is all the more pressing an adaptation in hominids, thanks to shifts in the composition of our predecessors’ social groups. Studies of our predecessors’ bones reveal that for the first time in primate history, our predecessors were often living into old age, up to the age of sixty. These first older primates, wise with information about food sources, how to care for offspring, and climate patterns, likely required care from younger members of the group.

  Even a more pervasive and pressing fount of caregiving was the radical dependence of our hominid predecessors’ offspring. Our hominid predecessors evolved bigger brains: Homo erectus had brains about 1,000 cc, which is 50 percent bigger than those of their immediate predecessors, Homo habilis. The females evolved narrower pelvises, which emerged to support upright walking as our predecessors descended from arboreal life to become bipedal omnivores on the African savannah. As a result, early hominids were born premature, to squeeze through the narrower pelvis region. They entered the world with big brains but few physical survival skills. They had a longer period of dependency than those of their primate predecessors, and required more care, so much so that our hominid social organization had to shift radically, as did our nervous systems.

  In his review of hunter-gatherer social life in The Tangled Wing, Melvin Konner notes the pervasiveness of intensive infant care. This care was typically provided by mothers, but also by engaging fathers, younger female relatives (aunts, sisters), and younger children. Such care might seem indulgent to our modern, Benjamin Spock-trained sensitivities, but in hunter-gatherer culture, it was a given. Thus, Konner observes that the !Kung infant is

  carried in a sling at the mother’s side, held vertically in continuous skin-to-skin contact. Reflexes such as crawling movements in the legs, the use of the arms to move and free the head, and grasping responses in the hands allow the infant to adjust to the mother’s movements and avoid smothering in her skin and clothing. These movements also signal the infant’s changes of state, teaching the mother to anticipate its waking, hunger, or defecation. The hip position lets infants see the mother’s social world, the objects hung around the neck, any work in her hands, and the breast. Mutual gaze with the mother is easy, and when she is standing the infant’s face is just at the eye level of keenly interested ten-to twelve-year olds, who frequently initiate brief, intense, face-to-face interactions. When not in the sling, infants are passed from hand to hand around a fire for similar interactions with adults and children. They are kissed on their faces, bellies, and genitals, sung to, bounced, entertained, encouraged, and addressed at length in conversational tones before they can understand words.

  The mother indulges the infant’s dependency completely in the first year and the second year resists it only slightly. Nursing is continual, four times an hour throughout the day on average, triggered by any slightly fretful signs. Close contact for the first two years allows for a much more fine-grained responsiveness by the mother than can be attained in a culture where mother and infant are often apart.

  Caregiving is a way of life in humans, and has been wired into our nervous system in the forms of emotions, such as sympathy and filial love.

  FACE TO FACE

  A second feature of early humans’ social EEA is that it was almost continually face-to-face. Don’t be misled by the hours you spend alone, commuting, on the Internet, on your cell phone, or fingering your BlackBerry while eating in your car. The amount of time we spend alone is a radical aberration for our species (and a source of many contemporary social and physical ills). Early humans required one another to accomplish the basic tasks of survival and reproduction. They did so in highly coordinated, face-to-face interactions. Cooperative child rearing, where relatives and friends traded off duties, was central to quotidian life, as hinted at in Konner’s quotation above.

  Studies of archaeological sites reveal consistent evidence of cooperative hunting for meat—a critical part of early hominid diet. Relative to many of the animals early humans hunted—bison, elephants, rhinoceroses—our predecessors were weak and slow of foot, and lacking in the fangs, claws, speed, and strength seen in other predators. Early hominid strength was found in coordination and cooperation. For example, at Mauran, in the French Pyrénées, a massive accumulation of bison bones near a river, thought to be 50,000 years old, suggests that teams of Neanderthals banded together to force herds of bison off cliff edges, to fall to their deaths.

  The continual coordination required of early human social life coevolved with morphological changes that gave rise to our remarkable capacity to communicate, which is unlike that of any other species in terms of precision, flexibility, sensitivity, and band width. Unlike our primate relatives, the human face has relatively little obscuring hair (which most likely was lost in the hot African savannah, for purposes of cooling), making it a beacon of social messages. And our facial anatomy includes more facial muscles than those of our primate relatives, in particular around the eyes, allowing for a much richer vocabulary of expressive behavior originating in the face.

  The evolving capacity to communicate is even more pronounced in the human voice. With emerging bipedalism in our hominid predecessors, the human vocal apparatus evolved dramatically. Compared to our primate predecessors, the human vocal tract is elongated. As a result, the tongue has greater range of movement at the back near the larynx, allowing for the capacity to produce a remarkable variety of sounds. Some of the great apes, for example, have an extremely limited repertoire of vocalizations, which reduces to a few grunts. Humans, in contrast, can exhort, punish, threaten, tease, comfort, soothe, flirt, and seduce with the voice.

  Our evolving capabilities to communicate co-evolved with our broader capacity for culture, our tendency to produce artifacts, to imitate, to represent and spread in
formation across time and space with language. As charming as chimps and bonobos are, careful studies of their social existence find little evidence of anything remotely resembling culture—a point many have recently made in suggesting that the human capacity for imitation, symbolic language, memory, and coordination is radically different from that of our primate relatives. In humans our basic emotional tendencies can quickly spread to others, through mimicry, imitation, and communication. The spread of emotions like compassion, love, and awe becomes the basis for social ritual and ethical guidelines, and binds individuals into cooperative groups.

  CRO-MAGNON CEOS

  Our Cro-Magnon anthropologist would readily discern a third feature of early human social life—that it is hierarchical. Every moment of early hominid social life, from who sleeps with whom to who eats what to who touches whom, was stratified. In contemporary humans, individuals fall into social hierarchies with remarkable ease. In research with my colleague Cameron Anderson, we have found that hallmates, within one week of having moved into college dormitories, are nearly unanimous in singling out those whom they report to be of high status, having respect, prominence and influence in their emergent groups. They likewise readily agree in their judgments of who occupies the lower rungs of the totem pole. Differences in status quickly emerge in younger children (down to two years old, where status hierarchies have been observed on the seemingly egalitarian circle rugs of preschools). And don’t be fooled by gender-based assumptions: The concern for status is not just a male thing. Female adults attain comparable levels of status with just as much alacrity and effect. This is echoed in recent studies by Frans de Waal and others, who have documented clear hierarchies in female chimpanzee life. Primate social life is hierarchical, in large part because hierarchies enable group members to decide how to allocate resources with speed and minimal conflict.

  Yet the hierarchical social organization of higher primates and early humans differs dramatically from that of other species. In higher primates and humans, lower-status individuals can readily form alliances, most typically dyadic coalitions, which potentially negate many advantages that higher-status individuals might enjoy in physical size or power. In addition, humans developed several forms of social communication—for example, gossip—by which low-status individuals can comment upon and determine the status of other group members. The emergence of coalitions and alliances in group life, and the capacity for low-status individuals to comment on the reputations of those in power, placed new demands upon high-power individuals. Their power would come to rest increasingly upon the ability to engage socially and advance the interests of the group.

  Frans de Waal has found in his groundbreaking studies of primate politics that with the rise of the capacity of lower-status individuals to form coalitions, “alpha” males and females must rely on social intelligence to acquire and retain their privileged positions. Pure intimidation displays—chest pounding, random fang-bearing charges, throwing stones, and din making—are and were still stock-in-trade for alpha chimps and bonobos and our human predecessors, but new skills were required. Higher-status primates spend a great deal of their day smoothing over the rough edges of their group’s social existence. They are the ones who are likely to mediate conflicts, for example by bringing adversaries into physical contact with one another and encouraging grooming activities that reduce conflict. They are the ones who make sure that more equitable allocations of resources occur.

  My own research with humans paints a similar picture. We have studied who quickly rises in male and female hierarchies in groups of children and young adults. We find that it is not the domineering, muscle-flexing, fear-inspiring, backstabbing types who gain elevated status in the eyes of their peers (apologies to Machiavelli). Instead, it is the socially intelligent individuals who advance the interests of other group members (in the service of their own self-interest) who rise in social hierarchies. Power goes to those who are socially engaged. It is the young adults and children who brim with social energy, who bring people together, who can tell a good joke or tease in ways that playfully identify inappropriate actions, or soothe another in distress, who end up at the top. The literature on socially rejected children finds that bullies, who resort to aggression, throwing their weight around, and raw forms of intimidation and dominance, in point of fact, are outcasts and low in the social hierarchy. Power and status are inevitable facets of hominid social life but are founded on social intelligence more than Social Darwinism.

  THE PERPETUAL CONFLICT OF BEING

  Lest you suspect that our Cro-Magnon anthropologist suffers from a Pollyanaish view of her own kind—a universal bias of most human groups—it is wise to consider her fourth generalization. Here she would observe that almost every waking second of early hominid social life is pervaded by continual and often painful conflict.

  There would be discussion of obvious within-sex conflicts, for example, over mates and resources. Early hominid social organization increasingly came to revolve around the competition between males for access to females. The same applies to females, who, as Darwin long ago surmised, adorn and beautify themselves in an arms race of beauty to attract resource-rich mates.

  This logic of competing interests extends to parent-offspring relations, as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy brilliantly shows in Mother Nature. Offspring make competing demands upon parents. As a result, parents are required to make strategic and often disarmingly utilitarian judgments about which offspring to devote resources to, and, in extreme circumstancs such as famine (or in today’s political climate, civil war), which to abandon.

  This parent-offspring conflict even extends to mother-fetus relations, as Harvard evolutionary biologist David Haig has demonstrated at the genetic and physiological levels. Many of the pathologies of human pregnancy—hypertension and diabetes, for example—have been newly understood from the perspective of the fetus’s making self-serving demands upon the mother’s supply of nutrients, at considerable cost to the mother.

  Siblings are not safe from perpetual, and occasionally mortal, conflict. I remember late one night preparing for a lecture on family dynamics and moral development, having just put my daughters, Natalie, then 4, and Serafina, then 2, to bed. As they peacefully slept in their splayed-out positions, as if dropped out of space onto their beds next to one another, I encountered a fact that left me in shoulder-slumping laughter and tears. In an observational study of American families, four-and two-year-old siblings were observed to engage in conflicts—eye poking, name calling, hair pulling, toy grabbing, arm biting, cheek scratching—every eleven minutes of waking existence.

  This kind of sibling conflict, Frank Sulloway reveals in Born to Rebel, is expected, based on evolutionary theory. Siblings share, on average, 50 percent of their genes, and compete over numerous resources, from the protection and affection of parents to food to mates—particularly when resources are scarce. Sibling conflict is frequent, widespread, and, on occasion, deadly. Sibling sand sharks devour one another prior to birth in the oviducts of the mother, until one well-fed shark emerges. Once a blue-footed boobie drops below 80 percent of its body weight, its siblings exclude it from the nest, and at times will peck it to death. Infant hyenas are born with large canine teeth, which they often turn to deadly effect upon their newly born siblings.

  Conflict is synonymous with human social life. Yet early hominid conflict differed from that of many other species: It was met with evolved capacities to reconcile. This essential insight can be traced back to the observations of Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, who documented how our primate relatives reconcile after aggressive encounters. Prior to Goodall and de Waal’s work, the prevailing wisdom, developed by ethologist Konrad Lorenz, was that following an aggressive encounter, aggressors moved away from each other as far as possible. This view might make sense for solitary species, like the golden hamster, who flee upon attack, or territorial species, like many birds, who rely on birdsong to create invisible but audible property lines to avoid deadly
conflicts.

  For many mammals, though, these options—fleeing the group or solitary territorial arrangements—do not make evolutionary sense. Our hominid predecessors were dependent upon one another to defend against predators, hunt, reproduce, and ensure that offspring reached the age of viability and reproduction. Individuals who were better able to negotiate conflicts almost certainly fared better in the tasks of survival and gene replication. Recent studies have found that wolves who have been kicked out of their group for excessive aggression and an inability to play are less likely to reproduce and more likely to die. Many physiological difficulties associated with human isolation—namely, increased stress, weaker responses to disease, and even shorter lives—suggest that our survival depends on healthy, stable bonds with others. Conflict is costly and painful but better than the alternative—a solitary existence of fending for oneself. Out of the perpetual conflict that runs through human social life emerged a rich array of capacities that short-circuit or defuse conflict—appeasement displays, forgiveness, play, teasing, and laughter.

  FRAGILE MONOGAMY AND THE NEW DAD

  Finally, our Cro-Magnon anthropologist would have to devote a surprisingly chaste chapter to the bawdy politics of our primate predecessors. Their sexual organization differs from that of our closest primate relatives, and makes us resemble the local Towhee or warbler flitting about rather than baboons or chimpanzees. We are relative prudes compared to these primate relatives. Once a female chimpanzee is sexually mature at age fifteen, she advertises her sexual receptiveness by a large pink patch of sexual skin, and for a ten-day period during a thirty-six-day menstrual cycle, she copulates several dozen times a day, with all or most of the adult males in her social group. Aggression and jockeying for access to female chimpanzees during these periods become all-consuming for male chimpanzees. Females raise offspring largely on their own; males contribute to the community but not to individual offspring, and males don’t know which offspring they have fathered.