When humans attack and kill their enemies, we may assume that the similarities in how we and chimpanzees express hostility toward out-groupers are homologous, because we share such a recent ancestor and over 98 percent of our DNA. To be precise, the territoriality of chimpanzees and humans is very likely based on similar mechanisms of psychology, which in turn are prepared by large numbers of genes that are similar. The same would go for bonobos, even though their potential for similarly territorial behavior seems to be far less violent.12
WHAT IS A PREADAPTATION?
The moral origins theory I’m developing here is based squarely on arguments of homology. That’s why I’ll be taking such pains to identify likely primitive building-block behaviors in the CA and also in Ancestral Pan, and I will endeavor to show how, over evolutionary time, such behaviors have provided an important preadaptive wherewithal for further evolution.
Vocabulary-wise, preadaptation and the more recent term “exaptation” mean the same thing—genes that support an already evolved trait are “made use of” by blind selection processes in future adaptations. I prefer the older term, even though for many scholars it rings of improper teleological thinking because somehow “preadaptation” sounds forward-looking. Here there will be no such suggestion. Basically, evolutionary process is totally blind—even though through their preferences it has allowed purposeful human actors to unwittingly influence certain aspects of natural selection process in certain prosocial directions. This prehistoric side effect is nothing like genetic engineering by the way, which in contrast is far from unwitting.
With respect to homology, ancestral dominance and fear-based responses to dominance—along with an ancestral capacity to resentfully gang up against dominants—are just two of the many preadaptations we’ll be working with. They provided the basis for humans to develop an increasingly potent type of punitive social selection that affected earlier gene pools. At first, this worked mainly through gang attacks, but eventually it led to far more refined means of social control.
The coming analysis of moral evolution will rely not only on a homology-based behavioral reconstruction of Ancestral Pan, and on archaeological findings about earlier human evolution, but also on dramatic recent information about Late Pleistocene climates. In that context, there will be some innovation in using current (LPA) ethnographic information to help in reconstructing the earlier evolutionary trajectory of the increasingly modern people who had to cope with these climates. I will show how the moral flexibility we experience today could have helped us to cope with these often unruly and sometimes treacherous climates, mainly by people being able to cooperate—but at times by their being able to set cooperation aside.
ANCESTRAL HIERARCHIES AND ANTIHIERARCHICAL BEHAVIOR
One contribution I have made to the behavioral reconstruction of Wrangham’s original Common Ancestor has been to emphasize that it lived a social life that was heavily determined by individual tendencies to dominate and, ambivalently, submit. In Hierarchy in the Forest I start by suggesting that if we look closely at gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans, we’ll see a noteworthy shared tendency for alpha males to appear at the tops of pecking orders, and, linked to the predictable and strong competition for high rank that goes with this, we’ll also see that generally subordinates do not relish being dominated. In fact, in all four of these living apes, rebellious subordinates can form counterdominant coalitions13 to actively reduce the power of alphas. Gorillas do this very rarely, bonobos and chimpanzees can do it routinely, and LPA human groups do this with a real vengeance even though some later types of human groups were able to strongly embrace hierarchy.
Politically, humans are far more flexible than the other three African-based apes. We only have to think of a modern Hitler or Mao or Stalin as an alpha male at the top of a hierarchy—or of an American president as a less all-powerful alpha who nonetheless gives orders to a huge military—and it’s obvious that we share the apes’ hierarchical tendencies and have a strong potential to develop alpha males. However, the proper humans for evolutionary analysis are the LPA hunter-gatherers I introduced in the previous chapter, and their political arrangements are quite different—even though obviously they are based on the same innate political potential. These humans, along with many of the tribal agricultural people that followed them in time, were strongly and insistently egalitarian.14
If the other three African great apes can partially neutralize alpha power by forming subordinate coalitions, human foragers have carried such counterdomination virtually to perfection—at least among the adult males.15 When I say that hunting bands are politically egalitarian, I mean people are so intolerant of alpha-type power moves that normally no individual dares to boastfully aggrandize his own status, let alone try to boss around another hunter or take over a carcass the group wants to treat as common property.
As we’ll be seeing in detail, self-aggrandizing individuals who try such moves are put down by criticism or shaming or are banished from the group; and as we’ve seen already, the very rare unrestrained tyrants, who somehow manage to gain a firmly dominant hold on group life, are soon taken out by capital punishment. Thus, in human politics primitive ancestral tendencies that favor both hierarchical behavior and counterdominant behavior can be expressed phenotypically either in the form of rampant totalitarianism or in the form of radical hunter-gatherer democracy—and anywhere in between. It all depends on how people feel about hierarchy, on how badly centralized command and control are needed, and on the degree to which subordinates’ control of those above them can become decisive.
CULTURAL LEARNING SKILLS ARE ANCIENT
Using Wrangham’s conservative reconstruction method is quite straightforward. If all of the ancestor’s living descendants share a trait, in all probability that trait has to be ancestral. If one or more of the descendants fails to share a trait, however, then an ancestral question mark must be assigned for that particular trait. By using this conservative methodology, even though just a few species are involved, we’ll be able to probabilistically peer deep inside the psyche of our two ancestors, to understand much of what made them tick as highly social beings.
Let’s begin with “family life” in the CA. We might play to a human bias and ask if in the four extant species there’s pair bonding between mating partners, with fathers participating in the nurturing of their own offspring. This certainly is common among humans today and it exists to a significant degree among gorillas, but unanimity is lacking: chimpanzees and bonobos mate promiscuously, and there’s no substantial sign that the biological fathers (they can be identified by doing a DNA analysis on their hair samples) show any very special interest in the females they have impregnated—let alone that they take any major care of their own offspring. Thus, as of 8 MYA, two-parent families with strong paternal participation in childcare will have to receive a big question mark.
What we can say, however, is that the CA at least had maternally based families, for in all four living species the mothers associate very closely with their offspring for up to half a dozen years,16 while siblings also are socially close. This means that a strong matricentric family pattern goes back to 8 MYA and that minimally this more limited form of familial organization has been present in the line leading to humans ever since the time of the CA. At some point, however, humans obviously added something important: we evolved a two-parent family unit, and even though there are no really solid archaeological cues as to when this occurred, we have only to look at ourselves today to know this did take place. At latest the human nuclear family would have arrived with cultural modernity, no later than 45,000 BP, simply because archaeologists agree so unanimously that we were entirely modern by then.17
I chose to discuss this maternally based family structure up front because even such rudimentary familial behaviors provided a very important head start for the evolution of a conscience. Humans are moral because we are genetically set up to be that way, and it’s of interest that today’s
small children turn into increasingly moral beings in highly predictable stages. Sympathetic feelings for others in need of help arrive quite early in infants, as does a primitive sense of right and wrong. These developments are followed by a general sense of rules, while highly self-conscious shame reactions, which include blushing when in the wrong, arrive later when children are reaching school age.18 These learning windows make up a hard-wired sequence, but the rules themselves are not nearly so explicitly prepared by our genes. Like infant or juvenile apes, young humans learn the social rules of their groups early in life largely from significant others they are with constantly—and the most significant other of all is going to be their mother.
When people learn exactly how to be moral from their cultural environments, this starts with the family. But later in life group traditions can have a very strong or even a definitive role to play, and sometimes cultural tradition can make a given behavior perfectly acceptable in one culture but taboo in another. For instance, in some societies it’s abhorrent ever to eat human flesh, whereas in others it may be morally proper and even quite laudable if this act is performed as part of an important ritual or ceremony, as with funerals in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia.19 These cultural differences seem to be much more subject to diversity in symbolic humans than they are in the great apes.
CULTURAL DIVERSITY
Thus, the specific rules we internalize from parents and peers are culturally maintained by local groups, rather than being firmly encoded in our genes. However, although many of these rules can vary widely across cultures, among LPA foragers many of the more socially important rules do appear to be universal. For instance, no hunter-gatherer community condones either killing another group member without proper cause, or theft or cheating within this primary group,20 and the same appears to be true of all humans in all walks of social and cultural life.
Whether a social behavior is unique to one forager group or universal to all humans, our rules of conduct are always learned through cultural transmission—which means originally in the bosom of the family. If we leave morality aside and think ancestrally, all four of the living species we’re concerned with are capable of cultural transmission of social rules and behaviors. This begins with mothers being closely bonded to their infants for a number of years, with the youngsters engaged in imitation and emulation. Thus, for instance, the art of political alliancing is learned first by an infant’s watching Mom’s behaviors, then by trying to replicate them, and later by a juvenile’s watching adults in the group and further modeling its behavior on theirs.
That’s why, for example, these four living species, and therefore the Common Ancestor they share, are all capable of ganging up in coalitions that try to limit alpha power.21 This same social learning capacity would have continued to be available millions of years later, when archaic humans began to develop a culture that carried a still more decisive message: dominating your peers is not merely irritating to others; it’s morally wrong.
For moral evolution to have been set in motion, more was needed than a preexisting capacity for cultural transmission.22 It would have helped if there were already in place a good capacity to strategize about social behavior and to calculate how to act appropriately in social situations—especially when a behavior could get an individual in serious trouble with a dominant other, be this a single individual or, at times, a sizable coalition.
Just like ourselves, chimpanzees and bonobos are quite adept at coping with the power of others, so the development of a rule-based moral capacity had a nice head start. But a head start is only a head start. Next, the right selection pressures had to come along to lead to strong and consistent social control by entire groups, and for these two Pan species they apparently didn’t come along. For humans they did, however, and the reasons for this will be discussed when we turn to the evolution of a conscience.
HOW SOPHISTICATED WERE ANCESTRAL BRAINS?
As Darwin noted, our consciences guide our actions in ways that help us as social beings.23 They keep us congruent with the standards of our groups, and therefore they keep us out of trouble with our potentially very punitive peers. Today, we know that our brain’s capacity for engaging in social planning and for dealing with complex moral orders is at least partly localized in our quite sizable prefrontal cortex.24 As we’ve seen, this brain region plays a major role in guiding our social interactions, and it also involves our moral feelings. In short, it helps us to adjust to the moralistic groups we live in.
A broader question we must address now is exactly how much of an ancestral head start existed in this direction? Is it possible that our Common Ancestor actually possessed something like a primitive but internalized, self-judgmental sense of morals? If we consider all four of the CA’s descendant species as a single phylogenetic family, or “clade,” we know that in this clade the prefrontal cortex is substantially larger in proportion to body size than that of, say, a rat or a solitary polar bear or even a highly sociable wolf or dog. There was a time when it was assumed that in this respect the human prefrontal cortex had to be uniquely enormous, but careful scientific measurement has shown otherwise.25 Ours may not be larger than that of the three other African great apes, and this is not terribly surprising given the social sophistication of these apes. In fact, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas can exhibit remarkably nuanced social behavior when we observe them in the wild. Given this overall social acumen, it’s conceivable that these apes might exhibit something like the moral potential we possess—but that this remains latent because of the “might makes right” type of social life they lead as wild animals.
Proportionate size probably is not the only brain factor we should be considering. Natural selection could have changed humans’ mental functions by restructuring the brain internally, without affecting its overall size, and could have done so in ways that would be difficult to infer from a fossil record that includes hundreds and hundreds of fossilized brain cases but tells us very little about the brains inside because soft tissue is so unlikely to fossilize. This means we must at least ask whether our phylogenetic “cousins,” the living African great apes, may have some potential to react as moral beings who possess a sense of shame. If all of them can do this, then we must think in terms of a very strong ancestral preadaptation in the same direction—and consider moral origins as being not strictly a human affair.
If our Common Ancestor or Ancestral Pan had had some self-judgmental reactions by which it felt badly about itself because of rule breaking, this could have been a preadaptation that made it much easier for the human shame reactions we know so well today to evolve. Required also would have been a sense of “self,” even though as a single factor this does not guarantee having the capacity for shame.
TESTING SELFHOOD IN THE LABORATORY
Our human brains do provide us with a well-developed sense of self. And every person possesses this type of awareness. We share it with just a handful of other large-brained and highly social species, such as great apes or elephants or dolphins,26 and there are convincing experiments to back up this statement. In humans what sociologist George Herbert Mead called the “social self” has been extensively studied by social psychologists,27 and its fundamental role in our makeup is reflected in our languages—which consistently find some way of saying “I” and “you,” as well as “we” and “they.” As actors on a social stage, we are keenly aware of ourselves—of our selves—and this also enables us to realize that others have similar selves, of which we become intuitively aware during social interaction.
At the base of selfhood lies the simple capacity for visual self-recognition, which all people possess. For example, we routinely look at ourselves in the mirror and are aware that it is not another individual but our own image that we are seeing there. Even though humans obviously did not evolve with mirrors in hand, our large brains and our natural history as highly social beings provide the foundations for self-recognition. This trait is so well established that if a naïve
member of a nonliterate culture were to repeatedly see her visage reflected in a pool of water, there would be no more confusion about self-recognition than when a modern teenager scrutinizes his troubled complexion daily in the bathroom mirror. But what about the other three large primates that also originated in Africa?
In a National Geographic film that always delights my students, a chimpanzee at Jane Goodall’s early field station at Gombe National Park, Tanzania, approaches a mirror that has been set up temporarily in its environment and becomes intensely involved with the image it sees. It stares motionless for a moment, and then experimentally the curious ape moves its head sideways several times just to see what its imaged counterpart will do. Suddenly, it whips its head far to one side in order to quickly catch a view of the entity that seems to be positioned behind the mirror. Apparently, it is trying to outwit the “other chimpanzee” that is such a perfect—but elusive—imitator, and it goes through this sequence several times. But each time, of course, the phantom “disappears” from view at the very last minute.
Compare this chimp’s naïveté with that of Harpo Marx when he guest-starred in a remarkable episode of I Love Lucy. Lucy is dressed like Harpo right down to a curly blonde wig, and for some reason of sitcom logic she is hiding from Harpo in a closet. When he slides open the door, Lucy pretends to be his reflection in a mirror, and Harpo becomes engrossed by what he takes to be his own marvelous image. Soon a merrily narcissistic Marx Brother is clowning up a storm, and Lucy’s impersonation is so good that for a long time Harpo is fooled. But eventually she makes a barely noticeable mistake, and a now suspicious Harpo begins to seriously test this “mirrored” image. Some great comedy ensues as Harpo pushes Lucy’s imitative powers to the limit—and in the end she is revealed as an imposter.
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