Westermarck’s remarkable analysis makes ample use of the then available nonliterate ethnography, and it covers some of the topics I have concentrated upon here, such as moral emotions (including altruism), conscience, and capital punishment. It does so insightfully, but in spite of its overall brilliance, today this interesting work is known mainly for Westermarck’s almost offhand hypothesis about incest,10 which was mentioned in a previous chapter. This powerful synthesis deserves better acknowledgment on many other scores, largely as a precursor for today’s evolutionary psychology with its focus on emotions. However, Westermarck did not follow Darwin’s general approach by bringing a strong historical dimension into his evolutionary analysis, and with the information available to him at the time this would have been fairly difficult.
My guiding principle has been that the historical dimension is critical to a full explanation of moral origins, and that it was simply because Darwin hadn’t the needed information that he was obliged to suggest a “byproduct” type of argument with respect to the conscience. Today, a number of other scholars are actively exploring the moral origins question mainly from the ahistorical perspective of “adaptive design,” which also is taken from Darwin. But I find it curious that in spite of our vastly improved knowledge from archaeology, and in spite of our growing capacity to make reliable ancestral behavioral reconstructions, this historical dimension has been set aside to the degree it has.
Perhaps part of the answer is that in grappling with the question of conscience, Darwin set a precedent, and, as loyal Darwinists, scientists who respect his work have simply assumed that in such matters a historical analysis is out of the question. But another piece of the puzzle is that modern academicians tend to put themselves into specialist compartments, whereas Darwin’s curiosity knew no disciplinary boundaries.
Edward O. Wilson did end his classic interdisciplinary work, Sociobiology, with a tentative historical analysis of human social evolution that included matters of morals in the sense that altruism was a focus.11 However, a few years later in his On Human Nature, which dealt much more directly with morality, he did not pursue this historical dimension further.12 I believe it was this second work of Wilson’s that set the standard for well-known popularizations like those of Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and James Q. Wilson, along with Michael Shermer.
Ridley’s popular scientific work The Origins of Virtue is essentially a sociobiological tract in that it sticks to models like kin selection and reciprocal altruism.13 Like Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal,14 Ridley’s book essentially lacks any in-depth historical dimension. The same is true of James Q. Wilson’s The Moral Sense,15 which is written more humanistically but, like more technical academic works in evolutionary psychology, is equally ahistorical if it is compared with Darwin’s way of writing natural history. A similar but theoretically more far-ranging work is Michael Shermer’s The Science of Good and Evil,16 which breaks with this sociobiological tradition in one way: it gives some serious consideration to group selection theory as this has been espoused by Ernst Mayr and David Sloan Wilson.17 But it, too, is essentially ahistorical. Also essentially ahistorical is Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds,18 which basically takes a linguistic approach to moral origins.
In a more technical volume edited by philosopher Leonard Katz, which is entitled Evolutionary Origins of Morality,19 four long chapters provide a nice sampling of the scientific diversity currently encountered in this field. I have already mentioned the first essay, by Jessica Flack and primatologist Frans de Waal. They talk about empathy as a major building block for moral evolution;20 here, I’ve used the more technical term “preadaptation” to the same effect. Their building block approach ties in nicely with a historical evolutionary approach, and it has been as a result of reading their work that I have emphasized human sympathy (they refer to it as empathy) so heavily in the preceding pages.
In Katz’s book my own anthropological chapter comes next,21 and it deals with the prehistoric role of social sanctioning and conflict resolution in the natural selection of moral behavior, with some hints of the free-rider suppression theory I’ve developed here. In the third chapter philosopher Elliott Sober and biologist David Sloan Wilson continue the arguments they made in Unto Others,22 endeavoring to establish group selection as an important factor in moral evolution and to expand its theoretical scope.23 (In their important book Unto Others there’s a great deal of evolutionary theory, and some excellent use of ethnography, but again not very much emphasis on historical process, per se.) The final chapter, by evolutionary philosopher Brian Skyrms,24 is heavily involved with relevant mathematical modeling, and characteristically it is ahistorical and oriented to explaining morals in terms of game theory and adaptive design.25
HUMAN NATURE MATTERS
The great majority of the contemporary work on the human nature aspect of moral evolution is more in line with this last approach of Skyrms. To test such models, most often the primary data are generated in laboratories, usually with children or college students as subjects, and the findings are tested against criteria of evolutionary design, a mode of analysis that (as I’ve said) does stem directly from Darwin. A large number of evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary economists, including Ernst Fehr in Zurich, do this type of work, and in the field of morals some of the overall flavor of evolutionary psychology is exemplified by the title of an article by Dennis Krebs: “The Evolution of Moral Dispositions in the Human Species.”26 But design, not holistic natural history, is the approach throughout.
Among a growing coterie of evolutionary economists, elaborations of game theory of the type that originally inspired Robert Trivers have been used to investigate morally relevant behaviors like human generosity, our sense of fairness, the uses of punishment, and the punishment of nonpunishers.27 In addition, Robert Frank, notably in Passions Within Reason, has contributed significantly to our evolutionary understanding of conscience and moral emotions.28
An interesting recent debate that ties in with the egalitarian theory I espouse has to do with whether, when people in these experiments go out of their way to punish those who make “unfair” offers, they are motivated by a spiteful or otherwise resentful need to retaliate or whether they are expressing an aversion to inequality.29 In subsequent experiments, it appears that by the age of seven to eight, children act on feelings in this latter direction—which helps to build the case that antihierarchical feelings are an important and evolved component of human nature.
Evolutionary economists such as Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis have explored the impact of social control through “strong reciprocity.”30 And with an emphasis on fighting between bands, Bowles has also explored the possibility that group selection might have worked robustly to support altruistic traits in the Late Pleistocene;31 he has suggested that prehistoric warfare, in combination with major genetic differences between different prehistoric forager groups, could have generated significant forces in favor of group selection.32 If we factor in the moralistic free-rider suppression that I have been emphasizing so heavily, this may provide a major, multilevel formula for explaining the evolution of altruistic traits.
HISTORY MATTERS
Contemporary archaeologists and paleoanthropologists have done a remarkable job of explaining historically the physical evolution of humans and their material culture over time, taking their basic methodological historical cues directly from Darwin. They also have studied the cognitive side of prehistoric cultural evolution, to good effect.33 When it comes to accounting for the moral side of our evolution, however, these and the other scholars I’ve just discussed have not readily adopted the historical approach that Darwin himself would have preferred to use.
To many, my concern with writing the natural history of morals more historically may seem rather old-fashioned, or even quixotic, but my aim has been to provide as complete a scenario as possible for moral origins and to do so by employing the rich, holistic type of evolutionary analysis that Darwin used to such good e
ffect—whenever his data allowed him to do so. I could have wished for still better data, but I have provided a number of hypotheses that, I believe, may be useful to future explorations of moral origins in a number of fields, as better data do become available. If some of the present working hypotheses eventually are modified or even replaced by theories that seem more plausible, so be it.
IS HUMAN EUSOCIALITY UNIQUE?
The preceding chapters have made it abundantly clear that moral origins involved some radical changes in our behavioral potential. Yet our ape ancestors, in spite of their lack of feelings of shame, at least had the potential to impose “rules”—as individuals but also as groups—even as they responded to rules imposed by others. It’s our sense of virtuous good and shameful evil, along with our universal and symbolically stated love of altruistic generosity, that sets us apart.
If my treatment of moral origins has focused heavily upon homologous continuities, there has also been what appears to be some outright “novelty.” The symbolic language that allows us to gossip in such specific terms is one such advance. Blushing with shame is also a major evolutionary anomaly in this sense.34 Could such blushing be a signal, sent to others, that somehow redounds to the fitness of the signaler? Or could it have evolved as a way of signaling to oneself that social danger is being courted? I hope that someday we’ll be in a position to make some better educated guesses.
Both socially responsive shameful feelings and the accompanying bodily flushing, which is intimately involved with self-awareness, seem to be unique to humans. The same is true of having a deeply felt sense of right and wrong coupled with a capacity to internalize group rules of conduct—a capacity that is based in personal feelings of being morally worthy or unworthy. Our human degrees of altruism and cooperation may not make us unique among living beings, but what other animal gets there the way we do—by knowing shame or by developing a sense of virtue? And what other animal deliberately amplifies its own altruism because it understands cooperative societal functions well enough to do so?
With respect to the longstanding altruism paradox, our moralized type of extrafamilial generosity certainly is new among mammals, including the fascinating ones we’ve discussed that live in kin-based eusocial colonies that also are held in place by group selection.35 Analogically, the hypercooperative naked mole rat in fact can easily outdo our self-sacrificial generosity as these rodents achieve an antlike social organization. But they do this through underlying mechanisms that appear to be very different from ours, and clearly they do so in the absence of morality. Obviously, this applies also to the social insects, such as many species of ants, bees, or wasps.36 They, too, may outdo us in contributing “selflessly” to their societies, but if we look for homologies, we are sorely disappointed: basically, they are doing this in the absence of anything like an internalizing conscience, gossip, group social pressure, shameful blushing, or moralistic capital punishment by angry, morally outraged bands.
Yet it certainly is true that when we think about how far the human potential for cooperation can develop on the ground, it’s a beehive that readily comes to mind. We have only to think of Egyptian or other pyramid builders—or of rural Hutterite communities or hippie communes or, for that matter, the Nazi Wehrmacht’s most dedicated (and ruthless) elite corps—and the parallels are there.37 Nonetheless, the social insects merely provide a striking analogy, which shows that natural selection can stumble into the making of a collectively oriented species in more ways than one.
If we compare any of these eusocial colony dwellers with Ancestral Pan, our ape ancestor’s group-level cooperation pales by comparison because it was limited mainly to ganging up against conspecific bullies or collectively threatening neighbors. Yet it was this socially limited ape ancestor that had the useful building blocks in place as far as moral origins and the evolution of a human style of cooperation were concerned.
As a far less cooperative antecedent, Ancestral Pan does offer us the following homologies. As reconstructed, this species possessed capacities not only for self-awareness, perspective taking, and dominance and subordination, but also for formation of antihierarchical, counterdominant coalitions. In addition, mothers were empathetically socializing their offspring and providing them with cultural learning models.38 This was a remarkable and fortuitous array of preadaptations, and as building blocks all of them, I think, have been important or even crucial to our moral evolution.
Yet these ancestral apes cooperated as entire groups mainly in routinely guarding their territories, in sometimes putting down alphas, and possibly in mobbing predators.39 Like Ancestral Pan, today’s chimpanzees and bonobos are never likely to build pyramids or organize themselves to distribute meat in a fair and basically equalized manner, in spite of all the ancestral precedents the three of us have shared. And a profound evolutionary question that I introduced earlier still lingers. These two Pan species have had exactly the same amount of time that we have (about 6 million years) to develop a conscience like ours—or at least to develop some kind of shame-based feelings of right and wrong. Why have only we managed to do so—in spite of all these shared primitive characteristics? If the analysis in Chapter 5 was correct, and I admit that I wasn’t bending over backward to give living apes the benefit of the doubt, they haven’t even come close. And overall the analysis in this book suggests that this might be because their group social control has remained so limited that fear-based self-control responses have been able to do the job satisfactorily.
THE IMPACT OF SOPHISTICATED INTENTIONS
If we consider the three fundamental (and competing) “interests” that our genetic nature is designed to serve,40 I’ve emphasized that basically they weigh in heavily in favor of egoism and then, after egoism, nepotism. Both individual self-interest and family interests are straightforwardly selected aspects of our genetic potential,41 and unarguably they’re strong. I’ve emphasized this repeatedly because it’s so basic, and I don’t believe there’s an evolutionary biologist, anywhere, who would say no to this position. And then there’s our still rather mysterious “altruistic quotient,” which ever since Darwin, and especially over the past half a century, has been clamoring for further explanation.
Even though at present scientists are far from being able to identify any functionally very specific human behavior genes, which includes any that might be involved with extrafamilial generosity, I’ve suggested—noncontroversially, I believe—that overall this inherent propensity in favor of being generous outside the family has to be rather weak by comparison. Yet as Sober and Wilson’s work suggests, in everyday contexts this rather modest altruistic potential can be greatly culturally amplified in its expression—if it is actively and purposefully reinforced by social communities that believe in things like social harmony and the Golden Rule.42
I must emphasize, further, that when such phenotypic amplification is accomplished on an insightful basis, this intentional input tends to “focus” genetic selection processes in certain directions—notably, altruists who uplift social life are consistently favored while stingy individuals and those who behave disruptively are regularly disfavored.43 These intention-bearing inputs are made possible by our large brains, and in a sense the intentionality involved does bring a certain purposive element into the process of social selection—and therefore natural selection. Our promotion of generosity helps altruistic genes to be selected reputationally at the same time that our punishment of uninhibited, free-riding bullies or cheaters works against the selfishly aggressive genes that they carry. The advantage goes to the altruists as long as they stay politically united, and therefore to their genes as they are represented in the gene pool.
The human preferences that orient both punitive and prosocially oriented social selection are on a relatively long genetic leash,44 and because they involve flexible choices among alternatives, their effects can be highly facultative, going in quite different directions. For instance, in the face of starvation, only a human being ca
n frame the resulting social dilemma in terms of life, death, and continuation of the family and then consciously choose among the perceived alternatives. And only a group of humans can talk over the dilemma of whether to try and reform a seriously entrenched bully, as opposed to quietly asking his brother to step in and do away with him. Intentions, combined with high intelligence, do make a difference.
I am putting these last ideas forward even though biological scientists normally don’t appreciate the use of any language that smacks of “teleology” in conjunction with evolutionary process. In their book, and mine, natural selection by definition has to be basically blind and not in any way “guided.” However, even though when hunter-gatherers’ preferences affect gene pools this is wholly unintentional, when they go about shaping and implementing their own immediate social policies, often they know exactly what they’re doing. The fact that LPA foragers so predictably use symbols to try to amplify altruism is a testimonial to this, and as a result selection-by-reputation helps to shape gene pools. By itself, this one potent human social preference provides any evolutionist with some serious food for thought.
Both our human cultural capacity in general and many of the specific things that we’re genetically prepared to learn very early in life—such as acquiring a language or helping others in need or having an aversion to inequality—give us an unusual capacity to shape our societies in certain directions, and not in others, and to do so consistently over evolutionary time. If we look at the everyday cultural priorities and vocally manipulative behavior of LPA foraging people in their bands, they have managed to give substantial weight to tweaking altruistic tendencies and to ensuring cooperative outcomes. Innately helpful tendencies are reinforced both in child-rearing and later on, and I’m convinced that LPA foragers have a reasonably good grasp of what they’re doing when they reinforce them.
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