If culture is so intimately entwined with biology, how can we effectively factor out the purposive element in culture to ask what its effects may be on gene pools? The hunter-gatherers in my sample of fifty societies do this kind of tweaking quite regularly by insisting that meat be divided according to the rules, by actively encouraging generosity, by cracking down severely on major free riders, and by trying very hard to manage conflicts before they explode. They often do this preemptively by discouraging the self-aggrandizing or deceptive aspects of their fellows’ behaviors when these are likely to result in victimization—or conflict.
This strategic use of punitive social selection improves the reproductive success of everyone save for antisocially selfish types, such as overly dominant or deceptive deviants. And I’ve held that there’s a zero-sum game going on: the greedy deviant’s loss, for example when he’s stopped from hogging the meat, is everyone else’s gain. Thus, it’s good for everyone’s genes to be part of a group-wide coalition that sees to it that a few alpha males are prevented from monopolizing a modest-sized carcass like an antelope or zebra and sees to it that all share in the proceeds more or less equally.
An important theoretical point is that such culturally based purposeful inputs are both part of natural selection and a product thereof. Thus, their effects have gone beyond shaping everyday group life prosocially, for they have helped to shape our gene pools in prosocial directions that are similar. I believe that these powerful brains of ours have been making all of this possible for thousands of generations, and one major and totally unintentional side effect has been the conscience that originally made us a moral species. Another has been our unusual propensity to practice generous behavior outside the family, which evolved through a variety of mechanisms and which, I propose, humans have deliberately amplified in order to facilitate better cooperation.
THE ADJUSTABILITY OF GENEROSITY
Tendencies to extrafamilial generosity just naturally come into conflict with innate selfishness and nepotism—even as they’re being amplified by the impressive array of cultural practices we’ve met with, and even as social selection makes them useful to fitness. For scores or hundreds of millennia, the balance among these three in their everyday expression has made possible the cooperation we are famous for, and if we look at hunter-gatherers’ overall meat-sharing patterns, our well-amplified, innately generous impulses can be seen as oiling the wheels of a collaborative hunting-and-sharing system that has been highly useful to the interests of, respectively, individuals, families, and bands as a whole.
From the standpoint of reproductive success, this cooperative system has worked superbly in what I’ve called normal times, even in bands like those of the ever-contentious Bushmen, or of certain Australian Aborigines we’ve mentioned, with their routinized grousing about not getting fair shares of meat. The bottom line is that all LPA hunter-gatherers do share large carcasses immediately after they kill them, that they do so in similar ways, and that they seldom get into serious conflicts over this meat even though it’s so precious. This is their normal mode of operation, and even when the making of hostile demands is pronounced, this simply produces social pressures that help to keep the system of sharing working for everyone.
This is the cooperation our forbears are so famous for, and it takes place in normal times, when the meat supply is adequate—or at least is not woefully inadequate. But I’ve presented an untold part of the human cooperation story that is equally important. For our species, all times haven’t been normal—far from it. We’ve seen that in situations of serious scarcity tendencies to extrafamilial generosity will begin to lose out and that even nepotistic helpfulness can be set aside.
Such flexibility stood our species in excellent stead when attempts to stay with normal, “good times” modes of altruistic, contingent meat sharing could have led to total extinction of a hungry, embattled regional population had it continued to live—and share—in a good-times mode. Once a band’s equalized sharing system was abandoned, and sharing declined to the level of nepotism, this might have permitted at least a few lucky or unusually adept families to survive by cooperatively subsisting on their own until better conditions arrived, or until migration to a different region with better possibilities could be accomplished. In still harsher situations, as we’ve seen, a similar argument can even be made with respect to individuals acting just on the basis of egoism.
When Leibig’s Law comes into play sharply, and the already-limited quality of human generosity becomes seriously strained, on average the individuals who can adjust their responses accordingly will gain a fitness advantage. Thus, it’s adaptive to fit in well with a band or family unit that cooperates well—but it’s also adaptive to strategically step back and become more selfish if that’s the only way out. This certainly could have been adaptive, but obviously it was very stressful emotionally for the moral beings who in earlier hard times were keeping our species in business for us.
I believe it’s when the chips are down, and true famine strikes, that the tripartite division of labor within human nature we’ve been discussing can be evaluated most accurately. And what this tells us is that when food supplies are adequate, cooperation can pay off quite handsomely and that the rather modest dose of innately prepared extrafamilial generosity we possess can, in fact, go a long way because of shrewd cultural reinforcement—and because generosity can beget more generosity.
The result has been an efficient—but fragile—capacity for cooperation that has had the virtue of being quite flexible. That’s why today we can cooperate effectively not only as hunting bands but also as tribes or as chiefdoms—or as individual nations. Whether this will work for today’s global community of nations may be a different matter, and I shall briefly address that problem in the Epilogue.
A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Just because humans have been capable of making prosocial choices that shape their societies and affect their very gene pools, does this mean that our species has evolved as far as it could in this direction? I doubt it. Consider, first, what might have transpired had the Late Pleistocene Epoch continued for another 50,000 years instead of beginning to seriously phase out about 12,000 years ago, and had the invention of agriculture never even occurred. Possibly, this additional 2,000 generations of exclusive (and often highly precarious) hunting and gathering might have made us evolve genetically so that our social systems would work more smoothly than they can today, or so that our moral responses would be somewhat different, or so that our modest but important gift of generosity-based altruism might have become stronger—or even could have dwindled, though this seems unlikely.
Thus, today’s innate moral capacity may amount to a mere evolutionary work in progress—even though in so many respects it seems to have been doing its main evolutionary job of contributing to individual reproductive success and getting us through times when the ecological chips were down. If in fact our moral potential is still changing, this may not fit very well with our self-concept as the moral animal, which of course has some self-congratulatory “finished-product” philosophical undertones. But my job as an evolutionary anthropologist is to tell it like it is, and we can only guess about this.
If conscience evolution began fairly abruptly in terms of an “egalitarian revolution” starting just 250,000 years ago, things may still be evolving in this respect. If it began much more gradually, long, long ago, with an authority-hating, autonomy-loving Homo erectus or early archaic Homo sapiens that perhaps wanted better access to females, our moral evolution is likely to have become more genetically stabilized—the idea being that at 45,000 BP an equilibrium would have been reached with respect to an optimized conscience and an optimized “altruism quotient.” We may never find a way of assessing all of this, but it’s interesting to think about.
The scientific study of Pleistocene bottlenecks probably is not yet complete,45 in that additional findings may be on their way. But we may well have just barely made it in terms of na
vigating some really dangerous junctures when relatively small numbers of human survivors hung on in refuge areas while their regional colleagues perished by the hundreds of thousands.46 Our evolving flexible moral capacity may have been an important part of this picture, and if we assume that these close calls did occur once in a while, it makes sense that even with the facultative adjustments we were able to make, these flexible social capacities were barely up to the job of keeping us alive at the species level.
One obvious implication is that another 50,000 years of Pleistocene instability might eventually have done us in, pure and simple, through sheer bad luck—at some time of cruel adversity when even an “every man for himself” response couldn’t keep just a few of us in business. But, conversely, had these wildly varying selection pressures continued, they might have allowed us time to develop some still better (or different) mechanisms for coping. Just how this might have affected our moral capacity is difficult to say, but the selection forces involved certainly were likely to have favored moral flexibility.
Basically, the evolutionary “destiny” of our species has been up to chance—unless you believe that a micromanaging Divine hand was protectively overseeing the process. I don’t. I believe devoutly in dumb luck as far as the basics of biological evolution are concerned, and this affords little comfort if as a human being, you’d prefer to feel watched over and “special.” Of course, I’ve argued that intelligent intentions on our own part may have helped us genetically to become by nature moral, but we certainly never intended this to take place. Nor did we design ourselves to make it through the Pleistocene, even though I believe we were smart enough to continually fine-tune our contingency-based meat-sharing systems in times of ecological adequacy, and smart enough to abandon them when the chips were really down.
All of which is to say that we cannot take our present moral potential or our present capacity to cope with environmental crises to be either finished products or outcomes of biologically enlightened intentions. We arrived at our moral nature in the great evolutionary arena of chance, even though our very immediate purposeful inputs influenced the process in directions that were prosocial. Indeed, if we set aside this hypothetically extended Pleistocene as an evolutionary fantasy, and consider the actual Holocene present we live in, our moral capacity surely continues to evolve at the level of genes, for some key environmental constraints have changed, and for urban humans surely they are changing further as I write this.
FUTURE HYPOTHESES ON MORAL EVOLUTION
I’ve hypothesized that 45,000 years ago culturally modern band-level societies were continuing to help shape our human gene pool as people favored individuals with good reputations and punished active free riders, just as their forbears had done. The social context was a cooperative band with usually four to seven families, a band far too egalitarian to let any one person run the show. Today’s huge, highly organized, socially and politically hierarchical modern societies differ in the ways that problems of social deviance arise, and in how they are handled by highly centralized systems of law and order, so as I said, this evolutionary story hasn’t necessarily ended. In fact, its trajectory is likely to be changing.
As just one instance, in spite of police detectives and computerized data banks, sociopaths too often go undetected in our large, anonymous societies, and their frightening genetic footprint could, in theory, be increasing. We need only to think of a modern serial rapist, who in an intimate hunting band would know that he could be easily identified—and that as a practical matter he’d better avoid expressing such behavior or he’d soon be killed. Today, if undetected, in theory he can gain a major genetic advantage even though in many parts of the United States abortion interventions would tend to reduce this. And over a few thousand generations, such advantages might be adding up—even though, very fortunately, at least a portion of these conscienceless monsters are taken out of circulation so that they can’t stock our gene pools. In many other ways, presently unfathomable, we may assume that our evolutionary course could be gradually changing because, in these modern settings, the selection scenarios have changed.
We do now have a genomic baseline for future studies, even though at present we can’t identify a single very specific “moral gene.” And a few generations in the future, we may have identified some of the genetic mechanisms that help us to behave egoistically, nepotistically, and altruistically, along with others that make for sympathetic generosity, domination and submission, and a variety of other socially significant behaviors that are relevant to morality, including our shame responses. Perhaps we may even be able to understand the basis for social dispositions that make us prone to blush and find some clues as to how they might have evolved. This may seem optimistic, but then it would have taken an optimist in 1950 to predict that the double helix code would soon be cracked.
At some future point we could also compare a future genome with the one we possess now, but unless that future were very distant, this probably would tell us very little—unless gene selection can proceed far more quickly than we believe it to. This is not out of the question socially if we consider all of the types and levels of selection that are likely. These include two-way runaway social selection, kin selection, piggybacking that involves mistaken kinship, reciprocal altruism and mutualism, group selection, and Simon’s docility selection. All could be contributing to the stabilization and further evolution of traits that make us generous to kin and nonkin alike and that make us moral.
We could also compare current genomes with prehistoric ones, where the necessary DNA is retrievable for Homo erectus, for archaic Homo sapiens, and for anatomically modern humans. Some of these opportunities are already available, and with all this new information we might be able to ask some new kinds of questions, or answer ones I’ve been struggling with here, such as fixing a point in time at which a conscience began to evolve or providing clues as to exactly how or when we were likely to have acquired blushing as a sign of moral distress. What we need is a new Watson and Crick, who can open up the study of social behavior genes in spite of their surely very high degree of complexity.
New substantive findings could lead to novel ways of framing evolutionary questions, and many of the hypotheses explored in this book could become more directly testable or even falsifiable in the sense that philosopher of science Karl Popper famously used the term.47 But I must emphasize that Popper eventually decided that the testing of evolutionary theories constituted a special case, as far as rigorous falsification methods were concerned. Basically, scientific rules for the “building evolutionary scenarios game” have to be more permissive, and that is why I have referred so often to relative plausibility. It is also the reason that I have dared to set forth tentative but specific scenarios like the “large-game hunting necessitated egalitarianism” one.
For the present, the methods and information I have relied upon must suffice, and the various theories I have generated here must be judged largely by how much sense they make as working hypotheses, as well as by how well they fit into the larger pictures I have built. Such evaluation is not easy, and some scientists may prefer to throw up their hands—or even suggest that I may be “hand-waving” my way into one big just-so story. However, I believe the question of moral origins is important enough to merit investing the effort and taking a few chances in terms of setting up working hypotheses that, in combination, may stimulate better working hypotheses for the future.
My credo has been that such scenarios, even if partly wrong, can lead to more satisfying scientific explanations in the future. And I do believe that the Darwinian evolutionary scenario I have laid out here to be an advance over Darwin’s own story, which in 1871—all of 140 years ago—took the conscience to be an apparently inevitable side effect of our human intelligence and empathy, and looked solely to group selection as the way to explain extrafamilial generosity.
Our consciences and their functions are, indeed, tied to intelligence and sympathy, but the message o
f this book is that the conscience has actually evolved on its own in ways that can now be hypothesized on the basis of relative plausibility. Such a theory can be built not only by considering prehistoric changes in the natural environment, but also by giving some serious weight to prosocial human choices as these have shaped our social environments, sometimes quite brutally, and in turn have helped to shape our gene pools.
As I was writing this final chapter, I found myself wondering how convincing the scientific answers I have proposed in the preceding pages will be with the passage of yet another 140 years. I can only hope that my story here, like Darwin’s, will be seen as being incomplete but far from wrong—and worthy of continuation.
EPILOGUE:
HUMANITY’S MORAL FUTURE
This book has addressed an ancient curiosity about human origins, and about our moral origins in particular, and as such it qualifies as pure science. Here, briefly and as an afterthought, I shall carry the evolutionary analysis into an at least partly knowable future as I consider the more immediate practical prospects for our world moral community of nations.
We won’t be considering the future of the human gene pool here, but rather how what is essentially a Pleistocene human nature impinges on our civilized moral future. In times to come, the cultural side of our ongoing moral life faces at least one profound challenge. Rather than rising from the vagaries of an often perilously unstable Pleistocene environment, this challenge is partly one of our own making. It has to do with the further development of our entire planet as one big moral community, that is, as a Durkheimian type of society that can promote cooperation and regulate deviant behavior.
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