by Mark Pagel
THE TARGET OF OUR ALTRUISTIC DISPOSITIONS
THIS ACCOUNT of how altruism arises can help us to understand one of the most contentious ideas about the nature of our behavior and morality. It concerns the question of whether we perform our altruistic acts—especially our acts of self-sacrifice—for the “good of our group” or for more self-interested reasons. Proponents of what is known as group selection believe that Darwinian evolution can choose among groups, thereby selecting for sets of behaviors that make it likely that one group will outcompete another. Group selection theorists believe that the most successful groups of people in our past—our hunter-gatherer or early tribal ancestors—were those whose individuals submerged their own selfish interests to the interests of the group, because this would have created highly cohesive and formidable opponents in battle.
The idea is that over time, this process molded our psychology and social behavior so that we became—as one of the proponents of group selection, David Sloan Wilson, puts it—like cells in a body, or bees in a hive, devoted to the well-being of our group, even willing to sacrifice our health or survival for it. And indeed, suicidal charges in battle or falling on grenades will surely promote your group’s success. Proponents of group selection interpret music, dance, religion, and even laughter as aids to promoting the sense of group membership and mutual well-being that gives rise to these self-sacrificial emotions. It is an account of our nature and individual psychology which has us content to accept that we are part of a larger organism that looks out for its interests, even if this means sacrificing some of its individuals. It is a view that chimes with our sense of duty as taught to us in patriotic songs and national anthems, and is most vividly manifested in our acts of courage and bravery in war. This sense of submerging ourselves in the group is also thought to be why we do such things as help the elderly, give money to charities, put on identical silly shirts to attend football matches, obediently wait in line, and why we positively ripple and snort with righteousness and indignation when we think others don’t do some of these things.
But the account we have given is clear. Even dispositions that can predispose someone to an act of suicidal self-sacrifice can nevertheless evolve out of self-interest, by attracting benefits from others who share that disposition. Sebastian Junger emphasizes that the men fighting in the Korangal Valley were not there to die for their country, to defend their land, or even necessarily to like each other, and many did not. In talking to the men, Junger came to realize that abstract and symbolic commitments like doing your best for your country were of little relevance in battle when it is group effort that saves lives. The men wanted to survive and realized this was more likely the more they all pulled together. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of this peculiar and even shocking form of altruism for understanding our evolved psychology. But we must bear in mind that we are a species that has lived for nearly all of its history in cultural survival vehicles that compete with other such vehicles for the same territories, resources, and potential mates.
We owe the heroes of war enormous gratitude; but few young men join armies willingly except when their home country is directly threatened, and historically those who do have often had few alternatives. Drafts, press-ganging, economic hardship, and ultimatums frequently serve as the most efficient recruiting offices, and desertion in war is common. The trench warfare of World War I is better remembered for callous commanders willing to sacrifice men in their charge rather than men eager to be sacrificed. The least eager were often persuaded by the threat of being shot on sight for desertion. The spontaneous truces that sometimes broke out between the warring sides had to be forcefully put down by these same commanders. Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is a story of individual heroism, but that heroism is a desperate struggle for mental self-preservation in the face of unspeakable horrors, not selfless military sacrifice. Despite what seems like daily reports of suicide bombings, the numbers of people who do this are negligible compared to those who could if our motivations really were to promote our groups at our own expense.
It is the view of war films, patriotic songs, and propaganda campaigns that we do things for our group; but if self-sacrifice were a part of our nature, why do we need to go to such lengths to sell the idea? No one asks us to eat, talk, sleep, or have sex, things that are very much wired into our nature. If we really have evolved to do things for the good of our groups, what are we to make of our tendencies to cheat, deceive, manipulate, and coerce? Why do we need so many laws, police forces, jails, surveillance cameras, and tax offices? Why do we gossip incessantly about others’ behaviors and reputations; why do we compete so strenuously to get ahead and pay so much to get our children educated? All of this would mystify a sentinel bee or an immune cell in our body, neither of which would blink at giving its life and certainly not expect nor receive reward. Indeed, both would race to the scene of invasion clamoring to die for their hive or body.
What seems far more likely than that we are somehow nobly disposed to the idea of self-sacrifice is that natural selection has duped us with an emotion that encourages group thinking. It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the good of the group; an emotion that brings pleasure, pride, or even thrills from coordinated group activities. It is the emotion we feel on the sports field, when singing together, and probably when going into battle. It is the emotion that national anthems, flags, war recruiting posters, patriotic songs, and military commanders exploit. And it is an emotion that by encouraging coordinated group behavior has brought our ancestors and us direct benefits.
Warriors do die, but when the choice is to fight or be killed, fighting with coordinated gusto is often the best option for staying alive, and the spoils of victory can be great. Cooperative altruism of the style we can find in our species has paid handsome dividends in our past—dividends that arise from assembling a powerful and cohesive social vehicle made up of individuals committed to cooperating with each other. It is this that makes human culture the survival vehicle that it is, and we have evolved an entire psychology around it, from our acts of kindness and self-sacrifice to our xenophobia, parochialism, and predilection to war.
CHAPTER 3
The Domestication of Our Talents
That culture might have domesticated us in a manner not
so different from the ways we have domesticated dogs
BUTCHERS, BAKERS, AND CANDLESTICK MAKERS
GO OUT INTO the wild sometime and observe a group of animals. Maybe it is a flock of birds, or a herd of cows, or if you are lucky you might travel to Africa and watch giraffes or monkeys. One of the things you will realize after you have been watching for a while is that, apart from the usual division of labor between males and females, all of the animals in these groups will be doing more or less the same things. If it happens to be cows you are watching, they will all have their heads lowered to graze, they will be twitching their tails, and lowing and mooing. If you are watching a group of monkeys, they will be feeding, grooming each other, and occasionally grimacing or shrieking. If it is a flock of birds wheeling around the sky, there won’t be leaders and followers, at least not for any length of time; the birds’ positions in the flock will be in a constant state of flux. In all of these groups, most of the individuals will routinely do a little bit of everything.
Now imagine yourself up in the air—perhaps having climbed high up a tree—looking down on a human settlement maybe 40,000 years ago. The scene will be different from watching the cows, giraffes, birds, or monkeys. Yes, like them there will probably be a division of labor between the sexes, but even by that time in our history someone might be making a musical instrument, carving a figurine, or crafting jewelry. Someone else might be flaking a stone blade or making an arrow or a spear. Someone else might be building a shelter, making a net or bow, and someone who spent the day foraging might trade some of his or her food for one of these efforts. These humans are doing different things and exchanging what they produce
or acquire for things others have built or acquired.
This kind of task sharing and exchange among unrelated people does not occur elsewhere in the animal kingdom. It is something we take for granted, but it might just have had profound effects on our makeup and be yet another way that culture has sculpted our species. The question we want to ask in this chapter is whether, as a result of thousands or even tens of thousands of years of being able to specialize or “do different things,” people have come to differ from each other in innate abilities and dispositions that make them suited to alternative ways of prospering in society. Why, for example, are some of us so good at music, or art or architecture, and from such early ages, and others not? Why do others have exceptional ability at mathematics, singing, sculpture, or design? Why do others have remarkable spatial abilities or eye-hand coordination? And what of social skills such as charm, leadership, and persuasion? Where does this variety come from? Is it all a product of upbringing or chance, or something more hard-wired?
These differences are a puzzle because if natural selection is the process by which some combinations of genes survive at the expense of others, we normally expect differences among us to get “used up.” Natural selection favors speed in the antelope fleeing from a lion, as well as in the lion. Slow antelopes get caught, and slow lions go hungry. When male songbirds try to attract the attentions of females, natural selection favors the melodic singers. Poor singers remain lovelorn, and more important, childless. But we will see evidence in this chapter that human populations carry what appear to be wide genetic differences related to performance, skills, and personality. Does this variety exist because life in the presence of human society has, throughout history, provided a range of opportunities for advancing our interests, opportunities that have cultivated genetic differences among us? Have we, in short, been domesticated by culture?
SPECIALIZATION AND SELF-INTEREST
IN RAISING this question I do not suggest, much less advocate, any sort of moral judgment or natural order built on the possibility of differences among us in our innate skills or abilities. In fact, we will see that if such differences do exist, they are likely to lead to equally good outcomes in those who have them—indeed, we will see that there is no other way the differences could be maintained. I also do not want to give the impression that I am ignoring our brains’ prodigious abilities to learn and adapt, or the disabling effects of social deprivation. Rather, I want to call attention to the possibility that we have been subjected to forces of natural selection that won’t have arisen in other species. These forces are what evolutionary biologists call “diversifying selection,” or selection favoring more than one outcome, and they arise in our species because of the opportunities culture provides.
In fact, the possibility of domestication by culture is a scenario we should recognize, having inflicted it on countless animals. For example, in just a few thousand years humans created breeds of dog ranging from Chihuahuas to Great Danes. They are all the same species—they can all interbreed, if with care in some cases—and the differences among the breeds are genetic. There are genes for longer legs, shorter ears, fluffier fur, or wider snouts. But our domesticating efforts didn’t stop at appearances. We have also selected for particular behaviors, intellectual abilities, and temperaments. Alsatians are aggressive, sheepdogs and collies are intelligent, having been bred to be good at the complex task of herding animals (try it yourself), spaniels are gentle, and bloodhounds are exceptionally good at tracking scents. Other dog breeds are good at guarding, or at sports; some are good with children, and others, like the sled dogs, have extraordinary physical stamina.
The environment that cultivates the various dog breeds is the environment of human preferences. Calling them breeds is just a shorthand way of saying that among the species we call the dogs, there are genetic varieties that have been selected for and maintained by humans. From the standpoint of the dogs’ genes, humans constitute a social environment that favors many different solutions to the problem of how to satisfy their whims. Dog genes have been only too happy to comply, advancing as this does their survival and reproduction.
From the standpoint of our own genes, human culture also constitutes a social environment that presents many different ways to solve the problems of surviving and prospering. The opportunities for task sharing and specializing might have been limited in our hunter-gatherer past, but there seems little doubt that a tendency toward specialization has always lurked inside our societies. Even among the hunter-gatherers, several hundred different products might have been available—including foodstuffs and local technologies—and it is conceivable that some of these required specialized skills to produce. By about 10,000 years ago, humans had invented agriculture and animal domestication. These practices can produce surpluses of food, and so for the first time in our history some people were freed from having to hunt and forage. Almost immediately after—by 7000 to 8000 years bc—the first stirrings of “urban” life arose as towns were built at places like Jericho, in what is now modern-day Israel, and Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, both with populations of several thousand people. The settlements at these sites supported people who specialized at pottery making, metalworking, and jewelry, and a merchant class arose. There was even enough surplus food with the invention of agriculture to support armies and a religious and political elite. These were people who made no other contribution to society than to protect it, pray for it, or attempt to run it.
By the Middle Ages the pace of cultural change had produced a range of professions that would have left a skilled cave dweller of 40,000 years ago, or even an early farmer, baffled and incredulous. The medieval Italian city of Siena is best known for the Palio, a horse race of three laps around the Piazza del Campo in the city center. The race has been held, with few exceptions, annually since at least 1238. Riders race their horses bareback, circling the piazza three times. It can be an untidy and even dangerous race as riders are allowed not only to whip their steeds on the steeply banked and slippery track but other horses and riders as well. Most races see at least some jockeys thrown or dislodged from their mounts and horses running freely around the course.
But it is not the horses or their riders that interest us here. Siena is also a city of around seventeen small social and political groupings called contrade, and it is the contrade that contribute the horses that run in the Palio. Imagine an irregular shape, like a poorly rolled out pizza crust. This could be a map of Siena. Now divide that shape up into seventeen further irregular shapes that fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This could be a map of Siena showing the outlines of the areas given over to the contrade. Each contrada is associated with a particular trade: there are notaries, silk workers, tanners, cobblers, bankers, painters, smiths and goldsmiths, bakers, potters, dyers, carpenters, apothecaries, weavers, stonemasons, wool carders, and silk merchants. The same set of contrade has been in place since at least the seventeenth century and some sort of contrade structure has existed since the Middle Ages. They are different ways of making a living in Siena, and the differences among them are maintained from one generation to the next as their survival in their present form over at least four centuries—and maybe eight—shows.
In our modern world we see the trajectory toward doing different things, or “specializing,” having reached its endpoint. Some of us are bakers, some of us are lawyers or engineers, butchers, medical doctors, hedge fund managers, mechanics or accountants. Once you become one of these, that is about all you do, acquiring everything else you need from others. Even so, unlike the domesticated dogs, we have a choice as to what we do, so why do we think there has been a cultural current pushing us toward greater specialization—why can’t everyone do a little bit of everything? The simple answer is that once a species works out the rules of cooperation that allow individuals to exchange their goods and services, it no longer pays even to try to be good at everything. We know this from the work of the nineteenth-century economist David Ricar
do, whose book On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation explained an idea that would come to be known as Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage. It is a vexing idea, simple and yet deeply counterintuitive, but one that, without our even knowing it, has penetrated our lives. Our interest here is that it is a law about the virtues of specialization, which can be summed up as “do what you are best at and do only that.”
Ricardo asks us to imagine two countries (the example could just as easily be two people). One is good at producing food and very good at producing clothing. The second is bad at producing food and very bad at producing clothing. Our instinct is that the first country—being better at both tasks—should make food and clothing and ignore the second country. But Ricardo pointed out that this would be folly. Assuming both countries want food and clothing, Ricardo realized that the first country should specialize in making clothes and the second in producing food. The reason is this: the first country can make more clothing than it needs and then trade its excess clothing to the second country for food. Because it is better at making clothing than it is at producing food, when it trades for food, it is acquiring it with an efficiency that rivals that of its clothes making. For the second country, there is little point in making clothes. It should focus on producing or acquiring food and use that food to buy clothes. In doing so, it will be acquiring clothes with an efficiency that rivals that of its food production, which it is better at than making clothes.
Another way to think about the problem is that the first country could raise the most cash per unit of work (if transactions were in cash) by producing only clothes. The same argument applies to the second country. If both countries follow Ricardo’s advice, both will be better off. Ricardo’s law is regarded as one of the most important rules of economics, lying behind the push toward free trade agreements and eradication of tariffs. It is why economically developed countries have had to all but abandon coal mining and manufacturing as countries that pay lower wages can do these things more efficiently. It is why most call centers are located in these same lower-wage-paying societies. Countries need to focus on what they are good at, not protectionism.