Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships

by Dario Maestripieri

  We perceive the activity of our own mind as a fully subjective experience. Although we have no direct access to other people’s minds, we imagine that these minds exist, that they work like ours, and that they guide other people’s behavior through beliefs, desires, knowledge, or ignorance. The ability to think about other people’s minds—what psychologists call “a theory of mind”—was accompanied by the ability to engage in complex forms of imitation, teaching, and deception. We also became capable of making complex predictions about the future behavior of other individuals, making complex mental calculations of the costs and benefits of our actions and those of other individuals, and anticipating the behavior of others the way chess players anticipate the moves of their adversaries and their own moves in response to them.

  Although our new language abilities, our new ability to think and act morally, our new emotions and feelings, and our new cognitive abilities could have revolutionized the way we negotiate our personal and business relationships as human beings, in reality this hasn’t happened—perhaps in much the same way that new technologies such as TV, radios, and computers have not replaced books. Our new mental powers have not replaced the psychological and behavioral predispositions we have inherited from our primate ancestors. Rather, they stand side by side in our brains the way books and the iPad lie side by side on our desk. We still use adaptive behavioral solutions to social problems that are similar to those evolved by distantly related animals such as fish or birds. Since many of our social problems are ancient, we routinely use ancient solutions to solve them. Our intellectual education gives us the opportunity to engage in amazing artistic, scientific, and scholarly achievements. With our moral or religious education and our love for our family, our friends, and the members of our country or any other group to which we belong—which may include the whole human race or all living organisms—we are motivated to engage in virtuous behavior that is valued, praised, and admired by our fellow human beings. And yet, despite how intellectually accomplished or morally virtuous we are, we continue to solve everyday social problems by resorting to the ancient emotional, cognitive, and behavioral algorithms that crowd our minds, often letting this automatic pilot help us navigate through the difficult and dangerous, but always fascinating, waters of human social affairs.

  EPILOGUE

  At 9:00 A.M. on September 18, 2010, a Saturday, I received an email from someone named Mitchell Heisman. Sent from a Hotmail account, the message was addressed to my University of Chicago email account as well as to a few hundred other email addresses, many of which had the “-edu” suffix of American universities, and to other email addresses that appeared to belong to newspaper reporters and government officials. The subject line read “suicide note”; attached to the email was a large PDF. About one hour after I received the email, a thirty-five-year-old man named Mitchell Heisman shot himself to death on the steps of Harvard University’s Memorial Church—while a Yom Kippur service was going on inside.

  I had never heard of Mitchell Heisman and suspect that, with a few exceptions, none of the other people who received the same email knew him either. Although I never open attachments from strangers, that day I did. The file contained a book manuscript, 1,905 pages long, including a 20-page bibliography. I couldn’t help but notice that my book Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World was in the list of references. I then discovered that Heisman discussed the book in great detail and in fact had pulled many quotes from it. I was shaken by the possibility that something I wrote could have somehow contributed to someone’s decision to end his own life. I started reading the manuscript from the beginning.

  I quickly gathered that the book was an intellectual inquiry into human nature, the history of philosophical and political thought in Western societies, the role of science and objectivity in understanding reality, and, ultimately, the meaning of life. The conclusions of the inquiry were not too uplifting.

  A couple of hours later, in the midst of my reading, a person named Jared Nathanson replied-all to Mitchell Heisman’s note. His email read as follows:

  Mitchell,

  You can’t argue the meaning or meaningless qualities of life or Democracy in absolutes. The human mind goes crazy within such attempts of discursive explanation. The idea that anything is meaningless because you cannot fathom meaning or because you can construct an elaborate thesis only exists within your own context.

  Life is. We are. Whatever the meaning, the brutality, or beauty, we exist. To say that there should be a meaning or that meaning isn’t there is in itself, a meaningless task. We exist. The alternative is not to exist. For whatever finite moments of joy and sadness and perhaps intellectual curiosity we experience, we will never solve it all and we (meaning you in this instance) will never come up with a cohesive answer to why one philosophical journey is inherently flawed or not. Like most scholars, you are caught up in the rhetoric of your self-made castle of words.

  What I do know is that once life is over, it is very possible that whatever argument you are making ends with the static confines of your thesis and that your drama in presentation will not cause it to go on forever. The vanity of the suicidal person, the self-centered nature causes the need to exit with a bang, to be noticed by the very people who you probably pity and judge as the unwashed masses.

  The only way that you can prove your thesis or allow it to live past these few moments and perhaps a tabloid moment on television is to live. Live to argue, live to discuss, live to see if you are right or not. Without you standing by your work, you are abandoning the baby, leaving something you obviously put great time into, simply so you can inaugurate its unique publishing. But your work will die, and not because of a great conspiracy that you think will stifle it, but because the drama of your actions will steal the attention from your work. You will take a work of intellectual labor and reduce it to an episode of the Jersey Shore. That is a sad thing for an intelligent man to do.

  If you decide to stay on the planet, I’d be happy to read your work thoroughly and discuss.

  Thanks,

  —Jared

  I immediately Googled Jared Nathanson and discovered that he was the lead singer of a Boston music band called the Heartsleeves. (On their website, www.heartsleeves.com, they describe their music as “Neo Eclectic, Soul Reflected, Sounds of Real Life!”) I decided to email him and ask him what was going on. Jared replied and, among other things, explained to me that

  I knew Mitch, though it must be said I didn’t recall his name when I received the email or when I responded. I didn’t mean to send my response to everyone, that was unfortunate. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t sure at that moment that it wasn’t some kind of internet scam. I responded because I had the feeling that I might know this person or at the least, I understood his plight, trying to find meaning in a world without simple moral narratives to guide us.

  A few days later, Jared sent me another email with a link to an article about Mitchell Heisman that had just appeared on the online edition of the Boston Globe.1 In the article, reporter David Abel provided some biographical information about Mitchell, his family and upbringing, and his living conditions prior to his death. Family members and friends remembered him as a gregarious child who had grown introverted after his father died of a heart attack when Mitchell was only twelve years old. He had studied psychology at the University at Albany in New York, where he generally avoided people and spent much of his time reading. After college, Mitchell worked at bookstores and accumulated a library of thousands of books. He then started working on his book full-time. He lived alone and survived on microwave meals, chicken wings, and energy bars. To better concentrate for his writing, Mitchell often listened to a constant loop of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and took Ritalin. On the morning of Yom Kippur, Mitchell showered, shaved, and ate a breakfast of chicken fingers and lentils. He put on a trench coat over a white tuxedo, with white socks and shoes. Then he went to Harvard and shot hims
elf.

  Mitchell was on a quest to understand himself and the world around him. As a scholar, he used scientific and logical reasoning to examine and evaluate theories and discoveries produced by biologists, psychologists, historians, philosophers, and other researchers. His inquiry led him to conclude that evolutionary biology provides the most direct answers to questions about the self and human nature. In his book, he argued that many of our emotions, feelings, and thoughts reflect biological predispositions that help us survive and reproduce. He also wrote that many patterns in human history can be understood as the outcome of nepotistic cooperation among members of one’s own family or group and competition against members of other groups, and that similar social dynamics occur in other primates as well. When discussing the controversies that followed the publication in 1975 of Edward O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Mitchell bluntly stated: “The problem is not that sociobiology does not make sense. The problem is that sociobiology makes too much sense.”

  Satisfied with the way his scientific reasoning produced the knowledge and explanations he was looking for, Mitchell tried to use the same approach to search for a justification of knowledge-seeking in itself and, ultimately, of his own existence. He wanted to be objective at all costs and eliminate all sources of bias that might cloud his analysis, especially the psychological predispositions toward self-interest, survival and reproduction, and life in general. But after searching for and eliminating all of these subjective biases, he couldn’t find any rational justification for knowledge or life. So Mitchell concluded that, taken to its extreme, striving for objectivity ultimately leads to nihilism and rational self-destruction. In his own words: “Life is a prejudice that happens to be talented at perpetuating or replicating itself. To attempt to eliminate this source of bias is to open your mind to death. I cannot fully reconcile my understanding of the world with my existence in it. There is a conflict between the value of objectivity and the facts of my life.” He committed suicide as an experiment to demonstrate the incompatibility between “truth” and “life.”

  When I was still a high school—and later college—student, I was an introvert who spent a lot of time reading books and thinking. Like Mitchell, I developed an interest in scientific and philosophical thinking as a way to try to understand myself and others around me and to answer the eternal questions of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. I, too, arrived at the belief that evolutionary biology has the most direct answers to these questions, and eventually I became one of those scientists who do “me-search.” I was especially fascinated by human behavior and by its parallels with animal behavior. If Mitchell and I had met and discussed our ideas, I would have agreed with many of his analyses of human nature and human history. I would even have accepted his conclusion that “life is a prejudice that happens to be talented at perpetuating or replicating itself.” Unlike Mitchell, however, I don’t have any problems with that. I find this “prejudice” to be interesting, beautiful, and well worth living.

  Mitchell’s death is a great loss for his family, friends, and humankind. But ultimately, Mitchell was the only one responsible for his death—not the people he met in his life, not the people whose books he read, and certainly not evolutionary biologists and their explanations of life and human nature. As Jared Nathanson tried to explain in his email to Mitchell that didn’t reach him in time, the justification for living one’s life doesn’t come from the explanation of what life is but from life itself. It is possible that had Mitchell lived a better life, he would have chosen to keep on living.

  Evolutionary explanations of the origins and processes of life—as opposed, for example, to the religious explanations advanced by creationists—are viewed by critics as being cynical, pessimistic, and depressing because they essentially maintain that life came out of nowhere. It simply emerged from some lucky mix of rocks, gas, and water. Nor is it going anywhere, since evolution does not have an ultimate goal, such as the reaching of complexity or perfection. The “selfish gene” view of natural selection articulated and publicized by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is also accused of being cynical, because it implies that organisms are merely vehicles for genes and that genes are preprogrammed to advance their own cause in competition with other genes for survival and propagation. Finally, evolutionary explanations of human social behavior are often labeled as cynical, because adaptive behavior is viewed as the product of cost-benefit ratios that are advantageous to individuals and their genes, often at the expense of others.

  These critics make the same mistake Mitchell made. They misunderstand what science is and what it does. Science produces knowledge and explanations, not philosophical, moral, or religious justifications. Evolutionary biology is a scientific discipline; its job is to help us understand what life is and how it works. Evolutionary biology has no business telling us whether or not life is worth living and why. In my view, whether or not life is worth living depends on the quality of one’s own life, which in turn may depend on one’s physical and mental health, one’s happiness or unhappiness. I like to think that there is a threshold level for quality of life, below which one’s life may not be worth living, especially if the prospects for improvement are nonexistent—a rare situation, but one that may nevertheless occur in some unfortunate circumstances.

  Science can improve the quality of our lives in many ways, such as through medicine or useful technologies. Knowledge produced by scientific research can also empower us, increasing our capacity to control our lives and accomplish our goals, and knowledge of the natural world and of all living organisms may lead us to an appreciation of the beauty in nature. However, science does not and cannot provide philosophical reasons that justify why life is worth living or why knowledge is worth pursuing.

  Nature is neither good nor bad; therefore, explanations of the natural world cannot be optimistic or pessimistic. Nor is human nature simply good or bad, and “rational” explanations of human behavior such as those provided by evolutionary biologists or economists cannot be optimistic or pessimistic, uplifting or depressing, hopeful or cynical. People search for happiness in many different ways throughout their lives, and being happy may include feeling good about oneself and having a positive outlook on life and the world. Although knowledge of oneself and the world may be instrumental in the pursuit of happiness, the truth is that there is no correlation between knowledge and happiness. People who are clueless about themselves and the world can nevertheless be very happy. Understanding ourselves, life, and the world we live in can be useful, and indeed a lot of fun, but I don’t think that there is an overall justification for the process of seeking knowledge of the kind that Mitchell Heisman was looking for, just as there is no overall justification or “meaning” of life.

  Instead of realizing that the only way to become happier is to improve the quality of one’s life, many people need reassurance that all stories have a happy ending, that humans are fundamentally good, that bad things don’t happen to good people, or that there is a supernatural being who takes care of us and makes sure everything is okay. If a scientist attempts to explain nature or human nature but doesn’t provide a positive message that makes people feel better about themselves, some of them will simply shoot the messenger. Scientists who communicate often with the general public have learned that their audiences expect a positive message from their science, the way many moviegoers expect that a film will have a happy ending. Movies with a happy ending are probably more successful than movies with an unhappy ending or no clear ending at all, and scientific books with a “positive message” probably sell many more copies than books that don’t have one.

  The notion that human beings have evolved from primate ancestors and that their behavior shares many similarities with the behavior of extant monkeys and apes is itself neither good nor bad. The scientists who attempt to educate the general public about our evolutionary ancestry and close genetic relatedness to other primates can convey a positive me
ssage if they maintain that these primates are fundamentally good-natured. Conversely, people may perceive that a message is bad if our close primate relatives are described as selfish, Machiavellian, or murderous creatures. Obviously, primates are neither good nor bad, neither good-natured nor evil. Therefore, recognizing and understanding our evolutionary kinship to other primates carries no implications whatsoever in terms of establishing the inherent goodness or badness of human nature. That would be beside the point. What our knowledge of the “games primates play” does do is help us understand that human nature exists, explain what it is, and help us learn how it works. And that’s all we can really ask for.