THIS CHAPTER CONTINUES our disturbing journey into our dark side. Envy, greed, and power are linked because they all revolve around the acquisition of resources. Resources can include money, possessions, positions, or people—whatever serves our needs and desires. We all have a desire to obtain these things, and sometimes we go to great extremes to get them—even if it means violating our own morals.
Envy is defined as coveting specific resources that others have. Herein, I shall focus mostly on possessions, wealth, and other material things, not relationships. (We covered relationships as resources in the last chapter.) Greed is the relentless pursuit of resources, above and beyond basic necessities for survival and comfort. Power is control over resources, including and especially people. Dictionaries have different word choices, but those are the definitions that frame this chapter.
We are all guilty of envy, greed, and the pursuit of power at certain times and in certain circumstances. We all want to do well for ourselves, and we all want the independence to make choices without economic or social restrictions. We all want a big home, a nice car, toys and gadgets to entertain us, a generous salary, plenty of vacation time, a beautiful husband or wife, darling and obedient children, supportive friends, and so forth. We all want those things, and that is not a bad thing, per se. Envy and greed start out as normal ambitions; there is nothing wrong with seeking and getting the basics in life.
Envy and greed become evil or sinful when the pursuit of resources becomes unhealthy, excessive, and insatiable. We begin to harm others, either intentionally or unintentionally, as we put our own desire for more stuff ahead of the needs and desires of others, including those who already have less than we do. Particularly with greed, we are talking about a callous and cruel disregard for the needs of others.
Delineating between normal ambition and ruthless power-mongering is a bit arbitrary. There is no clear line in the sand, only shades of gray. I think that we can all agree that working hard at your first job out of high school and then asking for a reasonable raise is an example of totally normal and healthy ambition. Similarly, nearly all of us would label a billionaire hedge-fund manager as greedy and evil if he cut benefits from his employees just to save a few bucks for himself. At the two ends of the spectrum, the moral judgments are more or less unanimous. Cases in the middle, however, are harder to label, and reasonable minds can disagree.
Greed is also a double-edged sword in nature. Healthy competition for resources is good for the long-term survival of a species, just like economic competition is good for the economy and distribution of wealth. Similarly, greedy and power-obsessed animals can threaten the survival of a species just like unbridled greed can do great harm to an economy and its political structures. Greed factors very prominently in the same dance of competition versus cooperation that has been discussed in other chapters. Greed pits the personal ambition of individuals against the success of others.
IT IS ALL ABOUT RESOURCES (AND SEX)
As mentioned in the previous chapter, in social animals resources bring status, and status brings reproductive success. We have seen how relationships, whether social or sexual, are interconnected with status. Possessions, too, can enhance social status.
First, a familiar story: Remember the cliff swallows from chapter 5? These birds live in very large colonies with an intricate social structure. One aspect of that social structure is the building of nests. Their nests are, shall we say, unique. They are made of a muddy paste that is allowed to dry in a tube shape and stuck onto the cliff face, sometimes even underneath a ledge. Picture a very large hornets’ nest-like tube, big enough for a small family of birds, stuck to the side of a stone cliff. The paste is made from mud, sand, sticks, feathers—whatever they can find.
Given the herculean task of building these nests, it is not too surprising that the size, quality, and location of a nest bring social status with it. For example, nests nearest to the watering hole, lake, or ocean are the most coveted. This is not just because of the easy access to drinking water but also because the water is where much of the social interaction takes place. If you remember, although the swallows form stable mated pairs, there is a lot of extramarital courtship and sexual activity as well. Much of that takes place around the watering hole or shoreline. It is a prime spot. The further you get from the water, the lower your status. It is just like the real-estate market in any major city: location, location, location. Because status equals sexual desirability, there is a pretty strong correlation between proximity to the watering hole and reproductive success in swallows.1
This is where envy comes in. Those with the nice nests in the fashionable part of the colony are sometimes the targets of nest theft. A mated pair of cliff swallows may envy another pair’s nest so much that they actually work together to forcibly evict them from their home and steal it.2 Of course, such a heist must be executed carefully. The operation must take place when only one member of the pair is home defending it. (Swallows are not so foolish as to leave a nest totally unguarded for very long.) Further, there is no point trying to steal from a larger pair of birds, since they will simply take it back. The thieves could lose their own unguarded nest in the meantime.
The point here is that envy, the desire for someone else’s things, is clearly present in this species, and with good reason. Having a better nest actually gets you something: more offspring because of your social rank. For both the males and the females, having a prime nest means that they will be more attractive to potential copulation partners at the watering hole. For the males, that means more offspring. For the females, that means baby daddies of higher status. Both cases lead to enhanced reproductive success. Natural selection would thus tend to reward both envy and home theft. Whoever said that thieves never prosper was not an ornithologist.
However, there is a downside to having a highly desirable nest. Besides the risk of home invasion, prime nests are also frequently the “victims” of brood parasitism—the placement of others’ eggs in their nests in order to “mooch” their parenting efforts. Sneaky cliff swallows have evolved a keen sense of figuring out which nests are the best for rearing fledglings. It is more than just the sexiness of the residents and the location of the nest. Some nests are infested with egg parasites that damage or destroy the young eggs before they can develop and hatch. Somehow, cliff swallows can detect the level of infection in other nests. They use this knowledge to help them decide where to place their eggs if and when they decide to parasitize the parental efforts of others. Nests that have lower levels of egg parasites will suffer higher rates of brood parasites.3
You may recall that I railed against the very idea of brood parasitism back in chapter 5 and instead argued that cliff swallows simply employ a system of communal parenting. I am not contradicting that claim here. It must always be remembered that competition is still present, even in cooperative social systems. In cliff swallow colonies, extra-pair copulation and egg transfer are part of the social fabric, but that does not mean that they are always harmonious. There is still competition, resistance, and struggles. It is just like dominance struggles among rams or dating in humans: there are often casualties.
There is no “pure” cooperation in the animal world. It is always a balance. Even though brood parasitism is common among cliff swallows, it does not mean that it is all perfectly egalitarian and selfless. No bird (or human!) likes to carry the weight of others, even though he may accept that he has to do it from time to time in order to live in harmony. While I emphasized the cooperative side in chapter 5, I admit now that plenty of sneakiness and selfishness is involved.
This sounds awfully human to me. Each of us is a swirling mass of good and evil drives. We care about others, especially those we love but also strangers in need; yet we also work to get ahead of others. Most of us see nothing inconsistent about volunteering at a soup kitchen on Sunday and working tirelessly to undercut and defeat a competing company on Monday. Both the soup kitchen and the competing company are filled with our fellow humans, are they? Similarly, the difference between a teammate and a competitor is often found by analyzing whether or not we gain from their success. If helping John Smith helps me, we are teammates. However, a teammate can instantly become a competitor when a promotion becomes available and only one of us can get it.
Envy and greed, like jealousy, is the shifting of our focus from the cooperative to the competitive. Humans, like all social animals, have long known that working together promotes our common prosperity and makes available more resources for each of us. Within that scheme, however, there is nothing guaranteeing that those resources will be partitioned equally. Envy and greed motivate us to acquire and consume more than our fair share and, in so doing, ensure our genetic legacy through reproduction.
RICH GUYS GET ALL THE GIRLS (AND VICE VERSA)
Although we may not be aware of it, one key aspect of our motivation to get an education or a good job is to make ourselves desirable to a spouse or partner. Think about it. When meeting potential dates, “What do you do?” is one of the first questions asked—if not the first. “What does he do?” is also the first question that parents ask their children when they learn they are dating someone new. Why would that be? Surely not because everyone thinks that accountants are better parents than scientists or some other nonsense. The blunt truth is that we ask the question, “What do you do?” because we want to know about the earning potential of the suitor. Truth be told, we would probably rather ask, “How much do you have?” but that would be a bit too obvious.
There is a cold truth behind the reality that everyone wants their children to bring home doctors. Face it: if we wanted our children to bring home people that are more likely to be caring and dedicated parents, there would be much more cachet in saying, “My daughter is dating an elementary school teacher!” Admittedly, financial resources matter more to some than others, in part because some people fancy themselves as the breadwinners and so will concern themselves with other traits when searching for a mate. Still, I do not think it is a stretch to say that having a lucrative profession is seen as highly desirable in the search for mates.
Of course, mate selection is an aspect of human society in which gender roles and social conditioning still have a hold on many. Nevertheless, the general connection between attractiveness and wealth is undeniable.4 Bill Gates has a large number of female admirers (males, too) who express an overwhelming physical attraction to him. Yes, Bill Gates. Of Microsoft fame. What do you think they are so attracted to? It is difficult to imagine that he would get a second look from those people if it were not for the fact that everyone knows he has an enormous stock portfolio. Donald Trump never struggles to score beautiful women, and we know it cannot be because of his looks or his personality. Rich and powerful people are seen as more attractive than they would be otherwise. We all know it.
Interestingly, there may be some symmetry in the relationship between wealth and attractiveness. It has been suggested more than once that base level of attractiveness can also impact future success. Jerry Seinfeld once joked, “You don’t see many handsome homeless.” Callous jokes aside, there may actually be some truth to this premise. Attractiveness has been shown to have an impact in simulated personnel actions such as hiring and promotion.5 Attractiveness and self-perceived attractiveness can even impact everyday exchanges in ways that benefit people who are good-looking or at least believe that they are.6 Sadly, this phenomenon likely begins well before adulthood, and attractiveness can have bearing on academic success of adolescents in certain instances.7 Teasing out the relative contributions and cause-and-effect relationships of attractiveness, self-confidence, and the expectations of others is extremely difficult, but suffice it to say that there is a well-documented link between attractiveness and wealth/power, and this link likely operates in both directions.
In this light, the evolutionary origin of greed and lust for power is rather obvious. The more wealth we acquire, the more attractive we will appear. The more attractive we are, the more attractive (and numerous) will be the mates that we attract. Therefore, wealth and power have the potential to bring us not only more children, but better children, at least in terms of attractiveness, if we assume that attractiveness has some genetic basis. These more and “better” children will help propagate not only the genes for attractiveness but also the genes for greed and appetite for power. It is a rather simple and self-reinforcing cycle. Of course, this drive would be held in tension by the advantages offered by cooperation, but the advantages enjoyed by the greedy are obvious. Just take a look around the world today. It is no wonder that humans came up with the concept of karma.
What about animals? Do wealth and resources actually lead to more and higher-quality sexual partners? Not surprisingly, the answer turns out to be yes. In many species, one sex does the “courting” and the other does the “choosing.” There are many ways that an animal can court another. Some sing, some croak, some display colorful body decorations, some fight, some dance, and so on. However, some try to impress the opposite sex through their acquisition of resources. It is not the same as “purchasing” sexual access, although animals do that, too, as we saw in chapter 4. Some animals build an empire of sorts in order to attract a choice mate, whatever that entails for that particular species. Some examples will illuminate.
Many birds employ the phenomenon of territorial display. Most hummingbird species are a good example of this.8 In the spring, male hummingbirds will stake out a territory and then make mating calls to attract a female to roost. However, the females are not attracted to the males based on the quality or volume of the song, as are some other birds. The calls just grab the females’ attention. Once a female hears the male, she comes over to him and checks him out. It is more like a catcall than a courtship song. However, once she starts looking, the things that make a male attractive have little to do with what he is and everything to do with what he has. The females are most interested in a male with a large territory with lots of food sources and places for nest-building—in other words, a wooded area with diverse vegetation.
Under this system, the males have every reason for ruthless greed. In North America, most hummingbird species are migratory, and the males arrive back in the north two to three weeks before the females. This gives them time to establish their territories. Each male tries to stake out as large and rich a territory as possible, with lots of flowers and trees. However, the larger and more densely vegetated the territory is, the more difficult it is to protect from neighboring males looking to expand their territory. A male will protect his territory by standing guard on a high branch. Intruders are then warned with distinctive calls and wing-beating sounds. If the “verbal” warnings are not enough, the territorial male attacks the trespasser. To do so, he floats up to a very high altitude and executes a dramatic (and dangerous!) nosedive attack. The intruder is rarely injured and usually just moves on.
Most of the male-male fighting takes place before the females arrive. By the time they do, the territories are established. A female spends just a few days visiting various males, and she makes her choice almost exclusively based on the size and quality of his territory.9 Interestingly, there is a debate about why the territory matters to her so much. Some argue that the territory itself is an attractive place for her to live, build a nest, and raise her chicks. However, since most hummingbird males stop guarding the territory after they have mated and contribute nothing to the nest, eggs, or hatchlings, some see the territory-based selection process as an expression of sexual selection. Since large and rich territories equal reproductive success, females choose baby daddies that are good at defending them in the hopes that their sons will also have that talent. It is a version of the “sexy son” theory that females choose desirable mates at least partially because they want desirable sons to promote their own reproductive success. In this case, however, desirability comes from your real estate, not your looks.
A slightly different twist on this hypothesis claims that the ability to stake out and defend a large and desirable territory is a good proxy measurement of the overall health and vitality of the male. For example, a bird needs good eyesight and visual processing, as well as a keen sense of smell and knowledge of trees and flowering plants, to assess the suitability of a patch of land. He needs certain cognitive functioning to make judgment calls about how much territory to try to defend: too large and he cannot defend it; too small and he may not impress the ladies. He must be alert with good vision and hearing in order to detect intruders before they have established a strong position in the territory. Finally, to pull off the impressive nosedive attack, he must be strong and fast, with good muscle coordination and integration of senses such as vision, tactile perception (to sense wind, air resistance, and contact with leaves), and the sensation of position, equilibrium, and balance. All in all, I would say the selection criterion used by female hummingbirds—the size of a male’s territory—is a pretty reliable summary measurement of the overall quality of the males.
It turns out that hummingbird-style territorialism is common, though not universal, among birds.10 Woodpeckers, mockingbirds, cardinals, and most other “backyard birds” are territorial, with the males usually partaking in the defending and the calling. Interestingly, in most of these birds, the males stick around after insemination and actually contribute the parenting equally or nearly so. (Hummingbirds are in the tiny minority, among birds, for having deadbeat fathers.) Accordingly, the territory is even more meaningful to other birds than it is to hummingbirds. The males actually utilize much of their territory, together with their mates, foraging for nest materials and food for the family. That the desire for prime real estate is retained in hummingbirds even though it is not really needed indicates that this is a deeply ingrained instinct in birds.
Red-winged blackbirds are even greedier than hummingbirds. In this species, the territorial males also attempt to stake out territories, but square footage is not as important as the richness in fruit and sources of water, which are necessary to support the brood of hatchlings that the males hope to sire there. However, you would think that a male would be satisfied with a lush territory that provides ample fruit and water to support the largest possible nest. Nope. A male will continue to seek, fight for, and defend more and more territory. If he is successful at that, he may attract a second female, who will establish another nest. After that, he will go on searching and fighting. He is never quite satisfied. In this scheme, the most hapless male blackbirds end up with zilch, and the most aggressive and successful will father as many as ten nests with three to four eggs each. Most of the males end up with one or two mates, making this species a rare exception to the monogamy exhibited by most birds.11
The most interesting thing here is that the polygyny of red-winged blackbirds is directly related to resource acquisition. There is a near-perfect correlation between how rich a male can make himself and how many wives he will get. This is a prime example of the connection between greed and reproduction.
Using acquired resources to attract mates is not unique to birds. We already talked about how most male fish build nests to entice females to deposit their eggs.12 The females are most attracted to males that have built (and have been able to defend) large and elaborate nests. In many species of fish, there is no “married life,” and the females do no parenting. They simply squirt their eggs, and that is it. Judging a male by his nest works well because, presumably, the ability to build and defend a nest is a measure of the health, strength, and skill of the male. Health, strength, and skill are things that all fish mothers want their children to have. Also, in theory, defending a nest prior to spawning is not all that different than protecting the eggs afterward. For fish, judging a male by the home he has built makes a lot of sense.
OTHER TYPES OF ANIMAL GREED
Although most examples of animal greed involve the acquisition of resources for the direct purpose of reproduction, there are a few additional reasons for animal greed. Take, for instance, the wolverine. This aggressive and powerful member of the weasel family has a reputation for being quite the bully. Wolverines can successfully fight off and chase away much larger animals, including bears, cougars, and moose (!). There are even stories of a lone wolverine fending off an entire pack of wolves, each one of which probably having outweighed the wolverine. They also have a penchant for being smelly. Sometimes called the skunk bear, wolverines frequently spray their territory, their food, their mates, their offspring, and even themselves with a mist from their anal glands. Given their toughness, other animals are well advised to steer clear of the musky scent of the wolverine.
Not surprisingly, wolverines are expert hunters, rarely preyed upon, and comfortably at the top of their food web. Because many other predators seek the same food sources, wolverines have become fierce competitors. They are known to chase other scavengers away from a carcass, and they have no shame in stealing a hard-earned kill from a smaller wolverine or even a different animal. They are voracious eaters, which gives rise to their various names in other languages such as “glutton” (in French), “gluttonous badger” (in Romanian), and “fat belly” (in Finnish). In fact, the scientific name of the wolverine is Gulo gulo, from the Latin word for gluttony.
Although wolverines sound rather like playground bullies, this is all pretty standard food competition. Where does the greed come in? Well, after a wolverine has eaten all he can, whether from his own kill or find or from something he has stolen from some unfortunate schlimazel, he will actually spray the leftover food with his marking scent. Biologists once thought that the wolverines were marking the food to protect their next meal of leftovers. However, this does not seem to be the case. Wolverines rarely return to their leftovers. Sure, the distinctive wolverine scent alone is probably enough to dissuade many animals, but it turns out that the spray of wolverines, unlike that of skunks, for example, is highly acidic. By spraying noxious carboxylic acids onto the leftover food, the wolverines actually accelerate the spoiling process.13 To summarize, the wolverines consume all they can fit into their stomachs, and then they try to spoil any leftovers so that other predators and scavengers cannot eat them. This fits part of our description of greed. It is not just about acquiring things; it is about having more than others have.
Those not comfortable assigning the term greed to these small weasels may counter that this is just a good competitive strategy. If an animal is in constant competition with other animals for the same food sources, there is an advantage in not feeding the competition. By leaving leftovers behind, the wolverines would be helping future competitors live to fight another day.
My response to that is, “Bingo!” Greed is precisely that. It is an intense competitive strategy that goes beyond just getting what we need. It is also about preventing others from getting what they need. Greed makes us see everyone else as competition and drives us to measure what we have against what others have.
What about primates, our closest relatives? The many species of primates exhibit widely different social structures. On one hand, bonobos have a highly stratified social structure with a strict rank order that determines everything from mate choice to partitioning of resources. On the other hand, there are orangutans, which are mostly solitary as adults. Gibbons tend to form nuclear families, while gorillas live in harems. When it comes to sharing of food and resources, primates pretty much run the whole spectrum.
Researchers at New York University discovered that rhesus monkeys display similar behaviors to humans when it comes to risk tolerance and wealth.14 These scientists used water as the proxy for wealth, as water resources are important to rhesus monkeys, which are adapted to arid habitats. In this model, greed—the “thirst for money”—is represented by actual thirst. Over many days, the monkeys were trained to make choices that could lead to them receiving water. There was a “safe” choice that gave them a small amount of water no matter what, and there was a “risky” choice, which gave them a 50 percent chance of getting a large amount of water and a 50 percent chance of getting nothing.
After the monkeys had been well trained on the gambling system, the researchers presented them with the choices when they were either well hydrated or a bit dehydrated after a short period of water deprivation. This was to simulate wealth and poverty. Researchers measured the blood osmolarity (a measure of hydration) of the monkeys and then provided the monkeys with the water choices. Interestingly, the thirstier monkeys nearly always opted for the safe choice: a guaranteed small amount of water. The well-hydrated monkeys tended to take the fifty-fifty choice. With plenty of water already, they were willing to tolerate the risk of getting nothing for the chance of getting a big payoff.
While this study was, first and foremost, a proof of concept that rhesus monkeys can be trained for experiments involving game theory and wealth apportionment, it revealed that primate and human psychology share features when it comes to risk and wealth. The less you have, the more risk averse you are. The more you have, the more you are willing to risk in order to get even more. Economists have known this about humans for some time.15 Those who are already wealthy, or whose proximate family is, are more likely to take risks such as starting a new business, changing careers, or putting large sums of money into venture capital. It is not just that they have more to risk; they are looking for the big payoff. For those of more humble means, this seems greedy. If you already have a decent living, why not go for safe choices that will ensure you retain your comfortable lifestyle?
Wall Street is the perfect example of this. Wealthy investors start hedge funds or engage in rampant speculation about the future of specific markets and commodities. As we have observed over the past decade, such wild speculation is incredibly risky. If left to their own devices, an elite group of greedy investors can take down not just themselves but the entire global economy as well. The most aggravating part is that they were wealthy already!
While it may be oversimplifying to compare human greed with the choices that thirsty rhesus monkeys make, there are definitely parallels, which speaks to an underlying common thread: wealth invites risk; poverty leads to risk aversion. That behavioral feature is likely present in all primates and could have evolved into human greed in our lineage.
THE EVOLUTION OF GREED AS A BEHAVIORAL PROGRAM
How did greed evolve? Consider the examples of animal greed that I have discussed. The example of territoriality in hummingbirds shows that, for some animals, the aggressive pursuit and dominance of terrestrial resources has a direct benefit for them. They have every reason to be greedy. Further, not unlike human greed, that appetite for land resources is purely selfish. The birds do not actually need that territory, and they do not end up using it for anything. They want it simply because they do not want others to have it.
In fact, if each male hummingbird would be more content with a more humble plot of land, the environment might even be able to support more hummingbird nests. The individual pursuit of success seems to limit the potential of the species. This is not an uncommon outcome because evolution is not goal oriented. Negative features are sometimes perpetuated by their own popularity. Many species have evolved themselves into evolutionary dead ends. After all, 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed on the planet are now extinct. Fierce and counterproductive intraspecies competition is no doubt a big part of that. Take heart: there is a reason that mammals now dominate the planet, with birds not far behind: these two classes of animals have made the greatest strides in augmenting competition with cooperation.
Is human greed like hummingbird greed? Is it largely about showing off, increasing our social standing, and impressing potential sexual mates? I would argue that it is, but for now, just say that a “greed program” does exist in the animal brain, and it is reasonable to think that humans inherited this ancient program from our ancestors. The greed program is a behavioral suite of observations, calculations, and desires associated with the acquisition and dominance of resources.
Greed in humans is not necessarily identical to that of other species because a behavioral program can be shaped by evolution over time, just like an anatomical feature. Consider the digits of the forelimbs in mammals. In different habitats and lifestyles, natural selection has shaped these digits into fingers, paws, hooves, fins, and wings in humans, dogs, horses, dolphins, and bats, respectively. The same anatomical digits are the common underlying chassis of those wildly different structures. Similarly, behavioral programs are like templates that can be modified in different lineages based on the adaptive pressures experienced in a specific time and place. In different kinds of animals, the greed program can be suppressed, enhanced, and tweaked as appropriate.
For example, it should be noted that not all bird species engage in territorialism like hummingbirds do. Those that engage in communal nesting, like herons, swallows, and most waterfowl, do not show any territorialism toward each other. They do defend their nests, but that is something else altogether. They do not even build those nests until after they have formed a mated pair. For most swallows, courtship involves song, not territory.
This does not mean that these communal birds do not have greed or that greed is not about reproductive potential for them. Remember the cliff swallows? They are greedy, but in a different way. They do not stake out huge territories in order to show off, but they will engage in nest thievery. They may try to pass their eggs to others so that they can lay more. And that is greedy. The greed program can manifest in a variety of ways, from territoriality to hedge funds and brood parasitism to corporate malfeasance.
Ergo, to dissect the programming of human greed, I turn back to experiments in our closest relatives, the primates. In possibly the most sophisticated look at how nonhuman primates behave in regard to wealth and resources, Professor Laurie Santos at Yale University has spent years teaching capuchin monkeys the concept of money using silver-colored tokens.16 The monkeys use the tokens to purchase various items from the researchers, mostly their favorite foods. To help simulate a marketplace, they created a special enclosure where all transactions take place and certain research assistants become “salesmen” for specific items. By giving the monkeys a limited number of tokens and many options, the scientists can explore the decisions that the monkeys make and probe the effects of comparative pricing, salesmanship, and sales and discounts as they force the monkeys to make difficult decisions that reflect the value that they place on certain items.
Within this simple economic system—“monkeynomics,” as it came to be called—some fascinating phenomena were observed. Not surprisingly, theft was one of the first things that the researchers noticed. Of course animals will steal food, toys, and tools from each other; that is nothing new. However, this was the first time it had been shown that animals would knowingly and intentionally steal currency in order to spend it on other things.
In other matters, the monkeys do all the things that humans do with their money. They consider the price of things before they purchase, they take advantage of discounts, and, when offered various choices, they budget their purchases to get as much out of their money as they can. As far as we can tell, they do grasp the concept of money and behave in ways identical to how humans behave in a similar market scenario.17 (This was the same research group that documented the exchange of tokens for sex, discussed in chapter 4.)
The most interesting observation is that monkeys behave similarly to humans when it comes to risk and loss. This is an elaborate experimental scenario, so buckle up and bear with me. There is a bizarre feature in humans that has been known for some time: we are more able to tolerate risk in order to gain something than we are when we might lose something, even if the end results are the same. Here is an example similar to one often used by Professor Santos: suppose I give you twenty dollars. It is yours to keep if you want it. However, say I then give you a choice. You can do nothing and I will give you five dollars more. Or you can flip a coin and you get ten dollars if it comes up tails and nothing if it comes up heads. In this scenario, most people actually choose to play it safe, take the extra five dollars, and walk away with twenty-five dollars. It is something for nothing, so why risk throwing it away?
In another scenario, I give you thirty dollars. Then I force you to choose between two options, both involving the possibility of loss instead of gain. You can flip a coin: if it comes up tails, you lose ten dollars, and if it comes up heads, you get to keep the full thirty dollars. Or, you can play it safe and do nothing, and you have to give back only five dollars. Which do you choose? If you are like most people that have been placed in this scenario, you will choose the riskier option and opt to flip the coin. This is bizarre because the choices in the two scenarios are actually the same. In both cases, you are choosing between twenty-five dollars and a fifty-fifty chance of twenty dollars or thirty dollars. And yet, most people play it safe in the first scenario but take the risk in the second scenario.
This contradiction is a sign of inconsistent and irrational thinking. It is a perfect example of how our intuition toward making financial decisions is frequently flawed. We hold on to a losing stock, even though all forecasts tell us to sell. We are easily fooled by sticker prices that are heavily inflated only to be marked down as “50 percent off.” We will not sell our house at a loss, even as taxes, bills, and cost-of-living expenses pile up. We do not measure the value of things solely on their own terms. We measure the value of things relative to what we spent on them or what they were supposedly worth previously. Humans are prone to behave irrationally when faced with losing money.
Professor Santos’s research group arranged choices equivalent to those mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Using the monkeynomics system, they found that the capuchin monkeys exhibit the same risk aversion that humans do when they are faced with losing what they have already purchased.18 This discovery tells us that the irrational way we behave when losing money is not human nature; it is primate nature. Capuchins diverged from our evolutionary lineage about forty million years ago, meaning this psychological quirk is an ancient and hardwired feature of the primate brain.
Furthermore, I would argue that this speaks to the evolution of greed in humans. Specifically, greed is about relative wealth. Greed means wanting your yacht to be ten feet longer than your neighbor’s. Envy is being upset when your neighbor gets an even bigger yacht in return. It is a never-ending cycle. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” it is sometimes called. We all do this, but my point here is that the reason may be because we have evolved to judge amounts of wealth and resources in purely relative terms.
GLUTTONY
Gluttony is the overindulgence and overconsumption of food and drink. It is similar to greed, in a sense, but focused specifically on foodstuffs and not in any way directed at others. Gluttony is overeating for its own sake, not to get ahead of others. It is a private and personal sin and something we are not usually eager to show off. In that sense, it is probably closer to masturbation than to greed.
Gluttony is something pretty much all of us are guilty of from time to time. We all love to eat. We especially crave rich, calorie-packed foods. Knowing that we “should not” often makes no difference at all. How often has your willpower collapsed at the sight of a scrumptious, moist chocolate cake? Our drive to eat is much more than just basic hunger. I think I speak for pretty much everyone when I say that if there were a magic pill that would allow me to eat anything I wanted in unlimited quantities and not suffer any weight gain or health risks, I would eat about six gigantic meals a day. And pecan pie. Lots of pecan pie.
There is a drive within all of us to eat, eat, and eat some more. Unfortunately, this drive also tends to focus on foods that are horrible for us. When was the last time you had an intense, mouth-watering craving for brussels sprouts? At our most basic level, we are built to crave high-fat, high-sugar, and high-protein foods. Sure, many of us grow into an appetite for more healthy foods and learn to shun the empty calories of milkshakes and soda, but if you believe that is the result of anything other than conditioning and training, you are kidding yourself. If children exhibit a more basic form of human emotions, their appetite for sweets and aversion to vegetables speaks for itself.
Gluttony is a feature we share with pretty much all animals. Anyone with dogs or cats knows how they can gorge themselves on treats, meat, and other rich and savory foods. Often, we have to carefully regulate the diets of our companion animals or else they will become overweight very quickly. The same is true for laboratory animals such as rats, mice, rabbits, fish, monkeys—you name it. Zoo animals, too. Great care has to be taken to select their diet—not just to include the diversity of food that they need to be healthy but also to regulate their intake so that they do not become morbidly obese. In sum, almost all animals, including and especially humans, if left to their own devices, will overeat to the point of extreme obesity. Why on earth is that?
Contrast this with the seemingly contradictory fact that you almost never encounter obese animals in the wild. Animals in their “natural state,” that is, the environment they are adapted to through thousands of years of evolution, are most often trim or even skinny. When we put them in an artificial habitat, they will immediately balloon up if we are not careful. Why would this be? Could it be that the artificial nature of the simulated environment just is not right for them? Indeed, it was previously thought that the stress of captivity caused hormonal changes and nervous overeating. It turns out that that does not seem to be the main issue. You might also guess that the lack of proper physical activity and exercise is the culprit. Nope. Plenty of experiments and anecdotal experience have disproven both of those hypotheses.19 So why do animals stay skinny in the wild but become obese in captivity?
The answer is a little disturbing. It turns out that animals in the wild are probably living in a near-constant state of intense hunger. As noted in the introduction, life on Earth is a pretty difficult experience for most animals. Life has been bustling on our planet for at least 3.5 billion years, and the animal kingdom emerged at least six hundred fifty million years ago. That is ten times longer than the amount of time that has passed since the last dinosaur died. During all this time, the proliferation of animals has allowed them to fill virtually every possible niche, in which they experience intense competition with each other. The great majority of animals in the wild live their lives teetering on a knife’s edge between survival and death. There simply is not enough food to go around. The fact that all species tend to produce far more offspring than can possibly survive was one of the first key realizations by Charles Darwin, leading him toward his discovery of natural selection.
What does this have to do with gluttony? Because animals are locked in a vicious struggle for survival, they are wired for intense hunger; they seek food essentially all the time and will consume every last bit that they can. After all, who knows how long it will be before they get another chance? Only by gorging on food when it does become available do animals get the best chance of surviving to the next meal. A lion will eat fifteen pounds of meat in a single sitting; a snake will eat a meal that can nearly equal its own body weight. President Teddy Roosevelt told a tale of a school of Amazonian piranhas devouring an entire cow in minutes.
Humans also have the drive to eat at every opportunity. As soon as our stomachs empty, we want to eat again. Fruits and vegetables will do if nothing else is available, but we really want the good stuff: high-fat, high-calorie foods. Those are the foods that are most essential for surviving for days and weeks when food may not be available. The problem is that nowadays, food is available to us constantly. Our brains are not built for that. Sensible eating decisions and disciplined restraint are not part of our inborn psychological toolkit. Nowhere in the animal world is self-denial important for survival. Today’s era of ready access to rich foods is a new experience for Homo sapiens, and there has not been near enough time to expect a change in our biology because of it.
It should be noted that it was previously thought that our relatively sedentary twentieth-century lifestyle was mostly to blame for the recent increase in obesity seen in Western populations. The idea was that, in previous generations, much more of the population earned their living through physical toil, and, prior to electronics, most recreation was physical. While these two phenomena do probably play some role, the idea that decreased physical activity is chiefly responsible for the recent obesity epidemic is now falling out of favor.20 The availability of rich foods and our resulting calorie-rich diet seem to be the main culprits.
For the masses, it is only been a few hundred years that rich food has been this readily available, and that is only in the developed Western world. Before the Industrial Revolution, only an elite few could eat rich foods every day, and the rest were not much better off than animals in the wild. Indeed, being stout or plump was a sign of aristocracy and privilege until the early twentieth century.21 We are now surrounded and bombarded with high-calorie foods, which goes against millions of years of evolution that have trained us to overeat whenever possible. Overeating was a great strategy when it was only rarely possible anyway, but now we are able to do it every day—multiple times. For most of us, our feeble willpower is simply no match for our physiology. As far as our bodies are concerned, at every meal, we are pounding on the energy storage, as if for a long winter when we may barely eat at all.
It is even worse than that. In addition to a tendency to eat, eat, eat and choose energy-rich foods, our bodies are also built to adjust our metabolism and fat-deposition patterns to easily gain weight and have difficulty losing weight. Anyone who has struggled with weight loss can tell you this. Weeks and weeks of dieting and exercise results in negligible weight loss, while a weekend eating binge can pack on a few pounds just like that. This is not an illusion caused by our cynical human tendency to see the glass half empty. Our bodies really do adjust our baseline metabolic rate in order to prevent weight loss and promote weight gain.22 This is accomplished by ramping down our “extra” uncoupled thermogenic energy expenditure when calories are being restricted and by immediately capturing any surplus calories in our diet and locking them down as fat deposits.23 Screw you, human body! In fact, it appears that exercise alone is often ineffective for weight loss and can sometimes do more harm than good. It stimulates our appetites in proportion to any calories burned.
Why are our bodies so impossible when it comes to weight management? It is because we are built to withstand a life of famine and starvation. For nearly all of our evolutionary history, obesity, heart disease, and weight-related diabetes were essentially nonexistent, so we did not evolve many defenses against them. On the other hand, starvation was a daily threat. Everything about our infrastructure for energy metabolism is reflective of that. In fact, that is exactly why heart disease and obesity are so common now—our metabolisms are poorly adapted for the food climate that we currently live in. The current Western diet is so mismatched to what our bodies were designed to cope with that most of us are “fat, sick, and nearly dead” (the title of a popular documentary on the subject). Depressing, no? Things could be worse. You could be killed by your spouse (see chapter 7).
Just to end things on a slightly more uplifting note, I should remind everyone that healthy weight management is still possible, even with bodies that are seemingly built to thwart us. Fad or crash diets never work over the long term. Hundreds of studies have proven that. Instead, healthy and sustainable eating styles must be adopted permanently. Opt for more fruits and vegetables, fewer desserts and meat. More whole and raw foods, fewer processed and sweetened ones. Cut out the soda and trade out fruit juice for vegetable juice. Combine high-protein and high-fat foods with high-fiber and low-density foods. In other words, you can have a rich main dish, if the portion is small and you have veggies or salad as a side, instead of fries or baked potato. Try to eat more slowly and drink plenty of water as you do. Have whole fruits for dessert instead of cake or ice cream. Treat yourself on occasion, but keep it rare and the portions small. Walk and cycle whenever possible, and take the stairs instead of the elevator every day. Throw in some regular cardiac exercise, and you have a recipe for healthy energy management. It is not always easy, and sacrifices must be made, but most people find that the resulting “high” of feeling healthy and energetic makes the new life pattern easier to maintain. (Or so I hear.)
FURTHER READING
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.