CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Evolutionary Science of Social Justice

I WAS BORN INTO A WORLD OF SOCIAL INJUSTICE. WE ALL WERE. Most people, for a variety of reasons, choose to accept that this is how the world must be. From an early age I chose to reject that notion and devote my life and career to advancing the cause of justice. For me that meant not just learning how the biological world worked but also deploying that knowledge to the causes of feeding the hungry, healing the sick, releasing the prisoners of all forms of oppression, and bringing about true community among all people. Precious few of my colleagues, in my discipline or in the academy as a whole, have opted to engage in this struggle. I wonder how much of their inaction comes from a failure of vision resulting from observing the undemocratic and unjust world as it is and thinking that our species and its societies evolved this way (and could have evolved in no other direction).

The key to a possible democratic future may reside in our past. Our species, anatomically modern humans, evolved from previous species of hominids. The morphology and behavior of all species are shaped by natural selection. While social behavior seems natural to us, it is in fact quite rare in the animal kingdom. Of the thirty-eight recognized animal phyla, only two, the arthropods and chordates, have species that exhibit extensively social behavior. This suggests that social behavior is not a prerequisite for species’ success in the history of life. Indeed, given the rarity of this type of behavior among animals, one could easily believe that sociality is a detriment. We continue to misunderstand the evolved component of human behavior and how it affects the form of our social structures. There has been a tendency to simplify and often to overstate the organic evolutionary principles that undergird human societies, as evidenced by the ideas of individuals such as Herbert Spencer (originator of social Darwinism). Ironically, Spencer got it wrong because he didn’t understand Darwinian natural selection.¹ Over the last decade there has been a resurgence of this type of thinking among some sociologists.² On the other hand, the idea that our biology has nothing to do with our social structures is equally damaging. Karl Marx was probably one of the greatest theorists of human social activity, but he never produced a theory relating class struggle to humanity’s evolutionary origins. In this regard, Friedrich Engels had some rudimentary ideas that appeared in an uncompleted essay published in Dialectics of Nature.³ The Italian philosopher and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto held that social elites ruled because they possessed a suite of personality characteristics that made them skillful in wielding power, influence, prestige, and status to achieve their ends. Pareto was agnostic with regard to the origin of the psychological predispositions. In the latter portion of the twentieth century, postmodern deconstructionism denied any important effect from evolved human biology on society (and also denied the legitimacy of the scientific method).⁴

There is a complex interrelation between the way societies are structured and the needs and desires of individuals. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson argued eloquently that human beings evolved behavioral pluralism between two extremes of behavior: hedonism and altruism.⁵

Hedonists are only concerned with attaining pleasure and avoiding pain. Hedonism is a special variety of egoism. Egoists place their own well-being at the center of their actions, but they are capable of considering the well-being of others as part of their self-centered strategies to achieve satisfaction. Altruists are thought to have a disinterested concern for the well-being of others, but their actions can also be understood as self-interested because they reap the benefits of acts toward close relatives and of reciprocal acts toward unrelated people. The best model of human behavior suggests that individuals exist along a continuum from those concerned only with hedonistic desires (we might call these people evil) to those overly concerned with the well-being of all (we might call these people saints). In reality, there are probably few people who consciously choose to be evil. Many of the people we classify in this convenient category suffer from mental illnesses and personality disorders, such as psychopathy or sociopathy, borderline personality disorder, and narcissism.⁶ The existence of brain-related dysfunctions is not surprising, but it is amazing that people allowed individuals with such attributes—such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Donald Trump—to rise to political power. Clearly the reason is not in these damaged individual’s personalities but in the defects of the social systems (and individuals within them) that fostered their rise.

We can understand how social systems can allow the rise of such personalities if we recognize that all of us have various levels of personality dysfunction and imperfect cognitive abilities. Our brains did not evolve to be perfect engines of truth determination. Our evolutionary path is the result of a combination of trade-offs in cognitive functions and the evolutionary mismatch associated with the disconnect between the rates of cultural and organic evolution. Our brains, because of their complexity, are in many ways more vulnerable than the other organ systems in our bodies. Thus, their “proper” functioning is contingent upon genetic variation in our populations, but it is even more sensitive to environmental inputs such as nutrition or environmental toxins. Some environmental inputs have had far-reaching societal effects. For example, the symptoms of lead poisoning were reported by Hippocrates in the fifth to fourth centuries BCE and again by Nicander of Colophon in the second century BCE. The Romans used lead extensively, and it is thought that the declining reproductive capacity and mental functions of its emperors were related to the lead used in wine-storage vessels.⁷ And another example: the madness of the British monarch George III was brought on by the genetic disease porphyria and arsenic poisoning.⁸ His mental dysfunction played a major role in his intransigence to the demands of his American subjects and helped precipitate the American Revolution.

These examples of dysfunction even among the wealthy and powerful should help us recognize that in all periods of human history, the vast majority of people suffered from some sort of diminished mental potential as a result of their social subordination, which increased their exposure to inadequate nutrition, environmental toxins, and disease. The discrepancy in conditions meant that those who were socially dominant had greater capacity to lead their societies as political leaders, religious leaders, scholars, inventors, scientists, engineers, and industrialists. In consequence, these individuals drove much of the social and cultural beliefs of their societies, including those beliefs that convinced the victims of oppression they deserved no better or could in any case never succeed in improving their lot. The denigration of the rights and abilities of “lesser” peoples was particularly apparent in the racialized societies that followed the European Age of Discovery, and it has always been a core component of the oppression of women and LGBTQ communities.⁹

AS FAMILIAR AS THE WORD “CULTURE” IS, THE CONCEPT IS DIFFICULT to define. Late nineteenth-century definitions were all-encompassing; they included knowledge, belief, art, morals, customs, capabilities, and habits.¹⁰ A century later culture was defined more narrowly around ideational principles: culture was held to consist of shared ideational phenomena (values, ideas, beliefs) residing in the minds of human beings.¹¹ Seeing culture through this lens results from accepting a structural/pattern definition. This definition sees culture as the acquired knowledge used to interpret experience and generate behavior. It further recognizes that individuals and groups differ in their knowledge, perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. Another aspect of this definition is the idea that culture is socially transmitted, which allows it to be transmitted within and between generations. Cultures also have elements of symbolic coding—that is, they bestow conventional, nonsensory meanings on things or acts. For example, the Aztecs may have thought of the hearts of sacrificed humans as food for the gods. Yet it is also likely that these human sacrifices took place during times of high population density and starvation (so also possibly as a way of feeding the priests).¹² Culture also takes the form of a system of knowledge within a group of people—a system that has hierarchical features: some pieces of knowledge are more important than others. For example, in the Christian gospels, that Jesus’s resurrection is evidence of his divinity is a piece of knowledge that is more important than disagreements between the gospels on specific aspects of his life on earth.

Consistent with the social transmission of culture is its social history, the shared ideas, values, and beliefs that have been handed down.¹³ These attributes also mean that elements of culture evolve. Cultural evolution shares some features with organic evolution, but there are important differences. First, the rate of cultural evolution is generally much faster than that of organic evolution, because the origin of new genetic information is constrained by the mutation rate of DNA, whereas the rate of cultural innovation has no necessary limit. Indeed, the rate of cultural evolution increased as new technological developments made it easier to acquire knowledge. Galileo’s invention of the telescope made possible the discovery of the moons of Jupiter. Their discovery in turn helped overturn the European geocentric understanding of the universe. Other astrophysical tools allowed improved navigation, and this, in conjunction with the invention of ocean-going ships, made possible the European voyages of discovery.¹⁴ The development of superior weaponry (iron, steel, muskets, cannons) made possible the conquest of the newly discovered lands. The conquest of the Aztecs by Hernán Cortés was made possible by a combination of superior weaponry and the accidental introduction of smallpox.¹⁵ A few hundred years later, in the late sixteenth century, the invention of the microscope would lead to a revolution in the treatment of disease. In 1658 Athanasius Kircher (a German Jesuit scholar) used the microscope to examine the blood of bubonic plague victims.¹⁶ He described “worms” in the blood, which he thought might be important in the transmission of the disease. Microbiology would be born of these early researches, altering the way the world treated disease.

Another crucial difference between cultural and organic evolution is that natural selection favors the propagation of genetic variants that increase differential reproductive (fitness) success (the product of differential survivorship and differential reproduction). Cultural ideas can propagate whether or not they increase the survivorship and reproduction of their adherents. For example, the introduction of farming to Europe about ten thousand years ago probably increased the fitness of those who practiced it. Ancient DNA suggests that these individuals originated in the Middle East and migrated into Europe, bringing their invention with them. Europe was already populated by hunter-gatherers, who interbred with the newcomers and probably also learned farming from them. Thus, modern Europeans are descendants of three populations that interbred: western European hunter-gatherers, northeastern Eurasians, and early European farmers (originally from the Middle East).¹⁷ On the other hand, in the first to third centuries CE, participation in the newly forming Christian religion was a cultural practice that would have lowered one’s probable survival in the Roman Empire. (The killings described in the gospels were probably rare; the lower survival and reproduction of Christians in imperial Rome resulted from their social ostracization.)¹⁸ Yet Christianity became the dominant religion of the empire after the fourth century. Today, false beliefs (e.g., that vaccination causes autism or that SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are designed to implant microchips in people) have spread across social media platforms like wildfire. Adhering to such beliefs has the potential to dramatically reduce one’s evolutionary fitness. In 2021, the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant spread aggressively among the unvaccinated, many of whom, even on their deathbeds, refused to accept the reality of the virus, the efficacy of vaccines, or the necessity for wearing masks.

Another major misconception concerning culture is the idea that we are completely unique among animals in having culture. This belief is patently false. Other mammals display quite sophisticated thinking; rhesus macaques, for example, can utilize probability to predict future events.¹⁹ The idea that other primates are capable of complex thinking shouldn’t be that surprising since humans share 98 percent of their genome with chimpanzees and their lineages diverged only between 4.9 million and 7.9 million years ago.²⁰ Given how much of our genomes we have in common, it is highly unreasonable to think that our behaviors would be drastically different. Traits often thought to be unique to humans include walking upright, large brains relative to body mass, culture, use of fire, reduced body hair, use of complex tools, and communication with language. In reality, the traits thought to be unique to modern humans differ from those of other large-brained organisms only by degree. For example, some primates know how to use medicinal plants to cure disease. (I learned of this from one of my early mentors, Eloy Rodriguez.)²¹ Probably the traits most nearly unique to humans are language and complex tool making, and there is evidence that the neural circuits involved in these activities overlap in our brains.²²

On the other hand, some traits that are not unique to humans, and that also play a large role in the unjust societies we have produced during our past, are inclusive fitness, intergroup hostility, and our predisposition to accept authority.²³ Inclusive fitness is premised on the notion that our evolutionary fitness is associated with the fact that our close relatives share genes with us. Thus, the argument goes, behaviors that benefit relatives evolved because we share more genes with our relatives than with strangers. Intergroup hostility is also related to sharing genes with relatives, as humans evolved in small hunter-gatherer groups composed of kin networks. The predisposition to accept authority is related to child-rearing practices. In environments where being killed by the unknown was a real and ever-present threat, there would have been a necessary trade-off between allowing a child to learn by experimentation and requiring strict and unquestioning obedience. This contradiction is the basis of authoritarian personality theory (APT).²⁴ There is strong psychological evidence that the default condition of the human mind is to accept ideas that originate in individuals and institutions of perceived authority. For example, people tend to believe that what is familiar is good and to prefer social policies that are in place (whether they work or not). In addition, the more threatened people are, the more likely they are to cling to the familiar.²⁵ Despots throughout human history have made great use of this last tendency.

These psychological tendencies are also associated with the structure of the human brain, which allows for two types of thought. One, anchored in the amygdala, is fast, automatic, and mostly unconscious; the other, anchored in the cerebellum and basal ganglia, is slow, deliberate, and judicious.²⁶ The predisposition to accept authority is rooted in the first pathway. Our capacity to build a just society will have to rely on the second. The contradictions in our minds result from the haphazard construction of the brain due to natural selection for specific cognitive tasks. Some of these tasks were in concert with each other; others resulted from trade-offs. These tasks were ultimately related to individuals’ differential reproductive success.²⁷ Yet even though the structure of the brain (and the behaviors it produces) led to the differential reproductive success of individuals, that success wasn’t necessarily achieved by ensuring our psychological and social well-being. Indeed, in some cases, it produces quite the opposite, what we call mental illness.²⁸

Our untrained brains fail in so many arenas that could actually help us achieve social justice—including in memory, belief, choice, and what we find pleasurable—that it is worth briefly reviewing these failings. On the one hand, there is some comfort in understanding that these failings are predictable.²⁹ On the other hand, it is precisely the predictability of these failings that have allowed them to be so effectively manipulated for particular social ends. Thus, while “belief” is ubiquitous in humans, our brain is not an objective truth-finding machine that provides us with rational reasons for what we believe to be true. Indeed, our beliefs are contaminated by our moods, desires, goals, and, often, self-interest, making us vulnerable to superstition, manipulation, and fallacy.³⁰ An example that has come to social significance recently is the use of “fake news” on social media platforms to influence politics. In the last three months of the 2016 electoral season, fake news stories generated more shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook than did the top “real” stories.³¹ However, the influence of these sites was hard to measure, and data suggest that the people consuming the most fake news content were about 10 percent of the Americans who held the most conservative views.³² This suggests that the fake news stories reified beliefs already held by that segment of the population.

The lesson to be learned from these failings is that the default position for human thinking about virtually everything is irrationality. We must train our minds to work in a rational manner. By “rational thinking” I mean thinking that follows the principles of critical reasoning. Critical reasoning includes recognizing basic logical forms, logical fallacies, arguments, credibility of sources, and the difference between subjective and objective claims. It can be achieved, but it requires work.³³ Those who control society understand these facts and consistently attack both the methods and the content of public education. In the spring of 2021 Trump Republicans unleashed a new assault on the social sciences and history curricula. Across the nation, they are introducing bills to prevent teaching that America is “racist or sexist.”³⁴ This assault is clothed in the rhetoric of preventing disunity and respecting all people. However, it is similar in form to the attacks on the legitimacy of organic evolution and climate change. Ignoring the reality of organic evolution and climate change represents an existential threat to humans on this planet. In the same way, ignoring the reality of racism and sexism is an existential threat to democracy in the United States. It is the perfect companion strategy to attacking voting rights.

The demographic changes coming in US society will mean that persons of European descent will no longer be the numerical majority in this nation by 2045. In preparation, white supremacist forces are implementing a well-thought-out strategy to guarantee that their interests will still control American economic, social, and political life going forward. They are deploying one of the most effective strategies used by despotic societies: They plan to make it as difficult as possible for people to learn to use their slow, deliberate, and judicious system to think rationally and critically. They want the educational system experienced by the majority of Americans—particularly by poor, Black, and Brown people—to produce docile and compliant workers and consumers. If that method fails with any given person, if that person can think and is willing to act for alternatives to the social status quo, then their tactic will be to simply remove them, by either discrediting their beliefs and/or character or assassinating or imprisoning them. Remember the treatment accorded Rosa Luxemburg, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Antonio Gramsci, Nelson Mandela, and many others.

ALTRUISM WAS ONCE THOUGHT TO BE A PARADOX OF EVOLUTIONARY theory; however, the concept of inclusive fitness helps us understand how it evolved. If natural selection acts to improve the differential reproductive success of individuals, how could altruism (behavior that benefits other individuals) evolve? William D. Hamilton solved this problem in 1964.³⁵ Hamilton proposed that a gene that promotes altruistic behavior could spread within populations if the benefit to the recipient (B) times the relatedness to the actor (r) is greater than the cost (C) to the actor: (B × r) − C > 0. The cost is measured in units of evolutionary fitness (or differential reproductive success). Hamilton’s model was used to solve the problem of how insects (e.g., bees, ants) could evolve a system of sterile castes with one reproductive queen. This kind of social structure is called eusocial. In this case, the sterile females are contributing care to their sister’s (the queen’s) offspring. As a result of this species mating system, the sterile females are actually more closely related to the queen’s offspring than they would be to their own.

Inclusive fitness predicts that in a species such as ours, altruistic behavior is most evolutionarily rewarded by acts that we direct toward our genetic kin (siblings, children, cousins). This is so not just because they are kin but because the genetic variants guiding the behavior are more likely to be shared by individuals who share close ancestry.³⁶ There is abundant evidence that Hamilton’s rule operates in nonhuman species (e.g., in predator warning in a variety of species); however, as human behavior is generally more complex, the bar for demonstrating an inclusive fitness behavior in our species should be higher. The most likely place to be able to observe evidence of Hamilton’s rule would be in hunter-gatherer groups. One study examined net food transfers according to age, sex, kinship, and the net food need of the donors and recipients among the Tsimané forager-horticulturalists in Bolivian Amazonia. The study showed that parents, grandparents, and siblings provide significant net downward transfers of food across generations. It also showed that the extent of the food transfers responded to variation in the productivity and demographic composition of families. These results are consistent with Hamilton’s theory, as the transfers occurred between closely related rather than more distantly related individuals.³⁷

Another study, this one done in an industrialized society (Los Angeles), examined costly instances of women giving and receiving help (e.g., picking up a friend’s kids when she was sick, loaning money for the down payment on a house). The study tested two inclusive fitness theory predictions: (1) Among kin helping will increase as a function of genetic relatedness. (2) Among kin helping will increase as the recipient’s reproductive value increases. The women described 2,520 instances of giving help and 2,651 of receiving help. The study showed that far more help was given or received by close kin (half of genes shared; that is, parents, full siblings, children: about 23 percent) compared to more distant relatives (quarter of genes shared; that is, half siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles: about 4 percent), or even more distant relatives (less than a quarter of genes shared; that is, cousins, children of half siblings, etc.: about 2 percent).³⁸ A strong test of inclusive fitness theory (and one that is particularly relevant to social justice struggles) is provided by the way people behave in life-and-death scenarios. In a cross-cultural study (United States, Japan) participants were asked which person they would save from a burning house. This scenario allowed only one person to be saved; those who remained in the house would die. The persons in the house were related to the person by 0.50 (sibling or child), 0.25 (cousin, grandparent), and 0.125 (second cousin, great-grandparent) of genetic relatedness. In another aspect of the experiment, the individuals also varied by age (less than one, ten, eighteen, forty-five, and seventy-five years). In both Japan and the United States, the results followed the prediction of inclusive fitness theory: the propensity to save individuals declined linearly with more distant genetic relatedness, and within genetic relatedness groups, declined linearly with increasing age.³⁹

It has been argued that inclusive fitness theory cannot explain “strong reciprocity”—that is, the predisposition to cooperate with others and punish those who violate the terms of cooperation, at a personal cost even when it is unlikely that the costs of this action would be repaid. In a series of experiments, Herbert Gintis and his collaborators showed that strong reciprocity was entirely consistent with inclusive fitness theory. They proposed that inclusive fitness played a role in helping evolve the moral capacity in our species that values freedom, equality, and representative forms of government.⁴⁰ Strong reciprocity is by definition a stronger form of reciprocal altruism. In reciprocal altruism, costly cooperation occurs between two unrelated individuals, but only if it benefits both partners, in the sense of “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”⁴¹ The evidence for the widespread existence of reciprocal altruism in nonhuman animals is weak, but the evidence is much stronger for its existence in humans. It is argued that uniquely human traits, such as language, make reciprocal altruism easier to sustain.⁴²

Intergroup hostility has been a constant feature of our species, and it may be part of the evolutionary heritage we share with other primates. The intergroup hostility traits we share with other primates include social networks (whether subsistence groups are generally closed to outsiders), lone males (whether males ever travel alone), female/male dispersion (whether females breed in the group they were born into), interaction quality (whether reaction to outsiders is generally hostile), parties to out-group hostility (whether males or females initiate out-group hostility), stalk/attack (whether adult or adolescent males seek out and attack outsiders), and territorial defense (whether groups stake out and defend territory). These traits are shared by orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans, suggesting they are inherited from a great ape ancestor.⁴³

However, descent with modification means that some traits continued to evolve in ways unique to each species. We know that anatomically modern humans evolved in sub-Saharan Africa (whether eastern, central, or southern is still debated). Modern human behavior (as measured by technology and art) had certainly appeared in humans before they began their migration out of Africa.⁴⁴ It is thought that our ancestral social behavior was characterized by moderately large communities, coalitions of males linked by kinship, unrelated females attached to a specific male (or males), and some intergenerational patterns of lineal descent. It is important to recognize that patriarchy is not considered an ancestral trait of humans; rather, it is considered to be a result of cultural evolution associated with the domestication of animals. Lineal patterning refers to direct ancestors or relatives and its features resulted from evolutionary changes in life history in humans compared to other primates (slower growth, later maturation, and longer life span).⁴⁵

Male dominance in early societies is consistent with the predictions of social dominance theory.⁴⁶ Social dominance theory focuses on both individual and structural factors that contribute to various forms of group-based oppression. At some level, it recognizes that oppression in modern societies results in part from the inherited evolved behavior of our primate ancestors. That behavior may have been beneficial for differential reproductive success for our ancestors, but it is maladaptive in the modern world (that is, it is an example of evolutionary mismatch). Evolutionary mismatch has been demonstrated for a variety of behaviors in modern humans. It has been made possible by such recent and rapid technological and cultural innovations as modern food surpluses, concentrated drugs, and tools such as smart phones.⁴⁷

It can also be argued that altruism toward kin and reciprocity toward strangers whose actions benefit you have no genetic basis whatsoever. They could simply be cultural conceptions that were initiated early in the existence of our species and that spread across the world. If this were true, then it could potentially be much easier to change these practices. My objection to this argument is that cultural conceptions driving human behavior can be just as difficult to change as an underlying genetic architecture. Nor is anything here an argument for attempting to alter the genetic architecture of humans in such a way as to make it more likely to be comfortable living in a world of justice and equity, as J. B. S. Haldane would have called for. The simple fact is that our behavior is a complex interaction of the underlying genetically encoded neural templates that run our brain and the cultural conceptions that our brains have invented. There can be no path forward without that fundamental recognition.

To understand where we can go, we need to understand where we have been. Modern humans first evolved in Africa around three hundred thousand years ago (in the late Pleistocene, when ice sheets were beginning to recede in the Northern Hemisphere). While what we know about human social behavior in the Pleistocene is open to debate, we know a great deal more about human behavior in the Holocene period (which began about 11,650 years ago—this is our current geological period). It is generally thought that intergroup hostility and social hierarchy dramatically increased with the coming of agriculture. Agriculture allowed human groups to produce social surplus production. This means surplus production that could not have been produced without social interaction, such as individuals banding together to plow fields or harvest crops. The existence of surplus represented a novel environment for brains that had evolved under the conditions of hunter-gatherer subsistence. Domestication of plants and animals required humans to intentionally take control over the life cycle of a plant or animal population and assume responsibility for caring for them to meet specific and well-defined objectives serving human needs. Domestication involved a fundamental change in human socioeconomic organization in which successive generations of domesticates became integrated into human societies as objects of ownership.⁴⁸ It is likely that the incorporation of domesticates into human socioeconomic organization was deeply involved in the origin and evolution of notions of property in human societies (Table 14.1).⁴⁹ Similarly, a recent study explains how the domestication of cereal plants and the creation of social surplus played a major role in the development of social complexity and inequality in early Holocene societies (about eleven thousand years ago) throughout the Mediterranean.⁵⁰ The authors of this analysis place the economic growth observed in these early civilizations in the context of a model created by Thomas Piketty that holds that returns on capital that exceed economic growth are a major force for the divergence of wealth. Over approximately six thousand years, the creation of surplus transformed a planet without social complexity, cities, or institutionalized inequality into one whose habitable parts are covered by complex, territorially discrete, hierarchical urban societies.⁵¹

Table 14.1. Incorporation into human socioeconomic organization

No notions of property	Group rights to territories containing resources	Group rights to resources	Individual rights to resources by means of producing them	Evolved notions of property
Small groups, kin networks tight	Small groups, kin networks tight	Small groups, kin networks tight	Larger groups, kin networks still tight	Larger groups, kin networks more diffuse
Before Upper Paleolithic	Upper Paleolithic	-	-	Widespread by Bronze Age
~300,000–200,000 YBP	50,000–12,000 YBP	-	-	~6,200–2,300 YBP

Source: Modified from Zeder MA, Central questions in the domestication of plants and animals, Evolutionary Anthropology 15 (2006): 105–117.

 

These hierarchical societies continued to evolve through phases of political-economic systems: slave society (the ancient world), feudalism (the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century), capitalism (the early sixteenth century to the twentieth century), and monopoly capitalism (the late twentieth century to the present). A consistent feature of these political-economic systems was patriarchy; racism is associated with the growth of capitalism beginning in the fifteenth century. Each step away from the nonhierarchical small communities we evolved in produced a greater contradiction between the neural circuitry of our brains and the societies we lived in and resulted in ever-growing misery for millions of people.

This contradiction sets the stage for the existential crisis of the twenty-first century. Capitalism accelerated the pace of evolutionary mismatch between our Pleistocene brains and our modern lifestyles, in different ways for different peoples. The transatlantic slave trade fueled the industrial growth of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁵² European society was transformed as large numbers of former peasants were broken out of peonage to landowners and transformed into engines of wealth creation for the bourgeoise. Was their life better than what they experienced under feudalism? Probably yes, but life got much better for those who owned the factories and the banks than it did for those who worked in them. Many people are familiar with Charles Dickens’s beloved novels (e.g., A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations), written between the mid-1830s and his death in 1870. Few, however, realize the great pains Dickens took to represent real social dilemmas in his writing and the degree to which Dickens’s themes were influenced by the thinking of Karl Marx.⁵³ As a child reading A Christmas Carol, I connected with the situation of the Cratchit family, whose father slaved away for the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, just as my father and mother slaved away for the misers who employed them. Darwin discussed the misery of the English working classes in The Voyage of the Beagle. Specifically, he spoke against citing their wretched conditions as an argument for justifying enslaving Africans. Darwin said, “If the wretchedness of our poor be not caused by nature but by our social institutions, then great is our sin.”⁵⁴

I submit that our sin is still great, particularly because it continues to justify a social system that can only lead to greater and greater disparities in wealth and well-being. Few people in the United States stop to think about the minerals used in manufacturing their cell phones and the impact that industry has on African nations. Specifically, they are ignorant of the relationship between the recruitment of child soldiers and the exploitation of natural resources.⁵⁵ Closer to home, few Americans think about the irreversible physical and neurological damage farmworkers endure from exposure to toxic levels of the pesticides used to grow the vegetables they enjoy on a regular basis.⁵⁶ Nor do they consider that the farming practices used to produce luxury items like almonds might be contributing to the decline of bee populations.⁵⁷ Earlier in this book I noted that the mathematical foundations of physical and social processes can produce unanticipated consequences (Chapter 3). Capitalism’s underlying foundation is the process of exploiting labor from the workers to create wealth for those who own the means of production (the rich get richer and healthier in the short run). But there are also unanticipated human and environmental effects associated with this process (the poor get poorer and sicker, and in the long run the planet loses the capacity to support large numbers of humans).

But herein lies the rub. The technological developments of the past two decades are rapidly perfecting the mechanisms to enable the world’s economic elites to exercise total social control. Those who control the world’s economy have studied social psychology as well. They have perfected the capacity to utilize the imperfect architecture of the human mind to convince hundreds of millions of people that they are better off keeping the current economic system than envisioning new ones. They work overtime to convince people not to think of ways to bring about greater social justice and sustainability for humanity on this planet. For example, Domino’s Pizza is now confidently advertising that they plan to automate their pizza delivery with self-driving vehicles.⁵⁸ Granted, there may be some upsides to automated delivery with regard to energy usage, and Domino’s is a very long way away from doing this on a large scale, but implementation of this technology is not without human cost. What about the humans who deliver the pizzas now? Uber is also considering the implementation of automated drivers. What about the humans who are attempting to make ends meet in the gig economy of Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash? So we must ask deeper questions about technological innovation. Whom does it serve? Will it lead to sustainable practices? How many human workers will be displaced by the implementation of artificial intelligence and automation? What does it mean to provide people with meaningful employment?

Beginning in the nineteenth century attempts were made to devise and implement alternative forms of political economy (e.g., anarchism, socialism/communism) that would redress social hierarchy. Anarchism and socialism/communism have in common the notion of class struggle. While anarchism never presented a unified or clear picture of how society should be governed after the fall of capitalism, socialist/communist ideology proposed that the working class (proletariat) should initially dominate the state. In the early to mid-twentieth century, the working class represented the majority of people living in the industrialized nations. From the latter part of the twentieth century to the present, the traditional notion of the working class has changed. In neoliberal capitalism a growing number of people have been transitioned into so-called structural unemployment. These are people who will never be employable in these economies.⁵⁹ Thus, despite the rhetoric deployed against socialism, its core idea is to place the government in the hands of the majority of people, as opposed to the way governments currently operate in the interests of the capitalist class (an ever-shrinking proportion of these nations, currently about 1 percent). Socialism is also premised on the notion that production should be planned to meet the well-being of the majority of the nation, and eventually the world, rather than being driven by supply-demand principles to churn out goods no one really needs.

The most significant attempts to bring socialism/communism into existence were the Bolshevik revolution (1917–1924) and anticapitalistic revolutions in China, Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam and general anticolonial revolutions in India, Africa, and Latin America in those same periods. However, capitalism has been quite resilient in the face of these challenges. The champions of capitalism claim that its resilience originates in human nature, and specifically that capitalism is based on meritocracy and provides all individuals with an opportunity to achieve either meaningful and satisfying employment or ownership of their own business. Thus, the argument continues, capitalism is a political-economic system consistent with individual self-interest. So long as individuals are convinced this is true, individuals will think it harmful to replace this system with some other way of doing things.

On the other hand, these ideologues claim that socialism/communism has utterly failed to show that it can meet individual self-interest. The prime examples of that failure are the fall of the Soviet Union and China’s backslide into capitalism. On the face of it, they seem to have made an excellent case. However, a more nuanced examination of history proves otherwise. No new social or economic system comes into being without drama. The political revolutions that ended feudalism and monarchy in the Western world included the English Civil War (1642–1651), the American Revolution (1776–1789), and the French Revolution (1789–1799).⁶⁰ In all these wars, class struggle played a crucial role, and neighbor fought against neighbor. The horrors and failures of the French Revolution are well-known; the last was the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. However, both the English Civil War and the American Revolution had their failures and horrors as well, not the least of which was the rise of the British Empire and, in America, the institutionalization of white supremacy and chattel slavery and the expulsion of Amerindians from their ancestral homes. Finally, as capitalism grew, despite its contribution to a variety of technological developments, it simultaneously spread across the world colonizing and enslaving hundreds of millions of people. In the early twentieth century the battle over who would control the colonized people of the world produced World War I. After a brief hiatus the battle was resumed in World War II, leading to the deaths of over 71 million people worldwide. Most of these people were civilians (about 20 million each in eastern Europe and Asia).⁶¹ The bulk of the European war was fought in the Soviet Union. Russia alone lost over 13.3 million civilians; the United States lost only 1,700 civilians. This central fact explains most of what happened in the post–World War II world (including the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union). The killing did not stop after World War II, as the United States would soon be engaged in Southeast Asia (on the false premises of the domino theory). By the end of the Vietnam War the United States had killed more than one million Vietnamese and had dropped more tonnage of explosives on that tiny country than all the ordnance dropped by all powers in World War II.⁶²

This is the insane logic of capitalism revealed. There is no evidence that the inherent capacities of this economic system to bring forth global military conflict is abating. Tensions between the United States and Russia are growing. On May 9, 2021, CNN reported that the United States believes that a Russian group known as DarkSide launched a ransomware cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline.⁶³ In my city, gas supplies ran low. Later that month CNN also reported that NATO military maneuvers were being conducted in Europe with a key intention of sending Vladimir Putin the message that the United States will not be intimidated by Russian aggression.⁶⁴ As of this writing, Russian forces are poised for a potential invasion of the Ukraine, and President Biden has warned Russia that there will be severe consequences if Russia invades that nation.⁶⁵ So far, the warning involves sanctions and economic actions. However, we should all remember how Japan responded to those sorts of actions in 1941. Indeed, the next great war capitalism spawns may be the last one.

WE SHALL OVERCOME, WE SHALL OVERCOME

WE SHALL OVERCOME SOMEDAY

OH, DEEP IN MY HEART I DO BELIEVE

WE SHALL OVERCOME SOMEDAY.

—“WE SHALL OVERCOME,” HYMN BY REVEREND CHARLES ALBERT TINDLEY, 1901

Social justice is our only hope, not just because it is morally right and long overdue but because without it our species will die. We are now in a race between justice and extinction. The growing gap between the haves and the have-nots within and between nations is not sustainable. This situation guarantees that more and more dangerous microbes will evolve. Global stress on energy, water, and food will also contribute to increasing rates of anthropogenic climate change. Greater population sizes and density are increasing industrial pollution. Increased automation is reducing the number of jobs and wages for people across the globe. Economic stress in turn increases ethnic and socially defined racial antagonism, resulting in more extreme positions and political coalitions. In 2021 the FBI reported a dramatic increase in hate crimes in the United States, mainly against Blacks and East Asians.⁶⁶ All these calamities are already being felt across the world by the poorest and most racially subordinated people. Recent studies suggest that the global capitalism driving this injustice may have already pushed our species past the tipping point (to extinction).⁶⁷ One example of this sort of analysis claims that the complete collapse of human civilization could occur as early as 2050 as a result of climate change.⁶⁸

Why is justice our only hope? To answer this question we must have some definition of social justice. One definition of social justice is the promotion of a just society by challenging injustice and valuing diversity. In this definition, diversity refers to various aspects of human identity (socially defined race, ancestry, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, and others) that have been the subjects of social subordination. If you accept this definition, you probably believe all people have a right to equitable treatment, support for their human rights, and a fair allocation of resources. This means we must adopt a new standard of how human beings should be treated. All people should have a right to adequate food, water, shelter, medical care, and education. All people should have the right to worship as they please or to not worship at all, without their religious or nonreligious views being imposed on others by force. All people should have the right to romantically love whomever they want (with the provision that the individuals be consenting adults). In addition, individuals should not be discriminated against, nor should their welfare and well-being be constrained or prejudiced on the basis of any of these identity features or any other characteristic of background or group membership.⁶⁹ I submit that such a vision is the only way to end social strife and war (the greatest crime we engage in as a species).

At present, we have no evidence that our species is capable of originating or maintaining “just” societies. If any ever existed, it was before the establishment of agriculture some ten thousand to twenty thousand years ago. This created an evolutionary mismatch, in both our general health and our behavior. What is clear is that our brains do not operate well under conditions of social hierarchy. The more unjust our societies, the worse the dysfunction becomes. This dysfunction occurs in both the oppressed and the oppressor. Oppressors experience the stress of maintaining unjust social institutions and bear their financial costs. For example, in the United States the belief in white supremacy is creating conditions that increase the sickness and mortality of poor persons of European descent.⁷⁰ Donald Trump’s greatest supporters are poor white people who were just as disadvantaged by his policies as poor Black and Brown folks. His failure to enact a national plan to address the COVID pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. Those people might not have died if concerted and coordinated action had been brought to bear; instead, the significance and danger of the virus was denied.⁷¹

Oppressed people suffer more, but in ways that are not readily observable. For example, there is abundant evidence that low social status harms individual health (both physical and mental), and this is a condition inherited from the common ancestor of the great apes.⁷² Ongoing studies are increasingly revealing the molecular mechanisms through which low social status causes biological harm. For example, one study examined the pattern of gene expression in pro-inflammatory, neuroendocrine, and antiviral transcription pathways in individuals measured by their degree of perceived racial discrimination. The study found that relative to European Americans, African Americans showed increased activity of two key pro-inflammatory transcription-control pathways and two stress-responsive signaling pathways, suggesting that differences in experiences of racial discrimination could potentially account for more than 50 percent of the total race-related difference in pro-inflammatory transcription factor activity. This is significant because so much of complex disease in humans is driven by inflammation.⁷³

Thus, when people think about how to remedy racial, class, and gender injustice or to prevent or slow anthropogenic climate change, they must also ask whether such an effort could possibly succeed under capitalism. I argue that such reforms are impossible to achieve in this social system. Socialism or Barbarism is the title of a volume of collected writings by the German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg.⁷⁴ She was murdered in 1919 by protofascists after a failed attempt at socialist revolution in Germany. The barbarism she warned of came to pass in the form of World War II, and specifically the Holocaust in Germany. We stand at the threshold of similar events in the twenty-first century. However, now the fate of our entire species is at stake. The COVID-19 pandemic is just a taste of what we can expect if we do not address and solve our ongoing social injustice.

Thus, we must apply our evolutionarily mismatched minds to the urgent task of social justice. Indeed, the degree to which we observe prosocial behavior is very much premised on the social systems individuals live in.⁷⁵ We cannot move humanity from the brink of the abyss without altering humanity in the direction of more prosociality. In this regard I point to the tremendous progress made by Norway, a social democratic country. In 2014–2016 I served on the board of the Evolution Institute.⁷⁶ Its goal is to advance social justice and human equality by a more scientific application of evolutionary principles to design better human societies. Norway has achieved great progress in this regard through its adherence to the idea “We are all in this together.” The country has come a long way from its early history as the home of murderous raiders who pillaged the productivity of others; it is now ranked by the UN Development Index as one of “the happiest countries in the world.” Some examples of what makes it so happy: parents receive paid leave for childcare (mother or father); it enjoys a reduced workweek; and all Norwegians are allowed, at the age of fifteen, to choose their own faith (or lack thereof). The obvious objections to holding Norway up as an example for the rest of the world are its small population and relative ethnic uniformity. Norway has not been without ethnic struggle, but one of its best-known issues with the indigenous Sami people, who struggled for land rights and self-government, was settled without the level of violence seen in the rest of the world.⁷⁷

What is certain is that either we replace capitalism with new systems, such as the Norwegian model, that have the potential to allow for more-just societies, or extinction of our species will follow. John of Patmos (also known as John the Revelator) was exiled by the Roman emperor Domitian in the late first century. In the Christian book of Revelation John envisioned that the end of times would be coming soon. The great battle between the Antichrist and Jesus Christ was at hand. John’s prediction did not come true, but it has been repeated throughout Western history since. However, the simple fact is that we don’t need a supernatural cause for our extinction. We are doing quite a good job carrying out the business ourselves. The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is now at a record one hundred seconds to midnight.⁷⁸ Where I would disagree with the atomic scientists is to say that our path away from doomsday relies not on our technology but on ourselves. Applying evolutionary science to social issues can help us design more-just societies.

However, the Western world, particularly the United States, lacks the political and moral will to do so. While my religious faith has me holding on to the belief that we can overcome, my rational mind fights back with the reality of this nation’s dramatic increase in right wing / white supremacist / fascist politics. Liz Cheney was ousted from her leadership position in the Republican Party. Cheney is no liberal; her conservative views and record of voting for Trump policies are greater than those of her replacement, Elise Stefanik.⁷⁹ Should these forces succeed in taking over this nation, they will eliminate the last vestiges of democracy. When the book burning starts, I am sure this work will be on the pile. Of course, I won’t survive the transition to fascism to witness that. However, I am entirely okay with giving up my life for a chance to make things right.