The social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.
—Charles Darwin1
A mos was one of the handsomest males I have known, except perhaps on the day he stuffed two entire apples in his mouth, which taught me again that chimpanzees can do things we can’t. He had large eyes in a friendly, symmetrical face, a full, shiny coat of black hair, and well-defined muscles on arms and legs. He was never overly aggressive, as some males can be, yet supremely self-confident during his heyday. Amos was beloved. Some of us cried when he died, and his fellow apes were eerily silent for days. Their appetite took a hit.
At the time, we didn’t know what his problem was, but we learned postmortem that in addition to a hugely enlarged liver that took up most of his abdomen, he had several cancerous growths. He had lost 15 percent of his weight from a year before, but even though his condition must have been building for years, he had acted normally until his body just couldn’t hold out any longer. Amos must have felt miserable for months, but any sign of vulnerability would have meant loss of status. Chimps seem to realize this. A limping male in the wild was seen to isolate himself for weeks to nurse his injuries, yet would show up now and then in the midst of his community to give a charging display full of vigor and strength, after which he’d withdraw again. That way, no one would get any ideas.
Amos didn’t betray his condition until the day before his death, when we found him panting at a rate of sixty breaths per minute, with sweat pouring from his face, sitting on a burlap sack in one of the night cages while the other chimps were outside in the sun. Amos refused to go out, so we kept him separate until a veterinarian could take a closer look. The other chimps kept returning indoors to check on him, though, so we cracked open the door behind which Amos sat to permit contact. Amos placed himself right next to the opening, and a female, Daisy, gently took his head to groom the soft spot behind his ears. Then she started pushing large amounts of excelsior through the crack. This is a wood shaving that chimps love to build nests with. They arrange it all around them and sleep on it. After Daisy had given Amos the wood wool, we saw a male do the same. Since Amos was sitting with his back against the wall and not doing much with the excelsior, Daisy reached in several times to stuff it between his back and the wall.
This was remarkable. Didn’t it suggest that Daisy realized that Amos must be uncomfortable and that he would be better off leaning against something soft, similar to the way we arrange pillows behind a patient in the hospital? Daisy probably extrapolated from how she feels leaning against excelsior, and indeed she is known among us as an “excelsior maniac” (instead of sharing the stuff, she normally hogs it). I am convinced that apes take the perspective of others, especially when it comes to friends in trouble. True, when such abilities have been tested in the laboratory, they have not always been confirmed, but those studies typically ask apes to understand humans in some artificial setting. I have already mentioned the anthropocentric bias of our science. In ape-to-ape tests of perspective taking, chimpanzees have fared considerably better, and in the wild they attend to what others know or don’t know.2 We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that Daisy seemed to grasp Amos’s situation.
The next day, Amos was put to sleep. There was no hope for survival, only the certainty of more pain. The incident illustrated two contrasting sides of primate social life. First, primates live in a cutthroat world, which forces a male to conceal physical impairment for as long as possible in order to keep up a tough façade. But second, they are part of a tight community, in which they can count on affection and assistance from others, including nonrelatives. Such dualities are hard to grasp. Popular writers prefer to simplify things by describing the lives of chimpanzees either in Hobbesian terms, as nasty and brutish, or by stressing their friendly side, but in fact it’s never one or the other. It’s always both. If people ask how chimpanzees can possibly be called empathic, knowing that they sometimes kill one another, my return question is always whether by the same token we shouldn’t abandon the whole notion of human empathy as well.
This duality is crucial. Morality would be superfluous if we were universally nice. What would there be to worry about if all that humans ever did was show sympathy for one another, and never steal, never stab someone in the back, never covet another’s wife? This is clearly not how we are, and it explains the need for moral rules. On the other hand, we could design a zillion rules to promote respect and care for others, but they’d come to naught if we didn’t already lean in that direction. They would be like seeds dropped onto a glass plate: without a chance of taking root. What permits us to tell right from wrong is our ability to be both good and bad.
Daisy’s assistance to Amos officially ranks as “altruism,” defined as behavior that costs you something (such as taking a risk or expending energy) while it benefits another. Most biological discussions of altruism don’t concern themselves much with motives, however, only with how such behavior affects others and why evolution might have produced it. Even though this debate is over 150 years old, it took center stage in the past few decades.
The Gene’s Point of View
“Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting anyone else,” we are urged at the beginning of every flight. Altruism requires that we take care of ourselves first, which is exactly what one of the chief theoreticians of this field tragically failed to do, as is described by the Israeli science historian Oren Harman in his enthralling book The Price of Altruism.
George Price was an eccentric American chemist, who moved to London in 1967, where he became a population geneticist trying to solve the mystery of altruism with brilliant mathematical formulas. He had trouble solving his own problems, though. He had shown little sensitivity to others in his previous life (he abandoned his wife and daughters and was a lousy son to his aging mother), and the pendulum now swung to the other extreme. From a staunch skeptic and atheist, he turned into a devout Christian who dedicated his life to the city’s vagabonds. He gave up all of his possessions while neglecting himself. By the age of fifty, he was sinewy and gaunt like an old man, with rotting teeth and a raspy voice. In 1975, Price ended his life with a pair of scissors.
Following a long-standing tradition, Price loved to pit altruism against selfishness. The sharper the contrast, the deeper the riddle of where altruism might have come from. There is of course no shortage of such puzzles. Defending their hive, honeybees die shortly after having stung intruders. Chimpanzees rescue each other from leopard attacks. Squirrels give alarm calls that warn others of danger. Elephants try to lift up fallen comrades. But why would any animal act on behalf of another? Isn’t this against the laws of nature?
Elephant altruism on the Kenyan plains. With her tusks, Grace (right) lifted the fallen three-ton Eleanor to her feet, then tried to get her to walk by pushing her. But Eleanor fell again and eventually died, leaving Grace vocalizing with streaming temporal glands—a sign of deep distress. Being matriarchs of different herds, these two elephants were likely unrelated.
Scientists passionately worked on, debated, and bickered about a theoretical problem that outsiders find esoteric but that lies at the core of recent progress in behavioral biology and evolutionary psychology. Apart from the drama of Price’s life and death, there was no lack of momentous events and personal encounters, such as the sublime irony that John Maynard Smith, a famous British evolutionary biologist, brought the even more famous J. B. S. Haldane on his deathbed a book that claimed that birds prevent overpopulation by curtailing their own reproduction. For a biologist, this would count as altruism since it would permit others to reproduce at a cost to oneself. This whole idea received heaps of ridicule in years to follow, however, given how unlikely it is that animals put the greater good before their own. Haldane immediately saw the problem, telling his visitors with a mischievous smile,
Well, there are these blackcock, you see, and the males are all strutting around, and every so often, a female comes along, and one of them mates with her. And they’ve got this stick, and every time they mate with a female, they cut a little notch in it. And when they’ve cut twelve notches, if another female comes along, they say, “Now, ladies, enough is enough!”3
Popularizers often stress how traits help the survival of the species or the group, yet most biologists—including myself—recoil from evolutionary scenarios that stress the group level. This is because most groups don’t act like genetic units. In the primates, for example, virtually all members of a given sex (males in most monkeys, but females in apes) leave their group at puberty to join the neighbors, just as humans frequently intermarry between tribes. This seriously blurs the kinship lines. Primate groups are too genetically “leaky” for natural selection to get a grip on them. The only units that may qualify are those based on shared genes, such as extended families. Haldane was one of the main architects of the “gene’s-eye view” of evolution. Looked at from the standpoint of the genes, altruism gets a special meaning. Even if one loses one’s own life to save a relative, one still perpetuates genes that one has in common with this relative. Helping kin is therefore like helping oneself. Stooped drunk over a beer, Haldane is said to have slurred, “I’ll jump into a river for two brothers and eight cousins,” thus foreshadowing the theory of kin selection proposed by William Hamilton, one of the brightest and nicest biologists since Charles Darwin.
I add “nicest” to contrast Hamilton with the scientist who in fact coined the term “kin selection” in an article that ran off with Hamilton’s idea without offering him credit. This was the same Maynard Smith mentioned before, who upon hearing of Hamilton’s idea is said to have exclaimed, “Of course, why didn’t I think of that!”4 Ever since Hamilton found out which anonymous reviewer on his seminal paper had delayed its publication, he harbored a burning grudge against Maynard Smith despite the many apologies he received. Price almost suffered the same fate when Maynard Smith merely wanted to thank him for his ideas on restrained combat (“Why don’t venomous snakes use their deadly fangs on each other?”), but fortunately Price managed to gain co-authorship instead.
Initially, kin selection overshadowed every discussion of altruism, owing to a focus on social insects, such as bees and termites, which live in colonies of close relatives. But a second explanation gained equal prominence. Robert Trivers, an American evolutionary biologist, proposed that cooperation among nonrelatives often relies on reciprocal altruism: helpful acts that are costly in the short run nevertheless produce long-term benefits if favors are being returned. If I rescue a friend who almost drowns, and he rescues me under similar circumstances, both of us will be better off than we would have been on our own. Reciprocal altruism allows cooperative networks to expand beyond kinship ties.
Not surprisingly, most players in this long quest were politically opinionated. One of them, the British statistician and biologist Ronald Fisher, was an avowed eugenicist, who felt that the human race could use some genetic improvement. Another one, the Hungarian American game theoretician John von Neumann, was so enthralled by his own calculations that he urged the U.S. Senate in 1955 to drop the atomic bomb onto the Soviets, saying, “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today?”5 Others were card-carrying Communists, however, and early on there was, of course, Petr Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist prince. Despite the charge by opponents that evolutionary biology is a right-wing plot, the altruism debate took place mostly on the left rather than right side of the ideological spectrum. I know this firsthand, since Trivers and the late Hamilton occasionally met in California at meetings of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, of which I have been part for decades. I once conducted an interview with Bob to ask him about the implications of his theory. Here is one of his answers:
FdW: Reading between the lines, I recognize in your paper the same sort of social commitment that led Kropotkin to develop his ideas. . . .
Trivers: You’re right about my political preferences. When I left mathematics, and cast about what I was going to do in college, I said (self-ironic bombast): “All right, I’ll become a lawyer and fight for civil rights and against poverty!” Someone suggested that I take up U.S. history, but you know at that time, in the early 1960s, their books were entirely self-congratulatory. I ended up in biology.
Because I remained a political liberal, for me, emotionally, to see that just pursuing this scratch-my-back argument would generate rather quickly a reason for justice and fairness was very gratifying because it was on the other side of the fence of that awful tradition in biology of the right of the strongest.6
After having attended Price’s funeral, Hamilton went to rescue the dead scientist’s papers in a squatter’s flat, commenting how much kinship he felt with the man who by the end of his life was talking to God (“I try to be in everything a slave of the Lord, and bring large and small matters to Him for decision”).7 One explanation of Price’s untimely death is that he was deeply upset by the unpleasant implications of his own calculations, such as the impossibility to evolve loyalty to the in-group without also evolving torture, rape, and murder of the out-group. He despaired at the thought that altruism might not have come into existence without its negative flip side. But Price also harbored the idea that self-interest stands in the way of genuine altruism. This giant misunderstanding may have cost him his life as he probed the boundaries of human nature by testing his own capacity for self-sacrifice. Never mind that most human altruism doesn’t operate this way. It grows out of empathy with those in need, and the whole point of empathy is a blurring of the line between self and other. This obviously makes the difference between selfish and unselfish motives rather hazy.
Realizing that empathy needs to be part of any theory of human altruism, Trivers tested the concept on Hamilton: “Long ago I spoke to Bill about it, I said ‘What about empathy Bill?’ and he said, ‘What’s empathy?’ As if it didn’t exist, as if there was no such thing.”8 Too bad, I should add, because attention to the way altruism works might have reduced the amount of controversy and confusion about what genes are capable of. The road between genes and behavior is far from straight, and the psychology that produces altruism deserves as much attention as the genes themselves. The error of early theorizing was to skip these complexities.
Empathy is mostly a mammalian trait, so the deeper error was that great thinkers had lumped all sorts of altruism together. There are the bees dying for their hive and the millions of slime mold cells that build a single, sluglike organism that permits a few among them to reproduce. This kind of sacrifice was put on the same level as the man jumping into an icy river to rescue a stranger or the chimpanzee sharing food with a whining orphan. From an evolutionary perspective, both kinds of helping are comparable, but psychologically speaking they are radically different. Do slime molds even have motivations the way we do? And when bees sting an intruder aren’t they driven by aggression rather than by the benign motives we associate with altruism? Mammals have what I call an “altruistic impulse” in that they respond to signs of distress in others and feel an urge to improve their situation. To recognize the need of others, and react appropriately, is really not the same as a preprogrammed tendency to sacrifice oneself for the genetic good.
With the increasing popularity of the gene’s-eye view, however, these distinctions were overlooked. This led to a cynical outlook on human and animal nature. The altruistic impulse was downplayed, ridiculed even, and morality was taken off the table entirely. We were only slightly better than social insects. Human kindness was seen as a charade and morality as a thin veneer over a cauldron of nasty tendencies. This outlook, which I have dubbed Veneer Theory, can be traced back to Thomas Henry Huxley, also known as “Darwin’s Bulldog.”
The Bulldog’s Cul-de-Sac
Darwin being defended by Huxley is a bit like Albert Einstein being defended by me. For the life of me, I can’t grasp the theory of relativity. I am just not mathematically inclined enough, even though I can follow the speeding-train example and other simplifications for dummies. All that Einstein could possibly expect from me is an arm-waving story about how I think he had a great idea that superseded Isaac Newton’s mechanistic notions. Not much help, of course, but not unlike what happened to Darwin when Huxley took up his cause. Huxley lacked formal education and was a self-taught comparative anatomist of great standing. He was notoriously reluctant, however, to accept natural selection as the chief engine of evolution and also had trouble with gradualism. These are no minor details, which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that one of last century’s leading biologists, Ernst Mayr, harshly concluded that Huxley “did not represent genuine Darwinian thought in any way.”9
Huxley is best known for wiping the floor with Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce in an 1860 public debate about evolution in which the bishop mockingly inquired whether Huxley descended from the primates through his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side. Huxley is said to have replied that he wouldn’t mind to be the progeny of an ape, but would be quite ashamed to be connected to someone who abuses his oratorical gifts to obscure the truth.
It is good to take this famous story with a grain of salt, though. Apart from the fact that it was concocted decades after the encounter, there is the problem that Huxley’s voice was too weak to command an audience. In the days before microphones, this mattered. One of the other scientists present wrote dismissively that Huxley was unable to throw his voice over so large an assembly and that it was he, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who had confronted the bishop: “I smashed him amid rounds of applause. I hit him in the wind at the first shot in ten words taken from his own ugly mouth.” The bishop himself, by the way, felt that he had thoroughly taken care of his opponents.10
This must have been one of those rare debates where everyone was a winner! It was Huxley, however, who went down in history as the great defender of science against religion. Being a far more retiring person, Darwin needed a soldier by his side to make the case for his controversial ideas. Huxley loved to fight and had been looking for a cause to sink his teeth into. After having read The Origin of Species, he eagerly offered Darwin his services: “I am sharpening up my claws & beak in readiness.”11
Thomas Henry Huxley, the combative public defender of Darwin, called himself “agnostic.” He had a strong religious bent, however, that kept him from agreeing with Darwin on the issue of moral evolution, which he considered an impossibility (cartoon by Carlo Pellegrini in Vanity Fair of 28 January 1871).
Contributing to Huxley’s reputation as the slayer of religion is his invention of the term “agnostic,” meaning that he wasn’t sure of God’s existence. He saw agnosticism as a method, however, not a creed. He advocated scientific arguments that were based purely on evidence rather than on any higher authority, a position nowadays known as “rationalist.” Huxley deserves admiration for this major step in the right direction, but the great irony is that he remained deeply religious and allowed this to color his outlook. He described himself as a “scientific Calvinist,” and much of his thinking followed the somber, joyless precepts of the doctrine of original sin. Given that pain in the world is a certainty, he said, we can only hope to endure it with clenched teeth—his “grin and bear it philosophy.”12 Nature lacks the capacity of producing any good, or in Huxley’s own words:
The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the “liberal” popular illusions that babies are all born good. . . .13
The primacy of Satan? Does this sound like an agnostic? A book entitled Lay Sermons allowed Huxley to compete with sermons from the pulpit. He adopted such a preachy tone that his critics called him self-righteous and full of Puritanical convictions. Huxley’s religious attitudes, hidden underneath a desire for objective truth, explain why he developed Veneer Theory and its bleak assessment of human nature. He saw human ethics as a victory over nature similar to a well-tended garden. The gardener struggles every day to keep his garden from going wild. As Huxley put it, the horticultural process is opposed to the cosmic process. Nature tries to undermine the gardener’s efforts by invading his plot with despised weeds, slugs, and other pests ready to choke off the exotic plants he wants to cultivate.
This metaphor says it all: ethics is a uniquely human answer to an unruly, wicked evolutionary process. In his well-known lecture on this topic for a large audience in Oxford, in 1893, Huxley summed up his position:
The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.14
Unfortunately, the anatomist gave no hint where humanity might have unearthed the will and strength to defeat its own nature. If we are indeed devoid of natural benevolence, how and why did we decide to become model citizens? And if doing so was to our advantage, as one would hope, why did nature refuse us a helping hand? Why must we perpetually sweat in the garden to keep our immoral impulses at bay? It is a bizarre theory, if that’s what we call it, according to which morality is only an evolutionary afterthought barely capable of concealing the sinners we truly are. Note that this dark idea was entirely Huxley’s. I agree with Mayr that it doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to Darwin’s thinking. In the words of Huxley’s biographer, he “was forcing his ethical Ark against the Darwinian current which had brought him so far.”15
In the end, Darwin desperately needed a defender against his public defender. He got one in the form of Kropotkin, a first-rate naturalist. Whereas Huxley was a city boy with little firsthand knowledge of noncadaverous animals, Kropotkin had traveled around Siberia and noticed how rarely animal encounters fit the gladiatorial style hyped by Huxley, who imagined a “continuous free fight.” Kropotkin had noticed frequent cooperation between members of the same species. Huddling together in the cold or collectively standing up to predators—such as wild horses against wolves—was critical for survival. Kropotkin emphasized these themes in his 1902 book Mutual Aid, which was explicitly directed against “infidels” such as Huxley, who misinterpreted Darwin. True, Kropotkin went overboard in the other direction, cherry-picking examples of animal solidarity to support his political views, yet he was right to protest Huxley’s depiction of nature, which was poorly informed by reality.
For me, the biggest question of all is how to exit from the Huxleyan cul-de-sac. If we are not allowed to talk about God and if evolution offers no answer either, what could possibly explain human morality? With both religion and biology out of the picture, all I see is a big black hole. And the most astonishing of all is that biologists, like bad drivers, steered us into the same blind alley again a century later.
My Life as a Toilet Frog
In Australia, it is not unusual to find a sizable frog in your toilet bowl. You may try to move it out, but the frog will happily hop back into the bowl, where it attaches itself with its suction cup toes during the occasional tsunamis that we humans produce. These frogs don’t seem to mind the body waste swirling down the bowl.
But I do! I felt like a toilet frog during the last three decades of the preceding century. I had to hang on desperately each time a book came out on the human condition, whether written by biologists, anthropologists, or science journalists, because most of them advocated ideas totally anathema to the way I view our species. One can consider humans as either inherently good but capable of evil or as inherently evil yet capable of good. I happen to belong to the first camp, but the literature stressed only the negative side. Even positive traits had to be phrased as if they were problematic. Animals and humans love their families? Let’s call it “nepotism.” Chimpanzees permit friends to eat food out of their hands? Let’s call it “pilfering” and “scrounging.” The prevailing tone was full of misgivings about kindness. Here is a characteristic statement, cited over and over in this literature:
No hint of genuine charity ameliorates our vision of society, once sentimentalism has been laid aside. What passes for co-operation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation. . . . Given a full chance to act in his own interest, nothing but expediency will restrain [a person] from brutalizing, from maiming, from murdering—his brother, his mate, his parent, or his child. Scratch an “altruist” and watch a “hypocrite” bleed.16
Altruists are just hypocrites for Michael Ghiselin, an American biologist so well known for his work on the sea slug that one of its defensive chemicals (ghiselinin) was named after him. But instead of dealing with slugs, the above statement was about humans. It set the tone for much that followed, as was also reflected two decades later in The Moral Animal, by the science journalist Robert Wright: “. . . the pretense of selflessness is about as much part of human nature as is its frequent absence.”17 And then there is George Williams, the American evolutionary biologist who took perhaps the most extreme position. Offering a dark assessment of nature’s “wretchedness,” he felt that calling nature “amoral” or “morally indifferent,” as Huxley wisely had done, didn’t go far enough. He rather accused nature of “gross immorality,” thus becoming the first and hopefully last biologist to infuse the evolutionary process with moral agency.18
The argument typically ran as follows: (1) natural selection is a selfish, nasty process, (2) this automatically produces selfish and nasty individuals, and (3) only romantics with flowers in their hair would think otherwise. Obviously, Darwin was claimed to be on board with the expulsion of morality from the natural domain, as if Darwin would ever have let himself get stuck in Huxley’s cul-de-sac. Darwin was too smart for this, as I will explain below, which is why the height of absurdity was reached when Richard Dawkins explicitly disavowed Darwin, telling an interviewer in 1997 that “in our political and social life we are entitled to throw out Darwinism.”19
I decline to cite more smelly stuff. The only scientist to reach a perfectly logical conclusion—even if I fully disagree—was Francis Collins, head of America’s largest federal research agency, the National Institutes of Health. Having read all those books that doubt the evolution of morality, and observing that humanity nevertheless possesses a measure of it, Collins saw no way around a supernatural source: “The Moral Law stands out for me as the strongest signpost of God.”20
Naturally, the esteemed geneticist became the laughingstock of the nascent atheist movement. Some claimed he was polluting science with faith, while Dawkins, with characteristic lenience, called him “not a bright guy.”21 Never mind the deeper problem, which is that by seriously fumbling the morality question, biologists had left the door wide open for alternative accounts. The whole episode could have been avoided had Collins encountered a more thoughtful evolutionary literature, one taking its lead from Darwin’s The Descent of Man. Reading this book, one realizes that there is absolutely no need to throw the old man under the bus. Darwin had no trouble aligning morality with the evolutionary process, and recognizing the human capacity for good. Most interesting for me, he saw emotional continuity with other animals. For Huxley, animals were mindless automata, but Darwin wrote an entire book about their emotions, including their capacity for sympathy. One memorable example was how a particular dog would never walk by a basket where a sick friend lay, a cat, without giving her a few licks. Darwin saw this as a sure sign of affection. In his last note to Huxley, right before his death, Darwin couldn’t resist gently poking fun at his friend’s Cartesian bent, hinting that if animals are machines, then humans must be, too: “I wish to God there were more automata in the world like you.”22
Darwin’s writing massively contradicts Veneer Theory. He speculated, for example, that morality grew straight out of animal social instincts, saying that “it would be absurd to speak of these instincts as having been developed from selfishness.”23 Darwin saw the potential for genuine altruism, at least at the psychological level. Like most biologists, he drew a sharp line between the process of natural selection, which indeed has nothing nice about it, and its many products, which cover a wide range of tendencies. He disagreed that a nasty process ipso facto needs to produce nasty results. To think so is what I have dubbed the “Beethoven error,” since it is like evaluating Ludwig van Beethoven’s music on the basis of how and where it was composed. The maestro’s Viennese apartment was a messy, smelly pigsty, strewn with waste and unemptied chamber pots. Of course, no one judges Beethoven’s music by it. In the same way, even if genetic evolution proceeds through death and destruction, this doesn’t taint the marvels it has produced.
That seems an obvious point to make, but once I had done so at length in my 1996 book Good Natured, I grew tired of the battle against Veneer Theory. For three long decades, it was greeted with irrational exuberance, no doubt owing to its simplicity: everyone understood it, everyone loved it. How could I disagree with something so obvious?
But then a curious thing happened: the theory vaporized. Rather than dying from a slow feverish illness, Veneer Theory suffered a massive heart attack. I don’t quite understand how and why this happened. Perhaps it was Y2K, but by the end of the twentieth century the need to combat Darwin’s “infidels” had quickly evaporated. New data were coming in, first as a trickle, then as a steady stream. Data have this wonderful quality of burying theories. I remember picking up an article in 2001 entitled “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.” It was by Jonathan Haidt, an American psychologist, who argued that we arrive at moral decisions through intuitive processes. We hardly think about them. Haidt presented subjects with stories of odd behavior (such as a one-night stand between a brother and sister), which they immediately disapproved of. He then challenged every single reason his subjects could come up with until they ran out of arguments. They might say that incest leads to abnormal offspring, but in Haidt’s story the siblings used effective contraception, which took care of this problem. Most of his subjects quickly reached the stage of “moral dumbfounding”: they stubbornly insisted the behavior was wrong without being able to explain why.
Haidt concluded that moral decisions come from the “gut.” Our emotions decide, after which human reason does its best to catch up. With this dent in the primacy of logic, Hume’s moral “sentiments” made a comeback. Anthropologists demonstrated a sense of fairness in people across the world, economists found humans to be more cooperative and altruistic than the Homo economicus view would allow, experiments with children and primates found altruism in the absence of incentives, six-month-old babies were said to know the difference between “naughty” and “nice,” and neuroscientists found our brains to be hardwired to feel the pain of others. We had come full circle by 2011, when humans were officially declared “supercooperators.”
Every new development slammed another nail in the coffin of Veneer Theory until the common view had swiveled around 180 degrees. It is now widely assumed that we are designed in body and mind to live together and take care of each other, and that humans have a natural tendency to judge others in moral terms. Instead of being a thin veneer, morality comes from within. It’s part of our biology, a view supported by the many parallels found in other animals. In a few decades, we had gone from calls to teach our children to be nice, since our species lacks any and all natural inclinations in this direction, to the consensus that we are born to be good and that nice guys finish first.
Veneer Theory used to be the dominant biological view of human nature. It regarded genuine kindness as either absent or an evolutionary misstep. Morality was a thin veneer barely able to conceal our true nature, which was entirely selfish. In the past decade, however, Veneer Theory has succumbed to overwhelming evidence for innate empathy, altruism, and cooperation in humans and other animals.
How radically attitudes have changed is clear every time I show audiences the notorious Ghiselin statement that had landed me in the toilet to begin with: “Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed.” Although I have featured this cynical line for decades in my lectures, it is only since about 2005 that audiences greet it with audible gasps and guffaws as something so outrageous, so out of touch with how they see themselves, that they can’t believe it was ever taken seriously. Had the author never had a friend? A loving wife? Or a dog, for that matter? What a sad life he must have lived! Seeing the shocked reaction, and how widespread it has become, I’m left wondering whether my audiences have changed under the influence of new evidence, or whether it’s perhaps the other way around. Have we entered a new Zeitgeist, and is science simply catching up?
Regardless, it has left my toilet smelling like a rose. Finally, I can release my grip, stretch my legs, and swim around.
Full of Mistakes
But still, it could all be a colossal mistake. Kindness could be maladaptive, occurring at the wrong time and wrong place. Take the way Daisy cared for a dying Amos, or how humans nurse the terminally ill. What is the point? Many people take care of an aging spouse, as my mother did during my father’s last years. What a load she carried, she being so much smaller and he barely able to walk. Or, think of caring for a husband or wife with Alzheimer’s, who needs supervision every minute of the day, doesn’t appreciate your efforts, and reacts surprised every time you enter the room, complaining that you’ve abandoned him or her. Stress and exhaustion are all you will ever get out of it. In none of these cases is there much chance of repayment, whereas evolutionary theory insists that altruism should benefit either blood relatives or those willing and able to return the favor. A dying spouse doesn’t fit the bill.
Since Daisy, my mother, and millions of caretakers deviate from evolutionary dogma, there has been much talk of “misfiring genes” that cause us to be better than is good for us. Don’t be misled by this kind of rhetoric, though. The reason why misfiring genes don’t exist as a concept in genetics is that genes are just little chunks of DNA that know nothing and intend nothing. They have the effect they have without any goal in mind, hence are incapable of mistakes. It would be more appropriate to call rampant altruism a glorious accident, but few experts are in a celebratory mood. Their message is rather sour, as if a great theory about the selfish origins of altruism is regrettably spoiled by the facts. They complain that “almost everything in modern life is a mistake from the genes’ point of view,” but never conclude that this makes their theories largely irrelevant.24
There is the mistake of sending money to faraway places struck by a tsunami or an earthquake. Anonymously donating blood is a mistake. Working in a soup kitchen or shoveling snow for an old lady is a mistake, as is pouring all of our resources into an adopted child. The latter is an incomprehensible multiyear mistake made by thousands of families ignorant of the fact that children who don’t share their genes lack any value. Families do the same with pets, providing extraordinary care for animals that lack repayment options. Other common mistakes are warning a stranger of danger, pointing out that someone has left his coat in a restaurant, and picking up a stranded driver. Human life is chock-full of mistakes, large and small. The same applies to the lives of other primates.
Take Phineas, Amos’s father. Not that Amos knew that Phineas was his father. In chimpanzee society, there are no permanent bonds between males and females, so that in principle any male might be your father. Phineas had been alpha in earlier years, but when he turned forty, he began to take it easy. He loved to play with juveniles, groom with females, and act as policeman. As soon as he heard a squabble, Phineas would go over to make a big show of force, with all his hair on end, to break it up. He would stand between the contestants until the screaming stopped. This “control role” is also well documented for wild chimpanzees. Remarkably, males in this role don’t take sides: they defend the weaker party even if the attacker is their best buddy. I have often puzzled over their impartiality, which deviates from so much else that chimpanzees do. By transcending the performer’s social biases, the control role truly aims at what’s best for the community.
Jessica Flack and I demonstrated how much the group benefits from such behavior by temporarily removing males that act as arbiters. The result was a society coming apart at its seams. Aggression increased and reconciliation decreased. Order was restored, however, as soon as we returned the males to their group.25 This still leaves the question, however, why they do it. What is in it for them? The main idea is that high-ranking males gain respect and popularity by coming up for the underdog. But while this may be a perfectly good strategy for younger males, I have trouble applying it to Phineas. Toward the end of his life, this gentle old guy was clearly over the hill and seemed to have few ambitions left. Yet, he zealously monitored discord in the group. His push for harmony was to everyone’s advantage except perhaps his own. Are chimpanzees, too, more generous than they should be according to gene-centric theories?
It is quite common for chimps to help unrelated individuals, such as when Washoe, the world’s first chimpanzee trained in American Sign Language, heard a female she barely knew scream and hit the water. Racing across two electric fences to reach the victim, Washoe dragged her to safety.26 Another case concerned Tia, a wild female, at Fongoli, in Senegal, who had lost her infant to poachers. Fortunately, researchers managed to confiscate the baby ape to return it to the group. Jill Pruetz describes how Mike, an unrelated adolescent male, who was too young to be the infant’s father, picked it up from where the scientists had left it and carried it straight to Tia. He obviously knew to whom the baby belonged and probably also had noticed how much trouble Tia had in moving around after having been mauled by the poachers’ dogs. For two days, Mike carried the baby during group travel while Tia limped behind.27
Even the costliest investment of all, the adoption of unrelated young, is not unknown. Not just in females, where one might expect it, but a recent report by Christophe Boesch from Ivory Coast lists at least ten wild male chimps who, over a period of three decades, adopted juveniles who had lost their mothers.28 In 2012, Disneynature released its popular movie Chimpanzee, which captured how Freddy, the community’s alpha male, took Oscar under his wing. This documentary was based on real events. When Oscar’s mother suddenly died of natural causes, the camera crew happened to be at the right place at the right time. It stayed around even though the prospects for little Oscar looked bleak. Freddy followed the pattern of other adoptive males, who shared food with youngsters, allowed them to sleep in their night nests, protected them against danger, and diligently searched for them when lost. Some cared for their charges for over one year, and one male did so for over five years (chimpanzees don’t reach adulthood until they are at least twelve). Barring nursing, these stepfathers were taking on the same burden as mothers do for their offspring, strongly enhancing the orphans’ chances at survival. According to DNA samples, adoptive males are not necessarily related to their charges. Oscar was lucky.
Rather than concluding that chimps, too, make mistakes, let’s move away from such normative language and its implication that we are born to obey our genes. Why not simply recognize the disconnect between the origin of a trait and its current use. Tree frogs evolved suction cups to cling to leaves, yet may use them to survive in a toilet. Primate hands evolved to grasp tree branches, but I play the piano with them, and baby monkeys use them to cling to their mothers. Many traits evolved for one reason yet have come to serve others as well. I have never heard anyone call fingers gliding over a piano “a mistake,” so why apply this sort of language to altruism? One might counter that altruism has a cost, whereas piano playing does not, and that this justifies the “mistake” terminology. But how sure are we that generalized empathy and lifelong commitments don’t pay off in the long run? I have never seen proof that such behavior harms us, and rather suspect the opposite. Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the “God is dead” phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purposes: “Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.”29
This is a liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of something against its possible applications. Even if computers started out as calculators, that doesn’t prevent us from playing games on them. Even if sex evolved for reproduction, anyone is free (up to a point) to engage in it for fun. There is no law that says traits need each and every time to serve the purpose for which they evolved. The same applies to empathy and altruism, which is why we should simply replace the word “mistake” with “potential.” Nothing keeps me from empathizing with a stranded whale and joining efforts to haul it back to the ocean, even if human empathy didn’t come into existence with whales in mind. I’m just applying my innate empathic capacity to its fullest potential.
Nietzsche was right: an item’s history has limited relevance in the here and now. While I stand in awe before the insights provided by Price, Hamilton, Trivers, and others into the evolutionary background of altruism, I see no reason to turn these insights into a dogma about how humans ought to behave.
Hedonic Kindness
Science tells us that we breathe in order to supplement our bodies with oxygen. Lacking this knowledge, however, I’d still do exactly the same, like millions of humans before me and billions of animals. Awareness of O2 is not what drives breathing. Similarly, when biologists speculate that altruism evolved for its payoffs, it doesn’t mean that actors need to know about this. Most animals don’t think ahead, as in “If I do this for him, he may return the favor tomorrow.” Lacking foresight, they just follow a benevolent impulse. The same applies to humans. Except in business or between unacquainted people, humans rarely tally up the costs and benefits of their behavior, especially among friends and family. In fact, doing so is a bad sign, which family therapists use as an indicator that a marriage is on the rocks.
Both human and animal altruism may be genuine, therefore, in that it lacks ulterior motives. This is true to the point that we have trouble suppressing it. James Rilling, an Emory colleague of mine, concluded from neuroimaging experiments that we have “emotional biases toward cooperation that can only be overcome with effortful cognitive control.” Think about it: this means that our first impulse is to trust and assist; only secondarily do we weigh the option of not doing so, for which we need reasons. This is the exact opposite of being driven by incentives. Only one category of people lacks this natural impulse, which explains my usual quip that Veneer Theory perfectly captures the psychopathic mindset. Rilling further showed that when normal people aid others, brain areas associated with reward are activated. Doing good feels good.
This “warm glow” effect brings a touching image to mind that I have seen countless times while working with rhesus monkeys. The behavior in question was not exactly altruistic, but very close to the source of all mammalian nurturance. Every spring, our zoo troops produced dozens of newborns. The babies held magnetic appeal for juvenile females, who would try to get their little hands on them by patiently grooming their mothers. It would take a long time of hanging around the mother until the baby would be released to take a few wobbly steps toward the would-be sitter. She’d pick it up, carry it around, turn it upside down to inspect its genitals, lick its face, groom it from all sides, but eventually doze off with the baby firmly clutched in her arms. We took bets on how long it would take. Five minutes, ten minutes? The sleepiness that overcame the babysitters gave the impression that they were in a trance, or perhaps ecstatic, having waited so long for their lucky break. As they held their treasure, release of oxytocin in their bloodstream and brains, known as the hormone of love, weighed down their eyelids. Their sleep would never last long, though, and soon they’d return the baby to its mother.
The joy of baby care prepares young females for the most altruistic act of all. Mammalian maternal care is the costliest, longest-lasting investment in other beings known in nature, starting with nourishment of the fetus and ending many years later. Or, as most parents would say, never. Strangely enough, however, maternal care has been largely absent from the altruism debate. Some scientists don’t even want to count it as altruism, since it doesn’t fit their emphasis on sacrifice. They want to speak of altruism only if it harms the performer, at least in the short run. No one should be eager to be an altruist, let alone take pleasure in it. I call this the altruism-hurts hypothesis, which is deeply erroneous. After all, the definition of altruism is not that it needs to cause pain, only that it carries a cost.
Mind you, biologists have absolutely no trouble explaining why a female mammal would care for her offspring. How else is she going to propagate? We also know how much women want babies. I don’t want to be grisly about it, but the desire is strong enough that some women kill for it, and cut open another’s belly. Or they steal babies from the nursery. These are sick cases, yet illustrate the overwhelming desire, and the reason why baby care isn’t regarded as a sacrifice. With maternal care not being much of a puzzle, science has focused on more perplexing behavior. Science seeks challenges. Yet, I would still argue that, at least for mammals, maternal care is the prototypical form of altruism, the template for all the rest. We ignore it at our peril. It is telling that not a single woman scientist that I know of has gotten carried away by the question of where altruism comes from. For women, maternal care would be hard to leave out, as has been illustrated by two women who did write on human cooperation. Sarah Hrdy, an American anthropologist, proposes an “it takes a village” theory according to which the human team spirit started with collective care for the young, not just by mothers but by all adults around. Similarly, Patricia Churchland, an American philosopher well versed in neuroscience, treats human morality as an outgrowth of caring tendencies. The neural circuitry that regulate the organism’s own bodily functions has been co-opted to include the needs of the young, treating them almost like extra limbs. Our children are part of us, so we protect and nurse them unthinkingly, the way we do our bodies. The same brain mechanism provides the basis for other caring relations.
This would explain observable sex differences, which start early in life. At birth, girl babies look longer at faces than do boy babies, who look longer at mechanical toys. Later in life, girls are more prosocial than boys, better readers of emotional expressions, more attuned to voices, more remorseful after having hurt someone, and better at taking someone else’s perspective. We also have learned that empathy is enhanced by oxytocin sprayed into the nostrils of both men and women, thus fooling them with the maternal hormone par excellence (oxytocin is associated with childbirth and nursing). In our own studies, we have found that female chimpanzees console distressed parties more often than males do. They approach victims of aggression, tenderly put an arm around them, and hug them until the screaming stops. Females are the more nurturing sex.
If maternal care was almost too obvious for theoreticians to consider, it is also the most self-rewarding care, which brings me to the altruism-feels-good hypothesis. Invariably, nature associates things that we need to do with pleasure. Since we need to eat, the smell of food makes us drool like Pavlov’s dogs, and food consumption is a favorite activity. We need to reproduce, so sex is both an obsession and a joy. And to make sure we raise our young, nature gave us attachments, none of which exceeds that between mother and offspring. Like any other mammal, we are totally preprogrammed for this in body and mind. As a result, we barely notice the daily efforts on behalf of our progeny and joke about the arm and leg that it costs. Distant relatives and nonrelatives obviously recruit less help, but the underlying satisfaction remains the same, an insight already present in The Meditations of the second-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (“. . . acts that are consistent with nature, like helping others, are their own reward”).30 We are group animals, who rely on each other, need each other, and therefore take pleasure in helping and sharing.
In the 1996 movie Marvin’s Room, Bessie (played by Diane Keaton) is visited by her more worldly sister (Meryl Streep). Bessie devoted many years of her life caring for their father, never getting any help from her sister. When Bessie tells her sister that she feels she has been lucky to have had her parents, having so much love in her life, her sister misunderstands, in her own self-centered way, what she means, and tells her, “They love you very much.” Bessie corrects her, saying, “That’s not what I mean, no. I mean that I have been so lucky to be able to love someone so much.” Altruism can fill us with happiness.
The odd notion that altruism has to hurt drove George Price to try his hand at extreme self-sacrifice. One can’t be a great altruist without suffering, he thought, and so he gave up all of his possessions and neglected himself to the point that he became miserable. He didn’t realize that self-neglect is counterproductive, a theme well known to charity workers. As with the oxygen masks on airplanes, the self needs to be fed before it can take care of anyone else. I have often thought about where the odd altruism-hurts notion may have come from. It’s totally anathema, for example, to Buddhism, in which compassion for others is supposed to fill us with joy. This effect isn’t limited to self-reflecting adults, but occurs also in toddlers, who derive greater satisfaction from giving treats to others than from receiving them.31 There is also intriguing evidence from a study of people taking care of a sick spouse or parent. The psychologist Stephanie Brown found that caregivers barely notice the cost of their behavior. They feel at one with their charges and derive such great fulfillment from being needed that they live longer than individuals without a need to take care of others.
On the basis of my personal experience taking care of my wife, whose life was imperiled by breast cancer, I totally agree that the word “sacrifice,” although often applied, misses the point. Nothing comes more naturally to us than taking care of loved ones. Churchland correctly saw continuity between caring for one’s own body, caring for one’s children, and caring for those close to us. Our brain has been designed to blur the line between self and other. It is an ancient neural circuitry that marks every mammal, from mouse to elephant. In a Thai nature reserve, I encountered a blind elephant walking around with her seeing-eye friend. The two unrelated females appeared joined at the hip. The blind one depended on the other, who seemed to understand this. As soon as the latter moved away, one could hear deep rumbling sounds coming from both of them, sometimes even trumpeting, which indicated the other’s whereabouts to the blind elephant. This noisy spectacle would continue until they were reunited again. An intensive greeting followed, with lots of ear flapping, touching, and mutual smelling. They enjoyed a close friendship, which enabled the blind female to lead a reasonably normal elephant life.
Given its intrinsic rewards, some like to label care for family and close associates “selfish,” at least at an emotional level. While not incorrect, this obviously undermines the whole distinction between selfishness and altruism. If my eating all the food on the table is just as selfish as my sharing it with a hungry stranger, language has become obsolete. How can a single concept cover such divergent motivations? More importantly, why is my satisfaction at seeing the stranger eat confused with my being selfish? Why can’t altruism be like any other natural human tendency in that it yields pleasure? Many people love to spoil their family and friends, and the greatest joy we can give them is to just let them do it.
Looking back on how we got to this reversal of perspectives—from altruism as a sacrifice that is hard to explain to the modern notion of altruism as rooted in mammalian nurturance endowed with intrinsic rewards—I am struck by how many ideological and religious elements infused the debate, ranging from Price’s conversion to Christianity, Huxley’s preoccupation with original sin, Kropotkin’s anarchism, and the curiously popular notion of altruism as either hypocritical or mistaken. Missing from most of this debate has been the view that humans and other mammals achieve altruism quite differently than, say, the social insects. Perhaps it is the common comparison of human altruism with that of ants and bees that has thrown us off. Insects lack empathy, whereas our brains are built to connect with others and experience their pain and pleasure. The end result is that altruism can be both genuine and satisfying at the same time. If Price pushed himself beyond this boundary, by giving up his health and wealth for fellow vagabonds whom he barely knew, his eventual despair is understandable. He underestimated the hedonic quality of altruism aimed at those we care about, and overestimated our capacity for generosity toward strangers. The second is seriously limited, whereas the first knows few bounds.