When, as by a miracle, the lovely butterfly bursts from the chrysalis full-winged and perfect…it has, for the most part, nothing to learn, because its little life flows from its organization like melody from a music box.
Douglas Alexander Spalding, 18731
Like Charles Darwin, William James was a man of independent means. He inherited a private income from his father Henry, whose father William had amassed $10,000 a year from the Erie Canal. The one-legged Henry used his self-sufficiency to become an intellectual, and spent much of his life shuttling between New York, Geneva, London and Paris with his children in tow. He was articulate, religious and self-assured. His two youngest sons went off to fight in the Civil War, then failed in business and turned to drink or depression. His two eldest sons, William and Henry, were trained almost from birth to be intellectuals. The result was (in Rebecca West’s phrase) that ‘one of them grew up to write fiction as though it were philosophy and the other to write philosophy as though it were fiction’.2
Both brothers were influenced by Darwin. Henry’s novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin’s idea of female choice as a force in evolution.3 William’s Principles of Psychology, much of which was first published as a series of articles in the 1880s, contained a manifesto for nativism – the idea that the mind cannot learn unless it has the rudiments of innate knowledge – going against the prevailing fashion for empiricism, the theory that behaviour is shaped by experience. William James believed that human beings were equipped with innate tendencies that were not derived from experience but from the Darwinian process of natural selection. ‘He denies experience!’ wrote James, quoting an imaginary reader. ‘Denies science; believes the mind created by miracle; is a regular old partisan of innate ideas! That is enough! We’ll listen to such antediluvian twaddle no more.’
William James asserted that human beings have more instincts than other animals, not fewer. ‘Man possesses all the impulses that [lower creatures] have, and a great many more besides…It will be observed that no other mammal, not even the monkey, shows so large an array’. He argued that it was false to oppose instinct to reason:
Reason, per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may, however, make an inference which will excite the imagination so as to set loose the impulse the other way; and thus, though the animal richest in reason might also be the animal richest in instinctive impulses, too, he would never seem the fatal automaton which a merely instinctive animal would be.4
This is an extraordinary passage, not least because its impact on early twenty-first-century thought can be said to be almost nil. Very few people, on the side of either nature or nurture, took up such an extreme nativist position in the century to come, and almost everybody assumed for the following hundred years that reason was indeed the opposite of instinct. Yet James was no fringe lunatic. His work has influenced generations of scholars on consciousness, sensation, space, time, memory, will, emotion, thought, knowledge, reality, self, morality and religion – to name just the chapter headings of a modern book about his work. So why does this same book of 628 pages not even have the words ‘instinct’, ‘impulse’ or ‘innate’ in its index?5 Why, for more than a century, has it been considered little short of indecent even to use the word ‘instinct’ in the context of human behaviour?
James’s ideas were indeed immensely influential at first. His follower, William McDougall, founded a whole school of instinctivists, who became adept at spotting new human instincts for every circumstance. Too adept: speculation outstripped experiment and before long a counter-reformation was inevitable. In the 1920s the very empiricist ideas attacked by James, embodied in the notion of the blank slate, swept back to power not just in psychology (with John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner), but in anthropology (Franz Boas), psychiatry (Freud) and sociology (Durkheim). Nativism was almost totally eclipsed until 1958, when Noam Chomsky once again pinned its charter to the door of science. In a famous review of a book on language by Skinner, Chomsky argued that it was impossible for a child to learn the rules of language from examples: the child must have innate rules to which the vocabulary of the language was fitted. Even then, the blank slate dominated human sciences for many years. It was not until a century after his book was published that William James’s idea of uniquely human instincts was at last taken seriously again in a new manifesto of nativism, written by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (see chapter 9).
More of that later. First, a digression on teleology. It was Darwin’s genius to turn the old theological argument from design on its head. Until then, the obvious fact that parts of organisms appear to be engineered for a purpose – the heart for pumping, the stomach for digesting, the hand for grasping – seemed logically to imply a designer, just as a steam engine implied the existence of an engineer. Darwin saw how the entirely backward-looking process of natural selection could none the less produce purposeful design – what Richard Dawkins called the blind watchmaker.6 Though in theory it makes teleological nonsense to talk of a stomach having its own purpose, since the stomach has no mind, in practice it makes perfect sense so long as you engage the grammatical equivalent of four-wheel drive, the passive voice: stomachs have been selected to appear as if equipped with purposeful design. Since I have an aversion to the passive voice, I intend to avoid this problem throughout this book by pretending that there is indeed a teleological engineer thinking ahead and planning purposefully. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls such an artefact a ‘skyhook’,7 since it is the rough equivalent of a civil engineer hanging his scaffolding from the sky, but for the sake of simplicity I shall call my skyhook the Genome Organising Device, or GOD for short. This may keep religious readers happy, and allows me to use the active voice. So the question is: how does the GOD build a brain that can express an instinct?
Back to William James. To support his assertion that human beings have more instincts than other animals, James systematically enumerated the human instincts. He began with the actions of babies: sucking, clasping, crying, sitting up, standing, walking and climbing were all, he suggested, expressions of impulse, not imitations or associations. So, as the child grew, were emulation, anger and sympathy. So was a fear of strangers, loud noises, heights, the dark, reptiles. (The ordinary cock-sure evolutionist ought to have no difficulty in explaining these terrors,’ wrote James, neatly anticipating the argument of what is now called evolutionary psychology, ‘as relapses into the consciousness of the cave-men, a consciousness usually overlaid in us by experiences of more recent date.’) He moved on to acquisitiveness, noting the tendency of boys to collect things. He noticed the very different play preferences of boys and girls. Parental love, he suggested, was at least initially stronger in women than in men. He tripped quickly through sociability, shyness, secretiveness, cleanliness, modesty and shame. ‘Jealousy is unquestionably instinctive,’ he remarked.
The strongest of the instincts, he believed, was love. ‘Of all propensities, the sexual impulses bear on their face the most obvious signs of being instinctive, in the sense of blind, automatic and untaught.’8 But, he insisted, just because sexual attraction was instinctive did not mean it was irresistible. Other instincts, like shyness, prevent us acting upon every sexual attraction.
So let me take James at his word, provisionally at least, and examine the idea of the love instinct in a little more depth. If he is right, there must be some heritable factor, which gives rise to a physical or chemical change in our brains when we fall in love, that change causing, rather than caused by, the emotion of falling in love. Such as this, from the scientist Tom Insel:
A working hypothesis is that oxytocin released during mating activates those limbic sites rich in oxytocin receptors to confer some lasting and selective reinforcement value on the mate.9
Or, to put it more poetically, you fall in love.
What is this oxytocin and why does Insel make such an extravagant claim for it? The story starts in an almost ridiculously unromantic process: urination. Some 400 million years ago, when the ancestors of our species first left the water, they were equipped with a tidy little hormone called vasotocin, a miniature protein made out of a chain of just nine amino acids formed into a ring. Its job was to regulate salt and water balance in the body, and it performed this job by rushing about switching on cells in the kidney or other organs. Fish still use two different versions of vasotocin for this purpose today, and so do frogs. In the descendants of reptiles – and that includes human beings – there are two slightly different copies of the relevant gene lying next to each other, facing different ways (in human beings on chromosome 20). The result today is that all mammals have two such hormones, called vasopressin and oxytocin, that differ at two of the links in the chain.
They still do their old job. Vasopressin tells the kidney to conserve water; oxytocin tells it to excrete salt. But, like vasotocin in modern fish, they also have a role in the regulation of reproductive physiology. Oxytocin stimulates the contraction of muscles in the womb during birth; it also causes milk to be expelled from the ducts in the breast. The GOD is an economiser: having invented a switch for one purpose, he readapts it for other purposes, by expressing the oxytocin receptor in a different organ. But a much greater surprise came in the early 1980s, when scientists suddenly realised that vasopressin and oxytocin had a job to do inside the brain as well as being secreted from the pituitary gland into the bloodstream.
So they tried injecting oxytocin and vasopressin into the brains of rats to see what effect they had. Bizarrely, a male rat injected with intracerebral oxytocin immediately begins yawning and simultaneously gets an erection.10 So long as the dose is low, the rat also becomes more highly sexed: it ejaculates sooner and more frequently. In female rats, intracerebral oxytocin induces the animal to adopt a mating posture. In human beings, meanwhile, masturbation increases oxytocin levels in both sexes. All in all, oxytocin and vasopressin in the brain seem to be connected to mating behaviour.
Now all of this sounds rather unromantic: urine, masturbation, breastfeeding – hardly the essence of love. Be patient. In the late 1980s, Tom Insel was working on the effect of oxytocin on maternal behaviour in rats. Brain oxytocin seemed to help the mother rat form a bond with its young and Insel identified the parts of the rat brain that were sensitive to the hormone. He switched his attention to the pair bond, wondering if there were parallels between a female’s bond to her young and to her mate. At this point he met Sue Carter, who had begun to study prairie voles in the laboratory. She told him how the prairie vole is a rarity among mice for its faithful marriages. Prairie voles live in couples and both father and mother care for the young for many weeks. Montane voles, on the other hand, are more typical of mammals: the female mates with a passing polygamist, separates quickly from him, bears young alone and abandons them after a few weeks to fend for themselves. Even in the laboratory, this difference is clear: mated prairie voles stare into each other’s eyes and bathe the babies; mated montane voles treat their spouses like strangers.
Insel examined the brains of the two species. He found no difference in the expression of the two hormones themselves, but a big difference in the distribution of molecular receptors for them – the molecules that fire up neurons in response to the hormones. The monogamous prairie voles had far more oxytocin receptors in several parts of the brain than the polygamous montane voles. Moreover, by injecting oxytocin or vasopressin into the brains of prairie voles, Insel and his colleagues could elicit all the characteristic symptoms of monogamy, such as a strong preference for one partner and aggression towards other voles. The same injections had little effect on montane voles, and the injection of chemicals that block the oxytocin receptors prevented the monogamous behaviour. The conclusion was clear: prairie voles are monogamous because they respond more to oxytocin and vasopressin.11
In a virtuoso display of scientific ingenuity, Insel’s team has gone on to dissect this effect in convincing detail. They knock the oxytocin gene out of a mouse before birth. This leads to social amnesia: the mice can remember things, but they have no memory of mice they have already met and will not recognise them. Lacking oxytocin in its brain, a mouse cannot recognise a mouse it has just met ten minutes before – unless that mouse was ‘badged’ with a non-social cue such as a distinctive lemon- or almond-scented smell (Insel compares this to an absent-minded professor at a conference who recognises friends by their name tags, not their faces).12 Then by injecting the hormone into just one part of the animal’s brain in later life – the medial amygdala – the scientists can restore social memory to the mouse completely.
In another experiment, using a specially adapted virus, they turn up the expression of the vasopressin receptor gene in the ventral pallidum, a part of a vole’s brain important for reward. Pause here to roll that idea around your mind a few times to appreciate just what science can do these days: they use viruses to turn up the volumes of genes in one part of the brain of a rodent. Even ten years ago such an experiment was unimaginable. The result of turning up the gene’s expression is to ‘facilitate partner preference formation’, which is geekspeak for ‘make them fall in love’. They conclude that for a male vole to pair-bond, it must have both vasopressin and vasopressin receptors in its ventral pallidum. Since mating causes a release of oxytocin and vasopressin, the prairie vole will pair-bond with whatever animal it has just mated; the oxytocin helps in memory, the vasopressin in reward. The montane vole, by contrast, will not react in the same way, because it lacks receptors in that area. Female montane voles express these receptors only after giving birth, so they can be nice to their babies, briefly.
So far I have talked of oxytocin and vasopressin as if they were the same thing, and they are so similar that they probably stimulate each other’s receptors somewhat. But it appears that to the extent that they do differ, oxytocin makes female voles choose a partner; vasopressin makes males choose a partner. The male prairie vole becomes aggressive towards all voles except its mate when vasopressin is injected into his brain. Attacking other voles is a (rather male) way of expressing his love.13
All this is astonishing enough, but perhaps the most exciting result to emerge from Insel’s lab concerns the genes for the receptors. Remember that the difference between the prairie vole and the montane vole lies not in the expression of the hormone, but in the pattern of expression of the hormone’s receptors. These receptors are themselves the products of genes. The receptor genes are essentially identical in the two species, but the promoter regions, upstream of the genes, are very different. Now recall the lesson of chapter 1: that the difference between closely related species lies not in the text of genes themselves, but in their promoters. In the prairie vole, there is an extra chunk of DNA text, on average about 460 letters long, in the middle of the promoter. So Insel’s lab made a transgenic mouse with this expanded promoter and it grew up with a brain like a prairie vole, expressing vasopressin receptors in all the same places, though it did not form a pair bond.14 Steven Phelps then went out and caught 43 wild prairie voles in Indiana and sequenced their promoters: some had longer insertions than others. They varied from 350 to 550 letters in length. Are the long ones more faithful husbands than the short ones? Not yet known.15
The conclusion to which Insel’s work is leading is devastating in its simplicity. The ability of a rodent to form a long-term attachment to its sexual partner may depend on the length of a piece of DNA text in the promoter switch at the front of a certain receptor gene. That in turn decides precisely which parts of the brain will express the gene. Of course, like all good science, this discovery raises more questions than it settles. Why should feeding oxytocin receptors in that part of the brain make the mouse feel well-disposed to its partner? It is possible that the receptors induce a state a bit like addiction, and in this respect it is noticeable that they seem to link with the D2 dopamine receptors, which are closely involved in various kinds of drug addiction.16 On the other hand, without oxytocin, mice cannot form social memories, so perhaps they simply keep forgetting what their spouse looks like.
Mice are not men. You know by now that I am about to start extrapolating anthropomorphically from pair-bonding in voles to love in people, and you probably do not like my drift. It sounds reductionist and simplistic. Romantic love, you say, is a cultural phenomenon, overlaid with centuries of tradition and teaching. It was invented at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, or some such place, by a bunch of oversexed poets called troubadours; before that there was just sex.
Even though in 1992 William Jankowiak surveyed 168 different ethnographic cultures and found none that did not recognise romantic love, you may be right.17 I certainly cannot prove to you yet that people fall in love when their oxytocin and vasopressin receptors get tingled in the right places in their brains. Yet. And there are cautionary hints about the dangers of extrapolating from one species to another: sheep seem to need oxytocin to form maternal attachment to their young; mice apparently do not.18 Human brains are undoubtedly more complicated than mouse brains.
But I can draw your attention to some curious coincidences. A mouse shares much of its genetic code with a human being. Oxytocin and vasopressin are identical in the two species and are produced in the equivalent parts of the brain. Sex causes them to be produced in the brain in both human beings and rodents. Receptors for the two hormones are virtually identical and are expressed in equivalent parts of the brain. Like those of the prairie vole, the human receptor genes (on chromosome 3) have a – smaller – insertion in their promoter regions. Like the prairie voles of Indiana, the lengths of those promoter insertions vary from individual to individual: in the first 150 people examined, Insel found 17 different promoter lengths. And when a person who says she (or he) is in love contemplates a picture of her loved one while sitting in a brain scanner, certain parts of her brain light up that do not light up when she looks at a picture of a mere acquaintance. Those brain parts overlap with the ones stimulated by cocaine.19 All this could be a complete coincidence, and human love may be entirely different from rodent pair-bonding, but given how conservative the GOD is and how much continuity there is between human beings and other animals, you would be unwise to bet on it.20
Shakespeare was ahead of us, as usual. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon tells Puck how Cupid’s arrow fell upon a white flower (the pansy), turning it purple, and that now the juice of this flower
…on sleeping eyelids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Puck duly fetches a pansy and Oberon wreaks havoc with the lives of those sleeping in the forest, causing Lysander to fall in love with Helena, whom he has previously scorned, and causing Titania to fall in love with Bottom the weaver wearing the head of an ass.
Who would now wager against me that I could not soon do something like this to a modern Titania? Admittedly, a drop on the eyelids would not suffice. I would have to give her a general anaesthetic while I cannulated her medial amygdala and injected oxytocin into it. I doubt even then that I could make her love a donkey. But I might stand a fair chance of making her feel attracted to the first man she sees upon waking. Would you bet against me? (I hasten to add that ethics committees will – should – prevent anybody taking up my challenge.)
I am assuming that, unlike most mammals, human beings are basically monogamous, like prairie voles, and not promiscuous, like montane voles. I base this assumption on the testicle-size argument enunciated in chapter 1; on the ample evidence from ethnography that, though most human societies allow polygamy, most human societies are still dominated by monogamous relationships; and on the fact that human beings usually practise some paternal care – a characteristic feature of the few mammal species that live as social monogamists.21 Furthermore, as we have liberated human life from economic and cultural straitjackets, such as arranged marriage, we have found monogamy growing more dominant, not less. In 1998 the most powerful man in the world, far from treating himself to a gigantic harem, got into trouble for having an affair with one intern. The evidence for long-term, exclusive (but sometimes cheated-on) pair bonds as the commonest pattern in human relationships is all around you.
Chimpanzees are different. Long-term pair bonds are unknown, and I predict that they have fewer oxytocin receptors in the relevant parts of their brains than human beings, probably as a result of having shorter gene promoters. The oxytocin story lends at least tentative support to William James’s notion that love is an instinct, evolved by natural selection, and is part of our mammal heritage, just like four limbs and ten fingers. Blindly, automatically and untaught, we bond with whoever is standing nearest when the oxytocin receptors in the medial amygdala get tingled. One sure way to tingle them is to have sex, although presumably chaste attraction can also do the trick. Is this why breaking up is hard to do?
Having oxytocin receptors does not make it inevitable that somebody will fall in love during his life, nor predictable when it will happen, or with whom. As Niko Tinbergen, the great Dutch ethologist, demonstrated in his studies of instincts, the expression of a fixed, innate instinct must often be triggered by an external stimulus. One of Tinbergen’s favourite species was the stickleback, a tiny fish. Male sticklebacks go red on the belly in the breeding season, when they defend small territories in which they build nests, which attract females. Tinbergen made little models of fish and caused them to ‘invade’ the territory of a male fish. A model of a female elicited the courtship dance of the male, even if the model was astonishingly crude; so long as it had a ‘pregnant’ belly, it excited the male. But if the model had a red belly, it would trigger an attack. It could be just an oval blob with a crudely drawn eye but no fins or tail: still it was attacked just as vigorously as if it were a real male rival – so long as it was red. One of the legends of Leiden, where Tinbergen first worked, is that he noticed his sticklebacks would threaten the red post-office vans that drove past the window.
Tinbergen went on to demonstrate the power of these ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ to provoke an instinct in other species, notably the herring gull. Herring gulls have yellow beaks with a bright red spot near the tip. The chicks peck at this spot when begging for food. By presenting newborn chicks with a series of models, Tinbergen demonstrated that the spot was a powerful releaser for the begging action, and the redder it was the better. The colour of the beak or the head of the bird mattered not at all. So long as it had a contrasting spot near the tip of the bill, preferably in red, it would elicit pecking. In modern jargon, scientists would say that the chick’s instinct, and the adult’s beak spot had ‘co-evolved’. An instinct is designed to be triggered by an external object or event. Nature plus nurture.22
The significance of Tinbergen’s experiments was to reveal just how complex instincts could be, and yet how simply triggered. The digger wasp he studied would dig a burrow, go and catch a caterpillar, paralyse it with a sting, bring it back to the burrow and deposit it with an egg on top, so that the baby wasp could feed on the caterpillar while growing. All of this complex behaviour, including the ability to navigate back to the burrow, was achieved with almost no learning, let alone parental teaching. A digger wasp never meets its parents. A cuckoo migrates to Africa and back, sings its song and mates with one of its own species without as a chick ever seeing either a parent or a sibling.
The notion that animal behaviour is in the genes once troubled biologists as much as it now troubles social scientists. Max Delbruck, pioneering molecular biologist, refused to believe that his colleague at Caltech Seymour Benzer had found a behavioural mutant fly. Behaviour, he insisted was too complex to reduce to single genes. Yet the idea of behaviour genes has long been accepted by the amateur breeders of domestic animals. The Chinese started breeding mice of different colours in the seventeenth century or earlier and they produced a mouse called the waltzing mouse, famous for its dance-like gait caused by an inherited defect in the inner ear. Mouse breeding then caught on in Japan in the nineteenth century and thence spread to Europe and America. Some time before the year 1900 a retired schoolteacher in Granby, Massachusetts, by the name of Abbie Lathrop, took up the ‘mouse fancying’ hobby. Soon she was breeding different strains of mice herself in a small barn adjoining her property and selling them to pet shops. She was especially fond of what were by then known as Japanese waltzing mice, and she developed several new strains. She also noticed that some strains got cancer more often than others; picked up by Yale University, this hint became the basis of early studies of cancer.
But it was Lathrop’s link to Harvard that uncovered the link between genes and behaviour. William Castle of Harvard bought some of her mice and started a mouse laboratory. Under Castle’s student Clarence Little, the main mouse laboratory moved to Bar Harbor, Maine, where it still is – a giant factory of inbred mouse strains used in research. Very early on, the scientists began to realise that different strains of mice behaved in different ways, too. Benson Ginsburg, for instance, found out the hard way. He noticed that when he picked up a mouse of the ‘guinea-pig’ strain (named for its coat colour), he often got bitten. He was soon able to breed a new strain that had the coat colour but not the aggressive streak: proof enough that aggression was somewhere in the genes. His colleague Paul Scott also developed aggressive strains of mice, but bizarrely, Ginsburg’s most aggressive strain was Scott’s most pacific. The explanation was that Scott and Ginsburg had handled the mice differently as babies. For some strains, handling did not matter. But for one strain in particular, C57-Black-6, early handling increased the aggressiveness of the mouse. Here was the first hint that a gene must interact with an environment if it is to have its effect. Or, as Ginsburg put it, the road from the ‘encoded genotype’ the mouse inherits to the ‘effective genotype’ it expresses passes through the process of social development.23
Ginsburg and Scott both later went on to work with dogs, Scott proving by crossing experiments between cocker spaniels and African basenjis that play-fighting in puppies is controlled by two genes that regulate the threshold for aggression.24 But it did not need science to prove the inheritance of behaviour in dogs: that was old news to dog-breeders. The point of dogs is that they come in different behavioural types: retrievers, pointers, setters, shepherds, terriers, poodles, bulldogs, wolfhounds – their very names denote the fact that they have instincts bred into them. And those instincts are innate. A retriever cannot be trained to guard livestock and a guard dog cannot be trained to herd sheep. It’s been tried. In the process of domestication, dogs have kept incomplete or exaggerated elements of wolf behaviour development. A wolf will stalk, chase, pounce, grab, kill, dissect, and carry food, and a wolf pup will practise each of these activities in turn as it grows up. Dogs are wolf pups frozen in the practising stage. Collies and pointers are stuck in the stalking stage; retrievers are stuck with carrying and pit bulls with biting: each is a frozen mixture of different wolf-pup themes. Is it in their genes? You bet: ‘Breed-specific behaviours are irrefutable,’ says dog chronicler Stephen Budiansky firmly.25
Or go ask the cattle-breeders. I have in front of me a catalogue of dairy bulls designed to entice me into ordering some semen by mail. In enormous detail it describes the quality and shape of the bull’s udder and teats, its milk-producing ability, its milking speed and even its temperament. But surely, you point out, bulls don’t have udders? On every page there is a picture of a cow, not a bull. What the catalogue is referring to is not the bull himself but his daughters. ‘Zidane, the Italian No 1,’ it boasts, ‘improves frame traits and fixes on tremendous rumps with ideal slope. He is particularly impressive in his feet and leg composites with excellent set and terrific depth of heel. He leaves faultless udders, which are snugly attached with deep clefts.’ The characters are all female, but the attribution is to the sire. Perhaps I would prefer to buy a straw of semen from Terminator, whose daughters have ‘great teat placement’, or Igniter, a bull that is a ‘milking speed specialist’ whose daughters ‘display great dairy character’. I might wish to avoid Moet Flirt Freeman, because although his daughters have ‘tremendous width across the chest’ and give more milk than their mothers did, the small print admits they are also slightly ‘below average’ in temperament – which probably means that they tend to kick out when being milked. They are also slow milkers.26
The point is that cattle-breeders have no qualms about attributing behaviour to genes, just as they attribute anatomy to genes. Minute differences in the behaviour of cows they confidently ascribe to the semen that arrived through the mail. Human beings are not cows. Admitting instinct in cows does not prove that human beings are also ruled by instinct, of course. But it demolishes the assumption that because behaviour is complex or subtle, it cannot be instinctive. Such a comforting illusion is still rife within the social sciences; yet no zoologist who has studied animal behaviour could believe that complex behaviour cannot be innate.
Defining ‘instinct’ has baffled so many scientists that some refuse to use the word altogether. It need not be present from birth: some instincts only develop in adult animals (as wisdom teeth do). It need not be inflexible: digger wasps will alter their behaviour according to how many caterpillars they find already in the burrow they are provisioning. It need not be automatic: unless it meets a red-bellied fish, the stickleback male will not fight. And the boundaries between instinctive and learned behaviour are blurred.
But imprecision does not necessarily render a word useless. The boundaries of Europe are uncertain – how far east does it stretch? Are Turkey and Ukraine in it? – and there are many different meanings of the word ‘European’, but it is still a useful word. The word ‘learn’ covers a multitude of virtues, but it is still a useful word. Likewise, I believe that to call behaviour instinctive can still be useful. It implies that the behaviour is at least partially inherited, hard-wired and automatic, given the expected environment. A characteristic feature of an instinct is that it is universal. That is, if something is primarily instinctive, then it must be approximately the same in all people. Anthropology has always been torn between an interest in human similarities and human differences, with the advocates of nature emphasising the former and the advocates of nurture stressing the latter. The fact that people smile, frown, grimace and laugh in much the same way all over the world struck Darwin and would later strike the ethologists Irenaeus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Paul Ekman as astonishing. Even among those inhabitants of New Guinea and the Amazon till then uncontacted by ‘civilisation’, these emotional expressions have the same form and the same meaning.27 At the same time, the astonishing variety of rituals and habits expressed by the human race testifies to its capacity for difference. As usual in science, each side of the argument pushed the other to extreme positions.
Perhaps it would satisfy both (or neither) to focus on the paradox of human differences that are universally similar all over the world. After all, similarity is the shadow of difference. The prime candidate is sex and gender difference. Nobody now denies that men and women are different not just in anatomy but also in behaviour. From best-selling books about them being from different planets to the increasing polarisation of films into those that appeal to men (action) or to women (relationships), it is surely no longer controversial to assert that – despite exceptions – there are consistent mental as well as physical differences between the sexes. As the comedian Dave Barry puts it, ‘If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, she will choose to save the infant’s life without even considering if there are men on base.’ Are such differences nature, nurture, or both?
Of all the sex differences, the best studied are the ones to do with mating. In the 1930s, psychologists first started asking men and women what they sought in a mate, and they have been asking them ever since. The answer seems so obvious that only a laboratory nerd or a Martian would bother to ask the question. But sometimes the most obvious things are the ones that most need demonstrating.
They found many similarities. Both sexes wanted intelligent, dependable, cooperative, trustworthy and loyal partners. But they also found differences. Women rated good financial prospects in their partners twice as highly as men. Hardly surprising, since men were breadwinners in the 1930s. Come back in the 1980s and you would surely find such a patently cultural difference vanishing. No: in every survey conducted since then, right up to the present day, the same preference emerges just as strongly. To this day, American women rate financial prospects twice as highly as men do when seeking mates. In personal advertisements, women mention wealth as a desirable feature of a partner 11 times as often as men do. The psychology establishment dismissed this result: it merely reflected the importance of money in American culture, not a universal sex difference. So the psychologist David Buss went and asked foreigners, and got the same answer from Dutch and German men and women. Don’t be absurd, he was told, Western Europeans are just like Americans. So Buss asked 10,047 people from 37 different cultures on six continents and five islands, ranging from Alaska to Zululand. In every culture, bar none, women rated financial prospects more highly than men. The difference was highest in Japan and lowest in Holland but it was always there.28
This was not the only difference he found. In all 37 cultures, women wanted men older than them. In nearly all cultures, social status, ambition and industriousness in a mate mattered more to women than to men. Men by contrast placed more emphasis on youth (in all cultures, men wanted younger women) and physical appearance (in all cultures, men wanted beautiful women more than women wanted beautiful men). In most cultures, men also placed slightly more emphasis on chastity and fidelity in their partners, while (of course) being much more likely to seek extramarital sex themselves.29
Well, what a surprise! Men like pretty, young, faithful women, while women like rich, ambitious, older men. A casual glance through films, novels or the newspaper could have revealed this to Buss, or any passing Martian. Yet the fact remains that many psychologists had firmly told Buss he would not be able to find such trends repeated outside the countries of the West, let alone all over the world. Buss proved something which was – at least to the social science establishment – very surprising.
Many social scientists argue that the reason women seek wealthy men is that men have most of the wealth. But now you know this is universal to the human race, you could easily turn it around. Men seek wealth because they know it attracts women – just as women pay more attention to appearing youthful because they know it attracts men. This direction of causality was never less plausible than the other, and given the evidence of universality, it is now more plausible. Aristotle Onassis, who knew a bit about both money and beautiful women, reputedly once said: ‘If women did not exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.’30
By proving how universal so many sex differences in mating preferences are, Buss has thrown the burden of proof on to those who would see a cultural habit rather than an instinct. But the two explanations are not mutually exclusive. They are probably both true. Men seek wealth to attract women, therefore women seek wealth because men have it, therefore men seek wealth to attract women. And so on. If men have an instinct to seek the baubles that lead to success with women, then they are likely to learn that within their culture money is one such bauble. Nurture is reinforcing nature, not opposing it.
With the human species, as Dan Dennett observed, you can never be sure that what you see is instinct, because you might be looking at the result of a reasoned argument, a copied ritual or a learned lesson. But the same applies in reverse. When you see a man chasing a woman just because she is pretty, or a girl playing with a doll while her brother plays with a sword, you can never be sure that what you are seeing is just cultural, because it might have an element of instinct. Polarising the issue is entirely mistaken. It is not a zero-sum game, where culture displaces instinct or vice versa. There might be all sorts of cultural aspects to a behaviour that is grounded in instinct. Culture will often reflect human nature rather than affect it.
Buss’s study of global similarity in difference proves the universality of different approaches to mating behaviour, but says nothing about how they come about. Suppose he is right and the differences are evolved, adaptive and therefore at least partly innate. How do they develop and under what influences? Thanks to an extraordinary battle in the nature–nurture war, called Money vs. Diamond, there is now a glimmer of light to be cast upon this subject.
Money is John Money, a psychologist from New Zealand who reacted against his strict religious upbringing to become an outspoken ‘missionary’ of sexual liberation at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, eventually defending not just free love but even consenting paedophilia. Diamond is Mickey Diamond, a tall, soft-spoken, bearded son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to the Bronx who moved first to Kansas and then to Honolulu, where he studies the factors determining sexual behaviour in animals and people.
Money believes that sex roles are the products of early experience, not instinct. In 1955 he set out his theory of psychosexual neutrality based on the study of 131 human ‘hermaphrodites’ – people who had been born with ambiguous genitalia. At birth, said Money, human beings are psychosexually neutral. Only after experience, at about the age of two, do they develop ‘gender identity’. ‘Sexual behavior and orientation as male or female does not have an innate, instinctive basis,’ he wrote. ‘It becomes differentiated as masculine or feminine in the course of the various experiences of growing up.’ Therefore, said Money, a human baby can be literally assigned to either sex, a belief that was used by doctors to justify surgery to change baby boys born with abnormal penises into girls. Such surgery became standard practice: males with unusually tiny penises were ‘reassigned’ as females.
In contrast, the Kansas group came to the conclusion that ‘the biggest sex organ is between the ears, not between the legs’ and began to challenge the orthodoxy that sex roles were environmentally determined. In 1965 Diamond argued the point in a paper critical of Money, charging that Money had presented no case histories to support his theory of psychosexual neutrality, that the evidence from hermaphrodites was irrelevant – if their genitalia were ambiguous, their brains might be, too – and that it was more plausible that human beings, like guinea pigs, experienced a prenatal fixation of mental sex identity.31 In effect, he challenged Money to produce a psychosexually neutral, normal child, or one that had accepted sex reassignment.
Money brushed aside the criticism as he gathered the rewards of increasing fame. His paper had won a prize; that had led to a huge grant; and when his team began transsexual surgery, he became a celebrity profiled in newspapers and on television. But Diamond had hit a nerve, for the very next year Money took on a case of a normal boy who had lost his penis after a botched circumcision. The boy was a monozygotic twin, so the opportunity to demonstrate how he could be turned into a woman, while his twin developed as a man, was irresistible. On Money’s advice the boy was surgically reassigned as a girl then raised by his parents as a girl and never told of her origin. In 1972 Money published a book describing the case as an unqualified success. It was hailed in the press as definitive proof that sex roles were the product of society, not biology; it influenced a generation of feminists at a critical time; it entered the psychology textbooks; and it influenced multitudes of doctors who now saw sex reassignment as a simple solution to a complicated problem.
Money seemed to have won the argument. Then in 1979 a BBC television team began investigating the case. They had heard rumours that the boy who became a girl was not the success that Money claimed. They managed to penetrate the anonymity of the case and even briefly meet the girl in question, though they did not divulge her identity on air. Called Brenda Reimer, she lived with her family in Winnipeg and was then 14. What they saw was an unhappy youth with masculine body language and a deep voice. The BBC crew interviewed Money, who reacted with fury at the invasion of the family’s privacy. Diamond continued to press Money for details, but got nowhere. Money now dropped all reference to the case from his published work. The trail once more went cold. Then in 1991 in print Money blamed Diamond for inciting the BBC to invade the girl’s privacy. Enraged at the accusation, Diamond began trying to contact psychiatrists who might have treated the case. In 1995 at last he met Brenda Reimer.
Except Brenda was now called David, and was a happily married man with adopted children. He had endured a confused and unhappy childhood, constantly rebelling against girlish things, though he knew nothing of having been born a boy. When at 14 he still insisted on living as a boy his parents at last told him of his past. He immediately demanded surgery to restore a penis and adopted the life of a teenage male. Diamond persuaded him to let him tell the story to the world under a pseudonym so that they could prevent people having to endure the same fate in the future. In 2000, the writer John Colapinto convinced him to drop his anonymity altogether for a book.32
Money has never apologised either to the world for misleading it about the success of the reassignment, or to David Reimer. Today Diamond wonders what would have happened if the little boy had been a gay or transsexual who might have wanted to live either in an effeminate way or as a female, or had not been willing to come out of his closet and tell his story.
David Reimer is not alone. Most boys reassigned as girls declare themselves boys at adolescence. And a recent study of people born with ambiguous genitalia found that those who escaped the surgeon’s knife had fewer psychological problems than those who had been operated on in childhood. The large majority of those males that were switched to live as girls have reverted, on their own, to live as males.33
Gender roles are at least partly automatic, blind and untaught, to use William James’s terms. Hormones within the womb trigger masculinisation, but those hormones originate within the body of the baby and are themselves triggered by a series of events that begin with the expression of a single gene on the Y chromosome. (There are plenty of species that allow the environment to determine gender. In crocodiles and turtles, for example, the sex of the animal is set by the temperature at which the egg is incubated. But there are genes involved in such a process, too. Temperature triggers the expression of sex-determining genes. The prime cause may be environmental, but the mechanism is genetic. Genes can be consequence as well as cause.)
Boys like David Reimer want to be boys. They like toys, weapons, competition and action better than dolls, romance, relationships and families. They do not come into the world with all these preferences fully formed, of course, but they do come with some ineffable preference to identify with boyish things. This is what the child psychologist Sandra Scarr has called ‘niche picking’: the tendency to pick the nurture that suits your nature. The frustrations of David Reimer’s youth were caused by his not being allowed to pick his niche.
In this sense, cause and effect are probably circular. People both like doing what they find they are good at and are good at what they like doing. But that implies that this sex difference is at least jump-started by instinct, by innate behavioural differences that pre-date experience. Like many parents who have had children of both sexes, I found the differences surprisingly strong and early. I also had no difficulty in believing that I and my wife were reacting to, rather than causing, such gender dissimilarities. We bought trucks for the boy and dolls for the girl not because we wanted them to be different, but because it was painfully obvious that one wanted trucks and the other dolls.
Exactly how early do these differences emerge? Svetlana Lutchmaya, a student of Simon Baron-Cohen’s at Cambridge, filmed 29 girls and 41 boys at 12 months old and analysed how often the baby looked at its mother’s face. As expected, the girls made far more eye contact than the boys. She then went back and measured the testosterone levels present in the womb during the first trimester of each baby’s gestation. This was possible because in every case the mother had had amniocentesis and a sample of amniotic fluid had been stored. She found that the foetal testosterone level was generally higher for the boys than the girls, and that, among the boys, there was a significant correlation: the higher the testosterone level, the less eye contact made by the baby as a one-year-old.34
Baron-Cohen then asked another student, Jennifer Connellan, to go back even further, to the first day of life. She gave 102 24-hour-old babies two things to look at: her own face, or a physical-mechanical mobile of approximately the same size and shape as a face. The baby boys slightly preferred to look at the mobile; the baby girls slightly preferred the face.35
So the relative female preference for faces, which gradually turns into a preference for social relationships, seems to be there in some form from the start. This distinction between the social and physical world may be a crucial clue to how human brains work. The nineteenth-century psychologist Franz Brentano divided the universe rather starkly into two kinds of entities: those that have intentionality and those that do not. The former can move themselves spontaneously and can have goals and wants; the latter obey only physical laws. It is a distinction that fails at the edges – what about plants? – but as a rule of thumb it works rather well. Evolutionary psychologists have begun to suspect that human beings instinctively apply two different mental processes to understanding such objects: what Daniel Dennett has called folk psychology and folk physics. We assume that a footballer moved because he ‘wanted to’, but that a football moved only because it was kicked. Even babies express surprise when objects appear to disobey the laws of physics – if they move through each other, if large objects seem to go into smaller ones, or if they move without being touched.
You can see where I am heading, I suspect: on average, men are more interested in folk physics than women, who are more interested in folk psychology than men. Simon Baron-Cohen’s research focus is autism, a difficulty with the social world that affects mainly boys. Together with Alan Leslie, Baron-Cohen pioneered the theory that autistic boys have trouble theorising about the minds of others, though he now prefers to use the term ‘empathising’. There are many other features of severe autism, including difficulty with language, but in what is probably its ‘purer’ and less severe form, Asperger’s syndrome, autism seems mainly to consist of a difficulty in empathising with other people’s thoughts. Since boys are less good at empathising than girls anyway, then perhaps autism is just an extreme version of the male brain. Hence Baron-Cohen’s interest in the inverse correlation between prenatal testosterone and eye contact: the masculinisation of the brain by testosterone may go ‘too far’ in autistics.36
Intriguingly, Asperger’s children are often better than normal at folk physics. Not only are they frequently fascinated by mechanical things, from light switches to aeroplanes, but they generally take an engineering approach to the world, trying to understand the rules by which things – and people – operate. They frequently become precociously expert in factual knowledge and mathematics. They are also more than twice as likely to have fathers and grandfathers who worked in engineering. On a standard test of autistic tendencies, scientists generally score higher than non-scientists and physicists and engineers score higher than biologists. Baron-Cohen says of one brilliant mathematician, a winner of the Fields medal, who has Asperger’s: ‘Empathy passes him by.’37
To demonstrate how a difficulty with folk psychology can coexist happily with expertise at folk physics, psychologists designed two remarkably similar tests called the false-belief test and the false-photo test. In the false-belief test, the child sees the experimenter move a concealed object from one receptacle to another while a third person is not watching. The child then has to say where the third person will look for the object. To get the right answer, he has to understand that the third person holds a false belief. All children pass this test for the first time around the age of four (boys later than girls), but autistics are especially late developers.
In the false-photo test, by contrast, the child takes a Polaroid photograph of a scene, then, while the picture is developing, sees the experimenter move one of the objects in the scene. The child is asked which position the object will occupy in the photograph. Autistics have no difficulty with this test, because their understanding of folk physics outstrips their understanding of folk psychology.
Folk physics is just part of a skill that Baron-Cohen calls ‘systemising’. It is the ability to analyse input-output relationships in the natural, technical, abstract and even human world: to understand cause and effect, regularity and rules. He believes that human beings have two separate mental abilities, systemising and empathising, and that, though some people are good at both, others are good at one and bad at the other. Those who are good systemisers and bad empathisers will try to use their systemising skills to solve social problems. For instance, one person with Asperger’s said to Baron-Cohen that ‘Where do you live?’ was not a good question, since it could be answered on many levels: country, city, district, street or house number. True, but most people solve the problem by empathising with the questioner. If speaking to a neighbour, he might name the house; if to a foreigner, the country.
If Asperger’s people are good systemisers and bad empathisers, with extreme-male brains, the thought arises that there are probably people who are good empathisers and poor systemisers, with extreme female brains. A moment’s thought will confirm that we all know such people, but their particular skill combination is rarely classified as pathological. It is probably easier to live a normal life in the modern world with poor systemising skills than with poor empathising skills. In the Stone Age, it might have been less easy.38
The empathy story illustrates a very William James theme of separate instincts. To be good at empathising you need a domain, or module, in your mind that learns to intuitively treat animate creatures as having mental states as well as physical properties. To be good at systemising, you need a domain that learns how to intuit cause and effect, regularities and rules. These are separate mental modules, separate skills and separate learning tasks.
The empathy domain seems to rely on circuits around the paracingulate sulcus, a valley of the brain close to the mid-line and near the front of the head. In the studies of Chris and Uta Frith in London, this area lights up (in a suitable scanner) when a person reads a story that requires ‘mentalising’ – imagining the mental states of others; it does not light up when the person reads a story about physical cause and effect or a series of unlinked sentences. In people with Asperger’s syndrome, however, this area does not light up when reading mental-state stories, but a neighbouring area does, instead. This is an area implicated in general reasoning, which supports the psychologists’ hunch that Asperger’s people reason about social issues rather than empathise about them.39
All of which rather supports the idea that Jamesian instincts must be manifest in mental circuits called modules, each specifically designed to be good at its specific mental task. Such a modular view of the mind was first enunciated by the philosopher Jerry Fodor in the early 1980s and later developed by the anthropologist John Tooby and the psychologist Leda Cosmides in the 1990s. Tooby and Cosmides were attacking the then widespread belief that the brain is a general-purpose learning device. Instead, said the anthropologist-psychologist couple, the mind is like a Swiss army knife. For blades and screwdrivers and things for helping Boy Scouts get stones out of horses’ hoofs, read vision modules, language modules and empathy modules. Like the tools of a knife, these modules are rich in teleological purpose: it makes sense not just to describe what they are made of and how they do their job, but what they are for. Just as the stomach is for digestion, so the visual system of the brain is for seeing. Both are functional, and functional design implies evolution by natural selection, which implies at least partly a genetic ontology. The mind therefore consists of a collection of content-specific, information-processing modules adapted to past environments. Nativism was back.40
This was the high point of what is sometimes called the cognitive revolution. Though it now owes much to the tragic genius Alan Turing, with his extraordinary mathematical proof that reasoning could take a mechanical form – that it was a form of computation – the cognitive revolution really began with Noam Chomsky in the 1950s. Chomsky argued that the universal features of human language, invariant throughout the world, plus the logical impossibility of a child deducing the rules of a language as quickly as it does merely from the scanty examples available to it, must imply that there was something innate about language. Much later, Steven Pinker dissected the human ‘language instinct’, showed it had all the hallmarks of a Swiss army knife blade – structure designed for function – and added the notion that what the mind was equipped with was not innate data, but innate ways of processing data.41
Do not mistake this for an empty or obvious claim. It would be quite possible to imagine that vision, language and empathy are done by different parts of the brain in different people. That indeed is the logical prediction that follows from the empiricist argument that runs from Locke, Hume and Mill right up to the modern ‘connectionists’ who design multi-purpose computer networks to mimic brains. And it is wrong. Neurologists can produce battalions of case histories to support the idea that particular parts of the mind correspond to particular parts of the brain with very little variation all over the world. If you damage one part of your brain, in an accident or after a stroke, you do not suffer some generalised debility: you lose one particular feature of your mind – and the feature you lose depends precisely on which part of the brain is lost. This cannot but imply that different parts of the brain are pre-designed for different jobs, something that could only come about through genes. Genes are often thought of as constraints on the adaptability of human behaviour. The reverse is true. They do not constrain; they enable.
True, there have been rearguard actions by the retreating empiricists, but these skirmishes have only briefly delayed the advance of the modular mind. There is a degree of plasticity in the brain that allows different areas to compensate for the failure of their neighbouring area. Mriganka Sur has partly rewired the eyes of a ferret to the auditory cortex of its brain rather than the visual cortex, and in some rudimentary way it can still ‘see’, but not very well. Although you might think it remarkable that the ferret can see at all after such surgery, there is disagreement whether Sur’s experiment reveals more about the plasticity of the brain or the limits of that plasticity.42
If the modular mind is real, then all you have to do to understand the special features of the human mind is to dissect the brain to find out which bits have ‘hypertrophied’ in the past few million years—which modules and therefore which instincts are disproportionately big. Then you will know what makes human beings special. If only it were so easy! Almost everything in the human brain is bigger than in the chimpanzee brain. Human beings apparently do more seeing, more feeling, more moving, more balancing, more remembering and even more smelling than chimps. Far from finding a normal chimpanzee brain with a huge, turbo-charged thinking-and-speaking device attached to it, you find, if you look inside the human skull, more of everything. Closer inspection reveals that there are certain subtle disproportions. In primates generally, compared with rodents, the bits that do smelling have shrunk dramatically and the bits that do seeing have grown. The neocortex has grown at the expense of the rest. But even here the disproportion is not very marked. Indeed, since the neocortex develops last, and the frontal regions last of all, you could simply explain the big human brain as a chimp brain that has been grown for longer. In its extreme form this theory holds that the brain expanded, not because expansion was demanded by the requirement for it to do new functions – specifically language or culture – but because something required the enlargement of the brain stem itself and a bigger cortex came along as a passenger for the ride. Remember the lesson of the IQ domains in the ASPM gene: it is genetically easy just to make every part of the brain bigger. Once the big brain was there, hey presto, 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens suddenly discovered he could use it to make bows and arrows, paint cave walls and think about the meaning of life.43
This idea has the advantage of again taking the species down a Cartesian peg – away goes the reassuring notion that humankind was the subject, rather than the object, in its own evolutionary story. But it is not necessarily incompatible with the idea of a modular mind. In fact, you could just as easily turn the logic on its head and argue that human beings were under selective pressure to develop more processing power in the parts of the brain needed for one function – language, say – and the easiest way for the genome to respond was to build a bigger brain generally. The ability to do more seeing and have a greater repertoire of moves was thrown in free. Besides, even a language module is hardly likely to be isolated from other functions. It needs fine discrimination of hearing, finer control of movement in the tongue, lips and chest, greater memory, and so on.44
Scientific theories, however, like empires, are at their most vulnerable when they have vanquished their rivals. No sooner had the modular mind triumphed than one of its main champions started dismantling it. In 2001 Jerry Fodor published a remarkable little book called The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way, which argued that though breaking down the mind into separate computational modules was by far the best theory around, it did not and could not explain how the mind works.45 Pointing out the ‘scandalous’ failure of engineers to build robots capable of routine tasks like cooking breakfast, Fodor gently reminded his colleagues how little had yet been discovered and chided Pinker for his cheerful optimism that the mind was explained.46 Minds, said Fodor, are capable of abducting global inferences from the information supplied by the parts of the brain. You may see, feel and hear raindrops with three different brain modules linked to different senses, but somewhere in your brain resides the inference: ‘it is raining’. In some inevitable sense, then, thinking is a general activity that integrates vision, language, empathy and other modules: mechanisms that operate as modules presuppose mechanisms that don’t. And almost nothing is known about the mechanisms that are not modular. Fodor’s conclusion was to remind scientists just how much ignorance they had discovered: they had merely thrown some light on how much dark there was.
But at least this much is clear. To build a brain with instinctive abilities, the Genome Organising Device lays down separate circuits with suitable internal patterns that allow them to carry out suitable computations, then links them with appropriate inputs from the senses. In the case of a digger wasp or a cuckoo, such modules may have to ‘get the behaviour right’ first time and may be comparatively indifferent to experience. But in the case of the human mind, almost all such instinctive modules are designed to be modified by experience. Some adapt continuously throughout life, some change rapidly with experience then set like cement. A few just develop to their own timetable. In the rest of this book, I propose to try to find the genes responsible for building – and changing – these circuits.
One of the besetting sins of the nature-nurture debate has been the habit of utopianism, the notion that there is one ideal design of society that can be derived from a theory of human nature. Many of those who thought they understood human nature promptly turned description to prescription and set out a design of the perfect society. This practice is common to those on the nature side of the debate as well as those on the nurture side. Yet the only lesson to be drawn from utopian dreaming is that all utopias are hells. All attempts to design society by reference to one narrow conception of human nature, whether on paper or in the streets, end in producing something much worse. I propose to end each chapter mocking the utopia implied in taking any theory too far.
William James and the protagonists of instinct did not, as far as I can discern, write a utopia. But Plato’s Republic, the father of all utopias, is in many ways close to a Jamesian dream. It is imbued with a similar nativism. The Republic has been called a ‘managerial meritocracy’ in which the same education is available to all, so the top jobs go to those with the innate talent for them.47 In Plato’s metaphorical republic (probably never intended as a political blueprint), everything is governed by strict rules. The Rulers, who make policy, are assisted by the Auxiliaries, who provide a sort of civil and defence service. Together these two classes are called the Guardians, and they are chosen on merit, which means on native talent. But to prevent corruption, the Guardians live lives of austere asceticism, unable to own property, to marry, or even to drink from gold cups. They live in a dormitory, but their miserable existence gladdens their hearts because they know it is for the good of the society as a whole.
Karl Popper was not the first, nor will he be the last, philosopher to call Plato’s dream a totalitarian nightmare. Even Aristotle pointed out that there was not much point in a meritocracy if merit did not bring rewards – of wealth and sex as well as power: ‘Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common.’48 Plato’s citizens were expected to accept any spouse nominated by the state, and (if female) to suckle any baby. Some chance. But grant Plato the backhanded compliment of having this insight, at least: even the meritocracy is an imperfect society. If all people receive the same education, then the differences in their abilities will be innate. A truly equal-opportunity society merely rewards the talented with the best jobs and relegates the rest to doing the dirty work.