As we’ve seen, it’s all too human to be curious about beginnings. Indeed, it’s likely that somehow our brains were set up to think that way, for all humans seem to think about how we became so different from other animals in the important matter of morals. The intuitive philosopher in all of us just naturally wonders about how things got started, as opposed to assuming that somehow they must have been eternally in existence, and the answers human beings have come up with in the moral sphere are various, to say the least, as well as fascinating and often colorful.
For those who are theologically inclined, questions of moral origins may conjure up Adams and Eves who contemplate forbidden but inviting knowledgeable fruit hanging from readily accessible low branches in trees. Or there may be images of this same pair, fallen and shamefully hiding their newly private pudenda behind the plucked leaves of a nearby ficus, as seen in many Renaissance paintings. Long before such stories were written down, however, the entire world was dealing in oral traditions that perpetuated similar myths to satisfy similar human curiosities.
Anthropologists can assure us that today in virtually any ethnographically described nonliterate society, people will be thinking deeply about questions of origins—be they of the physical world, of people, or of morals—and that they’ll be encouraging rhetorically gifted specialists to tell them their origin stories from memory. The unusually imaginative and detailed myths of the Navajos testify to this, and just in the single Ichaa tale we heard not only about the earlier development of humans from mothlike entities, but about moral origins with respect to the incest taboo and how it came into being. That story was told by a gifted Navajo mythmaker named Slim Curly in the 1930s.
Naturally, this widespread human concern with origins is found among our LPA foragers, so it’s safe to say that this “around-the-campfire,” mythological approach extends far backward in time. The Garden of Eden story, Darwin’s personal interest in moral origins, and the very writing of this book would appear to have been culturally preadapted for us in the African New Stone Age, 45,000 years ago and more. The same ever-curious, problem-solving minds that make us ask exactly the same questions today have driven certain authors—including a number of the scientific writers we’re about to discuss—to write popular books having to do with moral origins.
Those earlier, oral-tradition mythologies suggest that first people—and subsequently their morals—were simply created out of whole cloth. The same reasoning is found in the formal religious belief systems that eventually followed—hence we have Adam and Eve as probably two of the more striking mythological figures ever to have emerged on an all-at-once basis. In contrast, the theory of natural selection brings us to a rather different kind of interpretation, for in comparison biological evolution is a process that builds gradualistically on its previous achievements—even when it’s punctuated.
The fact that gene mutations continually come into being is at least suggestive of unprecedented novelty, but mutant genes and random genetic drift are simply nature’s way of providing fodder for an overall Darwinian process that basically moves through time completely blindly and quite gradually, building on its own past precedents. For a biologist like Ernst Mayr, this ongoing process is by definition both dynamic and continuous at the same time.1 Nonetheless, when our common sense tells us an evolutionary event is both novel and important, we do tend to talk about origins. This was the case with Darwin, when in 1859 he entitled his first book On The Origin of Species. This remarkable naturalist obviously thought deeply about moral origins as well, even though his own high standards of scientific reasoning didn’t permit him to come up with even a tentative historical sequence in The Descent of Man.
Thus, “moral origins” is a venerable item in our scientific vocabulary, but we must keep in mind that the origins involved will have been based on preadaptations, and the mythmaker’s “whole cloth” idea must be set aside. Mutant genes surely were important, but basically nature has always liked to combine older building blocks with newer ones and then combine this product with still newer ones. That provides the continuity that Mayr spoke of.
I’ve suggested that moral origins took place gradually, over thousands of generations, through natural selection that gave us a conscience, including a sense of shame. Just like other selection events, this involved not only preadaptations but also, in all probability, significant environmental changes. My hypothesis has been that the immediate agency that created a shameful conscience was punitive social selection, so in fact there could have been two environments that helped to shape moral origins, depending on which of the three chronological hypotheses proposed in Chapter 6 was operative.
More at a distance was the changeable natural environment, which provided delicious, nutritious large ungulates to hunt, along with materials for fashioning some serious hunting weapons, plant foods to gather, water to drink, means of shelter, probably some curative herbs, and occasional periods of stress. It was the social environment, however, that provided the more immediate selection forces, and this social niche was in part created by humans themselves.2 The original, punitive type of social selection gave us a conscience, but by providing such efficient free-rider suppression, it later made it possible for altruistic traits to evolve as strongly as they have.
With regard to explaining moral origins in a concrete way, philosopher Mary Midgley half a decade ago took a relatively pessimistic view in The Ethical Primate:
We can indeed wonder how and when our remote ancestors did actually come to be troubled with a conscience, how they became aware that they could make free choices, how they developed moral concerns to the extent that every human society now has them. But we are unlikely ever to have more than the faintest, most tantalizing indications about this strange process, indications which can mislead us as easily as they can help us. They are misleading not just because they are scanty, but because of our own remoteness. Even if we could somehow listen in at some crucial point and had help with the language—or proto-language—the situation would be so unimaginably strange to us that we would stand little chance of grasping it. So we have here a gap which we have to fill in, like other historical gaps, as best we can from indirect evidence, from what comes before and after, and from careful comparison with other species.3
I’m probably a bit more sanguine about making an evolutionary reconstruction of moral origins than Midgley is, but then I have spent the last decade immersed in data on chimpanzees, bonobos, and LPA hunter-gatherers, trying to make many of the kinds of comparisons and connections she calls for. I also have recognized the barriers she identifies, and for that reason I have not attempted to describe the protoconscience beyond acknowledging its existence.
At the same time, I’ve been watching carefully to see what archaeologists were coming up with. Two studies by Mary Stiner that we encountered earlier have been critical to the more specific theories espoused in this book, and they were published within that same ten-year time frame. They told us that humans became dedicated large-game hunters a quarter of a million years ago and that their mode of butchery also changed in ways that could have been socially significant. It has been my view that if these various types of indirect evidence could be joined in a synthesis, and if relative plausibility was the scientific standard used to test the overall hypothesis, at least a substantial beginning could be made toward a fuller understanding of how we and we alone became moral.
I have tied moral origins to the major political transition of earlier humans from being a species that lived hierarchically to becoming one that became devoutly egalitarian. The theory I’ve proposed can be stated simply: what put this very decisive brand of egalitarianism so firmly in place was the ability of politically unified groups to “outlaw” and punish resented alpha-male behavior. The impact was profound, for this put an evolutionary premium on self-control and also began to suppress free riders in ways that were all but uniquely human.
What I cannot specify with current evidence is whether the humans who were just beginning to go after large ungulates were perhaps still nearly as hierarchical as their ape ancestor had been—or whether the transition to egalitarianism was already well under way. Aside from subordinate males wanting more personal autonomy or improved access to females for breeding, an additional factor, earlier on, might have been a desire to share more efficiently whatever carcasses were acquired and butchered, which included not only some megafauna but also, surely, smaller game like that hunted by Ancestral Pan.4
Whatever the earlier scenario, I have held that this overall political transition to egalitarianism could have been significantly accelerated, and made definitive and culturally institutionalized, at the point when humans were becoming active-pursuit hunters. Because variance reduction was so important to their nutrition, at that point they were obliged to live in bands with a fair number of other hunters, and somehow they had to efficiently share out the sizable but not enormous game they were killing, because as entire hunting teams they were routinely investing so much energy in its pursuit. These are hypotheses that have, I think, some specific empirical support—and also some general plausibility. But that is for the reader to judge.
We might also try to key such egalitarian developments to the crude archaeological evidence we have about brain size, for it’s at least logical that the larger the brain, the more that autonomy-loving subordinates could have been capable of effectively ganging up to improve their competitive position against high-ranking dominators in gaining meat—or females. But there’s no way at all of telling when brains became powerful enough socially to permit the creation of a decisive and stable egalitarian order.
I’ve suggested that archaic Homo sapiens might conceivably have already been fully egalitarian before a quarter of a million years ago, when intensive hunting began. If that were the case, we could turn things around and theorize that definitive egalitarianism paved the way for hunting, rather than vice versa. For moral origins, this is not important; what matters is that the strong social control that made earlier egalitarian orders possible led to the evolution of our human conscience.
What I feel most confident in hypothesizing is that from a quarter of a million years forward archaic humans in bands, with their obvious needs for efficient meat distribution, had a great deal to gain by being engaged in the same intensive, effective, general suppression of alpha-male behavior practiced today. This would have brought with it some really aggressive free-rider suppression, and in all probability it would have involved not only the many individuals who had stronger alpha tendencies, but also those with other antisocial proclivities like cheating or theft, which also would have seriously interfered with effectively equalized meat-sharing. Any such behavior would have aroused people’s ire in a multifamily band that was intent on sharing its favorite nourishment and was facing periodic but not calamitous scarcities that made such sharing very important.
At the beginning of what might be called the egalitarian transition, fear of receiving aggression would have been the primary and primitive (ancestral) psychological mechanism that drove the natural dominators to submit when their groups opposed them. And most likely the physical conflicts between resentful groups and their less restrained dominators would have been far more frequent than today, driving social selection strongly in favor of a conscience.
This conscience would have evolved as self-control based on rule internalization became more efficient, and evolving a degree of conscience that Mary Midgley or you or I would recognize surely involved changes to the brain. This process was likely to have taken at least 1,000 generations, depending on how strong the social selection was in its early and presumptively often quite brutal operation. That’s only 25,000 years, and probably a more reasonable figure would be 2,000 to 4,000 generations (50,000–100,000 years), but as we’ve seen, up to 8,000 generations could have been available with any of our three scenarios.
At the time that something close to a modern conscience would have evolved, and this would have included a shameful blushing response as well as emotionally identifying with rules, we may definitely speak in terms of moral origins. The point of comparison is the submissive, fear-based self-control of a domesticated dog or wolf or of a bonobo or chimpanzee. Once we’d acquired a full moral sense, which included thinking in terms of socially attractive virtue as well as shameful vice, gossiping accordingly about our fellows, and having a sense of our moral selves, the difference had become profound.
The following hypothesis is consistent with any of the three tentative sequences developed earlier in the book. First, it was angry, punitive social selection by groups that first gave us this physically evolved conscience. Second; it did so by making free-riding bullies and others who couldn’t control their antisocial impulses pay genetically for their “crimes,” and afterward similar forces, now endowed with morality, continued to vigorously suppress the behavior of would-be free riders—which made it much easier for altruistic traits to evolve genetically. This second phase of moral evolution might have begun at latest in the vicinity of 200,000 BP, but this is a guess. And because altruists not only were protected against free riding but also were pairing off with other altruists, the selection forces that genetically favored altruistic traits could have been powerful enough to require only a few thousand additional generations to make us fully as altruistic as we are today. Thus, by around 150,000 BP, when we may at least hypothesize that anatomically modern African humans were on the verge of cultural modernity, we could have been well on the way to becoming moral beings and to becoming significantly more altruistic than our more distant ancestors had been.
That is the story of moral origins as I am able to piece it together with present information, and it differs radically from any that has been told before. Perhaps in rendering this account I have allowed myself to become rather venturesome as a scientist, done so because the questions being addressed are so humanly important and also so intrinsically fascinating. But that is difficult to say because the many-faceted, holistic scenario I have developed here is not easily tested on a scientific basis that includes clear-cut “falsification.”
Of course, many of the component hypotheses are readily subjected to scrutiny, such as the parsimony-based reconstruction of ancestral behaviors or the reconstruction of culturally modern behaviors in human foragers as of 45,000 years ago. There are many other areas where alternative approaches are possible, and these include the very definition of morality, the focus on shame, and the rather expansive definition I have used of the evolutionary conscience. However, if we consider the moral origins theory advanced in this book as a unified whole, the best way to test it is simply to judge its overall plausibility in comparison with other theories of moral evolution.5
The scientific territory covered by moral origins is wide, just as it should be for such a large and relatively unexplored topic. However, my interest here does not extend to evolutionary ethics, as discussed by sociologist Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and others more recently.6 What the purview of this book does include is the mechanisms that have been active in the evolutionary development of shame, virtue, extrafamilial generosity, and moralistic group social control, and the task I set myself has been to write a pointedly historical natural history of moral origins, with full attention to details that include what preceded these origins and what happened to human social life afterward.
One interesting twist on the moral origins theme arrived over a century ago with Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals.7 This well-known writer followed Darwin in providing a philosopher’s version of moral origins with a strong evolutionary flavor, and his origins scenario was specific and, like mine, quite political, if rather fanciful. But basically the argument was more about questions of power, turn-the-other-cheek weakness, and anti-Christianity than about how morals came into being. In a sense, the power theme does link Nietzsche’s work with what I have done here, but the beauty of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is that the weak, in joining forces to control the strong, themselves become powerful.
As an archaeological treatise James Breasted’s The Dawn of Conscience sounds extremely promising in its title,8 but the idea seems to have been that to gain a purchase on moral evolution, we must turn merely to the ancient Egyptians. Darwin would not have agreed with this, nor do I. However, I do believe that Darwin would have heartily approved of Finnish sociologist Edward Westermarck’s monumentally documented The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,9 which was published before Breasted’s work and just a quarter of a century after Darwin’s death.
Westermarck’s remarkable analysis makes ample use of the then available nonliterate ethnography, and it covers some of the topics I have concentrated upon here, such as moral emotions (including altruism), conscience, and capital punishment. It does so insightfully, but in spite of its overall brilliance, today this interesting work is known mainly for Westermarck’s almost offhand hypothesis about incest,10 which was mentioned in a previous chapter. This powerful synthesis deserves better acknowledgment on many other scores, largely as a precursor for today’s evolutionary psychology with its focus on emotions. However, Westermarck did not follow Darwin’s general approach by bringing a strong historical dimension into his evolutionary analysis, and with the information available to him at the time this would have been fairly difficult.
My guiding principle has been that the historical dimension is critical to a full explanation of moral origins, and that it was simply because Darwin hadn’t the needed information that he was obliged to suggest a “byproduct” type of argument with respect to the conscience. Today, a number of other scholars are actively exploring the moral origins question mainly from the ahistorical perspective of “adaptive design,” which also is taken from Darwin. But I find it curious that in spite of our vastly improved knowledge from archaeology, and in spite of our growing capacity to make reliable ancestral behavioral reconstructions, this historical dimension has been set aside to the degree it has.
Perhaps part of the answer is that in grappling with the question of conscience, Darwin set a precedent, and, as loyal Darwinists, scientists who respect his work have simply assumed that in such matters a historical analysis is out of the question. But another piece of the puzzle is that modern academicians tend to put themselves into specialist compartments, whereas Darwin’s curiosity knew no disciplinary boundaries.
Edward O. Wilson did end his classic interdisciplinary work, Sociobiology, with a tentative historical analysis of human social evolution that included matters of morals in the sense that altruism was a focus.11 However, a few years later in his On Human Nature, which dealt much more directly with morality, he did not pursue this historical dimension further.12 I believe it was this second work of Wilson’s that set the standard for well-known popularizations like those of Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and James Q. Wilson, along with Michael Shermer.
Ridley’s popular scientific work The Origins of Virtue is essentially a sociobiological tract in that it sticks to models like kin selection and reciprocal altruism.13 Like Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal,14 Ridley’s book essentially lacks any in-depth historical dimension. The same is true of James Q. Wilson’s The Moral Sense,15 which is written more humanistically but, like more technical academic works in evolutionary psychology, is equally ahistorical if it is compared with Darwin’s way of writing natural history. A similar but theoretically more far-ranging work is Michael Shermer’s The Science of Good and Evil,16 which breaks with this sociobiological tradition in one way: it gives some serious consideration to group selection theory as this has been espoused by Ernst Mayr and David Sloan Wilson.17 But it, too, is essentially ahistorical. Also essentially ahistorical is Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds,18 which basically takes a linguistic approach to moral origins.
In a more technical volume edited by philosopher Leonard Katz, which is entitled Evolutionary Origins of Morality,19 four long chapters provide a nice sampling of the scientific diversity currently encountered in this field. I have already mentioned the first essay, by Jessica Flack and primatologist Frans de Waal. They talk about empathy as a major building block for moral evolution;20 here, I’ve used the more technical term “preadaptation” to the same effect. Their building block approach ties in nicely with a historical evolutionary approach, and it has been as a result of reading their work that I have emphasized human sympathy (they refer to it as empathy) so heavily in the preceding pages.
In Katz’s book my own anthropological chapter comes next,21 and it deals with the prehistoric role of social sanctioning and conflict resolution in the natural selection of moral behavior, with some hints of the free-rider suppression theory I’ve developed here. In the third chapter philosopher Elliott Sober and biologist David Sloan Wilson continue the arguments they made in Unto Others,22 endeavoring to establish group selection as an important factor in moral evolution and to expand its theoretical scope.23 (In their important book Unto Others there’s a great deal of evolutionary theory, and some excellent use of ethnography, but again not very much emphasis on historical process, per se.) The final chapter, by evolutionary philosopher Brian Skyrms,24 is heavily involved with relevant mathematical modeling, and characteristically it is ahistorical and oriented to explaining morals in terms of game theory and adaptive design.25
The great majority of the contemporary work on the human nature aspect of moral evolution is more in line with this last approach of Skyrms. To test such models, most often the primary data are generated in laboratories, usually with children or college students as subjects, and the findings are tested against criteria of evolutionary design, a mode of analysis that (as I’ve said) does stem directly from Darwin. A large number of evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary economists, including Ernst Fehr in Zurich, do this type of work, and in the field of morals some of the overall flavor of evolutionary psychology is exemplified by the title of an article by Dennis Krebs: “The Evolution of Moral Dispositions in the Human Species.”26 But design, not holistic natural history, is the approach throughout.
Among a growing coterie of evolutionary economists, elaborations of game theory of the type that originally inspired Robert Trivers have been used to investigate morally relevant behaviors like human generosity, our sense of fairness, the uses of punishment, and the punishment of nonpunishers.27 In addition, Robert Frank, notably in Passions Within Reason, has contributed significantly to our evolutionary understanding of conscience and moral emotions.28
An interesting recent debate that ties in with the egalitarian theory I espouse has to do with whether, when people in these experiments go out of their way to punish those who make “unfair” offers, they are motivated by a spiteful or otherwise resentful need to retaliate or whether they are expressing an aversion to inequality.29 In subsequent experiments, it appears that by the age of seven to eight, children act on feelings in this latter direction—which helps to build the case that antihierarchical feelings are an important and evolved component of human nature.
Evolutionary economists such as Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis have explored the impact of social control through “strong reciprocity.”30 And with an emphasis on fighting between bands, Bowles has also explored the possibility that group selection might have worked robustly to support altruistic traits in the Late Pleistocene;31 he has suggested that prehistoric warfare, in combination with major genetic differences between different prehistoric forager groups, could have generated significant forces in favor of group selection.32 If we factor in the moralistic free-rider suppression that I have been emphasizing so heavily, this may provide a major, multilevel formula for explaining the evolution of altruistic traits.
Contemporary archaeologists and paleoanthropologists have done a remarkable job of explaining historically the physical evolution of humans and their material culture over time, taking their basic methodological historical cues directly from Darwin. They also have studied the cognitive side of prehistoric cultural evolution, to good effect.33 When it comes to accounting for the moral side of our evolution, however, these and the other scholars I’ve just discussed have not readily adopted the historical approach that Darwin himself would have preferred to use.
To many, my concern with writing the natural history of morals more historically may seem rather old-fashioned, or even quixotic, but my aim has been to provide as complete a scenario as possible for moral origins and to do so by employing the rich, holistic type of evolutionary analysis that Darwin used to such good effect—whenever his data allowed him to do so. I could have wished for still better data, but I have provided a number of hypotheses that, I believe, may be useful to future explorations of moral origins in a number of fields, as better data do become available. If some of the present working hypotheses eventually are modified or even replaced by theories that seem more plausible, so be it.
The preceding chapters have made it abundantly clear that moral origins involved some radical changes in our behavioral potential. Yet our ape ancestors, in spite of their lack of feelings of shame, at least had the potential to impose “rules”—as individuals but also as groups—even as they responded to rules imposed by others. It’s our sense of virtuous good and shameful evil, along with our universal and symbolically stated love of altruistic generosity, that sets us apart.
If my treatment of moral origins has focused heavily upon homologous continuities, there has also been what appears to be some outright “novelty.” The symbolic language that allows us to gossip in such specific terms is one such advance. Blushing with shame is also a major evolutionary anomaly in this sense.34 Could such blushing be a signal, sent to others, that somehow redounds to the fitness of the signaler? Or could it have evolved as a way of signaling to oneself that social danger is being courted? I hope that someday we’ll be in a position to make some better educated guesses.
Both socially responsive shameful feelings and the accompanying bodily flushing, which is intimately involved with self-awareness, seem to be unique to humans. The same is true of having a deeply felt sense of right and wrong coupled with a capacity to internalize group rules of conduct—a capacity that is based in personal feelings of being morally worthy or unworthy. Our human degrees of altruism and cooperation may not make us unique among living beings, but what other animal gets there the way we do—by knowing shame or by developing a sense of virtue? And what other animal deliberately amplifies its own altruism because it understands cooperative societal functions well enough to do so?
With respect to the longstanding altruism paradox, our moralized type of extrafamilial generosity certainly is new among mammals, including the fascinating ones we’ve discussed that live in kin-based eusocial colonies that also are held in place by group selection.35 Analogically, the hypercooperative naked mole rat in fact can easily outdo our self-sacrificial generosity as these rodents achieve an antlike social organization. But they do this through underlying mechanisms that appear to be very different from ours, and clearly they do so in the absence of morality. Obviously, this applies also to the social insects, such as many species of ants, bees, or wasps.36 They, too, may outdo us in contributing “selflessly” to their societies, but if we look for homologies, we are sorely disappointed: basically, they are doing this in the absence of anything like an internalizing conscience, gossip, group social pressure, shameful blushing, or moralistic capital punishment by angry, morally outraged bands.
Yet it certainly is true that when we think about how far the human potential for cooperation can develop on the ground, it’s a beehive that readily comes to mind. We have only to think of Egyptian or other pyramid builders—or of rural Hutterite communities or hippie communes or, for that matter, the Nazi Wehrmacht’s most dedicated (and ruthless) elite corps—and the parallels are there.37 Nonetheless, the social insects merely provide a striking analogy, which shows that natural selection can stumble into the making of a collectively oriented species in more ways than one.
If we compare any of these eusocial colony dwellers with Ancestral Pan, our ape ancestor’s group-level cooperation pales by comparison because it was limited mainly to ganging up against conspecific bullies or collectively threatening neighbors. Yet it was this socially limited ape ancestor that had the useful building blocks in place as far as moral origins and the evolution of a human style of cooperation were concerned.
As a far less cooperative antecedent, Ancestral Pan does offer us the following homologies. As reconstructed, this species possessed capacities not only for self-awareness, perspective taking, and dominance and subordination, but also for formation of antihierarchical, counterdominant coalitions. In addition, mothers were empathetically socializing their offspring and providing them with cultural learning models.38 This was a remarkable and fortuitous array of preadaptations, and as building blocks all of them, I think, have been important or even crucial to our moral evolution.
Yet these ancestral apes cooperated as entire groups mainly in routinely guarding their territories, in sometimes putting down alphas, and possibly in mobbing predators.39 Like Ancestral Pan, today’s chimpanzees and bonobos are never likely to build pyramids or organize themselves to distribute meat in a fair and basically equalized manner, in spite of all the ancestral precedents the three of us have shared. And a profound evolutionary question that I introduced earlier still lingers. These two Pan species have had exactly the same amount of time that we have (about 6 million years) to develop a conscience like ours—or at least to develop some kind of shame-based feelings of right and wrong. Why have only we managed to do so—in spite of all these shared primitive characteristics? If the analysis in Chapter 5 was correct, and I admit that I wasn’t bending over backward to give living apes the benefit of the doubt, they haven’t even come close. And overall the analysis in this book suggests that this might be because their group social control has remained so limited that fear-based self-control responses have been able to do the job satisfactorily.
If we consider the three fundamental (and competing) “interests” that our genetic nature is designed to serve,40 I’ve emphasized that basically they weigh in heavily in favor of egoism and then, after egoism, nepotism. Both individual self-interest and family interests are straightforwardly selected aspects of our genetic potential,41 and unarguably they’re strong. I’ve emphasized this repeatedly because it’s so basic, and I don’t believe there’s an evolutionary biologist, anywhere, who would say no to this position. And then there’s our still rather mysterious “altruistic quotient,” which ever since Darwin, and especially over the past half a century, has been clamoring for further explanation.
Even though at present scientists are far from being able to identify any functionally very specific human behavior genes, which includes any that might be involved with extrafamilial generosity, I’ve suggested—noncontroversially, I believe—that overall this inherent propensity in favor of being generous outside the family has to be rather weak by comparison. Yet as Sober and Wilson’s work suggests, in everyday contexts this rather modest altruistic potential can be greatly culturally amplified in its expression—if it is actively and purposefully reinforced by social communities that believe in things like social harmony and the Golden Rule.42
I must emphasize, further, that when such phenotypic amplification is accomplished on an insightful basis, this intentional input tends to “focus” genetic selection processes in certain directions—notably, altruists who uplift social life are consistently favored while stingy individuals and those who behave disruptively are regularly disfavored.43 These intention-bearing inputs are made possible by our large brains, and in a sense the intentionality involved does bring a certain purposive element into the process of social selection—and therefore natural selection. Our promotion of generosity helps altruistic genes to be selected reputationally at the same time that our punishment of uninhibited, free-riding bullies or cheaters works against the selfishly aggressive genes that they carry. The advantage goes to the altruists as long as they stay politically united, and therefore to their genes as they are represented in the gene pool.
The human preferences that orient both punitive and prosocially oriented social selection are on a relatively long genetic leash,44 and because they involve flexible choices among alternatives, their effects can be highly facultative, going in quite different directions. For instance, in the face of starvation, only a human being can frame the resulting social dilemma in terms of life, death, and continuation of the family and then consciously choose among the perceived alternatives. And only a group of humans can talk over the dilemma of whether to try and reform a seriously entrenched bully, as opposed to quietly asking his brother to step in and do away with him. Intentions, combined with high intelligence, do make a difference.
I am putting these last ideas forward even though biological scientists normally don’t appreciate the use of any language that smacks of “teleology” in conjunction with evolutionary process. In their book, and mine, natural selection by definition has to be basically blind and not in any way “guided.” However, even though when hunter-gatherers’ preferences affect gene pools this is wholly unintentional, when they go about shaping and implementing their own immediate social policies, often they know exactly what they’re doing. The fact that LPA foragers so predictably use symbols to try to amplify altruism is a testimonial to this, and as a result selection-by-reputation helps to shape gene pools. By itself, this one potent human social preference provides any evolutionist with some serious food for thought.
Both our human cultural capacity in general and many of the specific things that we’re genetically prepared to learn very early in life—such as acquiring a language or helping others in need or having an aversion to inequality—give us an unusual capacity to shape our societies in certain directions, and not in others, and to do so consistently over evolutionary time. If we look at the everyday cultural priorities and vocally manipulative behavior of LPA foraging people in their bands, they have managed to give substantial weight to tweaking altruistic tendencies and to ensuring cooperative outcomes. Innately helpful tendencies are reinforced both in child-rearing and later on, and I’m convinced that LPA foragers have a reasonably good grasp of what they’re doing when they reinforce them.
If culture is so intimately entwined with biology, how can we effectively factor out the purposive element in culture to ask what its effects may be on gene pools? The hunter-gatherers in my sample of fifty societies do this kind of tweaking quite regularly by insisting that meat be divided according to the rules, by actively encouraging generosity, by cracking down severely on major free riders, and by trying very hard to manage conflicts before they explode. They often do this preemptively by discouraging the self-aggrandizing or deceptive aspects of their fellows’ behaviors when these are likely to result in victimization—or conflict.
This strategic use of punitive social selection improves the reproductive success of everyone save for antisocially selfish types, such as overly dominant or deceptive deviants. And I’ve held that there’s a zero-sum game going on: the greedy deviant’s loss, for example when he’s stopped from hogging the meat, is everyone else’s gain. Thus, it’s good for everyone’s genes to be part of a group-wide coalition that sees to it that a few alpha males are prevented from monopolizing a modest-sized carcass like an antelope or zebra and sees to it that all share in the proceeds more or less equally.
An important theoretical point is that such culturally based purposeful inputs are both part of natural selection and a product thereof. Thus, their effects have gone beyond shaping everyday group life prosocially, for they have helped to shape our gene pools in prosocial directions that are similar. I believe that these powerful brains of ours have been making all of this possible for thousands of generations, and one major and totally unintentional side effect has been the conscience that originally made us a moral species. Another has been our unusual propensity to practice generous behavior outside the family, which evolved through a variety of mechanisms and which, I propose, humans have deliberately amplified in order to facilitate better cooperation.
Tendencies to extrafamilial generosity just naturally come into conflict with innate selfishness and nepotism—even as they’re being amplified by the impressive array of cultural practices we’ve met with, and even as social selection makes them useful to fitness. For scores or hundreds of millennia, the balance among these three in their everyday expression has made possible the cooperation we are famous for, and if we look at hunter-gatherers’ overall meat-sharing patterns, our well-amplified, innately generous impulses can be seen as oiling the wheels of a collaborative hunting-and-sharing system that has been highly useful to the interests of, respectively, individuals, families, and bands as a whole.
From the standpoint of reproductive success, this cooperative system has worked superbly in what I’ve called normal times, even in bands like those of the ever-contentious Bushmen, or of certain Australian Aborigines we’ve mentioned, with their routinized grousing about not getting fair shares of meat. The bottom line is that all LPA hunter-gatherers do share large carcasses immediately after they kill them, that they do so in similar ways, and that they seldom get into serious conflicts over this meat even though it’s so precious. This is their normal mode of operation, and even when the making of hostile demands is pronounced, this simply produces social pressures that help to keep the system of sharing working for everyone.
This is the cooperation our forbears are so famous for, and it takes place in normal times, when the meat supply is adequate—or at least is not woefully inadequate. But I’ve presented an untold part of the human cooperation story that is equally important. For our species, all times haven’t been normal—far from it. We’ve seen that in situations of serious scarcity tendencies to extrafamilial generosity will begin to lose out and that even nepotistic helpfulness can be set aside.
Such flexibility stood our species in excellent stead when attempts to stay with normal, “good times” modes of altruistic, contingent meat sharing could have led to total extinction of a hungry, embattled regional population had it continued to live—and share—in a good-times mode. Once a band’s equalized sharing system was abandoned, and sharing declined to the level of nepotism, this might have permitted at least a few lucky or unusually adept families to survive by cooperatively subsisting on their own until better conditions arrived, or until migration to a different region with better possibilities could be accomplished. In still harsher situations, as we’ve seen, a similar argument can even be made with respect to individuals acting just on the basis of egoism.
When Leibig’s Law comes into play sharply, and the already-limited quality of human generosity becomes seriously strained, on average the individuals who can adjust their responses accordingly will gain a fitness advantage. Thus, it’s adaptive to fit in well with a band or family unit that cooperates well—but it’s also adaptive to strategically step back and become more selfish if that’s the only way out. This certainly could have been adaptive, but obviously it was very stressful emotionally for the moral beings who in earlier hard times were keeping our species in business for us.
I believe it’s when the chips are down, and true famine strikes, that the tripartite division of labor within human nature we’ve been discussing can be evaluated most accurately. And what this tells us is that when food supplies are adequate, cooperation can pay off quite handsomely and that the rather modest dose of innately prepared extrafamilial generosity we possess can, in fact, go a long way because of shrewd cultural reinforcement—and because generosity can beget more generosity.
The result has been an efficient—but fragile—capacity for cooperation that has had the virtue of being quite flexible. That’s why today we can cooperate effectively not only as hunting bands but also as tribes or as chiefdoms—or as individual nations. Whether this will work for today’s global community of nations may be a different matter, and I shall briefly address that problem in the Epilogue.
Just because humans have been capable of making prosocial choices that shape their societies and affect their very gene pools, does this mean that our species has evolved as far as it could in this direction? I doubt it. Consider, first, what might have transpired had the Late Pleistocene Epoch continued for another 50,000 years instead of beginning to seriously phase out about 12,000 years ago, and had the invention of agriculture never even occurred. Possibly, this additional 2,000 generations of exclusive (and often highly precarious) hunting and gathering might have made us evolve genetically so that our social systems would work more smoothly than they can today, or so that our moral responses would be somewhat different, or so that our modest but important gift of generosity-based altruism might have become stronger—or even could have dwindled, though this seems unlikely.
Thus, today’s innate moral capacity may amount to a mere evolutionary work in progress—even though in so many respects it seems to have been doing its main evolutionary job of contributing to individual reproductive success and getting us through times when the ecological chips were down. If in fact our moral potential is still changing, this may not fit very well with our self-concept as the moral animal, which of course has some self-congratulatory “finished-product” philosophical undertones. But my job as an evolutionary anthropologist is to tell it like it is, and we can only guess about this.
If conscience evolution began fairly abruptly in terms of an “egalitarian revolution” starting just 250,000 years ago, things may still be evolving in this respect. If it began much more gradually, long, long ago, with an authority-hating, autonomy-loving Homo erectus or early archaic Homo sapiens that perhaps wanted better access to females, our moral evolution is likely to have become more genetically stabilized—the idea being that at 45,000 BP an equilibrium would have been reached with respect to an optimized conscience and an optimized “altruism quotient.” We may never find a way of assessing all of this, but it’s interesting to think about.
The scientific study of Pleistocene bottlenecks probably is not yet complete,45 in that additional findings may be on their way. But we may well have just barely made it in terms of navigating some really dangerous junctures when relatively small numbers of human survivors hung on in refuge areas while their regional colleagues perished by the hundreds of thousands.46 Our evolving flexible moral capacity may have been an important part of this picture, and if we assume that these close calls did occur once in a while, it makes sense that even with the facultative adjustments we were able to make, these flexible social capacities were barely up to the job of keeping us alive at the species level.
One obvious implication is that another 50,000 years of Pleistocene instability might eventually have done us in, pure and simple, through sheer bad luck—at some time of cruel adversity when even an “every man for himself” response couldn’t keep just a few of us in business. But, conversely, had these wildly varying selection pressures continued, they might have allowed us time to develop some still better (or different) mechanisms for coping. Just how this might have affected our moral capacity is difficult to say, but the selection forces involved certainly were likely to have favored moral flexibility.
Basically, the evolutionary “destiny” of our species has been up to chance—unless you believe that a micromanaging Divine hand was protectively overseeing the process. I don’t. I believe devoutly in dumb luck as far as the basics of biological evolution are concerned, and this affords little comfort if as a human being, you’d prefer to feel watched over and “special.” Of course, I’ve argued that intelligent intentions on our own part may have helped us genetically to become by nature moral, but we certainly never intended this to take place. Nor did we design ourselves to make it through the Pleistocene, even though I believe we were smart enough to continually fine-tune our contingency-based meat-sharing systems in times of ecological adequacy, and smart enough to abandon them when the chips were really down.
All of which is to say that we cannot take our present moral potential or our present capacity to cope with environmental crises to be either finished products or outcomes of biologically enlightened intentions. We arrived at our moral nature in the great evolutionary arena of chance, even though our very immediate purposeful inputs influenced the process in directions that were prosocial. Indeed, if we set aside this hypothetically extended Pleistocene as an evolutionary fantasy, and consider the actual Holocene present we live in, our moral capacity surely continues to evolve at the level of genes, for some key environmental constraints have changed, and for urban humans surely they are changing further as I write this.
I’ve hypothesized that 45,000 years ago culturally modern band-level societies were continuing to help shape our human gene pool as people favored individuals with good reputations and punished active free riders, just as their forbears had done. The social context was a cooperative band with usually four to seven families, a band far too egalitarian to let any one person run the show. Today’s huge, highly organized, socially and politically hierarchical modern societies differ in the ways that problems of social deviance arise, and in how they are handled by highly centralized systems of law and order, so as I said, this evolutionary story hasn’t necessarily ended. In fact, its trajectory is likely to be changing.
As just one instance, in spite of police detectives and computerized data banks, sociopaths too often go undetected in our large, anonymous societies, and their frightening genetic footprint could, in theory, be increasing. We need only to think of a modern serial rapist, who in an intimate hunting band would know that he could be easily identified—and that as a practical matter he’d better avoid expressing such behavior or he’d soon be killed. Today, if undetected, in theory he can gain a major genetic advantage even though in many parts of the United States abortion interventions would tend to reduce this. And over a few thousand generations, such advantages might be adding up—even though, very fortunately, at least a portion of these conscienceless monsters are taken out of circulation so that they can’t stock our gene pools. In many other ways, presently unfathomable, we may assume that our evolutionary course could be gradually changing because, in these modern settings, the selection scenarios have changed.
We do now have a genomic baseline for future studies, even though at present we can’t identify a single very specific “moral gene.” And a few generations in the future, we may have identified some of the genetic mechanisms that help us to behave egoistically, nepotistically, and altruistically, along with others that make for sympathetic generosity, domination and submission, and a variety of other socially significant behaviors that are relevant to morality, including our shame responses. Perhaps we may even be able to understand the basis for social dispositions that make us prone to blush and find some clues as to how they might have evolved. This may seem optimistic, but then it would have taken an optimist in 1950 to predict that the double helix code would soon be cracked.
At some future point we could also compare a future genome with the one we possess now, but unless that future were very distant, this probably would tell us very little—unless gene selection can proceed far more quickly than we believe it to. This is not out of the question socially if we consider all of the types and levels of selection that are likely. These include two-way runaway social selection, kin selection, piggybacking that involves mistaken kinship, reciprocal altruism and mutualism, group selection, and Simon’s docility selection. All could be contributing to the stabilization and further evolution of traits that make us generous to kin and nonkin alike and that make us moral.
We could also compare current genomes with prehistoric ones, where the necessary DNA is retrievable for Homo erectus, for archaic Homo sapiens, and for anatomically modern humans. Some of these opportunities are already available, and with all this new information we might be able to ask some new kinds of questions, or answer ones I’ve been struggling with here, such as fixing a point in time at which a conscience began to evolve or providing clues as to exactly how or when we were likely to have acquired blushing as a sign of moral distress. What we need is a new Watson and Crick, who can open up the study of social behavior genes in spite of their surely very high degree of complexity.
New substantive findings could lead to novel ways of framing evolutionary questions, and many of the hypotheses explored in this book could become more directly testable or even falsifiable in the sense that philosopher of science Karl Popper famously used the term.47 But I must emphasize that Popper eventually decided that the testing of evolutionary theories constituted a special case, as far as rigorous falsification methods were concerned. Basically, scientific rules for the “building evolutionary scenarios game” have to be more permissive, and that is why I have referred so often to relative plausibility. It is also the reason that I have dared to set forth tentative but specific scenarios like the “large-game hunting necessitated egalitarianism” one.
For the present, the methods and information I have relied upon must suffice, and the various theories I have generated here must be judged largely by how much sense they make as working hypotheses, as well as by how well they fit into the larger pictures I have built. Such evaluation is not easy, and some scientists may prefer to throw up their hands—or even suggest that I may be “hand-waving” my way into one big just-so story. However, I believe the question of moral origins is important enough to merit investing the effort and taking a few chances in terms of setting up working hypotheses that, in combination, may stimulate better working hypotheses for the future.
My credo has been that such scenarios, even if partly wrong, can lead to more satisfying scientific explanations in the future. And I do believe that the Darwinian evolutionary scenario I have laid out here to be an advance over Darwin’s own story, which in 1871—all of 140 years ago—took the conscience to be an apparently inevitable side effect of our human intelligence and empathy, and looked solely to group selection as the way to explain extrafamilial generosity.
Our consciences and their functions are, indeed, tied to intelligence and sympathy, but the message of this book is that the conscience has actually evolved on its own in ways that can now be hypothesized on the basis of relative plausibility. Such a theory can be built not only by considering prehistoric changes in the natural environment, but also by giving some serious weight to prosocial human choices as these have shaped our social environments, sometimes quite brutally, and in turn have helped to shape our gene pools.
As I was writing this final chapter, I found myself wondering how convincing the scientific answers I have proposed in the preceding pages will be with the passage of yet another 140 years. I can only hope that my story here, like Darwin’s, will be seen as being incomplete but far from wrong—and worthy of continuation.