Evolution is not a warm and fuzzy concept. Whoever leaves behind the most offspring wins, no matter how that goal is achieved. So, it’s no surprise that the process itself is often brutal. I remember watching a nature show on TV in which a pack of hyenas tore a baby zebra limb from limb without even bothering to kill it first. I felt sick to my stomach, but for the hyenas, it was just an afternoon snack, and I’m sure they gave it no thought once they finished the last tidbit. Animals that arrive at effective solutions to their problems pass on their genes, and with them, their solutions—whether they’re vicious killers like those hyenas or adorable vegetarians like the baby zebra they consumed. Indeed, vicious and adorable, good and bad, moral and immoral—all these are human constructs that don’t exist in the natural world. Evolution is amoral.
Why am I reminding you of this? Because the evolutionary pressures inherent in such a world could easily have brought us to a miserable place. Our chimp cousins rarely look out for one another the way we do, and the same holds true for our baboon second cousins. If you read Robert Sapolsky’s wonderful book on savannah baboons, A Primate’s Memoir, you’ll see that the life of a baboon isn’t much fun unless you’re the alpha, with everyone endlessly harassing the monkey below them in the hierarchy. Their solution to the challenges of life on the savannah could just as easily have been our own, but as luck would have it, Australopithecines evolved to protect themselves by working together. Homo erectus then expanded on their ancestors’ loose-knit cooperation with division of labor, and the resultant interdependence gave us a life strategy that was not only effective but kind as well.
One of the most disconcerting aspects of evolution is the enormous role played by random chance. Our existence as a species is the result of innumerable rolls of the dice, every one of which had to go our way. The most trivial perturbations in our past would have changed everything. If our parents had felt amorous on a different night, or if other sperm happened to win the race to fertilize our mothers’ eggs, I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it. The probability that either of us got a chance to live at all is vanishingly small, and yet here we are. As Richard Dawkins puts it in his fascinating book Unweaving the Rainbow, “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.”
But the mere fact that we get to live is not what makes us lucky. Many animals live a life that I would just as soon forgo, not because it ends in tragedy, as it did for that baby zebra, but because their approach to living is one of endless conflict. Imagine being a seagull and spending your entire life fighting other seagulls for scraps. What makes us so lucky is the pure happenstance that we evolved to be (mostly) good to one another.
Our cooperative nature also set the stage for the evolution of our amazing brain. Our sociality made us smarter individually, but, far more important, it connected our minds to others’ minds in a manner that massively increased our knowledge and computing power. As a result, we long ago surpassed the predators that hunted us on the savannah, and are now holding most of the pathogens at bay that are a much greater threat than predators ever were. For the first time in history, we no longer bury almost half our children before they reach adulthood. Evolution is brutal, but those of us with the good fortune to live in established democracies have used the tools that evolution gave us to create unprecedentedly safe and satisfying lives. We evolved a psychology that continually searches for something better, but a moment’s reflection reveals that it’s hard to ask for much more than that.