The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (51 page)

Sportsmanship

Cheating during an athletic competition provokes a particular sort of moral outrage. It leads to finger-pointing, name-calling, and arguing. And yet, it is not the same resentment that we feel when someone fails to reciprocate a kindness. If someone cheats during social reciprocity, we initiate our punishment routine: we sulk and withdraw from further social contact. If someone cheats during sports, we complain loudly and publicly, and then go back to playing against them. Why should we do this?

Sportsmanship is not a matter of being altruistic, but of ritualizing one's intense sexual and social competitiveness in a particular, restrained manner. We are not normally playing against our kin, so kin selection cannot explain the restraint. Reciprocity looks relevant, but only in the sense that it always looks relevant to any social interactions that continue over time, include costs and benefits, and offer the possibility of cheating.

Turn-taking and rule-following in sport is not the same as reciprocity. When Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi hit a tennis ball back and forth, they are not reciprocating costs and benefits;

they are trying to win points. Of course, sports contestants play only because the expected average benefits of play exceed those of not playing. But the benefits from play are not transferred from one participant to the other, as in economic trade. The benefits come from the spectators, in the social status they confer on good players. Of course, the spectators do not need to be physically present to award status to the winners, they only need to hear about the result through gossip. The claim that a winner cheated during an athletic contest is a potent sexual insult, because it undermines their claim to status, which is one of the most valuable currencies in the sexual marketplace.

In competitive sports, games and contests, cheating means anything that interferes with a meritocratic outcome. The ideal is for the best player to win. Anything that significantly undermines the correlation between the players' ability and the outcome of the contest is viewed with suspicion, whether or not it is a violation of some explicit rule. In fact, the rules of sports are often changed to maintain the link between "true ability" and outcome, such as when professional sports banned steroids. We value a "level playing-field" not only in sports but in other kinds of meritocratic competition. Fair competition maximizes the information that winning carries about the relative fitness of the winner. The result is to maximize the efficiency of sexual choice based on sporting results. We saw in Chapter 8 that our mental capacities for sports may have evolved through sexual selection. But our sporting instincts also include some powerful moral judgments.

A concern for meritocracy—or fairness—pervades human social life, extending far beyond sport. What does "meritocracy" mean? It seems to imply maximizing the information about "merit" (fitness) carried by social status. At first glance, it looks as if instincts for meritocratic moral intuitions could not evolve biologically. By definition, a person of average merit and average fitness should not win a meritocratic contest. Why should they care whether contests are meritocratic or not? I think people prefer meritocracy because they want to be able to choose the best mate they can, so they favor meritocratic competition among the

opposite sex. While no one wants to appear inferior to individuals of higher merit, everyone wants to appear superior to those of lower merit. Winning the number one position is not the only thing that matters. Every increment of apparent fitness and apparent social status matters. So, people have powerful shared interests in setting up meritocratic competitions to make mate choice more efficient. It is likely that our concerns for fairness evolved in this context.

There is the distinction between equality of opportunity (meritocracy) and equality of outcome (egalitarianism). Hunter-gatherer tribes are intensely egalitarian about certain issues like sharing meat equally, articulating their views during tribal discussions, and preventing anyone from becoming a tribal "chief." Yet they are often meritocratic about sexual reproduction. This is because mate choice makes it impossible to impose equality of outcome at the level of reproductive competition. The discriminatory nature of sexual choice undermines all egalitarian Utopias. Women might like the idea of all men being able to have equal amounts of sex, but no individual woman would be willing to forgo her power of sexual choice to allow an unattractive, unfit man to copulate with her. In the realm of human sexuality, no one would agree to the maxim "from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs." While tribes have shared interests in meritocratic reproductive competition, they have no such shared interests in equalizing reproductive success across individuals by violating mate choice.

Sexual Selection and Nietzsche

The emphasis on reciprocity has led evolutionary psychology to concentrate on what Friedrich Nietzsche called the morality of the herd: prudence, humility, fairness, conscience, dependability, equality, submission to social norms, and the cult of altruism. In
The Genealogy of Morals,
Nietzsche argued that many human cultures attributed moral value to other virtues: bravery, skill, beauty, fertility, strength, pride, leadership, stoicism, sacrifice, tolerance, mercy, joy, humor, grace, good manners, and the creation

of social norms. In
The Will to Power,
he listed the core elements of these pagan virtues: "(1) virtue as force, (2) virtue as seduction, (3) virtue as [court] etiquette." What is striking here is that Nietzsche's virtues sound remarkably like sexually selected fitness indicators.

More than any other moral philospher, Nietzsche inquired into the biological origins of our moral judgments, trying to understand how they could serve the needs of organic life. He wrote of virtue as "a luxury of the first order" which shows "the charm of rareness, inimitableness, exceptionalness, and unaverageness." By their luxuriant excess, virtues reveal "processes of physiological prosperity or failure." For Nietzsche, virtue was what the strong and healthy could afford to display

Of course, we should remember the butler Jeeves's response to Bertie Wooster's asking whether Nietzsche was worth reading: "I would not recommend him sir; he is fundamentally unsound." Nietzsche read Darwin but did not understand him. Nietzsche intuited that sexuality and power lay at the heart of human perceptions, judgments, values, ideologies, and knowledge, but he did not understand sexual selection. Like Alfred Russel Wallace, he often used fallacious "surplus-energy" arguments to explain costly displays that had no apparent survival function.

Nietzsche's name remains taboo in polite society because of his misappropriation by the Nazis. But perhaps it is worth considering his argument that Christian values, which he called the morality of the herd, may not be the only human values worth analyzing from a biological and psychological viewpoint. The Nietzschean virtues do not raise the same evolutionary-theoretical problems as the Christian virtues, because they are not so altruistic. But our analysis of human morality should not be limited to behaviors that raise intriguing theoretical issues. Some aspects of human morality may have direct, unproblematic survival value. Other aspects, such as the Nietzschean virtues, may reflect evolved adaptations for certain kinds of costly display, just like other sexually selected handicaps.

Science could benefit by broadening its attention to the full range of human virtues that have been considered worthy of

praise in various cultures. As individuals, we may find some of those virtues no longer praiseworthy. Military heroism, stoicism, and etiquette are distinctly out of fashion at the moment; there may even be good philosophical or practical reasons why they should stay out of fashion. But that is no reason for scientists to ignore them. Moral philosophers consider only a tiny fraction of human virtues and moral judgments worthy of analysis.. But scientists must consider them all.

What's So Funny About Peace,
Love, and Understanding?

In this chapter we have found one of the hidden evolutionary benefits to human kindness: the reproductive advantages it brings through mate choice. Our ancestors favored kind, fair, brave, well-mannered individuals who had the ability and generosity to help their sexual partners, children, step-children, and other members of their tribe. They were sexually unattracted to cheats, cowards, liars, and psychopaths. Is that really so hard to believe? Darwinians have searched so hard for the selfish survival benefits of morality that we have forgotten its romantic appeal.

Does this reduce our noblest ideals to a crude sex drive? Emphatically not. When our ancestors were favoring kindness, they were not looking for fake kindness, strategic kindness, or short-term kindness. They were looking for the real thing— genuine concern for others. Because of the power of sexual choice, they had the power to evolve it. Human altruism is not an evolutionary paradox. It is a sexual ornament.

Clearly, sexual choice does not account for all of morality. Kinship and reciprocity, too, were very important. And I have barely alluded to many other virtues, such as prudence, temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope, mercy, compassion, friendship, gratitude, patience, and humility. Sexual choice may have favored some of them, but other forms of social selection were undoubtedly powerful as well. Different selection pressures probably interacted in different ways to produce each moral adaptation, and it will take decades to sort them all out.

Some may be unhappy with attributing a sexual function to human morality. But we must remember that a sexual function is not a sexual motivation. This theory does not claim that we are only virtuous when we want sex; rather, it suggests that moral emotions, judgments, and reasoning were favored during courtship between our ancestors. Their sexual choices were not satisfied with a few tokens of romantic generosity. They selected instincts to provide for the common good even at high personal risk. They selected principled moral leadership capable of keeping peace, resolving conflict, and punishing crime. They selected unprecedented levels of sexual fidelity, good parenting, fair play, and charitable generosity They helped to shape the human capacity for sympathy They helped to make us reasonably agreeable, sincere, and socially responsive. It is a remarkable achievement for an evolutionary process that began with amoral bacteria, and unfolded through pure genetic self-interest right up to the moment when each of us was conceived.

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Scheherazade

A classic symptom of paranoid schizophrenia is the belief that alien beings sometimes transmit their thoughts to us through invisible waves that influence our behavior. But every professor of linguistics knows that all ordinary people routinely transmit their thoughts to us through invisible waves that influence our behavior. The linguistics professors sound even more paranoid than the schizophrenics, but they simply have a greater respect for language. Most schizophrenics, like most other people, take language for granted, whereas language researchers recognize it as a signaling system of almost miraculous power and efficiency.

To other animals, we must seem a species endowed with telepathic powers. Consider things from a mammoth's perspective, a hundred thousand years ago. You are peacefully browsing somewhere in Eurasia when you spot a previously unknown type of two-legged primate. The creature watches you for a few minutes, then runs off. A few hours later you see a few of the creatures loping toward your vicinity, carrying pointy little tree-branches. How would a bunch of them suddenly know you were here? Must be a coincidence. Anyway, they don't look big enough to hurt you, since you stand ten feet at the shoulder and weigh about 14,000 pounds. But one of the creatures suddenly makes some strange squeaky sounds, and instantly all of the horrid little things start trying to stab you with their pointy branches. How annoying! You lumber away from them, but they make more squeaks, and a few seconds later another band of them springs up from a hiding place

in front of you. Another coincidence? The ones in front have somehow set the grass on fire, not in one place the way lightning would, but all at once, creating an impassable wall of crackling heat. You must turn back. Yet the creatures behind you are still there, looking more confident, like the pack-hunting carnivores you feared as a youngster. Time to deploy your defense against pack-hunters: charge one until it's injured, then another, until selfish fear breaks down their coordination. Your tusks manage to injure a few, but every time you charge one, the others try to stick their pointy branches into you, all at once. Their coordination just will not break, and they continue that infernal squeaking as your stab wounds accumulate. Worse, as you weaken, one of them points to your head and squeaks loudly, and then all of the pointy branches are being aimed at your eyes. Within minutes you are blind, and charging blindly, but the stab wounds come more quickly now. New, higher-pitched voices are now audible: perhaps their females and young already calling for your meat to be pulled from your bones. Your last thought before you bleed to death is: I am extinguished by a bunch of little bodies that weave themselves, through that odd squeaking, into one great body with dozens of eyes, dozens of arms, and one lethal will.