The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (2 page)

Here "worldview" is meant quite literally. The new Darwinian synthesis is, like quantum physics or molecular biology, a body of scientific theory and fact; but, unlike them, it is also a way of seeing everyday life. Once truly grasped (and it is much easier to grasp than either of them) it can entirely alter one's perception of social reality. The questions addressed by the new view range from the mundane to the spiritual and touch on just about everything that matters: romance, love, sex (Are men and/or women really built for monogamy? What circumstances can make them more so or less so?); friendship and enmity (What is the evolutionary logic behind office politics — or, for that matter, politics in general?); selfishness, self-sacrifice, guilt (Why did natural selection give us that vast guilt repository known as the conscience? Is it truly a guide to "moral" behavior?); social status and social climbing (Is hierarchy inherent in human society?); the differing inclinations of men and women in areas such as friendship and ambition (Are we prisoners of our gender?); racism, xenophobia, war (Why do we so easily exclude large groups of people from the reach of our sympathy?); deception, self-deception, and the unconscious mind (Is intellectual honesty possible?); various psychopathologies (Is getting depressed, neurotic, or paranoid "natural" — and, if so, does that make it any more acceptable?); the love-hate relationship between siblings (Why isn't it pure love?); the tremendous capacity of parents to inflict psychic damage on their children (Whose interests do they have at heart?); and so on.

The new Darwinian social scientists are fighting a doctrine that has dominated their fields for much of this century: the idea that biology doesn't much matter — that the uniquely malleable human mind, together with the unique force of culture, has severed our behavior from its evolutionary roots; that there is no inherent human nature driving human events, but that, rather, our essential nature is to be driven. As Emile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, wrote at the turn of the century: human nature is "merely the indeterminate material that the social factor molds and transforms." History shows, said Durkheim, that even such deeply felt emotions as sexual jealousy, a father's love of his child, or the child's love of the father, are "far from being inherent in human nature." The mind, in this view, is basically passive — it is a basin into which, as a person matures, the local culture is gradually poured; if the mind sets any limits at all on the content of culture, they are exceedingly broad. The anthropologist Robert Lowie wrote in 1917 that "the principles of psychology are as incapable of accounting for the phenomena of culture as is gravitation to account for architectural styles." Even psychologists — who might be expected to argue on behalf of the human mind — have often depicted it as little more than a blank slate. Behaviorism, which dominated psychology for a good part of this century, consists largely of the idea that people tend habitually to do what they are rewarded for doing and not do what they are punished for doing; thus is the formless mind given form. In B. F. Skinner's 1948 Utopian novel
Walden II
, envy, jealousy, and other antisocial impulses were being eliminated via a strict regime of positive and negative reinforcements.

This view of human nature — as something that barely exists and doesn't much matter — is known among modern Darwinian social scientists as "the standard social science model." Many of them learned it as undergraduates, and some of them spent years under its sway before beginning to question it. After a certain amount of questioning, they began to rebel.

In many ways, what is now happening fits Thomas Kuhn's description of a "paradigm shift" in his well-known book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
. A group of mainly young scholars have challenged the settled worldview of their elders, met with bitter resistance, persevered, and begun to flourish. Yet however classic this generational conflict may seem, it features a couple of distinctive ironies.

To begin with, it is, as revolutions go, inconspicuous. The various revolutionaries stubbornly refuse to call themselves by a single, simple name, the sort of thing that would fit easily onto a fluttering banner. They once had such a name — "sociobiology," Wilson's apt and useful term. But Wilson's book drew so much fire, provoked so many charges of malign political intent, so much caricature of sociobiology's substance, that the word became tainted. Most practitioners of the field he defined now prefer to avoid his label. Though bound by allegiance to a compact and coherent set of doctrines, they go by different names: behavioral ecologists, Darwinian anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists, evolutionary psychiatrists. People sometimes ask: What ever happened to sociobiology? The answer is that it went underground, where it has been eating away at the foundations of academic orthodoxy.

The second irony of this revolution is tied to the first. Many features of the new view that the old guard most dislikes and fears are not, in fact, features of the new view. From the beginning, attacks on sociobiology were reflexive — reactions less to Wilson's book than to past books of a Darwinian cast. Evolutionary theory, after all, has a long and largely sordid history of application to human affairs. After being mingled with political philosophy around the turn of the century to form the vague ideology known as "social Darwinism," it played into the hands of racists, fascists, and the most heartless sort of capitalists. It also, around that time, spawned some simplistic ideas about the hereditary basis of behavior — ideas that, conveniently, fed these very political misuses of Darwinism. The resulting aura — of crudeness, both intellectual and ideological — continues to cling to Darwinism in the minds of many academics and laypersons. (Some people think the term Darwinism means social Darwinism.) Hence many misconceptions about the new Darwinian paradigm.

For example: the new Darwinism is often mistaken for an exercise in social division. Around the turn of the century, anthropologists spoke casually of the "lower races," of "savages" who were beyond moral improvement. To the uncritical observer, such attitudes seemed to fit easily enough into a Darwinian framework, as would later supremacist doctrines, including Hitler's. But today's Darwinian anthropologists, in scanning the world's peoples, focus less on surface differences among cultures than on deep unities. Beneath the global crazy quilt of rituals and customs, they see recurring patterns in the structure of family, friendship, politics, courtship, morality. They believe the evolutionary design of human beings explains these patterns: why people in all cultures worry about social status (often more than they realize); why people in all cultures not only gossip, but gossip about the same kinds of things; why in all cultures men and women seem different in a few basic ways; why people everywhere feel guilt, and feel it in broadly predictable circumstances; why people everywhere have a deep sense of justice, so that the axioms "One good turn deserves another" and "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" shape human life everywhere on this planet.

In a way, it's not surprising that the rediscovery of human nature has taken so long. Being everywhere we look, it tends to elude us. We take for granted such bedrock elements of life as gratitude, shame, remorse, pride, honor, retribution, empathy, love, and so on — just as we take for granted the air we breathe, the tendency of dropped objects to fall, and other standard features of living on this planet.
⁶
But things didn't have to be this way. We could live on a planet where social life featured none of the above. We could live on a planet where some ethnic groups felt some of the above and others felt others. But we don't. The more closely Darwinian anthropologists look at the world's peoples, the more they are struck by the dense and intricate web of human nature by which all are bound. And the more they see how the web was woven.

Even when the new Darwinians do focus on differences — whether among groups of people or among people within groups — they are not generally inclined to explain them in terms of genetic differences. Darwinian anthropologists see the world's undeniably diverse cultures as products of a single human nature responding to widely varying circumstances; evolutionary theory reveals previously invisible links between the circumstances and the cultures (explaining, for example, why some cultures have dowry and others don't). And evolutionary psychologists, contrary to common expectation, subscribe to a cardinal doctrine of twentieth-century psychology and psychiatry: the potency of early social environment in shaping the adult mind. Indeed, a few are preoccupied with this subject, determined to uncover basic laws of psychological development and convinced that they can do so only with Darwinian tools. If we want to know, say, how levels of ambition or of insecurity get adjusted by early experience, we must first ask why natural selection made them adjustable.

This isn't to say that human behavior is infinitely malleable. In tracing the channels of environmental influence, most evolutionary psychologists see some firm banks. The Utopian spirit of B. F. Skinner's behaviorism, the sense that a human being can become any sort of animal at all with proper conditioning, is not faring well these days. Still, neither is the idea that the grimmest parts of the human experience are wholly immutable, grounded in "instincts" and "innate drives"; nor the idea that psychological differences among people boil down mainly to genetic differences. They boil down to the genes, of course (where else could rules for mental development ultimately reside?), but not necessarily to differences in genes. A guiding assumption of many evolutionary psychologists, for reasons we'll come to, is that the most radical differences among people are the ones most likely to be traceable to environment.

In a sense, evolutionary psychologists are trying to discern a second level of human nature, a deeper unity within the species. First the anthropologist notes recurring themes in culture after culture: a thirst for social approval, a capacity for guilt. You might call these, and many other such universals, "the knobs of human nature." Then the psychologist notes that the exact tunings of the knobs seem to differ from person to person. One person's "thirst for approval" knob is set in the comfort zone, down around (relatively) "self-assured," and another person's is up in the excruciating "massively insecure" zone; one person's guilt knob is set low and another person's is painfully high. So the psychologist asks: How do these knobs get set? Genetic differences among individuals surely play a role, but perhaps a larger role is played by genetic commonalities: by a generic, species-wide developmental program that absorbs information from the social environment and adjusts the maturing mind accordingly. Oddly, future progress in grasping the importance of environment will probably come from thinking about genes.

Thus, human nature comes in two forms, both of which have a natural tendency to get ignored. First, there's the kind that's so pervasively apparent as to be taken for granted (guilt, for example). Second, there's the kind whose very function is to generate differences among people as they grow up, and thus naturally conceals itself (a developmental program that calibrates guilt). Human nature consists of knobs and of mechanisms for tuning the knobs, and both are invisible in their own way.

There is another source of invisibility, another reason human nature has been slow to come to light: the basic evolutionary logic common to people everywhere is opaque to introspection. Natural selection appears to have hidden our true selves from our conscious selves. As Freud saw, we are oblivious to our deepest motivations — but in ways more chronic and complete (and even, in some cases, more grotesque) than he imagined.

Though this book will touch on many behavioral sciences — anthropology, psychiatry, sociology, political science — evolutionary psychology will be at its center. This young and still inchoate discipline, with its partly fulfilled promise of creating a whole new science of mind, lets us now ask a question that couldn't have been profitably asked in 1859, after the
Origin
appeared, nor in 1959: What does the theory of natural selection have to offer ordinary human beings?

For example: Can a Darwinian understanding of human nature help people reach their goals in life? Indeed, can it help them choose their goals? Can it help distinguish between practical and impractical goals? More profoundly, can it help in deciding which goals are worthy? That is, does knowing how evolution has shaped our basic moral impulses help us decide which impulses we should consider legitimate?

The answers, in my opinion, are: yes, yes, yes, yes, and, finally, yes. The preceding sentence will annoy, if not outrage, many people in the field. (Believe me. I've shown it to some of them.) They have long had to labor under the burden of Darwinism's past moral and political misuses, and they would like to keep the realms of science and value separate. You can't derive basic moral values from natural selection, they say, or indeed from any of nature's workings. If you do, you're committing what philosophers call "the naturalistic fallacy" — the unwarranted inference of "ought" from "is."

I agree: nature isn't a moral authority, and we needn't adopt any "values" that seem implicit in its workings — such as "might makes right." Still, a true understanding of human nature will inevitably affect moral thought deeply and, as I will try to show, legitimately.

This book, with its relevance to questions of everyday life, will have some features of a self-help book. But it will lack many. The next several hundred pages aren't loaded with pithy advice and warm reassurance. A Darwinian viewpoint won't hugely simplify your life, and in some ways will complicate it, by shining harsh light on morally dubious behaviors to which we are prone and whose dubiousness evolution has conveniently hidden from us. The few crisp and upbeat prescriptions I can glean from the new Darwinian paradigm are more than matched by the stubborn and weighty trade-offs, dilemmas, and conundrums it illuminates.