The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (27 page)

As predicted, parents do grieve more over the death of an adolescent than of a three-month-old — or, also in keeping with theory, of a forty-year-old. It is tempting to dismiss such results: of course we regret a young man's death more than an older man's; it's obviously tragic to die with so much of life unlived. To which Darwinians reply: Yes, but remember — the very "obviousness" of the pattern may be a product of the same genes that, we propose, created it. The way natural selection has worked its will is to make some things seem "obvious" and "right" and "desirable" and others "absurd" and "wrong" and "abhorrent." We should probe our commonsense reactions to evolutionary theories carefully before concluding that the common sense itself isn't a cognitive distortion created by evolution.

In this case, we should ask: If an adolescent boy's vast unlived life is what makes his death seem so sad, why doesn't the death of an infant seem even sadder? One answer is that we've had more time to get to know the adolescent and can thus see the unlived life more clearly. But what a coincidence that the countervailing changes in these two quantities — the growing intimacy with a person over time and the shrinking size of that person's unlived life — happen to reach some sort of maximum combined grief value right around adolescence, when that person's reproductive potential is highest. Why doesn't the peak come, say, at age twenty-five, when the contours of the unlived life are really clear? Or at age five, when there's so much unlived life?

The evidence so far is that grief does comply exquisitely with Darwinian expectations. In a 1989 Canadian study, adults were asked to imagine the death of children of various ages and estimate which deaths would create the greatest sense of loss in a parent. The results, plotted on a graph, show grief growing until just before adolescence and then beginning to drop. When this curve was compared with a curve showing changes in reproductive potential over the life cycle (a pattern calculated from Canadian demographic data), the correlation was fairly strong. But much stronger — nearly perfect, in
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fact — was the correlation between the grief curve of these modern Canadians and the reproductive-potential curve of a hunter-gatherer people, the !Kung of Africa. In other words, the pattern of changing grief was almost exactly what a Darwinian would predict, given demographic realities in the ancestral environment.
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In theory, and in fact, the dearness of parents to children also changes over time. In the pitiless eyes of natural selection, the utility of our parents to us declines, after a certain point, even faster than ours to them. As we pass through adolescence, they are less and less critical databanks, providers, and protectors. And as they pass through middle age, they are less and less likely to further promulgate our genes. By the time they are old and infirm, we have little if any genetic use for them. Even as we attend to their needs (or pay someone else to), we may feel traces of impatience and resentment. Our parents, in the end, are as dependent on us as we once were on them, yet we don't look after their needs with quite the same gusto they brought to ours.

The ever-shifting but almost perennially uneven balance of affection and obligation between parent and child is one of life's deepest and most bittersweet experiences. And it illustrates how imprecise the genes can be in turning on and off our emotional spigots. Though there seems to be no good Darwinian reason to spend time and energy on an old, dying father, few of us would, or could, turn our backs. The stubborn core of familial love persists beyond its evolutionary usefulness. Most of us, presumably, are glad for this crudeness of genetic control — although, of course, there's no way of knowing what our opinion would be if the controls were more precise.

Darwin had many occasions to grieve, including the deaths of three of his ten children and of his father. His behavior generally matches theory.

The death of the Darwins' third child, Mary Eleanor, came only three weeks after her birth in 1842. Charles and Emma were undeniably saddened, and the funeral was hard on Charles, but there are no signs of overwhelming or lasting grief. Emma wrote that, "Our
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sorrow is nothing to what it would have been if she had lived longer and suffered more," assuring her sister-in-law that, with two other children to distract her and Charles, "you need not fear that our sorrow will last long."
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The death of the last Darwin child, Charles Waring, should also, in theory, have been a glancing blow. He was young — a year and a half — and was retarded. One of the most straightforward Darwinian predictions is that parents will care relatively little for children who are so defective as to have negligible reproductive value. (In many preindustrial societies, infants with obvious defects have been routinely killed, and even in industrial societies, handicapped children are especially prone to abuse.)
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Darwin wrote a short memorial to his dead son, but it was, in places, clinically detached ("He often made strange grimaces & shivered, when excited ...") and was nearly devoid of anguish.
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One of the Darwin daughters later said of the baby: "Both my father and mother were infinitely tender towards him, but, when he died in the summer of 1858, after their first sorrow they could only feel thankful."
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Nor should the death of Darwin's father in 1848 have been devastating. Charles was by now easily self-sufficient, and his father, at age eighty-two, had spent his reproductive potential. Darwin did show signs of deep grief in the days after the death, and of course there's no way of being sure he didn't keep suffering for months. But in his letters he never got more effusive than to note that "no one, who did not know him, would believe that a man above 83 years old [sic], could have retained so tender & affectionate a disposition, with all his sagacity unclouded to the last." He wrote three months after the death, "[W]hen last I saw him he was very comfortable & his expression which I have now in my mind's eye serene & cheerful."
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Clearly distinct from all three of these cases was the de?.th of the Darwins' daughter Annie in 1851, after a periodic illness that had begun the year before. She was ten years old, her reproductive potential just a few years from its peak.

In the days leading up to her death, there is an anguished and poignant exchange of letters between Charles, who had traveled with her to a doctor, and Emma. A few days after the death, Darwin
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composed a memorial to Annie that is strikingly different in tone from the later memorial to Charles Waring. "Her joyousness and animal spirits radiated from her whole countenance, and rendered every movement elastic and full of life and vigour. It was delightful and cheerful to behold her. Her dear face now rises before me, as she used sometimes to come running downstairs with a stolen pinch of snuff for me, her whole form radiant with the pleasure of giving pleasure. ... In the last short illness, her conduct in simple truth was angelic. She never once complained; never became fretful; was ever considerate of others, and was thankful in the most gentle, pathetic manner for everything done for her... . When I gave her some water, she said, 'I quite thank you;' and these, I believe, were the last precious words ever addressed by her dear lips to me." He wrote in closing, "We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age. She must have known how we loved her. Oh, that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly, we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face! Blessings on her!"
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It is possible to inject this analysis of Darwin's grief with (believe it or not) a bit more cynicism. Annie, it seems, was the Darwins' favorite child. She was bright and talented ("a second Mozart," Darwin once said) — assets that would have raised her value on the marriage market, and hence her reproductive potential. And she was an exemplary child, a model of generosity, morals, and manners.
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Or, as Trivers might put it: Emma and Charles had successfully conned her into pursuing their inclusive fitness at the expense of hers. Perhaps an analysis of "favorite children" would confirm that they tend to possess these sorts of valuable attributes — valuable from the perspective of the parents' genes, which may or may not imply value from the perspective of the child's.

Only months after his father's death, Darwin had declared his grieving at an end, referring in a letter to "my dear Father about whom it is now to me the sweetest pleasure to think."
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In the case of Annie, no such point was reached for either Emma or Charles. Another of their daughters, Henrietta, would later write that "it may almost be said that my mother never really recovered from this grief. She very rarely spoke of Annie, but when she did the sense of loss was always there unhealed. My father could not bear to reopen his
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sorrow, and he never, to my knowledge, spoke of her." Twenty-five years after Annie's death, he wrote in his autobiography that thinking of her still brought tears to his eyes. Her death, he wrote, had been the "only one very severe grief" the family had suffered.
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In 1881, after Darwin's brother Erasmus had died, and less than a year, in fact, before Darwin's own death, he was moved to remark, in a letter to his friend Joseph Hooker, on the difference between "the death of the old and young." He wrote, "Death in the latter case, when there is a bright future ahead, causes grief never to be wholly obliterated."
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When Darwin first encountered a primitive society, he reacted roughly as you would expect a nineteenth-century English gentleman to react. As the Beagle sailed into a bay in Tierra del Fuego, he saw a group of Indians who yelled and "threw their arms wildly round their heads." With "their long hair streaming," he wrote to his mentor, John Henslow, "they seemed the troubled spirits of another world." Closer inspection reinforced the impression of barbarism. Their language, "according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate"; their houses "are like what children make in summer, with boughs of trees." Nor were these homes graced by affection
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between husband and wife, "unless indeed the treatment of a master to a laborious slave can be considered as such."
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To top it all off, the Fuegians seemed to have a habit of eating old women when food got scarce. Darwin reported grimly that a Fuegian boy, when asked why they didn't eat their dogs instead, had replied, "Dog catch otter — woman good for nothing — man very hungry." Darwin wrote to his sister Caroline: "Was ever any thing so atrocious heard of, to work them like slaves to procure food in the summer & occasionally in winter to eat them. — I feel quite a disgust at the very sound of the voices of these miserable savages."
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It turns out that the part about eating the women was apocryphal. But Darwin saw plenty of other examples of violence in the various preliterate societies he visited during the voyage. The savage, he wrote decades later in
The Descent of Man
, "delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse."
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So it's doubtful that, had Darwin known the Fuegians didn't in fact eat their senior citizens, he would have much altered the view of primitive peoples in his popular account of the Beagle's voyage: "I could not have believed how wide was the difference, between savage and civilized man. It is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal... ."
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Nonetheless, Fuegian life did include some things that lay at the core of civilized life in Victorian England. For example: friendship, signified by mutual generosity and sealed by a ritual of solidarity. Darwin wrote of the Fuegians: "After we had presented them with some scarlet cloth, which they immediately tied round their necks, they became good friends. This was shown by the old man patting our breasts, and making a chuckling kind of noise, as people do when feeding chickens. I walked with the old man, and this demonstration of friendship was repeated several times; it was concluded by three hard slaps, which were given me on the breast and back at the same time. He then bared his bosom for me to return the compliment, which being done, he seemed highly pleased."
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Darwin's consciousness of the savage's humanity was further raised by an experiment in cross-culturalization. On a previous voyage, Captain FitzRoy had brought four Fuegians to England, and
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now three of them were being returned to their native land, freshly educated and civilized (complete with respectable clothing), to help spread enlightenment and Christian morality in the New World. The experiment failed in several respects, most ignominiously when one newly civilized Fuegian stole all the possessions of another newly civilized Fuegian and headed for another part of the continent under cover of darkness.
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But the experiment did, at least, produce three English-speaking Fuegians, and thus gave Darwin a chance to do something with natives other than stare at them in disbelief. He later wrote: "The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Fuegians on board the 'Beagle' with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate."
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