The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (34 page)

The same point applies to a sector whose ethos is the subject of much discussion these days: the poor, crime-ridden inner cities of America. Budding criminals needn't look around, appraise the situation, and rationally choose a life of crime. If this were the whole truth, then the standard solution to crime — "alter the incentive structure" by making sure crime doesn't pay — might work better. Darwinism suggests a more unsettling truth: from an early age, the conscience of many poor children, the very capacity for sympathy and guilt, is hemmed in by the environment, and as they grow up it settles somewhat firmly into this cramped form.

The source of this cramping presumably goes well beyond urban anonymity. Many people in the inner city face limited opportunities for "legitimate" cooperation with the wider world. And the males, risk-prone by virtue of their gender to begin with, don't have the long life expectancies that so many people take for granted. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have argued that the "short time horizons" for which criminals are famous may be "an adaptive response to predictive information about one's prospects for longevity and eventual success."
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"Riches and rank have no necessary connection with genuine gentlemanly qualities," Samuel Smiles wrote. "The poor man may be a true gentleman, — in spirit and in daily life. He may be honest, truthful, upright, polite, temperate, courageous, self-respecting, and self-helping, — that is, be a true gentleman." For, "from the highest to the lowest, the richest to the poorest, to no rank or condition in life has nature denied her highest boon, — the great heart."
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That's a nice thought, and it may hold true for the first few months of life.
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But — under modern conditions, at least — it probably grows ever more false thereafter.

To some it will sound odd to hear Darwinians describing criminals as "victims of society" rather than as victims of faulty genes. But that's one difference between Darwinism at the turn of this century and at the turn of the last. Once you think of genes as programming behavioral development, and not just behavior, as molding the young mind to fit its context — then we all start to look like victims (or beneficiaries) of our environment, no less than of our genes.
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Thus can a difference between two groups (socioeconomic, say, or even ethnic) be explained by evolution yet without reference to genetic differences.

There is, of course, no "urban underclass" notch in the developmental program that shapes the conscience, any more than there is a "Victorian" notch. (Indeed, the village of Shrewsbury is more like the kind of setting that natural selection "anticipated" than are today's large cities.) Still, the deftness with which urban opportunities for cheating are often exploited suggests that the ancestral environment did, at times, present opportunities for profitable crime.

One likely source of such opportunities would have been periodic contact with nearby villages. And the adaptation that would help seize those opportunities is precisely what we find in the human mind: a binary moral landscape, comprising an in-group that deserves consideration and an out-group that deserves exploitation.
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Even urban gang members have people who can trust them. And even scrupulously polite Victorian men went to war, convinced of the justness of the death they dished out. Moral development is often a question not just of how strong the conscience will be, but of how long a reach it will have.

How "moral" the Victorians really were is a subject of some contention. They are commonly accused of great hypocrisy. Well, as we've seen, a little hypocrisy is only natural in our species.
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And, oddly, a lot of hypocrisy may be a sign of great morality. In a highly "moral" society — where daily life involves many acts of courtesy and
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altruism, where meanness and dishonesty are reliably punished by social sanction — a good moral reputation is vital and a bad one quite costly. This added weight of reputation is more incentive to do what people naturally do anyway: exaggerate their goodness. As Walter Houghton wrote in The Victorian Frame of Mind, "Although everyone at times pretends to be better than he is, even to himself, the Victorians were more given to this type of deception than we are. They lived in a period of much higher standards of conduct... ."
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Even if we accept that Victorian hypocrisy is a roundabout affirmation of Victorian morality, we might still ask whether morality is the right word. For most Victorians, after all, the prevailing ethos brought no net sacrifice. So many people were so diffusely considerate that everyone got a piece of the action. But that's no indictment of Victorian morality. That's the whole idea behind a robust morality: to encourage informal non-zero-sum exchanges, thus raising overall welfare; that is, to encourage non-zero-sum exchanges outside the realms of economic life and legal compulsion. One writer, lamenting "the rise of selfishness" and the passing of "Victorian America," has observed that, under the Victorian ethos, "the great central mass of Americans was living in a social system that was predictable, stable and basically decent. And it was so because — despite the hypocrisy — most people felt that they had duties and obligations to other people which came before their own gratification."
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We may question the literal truth of that last sentence without doubting its drift. What sustained everyone's sense of duty was not self-abnegation, ultimately, but their implicit assent to a vast social contract, under which duties discharged to others would, however indirectly, be discharged to them in return. Still, the author is right: an immense amount of time and energy now spent on vigilance was not spent in those days.

One way to put the matter is to say that Victorian England was an admirable society, but not one composed of especially admirable people. They were only doing what we do — acting conscientiously, politely, and considerately to the extent that it pays. It just paid more in those days. And besides, their moral behavior, however laudable it was or wasn't, was more a heritage than a choice; the Victorian
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conscience got shaped in ways the Victorians never understood and were in some sense powerless to affect.

Here, then, is the verdict on Charles Darwin, rendered with the authority of everything we now know about genes: he was a product of his environment. If he was a good man, he was good in passive reflection of his society's goodness. And, anyway, much of his "goodness" paid off.

Still, Darwin does seem sometimes to have gone above and beyond the call of reciprocal altruism. While in South America, he planted gardens for the Fuegian Indians. And years later, while living in the village of Downe, he founded the Downe Friendly Society, which provided a savings plan for the local workers, as well as a "clubroom" (where their moral life would be improved by Skinnerian conditioning — swearing, fighting, and drunkenness were subject to a fine).
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Some Darwinians make a sport of reducing even this sort of niceness to self-interest. If they can't find a way that the Fuegian Indians might have reciprocated (and we don't know that they didn't), the next recourse is to talk about "reputation effects"; maybe the men of the Beagle would carry tales of Darwin's generosity back to Kngland, where he would somehow be rewarded. But Darwin's moral sentiments were strong enough to strain such cynicism to its breaking point. When he heard that a local farmer had let some sheep starve to death, he personally gathered the evidence and brought the case to the magistrate.
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The dead sheep were poorly positioned to repay him, and the farmer certainly wouldn't; and the "reputation effects" of behavior so fanatical might not have worked entirely to Darwin's advantage. Similarly, where was the payoff in losing sleep over the past suffering of South American slaves?

The simpler way to account for this sort of "excessively" moral behavior is to recall that human beings aren't "fitness maximizers" but rather "adaptation executers." The adaptation in question — the conscience — was designed to maximize fitness, to exploit the local environment in the name of genetic self-interest, but success in this endeavor is far from assured, especially in social settings alien to natural selection.
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Thus the conscience can lead people to do things that aren't in their self-interest except in the sense of salving the conscience itself. Sympathy, obligation, and guilt, unless subjected to a veritable extermination campaign during youth, always have the potential to bring behaviors of which their "creator," natural selection, would not "approve."

We started this chapter with the working hypothesis that Darwin's conscience was a smoothly functioning adaptation. And in many ways it was. What's more, some of these ways are quite cheering: they show how some mental organs, though designed ultimately for self-interest, are at the same time designed to work harmoniously with other people's mental organs, and in the process may yield a large amount of social welfare. Still, in some ways Darwin's conscience did not function adaptively. This too is cause for cheer.
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After discovering natural selection in 1838, Darwin spent the next two decades not telling the world about it. He didn't start writing a book on his theory until 1855, and that book he never really finished. Only in 1858, when he learned that another naturalist had arrived at the same theory, did he decide to produce what he called an "abstract" —
The Origin of Species
, published in 1859.

But Darwin didn't spend the 1840s idly. Though slowed by frequent illness — violent shivering and vomiting attacks, gastric pain and epic flatulence, faintness, heart palpitations — he was prolific. During the first eight years of his marriage, he published scientific papers, finished editing the five volumes of
The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle
, and wrote three books based on the voyage:
The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs
(1842),
Geological
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Observations on the Volcanic Islands
(1844), and
Geological Observations on South America
(1846).

On October 1, 1846, Darwin made this entry in his personal journal: "Finished last proof of my Geolog. Obser. on S. America; This volume, including Paper in Geolog. Journal on the Falkland Islands took me 18 & 1/2 months: the M.S., however, was not so perfect as in the case of Volcanic Islands. So that my Geology has taken me 4 & 1/2 years: now it is 10 years since my return to England. How much time lost by illness!"
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This is vintage Darwin in several respects. There is the grim resignation with which, as his illness wore on, he often trudged through his work; though he had on this day finished a grand trilogy (at least one volume of which is still considered a classic), he doesn't sound as if he's poised to crack open a bottle of champagne. There is his never-ending self-criticism; he can't savor the project's end for even a day before turning to its imperfections. There is his sharp awareness of the passage of time, and his obsession with using it well.

You might think that this moment was an auspicious one for Darwin finally to start moving with some briskness toward his appointment with destiny. Certainly one great spur to productivity — a sense of mortality — was now honed to a keen edge. In 1844 he had given Emma a 230-page sketch of the theory of natural selection, along with written instructions to publish it — and "take trouble in promoting it" — in the event of his death. The very fact that the Darwins had now moved out of London, to the rural village of Downe, was testament to his physical decline. There he was to be insulated from the distractions and disequilibriums of city life, draw warmth from his growing family, and, under a tightly structured regimen of work, recreation, and rest, try to extract from his constitution a few good hours of output each day — seven days a week — so long as he could stay alive. This was the environment he had built for himself by the time he finished his books on the geology of South America. In a letter to Captain FitzRoy written that same day (October 1, 1846), Darwin reported: "My life goes on like Clockwork, and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it."
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Given all this — a secure workplace, the faint sound of the grim reaper's footsteps, and completion, at last, of all scholarly obligations from the Beagle expedition — given all this, what cause could there possibly be to further postpone the writing of Darwin's book on natural selection?

In a word: barnacles. Darwin's long involvement with barnacles began innocently enough, with curiosity about a species found along the coast of Chile. But one species led to another, and before long his house was world barnacle headquarters, replete with specimens solicited from collectors by mail. For so long did the study of barnacles figure in Darwin's life, and so centrally, that one of Darwin's young sons, upon visiting a neighbor's home, asked, "Where does he do his barnacles?"
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By the end of 1854 — eight years after Darwin predicted that his barnacle work would take him a few months, maybe a year — he had published two books on living species of barnacles and two on barnacle fossils, and established an enduring reputation within this realm. His books are consulted to this day by biologists studying the subclass Cirripedia of the subphylum Crustacea (that is to say, barnacles).