The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (37 page)

Confirming a link between serotonin and status in nonhuman primates is a messy task, and no one has tried it with our first cousins, the chimpanzees. But the smart money says the link is there. Indeed, so striking are the parallels between the human and the chimpanzee pursuit of status, and so closely related are we to chimps, that there may well be many biochemical mechanisms — and corresponding mental or emotional states — that we share with chimps by common descent. Chimpanzee striving is worth taking a look at.

Of the lavish attention that chimpanzees pay to status, much is merely ritual: greetings humbly offered to a social superior. Chimps often bow down and may literally kiss their master's feet.
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(The foot kissing seems to be a cultural quirk, not found in all chimp colonies.) hut in the case of males, at least, the rankings so peacefully acknowledged are set by struggle. If you see a chimp that regularly inspires great homage, he has won some pivotal fights.

The stakes are very real. Resources are allotted in rough accordance with status, and the alpha male tends to get the lion's share. In particular, the alpha jealously guards desirable females during estrus, their conspicuous phase of fertility.

Once this status ladder exists, and the higher rungs bring reproductive payoffs, genes that help a chimp climb it at acceptable cost will spread. The genes may work by instilling drives that, in humans, get labeled "ambition" or "competitiveness"; or by instilling feelings such as "shame" (along with an aversion to it and a tendency to feel it after conspicuous failure); or "pride" (along with an attraction to it and a tendency to feel it after doing impressive things). But whatever the exact feelings, if they raise fitness, they will become part of the species' psychology.

Male chimps seem more dramatically in the thrall of these sorts of forces than female chimps; they work harder for status. For that reason, male hierarchies are unstable. There seems always to be some young Turk mounting a challenge to the alpha male, and alpha males spend a lot of time spotting these threats and trying to head them off. Females settle into a hierarchy with less conflict (seniority often
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counts for a lot), and are thereafter less preoccupied with their status. In fact, the female hierarchy is so subdued that it takes an experienced eye to discern it, whereas spotting a pompous, imperious alpha male is something a schoolchild can do. Female social coalitions — friendships — often last a lifetime, whereas male coalitions shift with strategic utility.
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Some of this has a familiar ring. Human males, too, have a reputation for being ambitious, egotistical, and opportunistic. The linguist Deborah Tannen, author of
You Just Don't Understand
, has observed that for men, unlike women, conversation is "primarily a means to preserve independence and negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social order."
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Many people have argued, especially during the second half of this century, that this difference is wholly cultural, and Tannen, in her book, accepts this view. It is almost surely wrong. The evolutionary dynamics behind the male chimpanzee's fevered pursuit of status are well understood, and they have been at work during human evolution.

These dynamics are the same ones that explain the male and female approaches to sex: the huge reproductive potential of a male, the limited potential of a female, and the resulting disparity in reproductive success among males. At one extreme, a low-status male may have zero offspring — a fact that, via natural selection, could readily come to imply an energetic aversion to low status. At the other extreme, alpha status can mean fostering dozens of offspring by numerous mothers — a fact that, via natural selection, could embed in males a boundless lust for power. For females, the reproductive stakes of the status game are lower. A female chimp in ovulation, regardless of her status, faces no shortage of suitors. She is not fundamentally in sexual competition with other females.

Of course, females in our species do compete for mates — for mates with the most parental investment to offer. But there's no evidence that, during evolution, social status was a primary tool in that competition. Besides, the evolutionary pressure behind male competition for sex seems to have been stronger than the pressure behind female competition for investment. The reason, again, is that
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potential differences in fitness are so much greater among males than among females.

The
Guinness Book of World Records
vividly makes the point. The most prolific human parent in world history is credited with 888 children — about 860 more than a woman could dream of having, unless she had a knack for multiple births. His name and title were, respectively, Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian emperor of Morocco.
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It's a little chilling to think that the genes of a man nicknamed "Bloodthirsty" found their way into nearly 1,000 offspring. But that's the way natural selection works: the most chilling genes often win. Of course, it's not certain that Moulay Ismail's bloodthirstiness lay in distinctive genes; maybe he just had a rough childhood. Still, you get the point: sometimes genes
are
responsible for a male's inordinate drive for power, and so long as that power translates into viable offspring, those genes thrive.
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Shortly after the Beagle's voyage, Darwin wrote to his cousin Fox that his work was being "favourably received by the great guns, & this gives me much confidence, & I hope not a very great deal of vanity; though I confess I feel too often like a peacock admiring his tail."
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At that point, before natural selection dawned on him, and long before sexual selection did, Darwin could not have known how apt the comparison was. But later he would see that, indeed, the man-sized ego was produced by the same forces that created the peacock's tail: sexual competition among males. "Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness," he wrote in
The Descent of Man
. "Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright."
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Darwin also saw that this birthright wasn't just a vestige of our ape days, but a product of forces at work long after our species became human. "The strongest and most vigorous men, — those who could best defend and hunt for their families, and during later times the chiefs or head-men, — those who were provided with the best weapons and who possessed the most property, such as a larger number of dogs or other animals, would have succeeded in rearing a greater average number of offspring, than would the weaker, poorer and
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lower members of the same tribes. There can, also, be no doubt that such men would generally have been able to select the more attractive women. At present the chiefs of nearly every tribe throughout the world succeed in obtaining more than one wife."
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Indeed, studies of the Ache, the Aka, the Aztecs, the Inca, the ancient Egyptians, and many other cultures suggest that, until the common use of contraception, male power translated into lots of offspring. And even now that contraception has broken this link, a link remains between status and the amount of sex a man has.
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Certainly male competitiveness has a cultural as well as genetic basis. Though male toddlers, generally speaking, are naturally more assertive than female toddlers, they're also given guns and signed up for Little League. Then again, this treatment may itself lie partly in the genes. Parents may be programmed to mold their children into optimal reproductive machines (or, strictly speaking, into machines that would have been optimally reproductive in the environment of our evolution). Margaret Mead once made an observation about primitive societies that probably applies in some measure to all societies: "[T]he small girl learns that she is a female and that if she simply waits, she will some day be a mother. The small boy learns that he is a male and that if he is successful in manly deeds some day he will be a man, and will be able to show how manly he is."
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(The relative strength of these messages may depend on how much Darwinian sense they make locally. There is evidence that in polygynous societies, where high-status males are astronomically prolific, parents nurture their sons' competitiveness with special care.)
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None of this is to say that males have a monopoly on ambition. For female primates — ape or human — status can bring benefits, such as more food or favored treatment of offspring; accordingly, they do seek status with
some
enthusiasm. Female chimps routinely dominate young adolescent males and, given a vacuum in the male power structure, can even reach for great political heights. When colonies of captive chimps contain no adult males, a female may assume alpha status and then defend her rank ably after male rivals show up. And bonobos — our other evolutionary first cousins — evince even more female lust for power. In several small captive populations, females
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are the unquestioned leaders. Even in the wild, the more formidable females can prevail over the lowliest adult males.
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So as we look at status battles among chimps, the lessons will apply — in part, at least — to females. We'll focus on battles fought by males, because males battle in such high style. But the mental forces fueling these battles, if they reside in humans, probably reside in women as well as in men, albeit in smaller doses.

Both chimp and human hierarchies are subtler than chicken hierarchies. Which animal defers to which may change from day to day — not just because the hierarchies get reshuffled (which they do) but because dominance can depend on context; which primate gets its way can depend on which other primates are around. The reason is that chimps and humans have something chickens don't: reciprocal altruism. Living in a society with reciprocal altruism means having friends. And friends help each other during social conflicts.

This may seem obvious. What, after all, are friends for? But it really is remarkable. The evolutionary mixture that generated it — of reciprocal altruism and status hierarchy — is exceedingly rare in the annals of animal life.

The catalyst for the compound is the fact that, once hierarchies exist, status is a resource.
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If status expands your access to food or sex, then it makes sense to seek status in the abstract, just as it makes sense to seek money even though you can't eat it. So an exchange of status-enhancing assistance between two animals is not different in kind from an exchange of food: so long as the exchange is non-zero-sum, natural selection will encourage it, given the opportunity. Indeed, after looking closely at chimp and human society, one might suspect that, from natural selection's point of view, status assistance is the main purpose of friendship.

The evolutionary fusion of hierarchy and reciprocal altruism accounts for a good part of the average human life. Many, if not most, of our swings in mood, our fateful commitments, our changes of heart about people, institutions, even ideas, are governed by mental organs that this fusion wrought. It has done much to form the texture of everyday existence.

It has also formed much of the structure of existence. Life within
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and among corporations, within and among national governments, within and among universities — it is all governed by these same mental organs. Both reciprocal altruism and status hierarchies evolved as an aid to the survival of individual genes, yet together they're holding up the world.

You can see the foundation in the daily life of chimpanzees. Look at the structure of their society, then imagine a huge growth in their intelligence — in memory, cunning, long-range planning, language — and suddenly you can picture whole buildings full of well-dressed chimps: office buildings, capitol buildings, campus buildings, all functioning much as they do now, for better or worse.

Status for chimps, like status for people, depends on more than ambition and raw strength. True, an alpha chimp's ascent almost always involves beating up the incumbent alpha at least once. And the new alpha may thereafter make a habit of daunting his predecessor, and all other subjects; he runs through the colony, pounding the ground, heading toward a series of apes that, by ducking, acknowledge his supremacy — and he may slap one or two of them anyway for good measure. Still, it often takes strategic savvy, as well, to reach dominance and hang on to it.

The most famous example of cleverly sought status comes courtesy of Mike, one of the chimpanzees studied by Jane Goodall in Africa. Mike, though not a hulking specimen, discovered that by running toward more manly chimps while propelling empty kerosene cans loudly in their direction, he could earn their respect. Goodall writes: "Sometimes Mike repeated this performance as many as four times in succession, waiting until his rivals had started to groom once more before again charging toward them. When he eventually stopped (often in the precise spot where the other males had been sitting), they sometimes returned and with submissive gestures began to groom Mike... . Mike made determined efforts to secure other human artifacts to enhance his displays — chairs, tables, boxes, tripods, anything that was available. Eventually we managed to secure all such items."
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Mike's particular genius is not especially typical and may not be
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of utmost relevance to human evolution. Among chimpanzees, the most common use of wit in the quest for status has to do not with technological wizardry but with social savvy: the manipulation of reciprocally altruistic allegiances to personal advantage. Machiavellianism.

After all, chimpanzees, like human beings, seldom lead alone. To sit atop a heap of apes, some of whom are ambitious young males, is precarious, so alphas tend to arrange a regular source of support. The support may lie mainly in a single strong lieutenant that helps the alpha fend off challengers and in return is granted favors, such as sexual access to ovulating females. Or the support may lie in a close relationship with the dominant female; she will come to the alpha's defense, and perhaps in return get preferential treatment for her and her offspring. The support may be more complex and diffuse as well.