Why We Are The Way We Are:
The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

by Robert Wright

(The 2nd of two long pages; return to The Beginning)

Part Three: SOCIAL STRIFE

Chapter 11: DARWIN'S DELAY

My health has improved a good deal, since I have been in the country, & I believe to a stranger's eyes, I should look quite a strong man,
but I find I am not up to any exertion, & I am constantly
tiring myself by very trifling things... . 

[I]t has been a bitter mortification for me, to digest the conclusion, that the “race is for the strong" — & that I shall probably do little more, but
must be content to admire the strides others make in Science —
So it must be... .

— Letter to Charles Lyell (1841)¹

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 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!"³

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."⁴

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?"⁵ 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).

Now, there is nothing wrong with being a leading barnacle authority. But some people are capable of greater things. Why Darwin took so long to realize his greatness has been the subject of much reflection. The most common theory is the most obvious: writing a book that affronts the religious beliefs of virtually everyone in your part of the world — including many colleagues and your wife — is a task not to be approached without circumspection.

The task had already been approached by a few people, and the result was never unalloyed praise. Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, a noted naturalist and poet, had himself advanced a theory of evolution in 1794 in the book Zoonomia. He had wanted the book to be published posthumously but finally changed his mind, after some twenty years, saying, "I am now too old and hardened to fear a little abuse," which is what he got.⁶ Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck's grand exposition of a similar evolutionary scheme appeared in 1809, the year of Darwin's birth, and was denounced as immoral. And in 1844, a book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation appeared, outlining a theory of evolution and making a commotion. Its author, a Scottish publisher named Robert Chambers, chose to keep his name secret, perhaps wisely. The book was called, among other things, "a foul and filthy thing, whose touch is taint, whose breath is contamination."⁷

And none of these heretical theories was quite as godless as Darwin's. Chambers had a "Divine Governor" guiding evolution. Erasmus Darwin, being a deist, said that God had wound up the great clock of evolution and let it tick. And though Lamarck was denounced by Chambers as being "disrespectful of Providence,"⁸ Lamarckian evolution, as compared to Darwinian, was downright spiritual; it featured an inexorable tendency toward greater organic complexity and more highly conscious life. Imagine, if these men were due a severe scolding, what was in store for Darwin, whose theory involved no Divine Governor, no clock-winder (though Darwin pointedly left open the possibility of one), and no inherent progressive tendency — nothing but the slow accretion of fortuitous change.⁹

There's no doubt that Darwin was, from early on, worried about public reaction. Even before his belief in evolution had crystallized into the theory of natural selection, he weighed rhetorical tactics that might blunt criticism. In the spring of 1838, he wrote in his notebook, "Mention persecution of early Astronomers."¹⁰ In later years, Darwin's fear of censure is evident in his correspondence. The letter in which he confessed his heresy to his friend Joseph Hooker features one of the most defensive passages he ever produced — no small achievement. "I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable," he wrote in 1844. "Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression' 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals' &c, — but the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his — though the means of change are wholly so — I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends. — You will now groan, & think to yourself 'on what a man have I been wasting my time in writing to.' I sh'd, five years ago, have thought so."¹¹

SICK AND TIRED

The theory that Darwin was slowed by a hostile social climate assumes many forms, ranging from baroque to simple, and these depict his delay in various ways, ranging from pathological to wise.

In the more elaborate versions of the theory, Darwin's illness — which was never clearly diagnosed and remains a mystery — figures as a psychosomatic procrastination device. Darwin was feeling heart palpitations in September 1837, a couple of months after opening his first evolution notebook, and his reports of illness are fairly frequent as those notebooks unfold toward the theory of natural selection.¹²

It has been suggested that Emma, who held her religion dear* and was pained by her husband's evolutionism, heightened the tension between his science and his social environs; and that, by so devotedly nursing him, she made his unwellness easier than was healthy. A letter to Charles just before their marriage contains a passage to that effect: "[N]othing could make me so happy as to feel that I could be of any use or comfort to my own dear Charles when he is not well. If you knew how I long to be with you when you are not well! ... So don't be ill any more my dear Charley till I can be with you to nurse you...,"¹³ These sentences may represent the high-water mark of Emma's premarital ardor.

Not all theories linking Darwin's illness to his ideas imply a subconscious plot to conceal them. Darwin may have simply had what is known today as an emotionally induced illness. Anxiety about social rejection is, after all, an ultimately physiological thing, as Darwin would have been the first to point out. It takes a physiological toll.¹⁴

Some people accept that Darwin had a bona fide disease, probably contracted in South America (perhaps Chagas' disease or chronic fatigue syndrome), but say he used barnacles to subconsciously forestall the day of reckoning. Certainly, as Darwin entered his barnacle phase, insisting it would be brief, he had some misgivings about what lay beyond. He wrote to Hooker in 1846: "I am going to begin some papers on the lower marine animals, which will last me some months, perhaps a year, & then I shall begin looking over my ten-year-long accumulation of notes on species & varieties which, with writing, I daresay I shall stand infinitely low in the opinion of all sound naturalists — so this is my prospect for the future."¹⁵ That's the sort of attitude that could lead to an eight-year barnacle research project.

Some observers, including some of Darwin's contemporaries, have said the barnacles did him a great service.¹⁶ They immersed him fully in the details of taxonomy (good experience for someone who purports to have a theory explaining how all valid taxonomies came to be) and gave him an entire subclass of animals to examine in light of natural selection.

Besides, there were things other than taxonomy that he hadn't yet mastered — which leads to the simplest of all theories about his delay. The fact is that in 1846 — and in 1856, and, really, in 1859, when the Origin was published — Darwin had not fully figured out natural selection. And it is only logical, before unveiling a theory that will get you defamed and hated, to try to get it into good shape.

One of the puzzles about natural selection that faced Darwin was the puzzle of extreme selflessness, of insect sterility. Not until 1857 did he solve it, with his precursor of the theory of kin selection.¹⁷

Another of the puzzles Darwin never solved.¹⁸ This is the problem of heredity itself. A great virtue of Darwin's theory is that it doesn't depend, as Lamarck's did, on the inheritance of acquired traits; for natural selection to work, it isn't necessary that a giraffe's stretching for higher leaves affect the neck length of its offspring. But Darwinian evolution does depend on some form of change in the range of inherited traits; natural selection needs an ever-changing menu to "choose" from. Today any good high school biology student can tell you how the menu keeps changing — through sexual recombination and genetic mutation. But neither of these mechanisms made obvious sense before people knew about genes. For Darwin to have talked about "random mutations" when asked how the pool of traits changes would have been like saying, "It just does — trust me."¹⁹

It is possible to assess Darwin's delay from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology. This view doesn't yield a whole new theory about the delay, but it does help drain the episode of some mystery.

It can be best appreciated after the evolutionary roots of his ambitions and fears have become clear. For now, let us leave the story in 1854, when the last of the barnacle books was published and the time had come for Darwin to muster his full reserves of enthusiasm for the coming culmination of his life's work. He wrote to Hooker: "How awfully flat I shall feel, if, when I get my notes together on species, &c. &c, the whole thing explodes like an empty puff-ball."²⁰

Chapter 12: SOCIAL STATUS

Seeing how ancient these expressions are, it is no wonder that they are so difficult to conceal. — a man insulted may forgive his enemy & not wish to strike him, but he will find it far more difficult to look tranquil. — He may despise a man & say nothing, but without a most distinct will, he will find it hard to keep his lip from stiffening over his canine teeth. — He may feel satisfied with himself, & though dreading to say so, his step will
grow erect & stiff like that of turkey.

— M Notebook (1838)¹

Among the things Charles Darwin found troubling about the Fuegian Indians was their apparent lack of social inequality. "At present," he wrote in 1839, "even a piece of cloth is torn into shreds and distributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another." Such "perfect equality," he feared, would "for a long time retard their civilization." Darwin noted, by way of example, that "the inhabitants of Otaheite, who, when first discovered, were governed by hereditary kings, had arrived at a far higher grade than another branch of the same people, the New Zealanders — who although benefited by being compelled to turn their attention to agriculture, were republicans in the most absolute sense." The upshot: "In tierra del Fuego, until some chief shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantages, such as the domesticated animals or other valuable presents, it seems scarcely possible that the political state of the country can be improved."

Then Darwin added, "On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise till there is property of some sort by which he might manifest and still increase his authority."²

Had Darwin mulled this afterthought a little longer, he might have begun to wonder whether the Fuegians were, in fact, a people of "perfect equality." Naturally, to an affluent Englishman, reared amid servants, a society never far from starvation will seem starkly egalitarian. There will be no opulent displays of status, no gross disparities. But social hierarchy can assume many forms, and in every human society it seems to find one.

This pattern has been slow to come to light. One reason is that lots of twentieth-century anthropologists have, like Darwin, come from highly stratified societies, and been struck, sometimes charmed, by the relative classlessness of hunter-gatherer peoples. Anthropologists have been burdened, also, by a hopeful belief in the almost infinite malleability of the human mind, a belief fostered especially by Franz Boas and his famous students, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. The Boasian bias against human nature was in some ways laudable — a well-meant reaction against crude political extensions of Darwinism that had countenanced poverty and various other social ills as "natural." But a well-meant bias is still a bias. Boas, Benedict, and Mead left out large parts of the story of humanity.³ And among those parts are the deeply human hunger for status and the seemingly universal presence of hierarchy.

More recently, anthropologists of a Darwinian bent have started looking closely for social hierarchy. They have found it in even the least likely places.

The Ache, a hunter-gatherer people in South America, seem at first to possess an idyllic equality. Their meat goes into a communal pool, so the best hunters routinely aid their less fortunate neighbors. But during the 1980s, anthropologists took a closer look and found that the best hunters, though generous with meat, hoard a resource more fundamental. They have more extramarital affairs and more illegitimate children than lesser hunters. And their offspring have a better chance of surviving, apparently because they get special treatment.⁴ Being known as a good hunter, in other words, is an informal rank that carries clout with men and women alike.

The Aka pygmies of central Africa also appear at first glance to be lacking in hierarchy, as they have no "headman," no ultimate political leader. But they do have a man called a kombeti who subtly but powerfully influences big group decisions (and who often earns that rank through his hunting prowess). And it turns out that the kombeti gets the lion's share of the food, the wives, and the offspring.⁵

And so it goes. As more and more societies are reevaluated in the unflattering light of Darwinian anthropology, it becomes doubtful that any truly egalitarian human society has ever existed. Some societies don't have sociologists, and thus may not have the concept of status, but they do have status. They have people of high status and low status, and everyone knows who is who. In 1945 the anthropologist George Peter Murdock, swimming against the prevailing Boasian current, published an essay called "The Common Denominator of Cultures," in which he ventured that "status differentiation" (along with gift giving, property rights, marriage, and dozens of other things) was a human universal.⁶ The closer we look, the righter he seems.

In one sense, the ubiquity of hierarchy is a Darwinian puzzle. Why do the losers keep playing the game? Why is it in the genetic interest of the low men on the totem pole to treat their betters with deference? Why lend your energy to a system that leaves you with less than your neighbors?

One can imagine reasons. Maybe hierarchy makes the whole group so cohesive that most or all members benefit, even if they benefit unequally — exactly the fate that Darwin hoped would someday befall the Fuegians. In other words, maybe hierarchies serve "the good of the group" and are thus favored by "group selection." This theory was embraced by the popular writer Robert Ardrey, a prominent member of the generation of group selectionists whose decline marked the rise of the new Darwinian paradigm. If people weren't inherently capable of submission, Ardrey wrote, then "organized society would be impossible and we should have only anarchy."⁷

Well, maybe so. But judging by the large number of essentially asocial species, natural selection doesn't seem to share Ardrey's concern for social order. It is perfectly willing to let organisms pursue inclusive fitness amid anarchy. Besides, if you start thinking carefully about this group-selectionist scenario, problems arise. Granted, when two tribes meet in combat, or compete for the same resource, the more hierarchical and cohesive may win. But how did it get hierarchical and cohesive in the first place? How would genes counseling submission, and thus lowering fitness, manage to gain a foothold amid the everyday competition among genes within the society? Wouldn't they tend to be banished from the gene pool before they had a chance to demonstrate their goodness for the group? These are the questions group selection theories — such as Darwin's theory of the moral sentiments — often face and often fail to surmount.

The most widely accepted Darwinian explanation for hierarchy is simple, straightforward, and nicely compatible with observed reality. It is only with this theory in hand — only after taking a clear look at human social status, uncolored by morality and politics — that we can get back to the moral and political questions. In exactly what senses is social inequality inherent in human nature? Is inequality indeed, as Darwin suggested, a prerequisite for economic or political advancement? Are some people "born to serve" and others "born to lead"?

THE MODERN THEORY OF STATUS HIERARCHIES

Throw a bunch of hens together, and, after a time of turmoil, including much combat, things will settle down. Disputes (over food, say) will now be brief and decisive, as one hen simply pecks the other, bringing quick deferral. The deferrals form a pattern. There is a simple, linear hierarchy, and every hen knows its place. A pecks B with impunity, B pecks C, and so on. The Norwegian biologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe noticed this pattern in the 1920s and gave it the name "pecking order." (Schjelderup-Ebbe also observed, in a frenzy of politically loaded overextrapolation: "Despotism is the basic idea of the world, indissolubly bound up with all life and existence... . There is nothing that does not have a despot."⁸ No wonder anthropologists shied away from evolutionary accounts of social hierarchy for so long.)

The order of the pecking is not arbitrary. B had a marked tendency to defeat C in early conflicts, and A tended to prevail over B. So it isn't, after all, such a great challenge to explain the emerging social hierarchy as merely the sum of individual self-interest. Each hen is deferring to hens that will probably win anyway, saving itself the costs of battle.

If you've spent much time with chickens, you may doubt their ability to process a thought as complex as "Chicken A will beat me anyway, so why bother to fight?" Your doubt is well placed. Pecking orders are yet another case where the "thinking" has been done by natural selection, and so needn't be done by the organism. The organism must be able to tell its neighbors apart, and to feel a healthy fear of the ones that have brutalized it, but it needn't grasp the logic behind the fear. Any genes endowing a chicken with this selective fear, reducing the time spent in futile and costly combat, should flourish.

Once such genes pervade the population, hierarchy is part of the social architecture. The society may look, indeed, as if designed by someone who valued order over liberty. But that doesn't mean it was. As George Williams put it in Adaptation and Natural Selection, "The dominance-subordination hierarchy shown by wolves and a wide variety of vertebrates and arthropods is not a functional organization. It is the statistical consequence of a compromise made by each individual in its competition for food, mates, and other resources. Each compromise is adaptive, but not the statistical summation."⁹

This isn't the only conceivable explanation of hierarchy that skirts the pitfalls of group selectionism. Another is based on John Maynard Smith's concept of an evolutionarily stable state — more specifically, on his "hawk-dove" analysis of a hypothetical bird species. Imagine dominance and submission as two genetically based strategies, the success of each depending on their relative frequency. Being a dominant (for example, walking around intimidating submissives into giving you half their food) is fine so long as there are lots of submissives around. But as the strategy spreads, it grows less fruitful: there are fewer and fewer submissives to exploit, and meanwhile dominants encounter one another more and more, engaging in costly combat. That's why the submissive strategy can thrive; a submissive animal must often surrender some of its food, but it avoids the fighting that takes an increasingly large toll on dominants. The population should in theory equilibrate, with a fixed ratio of dominants to submissives. And, as with all evolutionarily stable states (recall the blue-gill sunfish from chapter three), this equilibrium ratio is the point at which each strategy enjoys the same reproductive success.¹⁰

There are species that this explanation seems to fit. Among Harris sparrows, darker birds are aggressive and dominant, and lighter ones more passive and submissive. Maynard Smith has found indirect evidence that the two strategies are equally conducive to fitness — the hallmark of an evolutionarily stable state.¹¹ But when we move to the human species — and, indeed, when we move to other hierarchical species — this explanation for social hierarchy encounters problems. Prominent among them is the number of findings — in the Ache, the Aka, many other human societies, and many other species — that low status brings low reproductive success.¹² This is not the hallmark of an evolutionarily stable mix of strategies. It is the hallmark of low-status animals trying to make the best of a bad situation.

For decades, while many anthropologists have downplayed social hierarchy, psychologists and sociologists have studied its dynamics, watching the facility with which members of our species sort themselves out. Put a group of children together, and before long they fall into distinct grades. The ones at the top are best liked, most frequently imitated, and, when they try to wield influence, best obeyed.¹³ The rudiments of this tendency are seen among children only a year old.¹⁴ At first, status equals toughness — high-ranking children are the ones that don't back down — and indeed, for males, toughness matters well through adolescence. But as early as kindergarten, some children ascend the hierarchy via skill in cooperation.¹⁵ Other talents — intellectual, artistic — also carry weight, especially as we grow older.

Many scholars have studied these patterns without bringing a Darwinian slant to their work, but it's hard not to suspect an innate underpinning for such robotic patterns of learning. Besides, status hierarchies run in our family. They emerge with great clarity and complexity in our nearest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, and are found also, if in simpler form, in gorillas, our next closest kin, and in many other primates.¹⁶ If you took a zoologist from another planet, showed him our family tree, and pointed out that the three species nearest our limb were inherently hierarchical, he would probably guess that we are too. If you then told him that hierarchy is indeed found in every human society where people have looked closely for it, and among children too young to talk, he might well consider the case closed.

There is more evidence. Some of the ways people signify their status, and the status of others, seem to hold steady across cultures. Darwin himself, after widely questioning missionaries and other world travelers, concluded that "scorn, disdain, contempt, and disgust are expressed in many different ways, by movements of the features, and by various gestures; and that these are the same throughout the world." He also noted that "a proud man exhibits his sense of superiority over others by holding his head and body erect."¹⁷ A century later, studies would show that posture becomes straighter immediately after social triumph — as, say, when a student gets a high test score.¹⁸ And the ethologist Irenaiis Eibl-Eibesfeldt would find that children in diverse cultures, after losing a fight, lower their heads in self-abasement.¹⁹ These universals of expression have reflections within. People in all cultures feel pride upon social success, embarrassment, even shame, upon failure, and, at times, anxiety pending these outcomes.²⁰

Nonhuman primates send some of the same status signals as people. Dominant male chimps — and dominant primates generally — strut proudly and expansively. And after two chimpanzees fight over status, the loser crouches abjectly. This sort of bowing is thereafter repeated to peacefully express submission.

STATUS, SELF-ESTEEM, AND BIOCHEMISTRY

Beneath the behavioral parallels between human and nonhuman primates lie biochemical parallels. In vervet monkey societies, dominant males have more of the neurotransmitter serotonin than do their subordinates. And one study found that in college fraternities, officers, on average, have more serotonin than do their less powerful fraternity brothers.²¹

This is a good opportunity to extinguish a once-flourishing misconception that, though in decline, has yet to die its richly deserved death. It is not the case that all behavior under "hormonal control," or some other "biological control," is "genetically determined." Yes, there is a correlation between serotonin (a hormone, like all neuro-transmitters) and social status. But no, that doesn't mean that a given person's social status was "in the genes," preordained at birth. If you check the serotonin levels of a fraternity president well before his political ascent, or of an alpha vervet monkey well before his, you may find them unexceptional.²² Serotonin level, though a "biological" thing, is largely a product of the social environment. It isn't nature's way of destining people at birth for leadership; it's nature's way of equipping them for leadership once they've gotten there (and, some evidence suggests, of encouraging them to make a bid for leadership at a politically opportune moment).²³ You too can have a high serotonin level, if you can get elected president of a college fraternity.

Certainly genetic differences matter. Some people's genes dispose them to be unusually ambitious, or clever, or athletic, or artistic, or various other things — including unusually rich in serotonin. But these traits depend, for their flowering, on the environment (and sometimes on each other), and their eventual translation into status can rest heavily on chance. No one is born to lead, and no one is born to follow. And to the extent that some people are born with a leg up in the race (as they surely are), that birthright probably lies at least as much in cultural as in genetic advantage. In any event, there are good Darwinian reasons to believe that everyone is born with the capacity for high serotonin — with the equipment to function as a high-status primate given a social setting conducive to their ascent. The whole point of the human brain is behavioral flexibility, and it would be very unlike natural selection, given that flexibility, to deny anyone a chance at the genetic payoffs of high status, should the opportunity arise.

What does serotonin do? The effect of neurotransmitters is so subtle, and so dependent on chemical context, that simple generalizations are risky. But often, at least, serotonin seems to relax people, make them more gregarious, more socially assertive, much as a glass of wine does. In fact, one of alcohol's effects is to release serotonin. As a slight and useful oversimplification, you might say that serotonin raises self-esteem; it makes you behave in ways befitting an esteemed primate. Extremely low levels of serotonin can accompany not just low self-esteem, but severe depression, and may precede suicide. Antidepressants such as Prozac boost serotonin.²⁴

So far this book has said little about neurotransmitters like serotonin, or about biochemistry in general. That is partly because the biochemical links among genes, brain, and behavior are largely unfathomed. It is also because the elegant logic of evolutionary analysis often lets us figure out the role of genes without worrying about the nuts and bolts of their influence. But, of course, there always are nuts and bolts. Whenever we talk about the influence of genes (or environment) on behavior, thought, or emotion, we are talking about a biochemical chain of influence.

As these chains become clearer, they can give form to inchoate data, and help graft the data onto a Darwinian framework. Psychologists found several decades ago that artificially lowering self-esteem (by giving false reports about scores on a personality test) made people more likely to cheat in a subsequent game of cards. A more recent study finds that people with lower serotonin levels are more likely to commit impulsive crimes.²⁵ Maybe both of these findings, translated into evolutionary terms, are saying the same thing: that "cheating" is an adaptive response, triggered when people are shunted to the bottom of the heap and thus find it hard to get resources legitimately. Maybe there's some truth to that ostensibly simplistic refrain about inner-city crime — that it grows out of "low self-esteem," as poor children are reminded, via TV and movies, that they're nowhere near the top of the roost. Again we see how Darwinism, often caricatured as genetically determinist and right-wing, can mesh with the sort of environmental determinism favored on the left.

We also see another way to test group-selectionist theories. If the acceptance of low status had evolved mainly as an ingredient of group success, success that then trickles down and benefits even the lowly, you wouldn't expect low-status animals to spend their time subverting the group's order.²⁶

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.²⁷ (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 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.²⁸

MEN, WOMEN, AND STATUS

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."²⁹ 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 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.³⁰ 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.³¹

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."³² 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."³³

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 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."³⁴ 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.³⁵

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."³⁶ (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.)³⁷

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 are the unquestioned leaders. Even in the wild, the more formidable females can prevail over the lowliest adult males.³⁸

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.³⁹ 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 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.

CHIMPANZEE POLITICS

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."⁴⁰

Mike's particular genius is not especially typical and may not be 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.

The best illustration of the fluidity of chimpanzee power, and the attendant emotional and cognitive complexity of chimps, is the primatologist Frans de Waal's gripping, almost soap-operatic, account of life among chimps housed on a two-acre island in a zoo in the Dutch town of Arnhem. Some people find de Waal's book — indeed its very title, Chimpanzee Politics — problematic. They think he too easily attributes to chimps an almost human nature. But no one can deny that this book is unique in its minutely detailed account of life among apes. I'll tell the story as de Waal tells it, complete with his engrossingly anthropomorphic tone, and we'll deal with problems of interpretation afterward.

Yeroen, a leading character in the drama, knew well the precariousness of power. While occupying the alpha position, he relied on the allegiance of various females, most notably Mama, a highly influential ape who occupied the dominant female slot throughout de Waal's narrative. It was to the females that Yeroen turned for help when challenged by the younger, stronger Luit.

Luit's challenge escalated relentlessly. First it was sexual intercourse with a female around ovulation, blatantly performed within sight of the jealous and possessive (like any alpha) Yeroen; next came a series of aggressive "displays," or threats, aimed at Yeroen; and finally a physical assault: Luit descended on Yeroen from a tree, struck him, and ran away. This is not the sort of treatment to which alpha males are accustomed. Yeroen started screaming.

He then ran over to a group of chimps, mostly females, embraced each of them, and, having thus consolidated his strategic ties, led them toward Luit. Yeroen and company cornered Luit, who then dissolved into a temper tantrum. He had lost the first battle.

Yeroen seems to have sensed in advance that this challenge was in the works. De Waal's records showed that during the weeks before Luit's first overt defiance, Yeroen had more than doubled the amount of time he spent in friendly contact with adult females. Politicians do most of their baby kissing around election time.

Alas for poor Yeroen, his victory was fleeting. Luit set about to undermine the governing coalition. For weeks on end he punished Yeroen's supporters. When he saw a female grooming Yeroen, he would approach the two and threaten or actually assault the female, sometimes jumping up and down on her. Yet later, Luit might be seen grooming the same female, or playing with her children — so long as she wasn't with Yeroen. The females got the message.

Perhaps if Yeroen had defended his allies better, he could have hung on to alpha status. But this option was rendered dicey by an alliance between Luit and a young male named Nikkie. Nikkie would accompany Luit during his persecution of females, sometimes giving them a hard slap of his own. Their partnership was a natural: Nikkie, just emerging from adolescence, was struggling to establish dominance over all females — a rite of passage for young male chimps — and the affiliation with Luit made this simple. Eventually, after some hesitation, Luit gave Nikkie the added incentive of special sexual privileges.

Having isolated Yeroen, Luit could ascend to alpha rank. The transition came through several hostile encounters, though it wasn't sealed until Yeroen finally mustered the humility to greet Luit submissively.

Luit proved a wise and mature leader. Under his rule, life was orderly and just. If two chimps were fighting, he would step between them with calm authority, ending hostilities without fear or favor. And when he did side with one combatant, it was almost always the one who was losing. This pattern of support for the downtrodden — populism, we call it — had also been employed by Yeroen. It seemed to impress the females especially; being less caught up in the pursuit of status than males, they seemed to place a premium on social stability. Luit could now count on their support.

In the long run, however, populism would not be enough. Luit still faced, on the one hand, Yeroen's persistent fondness for power (and perhaps some lingering enmity, though the two had lavishly reconciled, with much mutual grooming, after Yeroen conceded defeat); and, on the other hand, the conspicuous ambition of Nikkie. Luit must have found the latter the more threatening, for he sought alliance with Yeroen, thus freezing Nikkie out of the leadership circle. But Yeroen, seemingly aware of his pivotal place in the balance of power, proved a coy ally, and played the two off against each other. Finally, he shifted his weight toward Nikkie and, in league with him, toppled Luit. Alpha status went to Nikkie, but Yeroen continued to play his cards so deftly that for the next year he, not Nikkie, led all males in sexual activity. De Waal considered Nikkie a "figurehead" and Yeroen the power behind the throne.

The story has a morbid epilogue. After de Waal's book was published, Nikkie and Yeroen had a falling out. But their sense of common purpose was revived after Luit resumed alpha status. One night during a brutal fight, they wounded Luit mortally — even going so far, in a gratuitous bit of Darwinian symbolism, as to rip out his testicles. De Waal had little doubt about which of the two suspected killers deserved more blame. "Nikkie, ten years younger, seemed only a pawn in Yeroen's games," he later observed. "I found myself fighting this moral judgment, but to this day I cannot look at Yeroen without seeing a murderer."⁴¹

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A CHIMP?

That's the story of the Arnhem chimps, told as if they were people. Does de Waal deserve to be condemned for anthropomorphizing? Ironically, even a jury of evolutionary psychologists might vote for a conviction — on one count of the indictment, at least.

De Waal suspects that, just before Luit's bid for alpha status, when Yeroen started spending more time with the females, he had "already sensed that Luit's attitude was changing and he knew that his position was threatened."⁴² Yeroen probably did "sense" a change of attitude, and this may well account for his sudden interest in the politically pivotal females. But must we assume, with de Waal, that Yeroen "knew" about — consciously anticipated — the coming challenge and rationally took measures to head it off? Why couldn't Luit's growing assertiveness simply have inspired pangs of insecurity that pulled Yeroen into closer touch with his friends?

Certainly genes encouraging an unconsciously rational response to threat's can fare well in natural selection. When a baby chimp or a baby human, sighting a spooky-looking animal, retreats to its mother, the response is logical, but the youngster presumably isn't conscious of the logic. Similarly, when I suggested earlier that Darwin's recurrent illness may have periodically replenished his affection for Emma, I didn't mean he consciously reappraised her value in view of his poor health (though he may have). Threats of various kinds seem to nourish our affection for the people who help us face threats — kin and friends.

The point is that too readily imputing strategic brilliance to chimps may obscure a basic theme of evolutionary psychology: everyday human behavior is often a product of subterranean forces — rational forces, perhaps, but not consciously rational. Thus, de Waal may be creating a misleading dichotomy when he speaks of Yeroen's and Luit's "policy reversals, rational decisions and opportunism" and then asserts that "there is no room in this policy for sympathy and antipathy."⁴³ What look like policies may be products of sympathy and antipathy; the ultimate policy maker is natural selection, and it calibrates these feelings to execute its policies.

With that verdict rendered, our jury of evolutionary psychologists would probably go on to acquit de Waal of many other counts of anthropomorphism. For often what he imputes to chimps is not human calculation but human feelings. During the early, inconclusive phase of Luit's challenge to Yeroen, the two periodically fought. And a fight (among chimps and many other primates, including us) is typically followed, sooner or later, by rituals of reconciliation. De Waal notes how reluctant each chimp was to start the rapprochement and ascribes their hesitation to a "sense of honor."⁴⁴

He gingerly puts that phrase in quotation marks, but they may Hot be needed. In chimp society, as in human society, a peace overture can carry intimations of submission; and submission during a leadership struggle carries real Darwinian costs, as it may bring secondary or still lower status. So a genetically based aversion to such submissions (up to a point, at least) makes evolutionary sense. In our species, we call this aversion a sense of honor, or pride. Is there any reason we shouldn't use the same terms when talking about chimps? As de Waal has noted, given the close kinship of the two species, to assume a deep mental commonality is good parsimonious science: a single hypothesis that plausibly accounts for two separate phenomena.

Wives have been known to say of their husbands, "He can never hung himself to admit he's wrong," or "He's never the first to apologize," or "He hates to ask for directions." Men seem loath to concede the superiority of another human being, even in such trivial realms as municipal geography. The reason, perhaps, is that during human evolution males who too readily sought reconciliation after a fight, or otherwise needlessly submitted to others, saw their status drop, and with it their inclusive fitness. Presumably females did too; Women, like men, are reluctant to apologize or admit they're wrong. But if folk wisdom can be trusted, the average woman is less reluctant than the average man. And that shouldn't surprise us, as the fitness of our female ancestors depended less on such reluctance than did that of our male ancestors.

De Waal also speaks of "respect." When Luit's dominance was finally undeniable, and Yeroen faintly sought rapprochement, Luit ignored him until he heard some "respectful grunts," unambiguous signs of submission.⁴⁵ A beta chimp may well feel toward the alpha much the way a losing prizefighter feels toward an opponent he says he now "respects." And at moments of utter ape dominance, when the vanquished crouches in abject submission, awe may be an apt word.

Jane Goodall, like de Waal, saw "respect" in the apes she came to know, though she used that word somewhat differently. Recalling the apprenticeship of a young chimp, Goblin, under the alpha male Figan, she writes that "Goblin was very respectful of his 'hero,' followed him around, watched what he did, and often groomed him."⁴⁶ Everyone who has been through adolescence and has had a role model can imagine how Goblin felt. In fact, some might suggest that reverent is a better word than respectful.

All of this may sound facile — a grand leap from surface parallels between us and apes to the depths of primate psychology. And maybe it will turn out to have been facile; maybe the uncanny resemblance between chimp and human life isn't grounded in a common evolutionary origin or a common biochemistry. Still, if we are not going to explain such things — respect, reverence, awe, honor, stubborn pride, contempt, disdain, ambition, and so on — as natural selection's way of equipping us for life in a status hierarchy, how, then, are we to explain them? Why are they found in cultures everywhere? Is there an alternative theory? If so, does it explain, as well, why pride and ambition, for example, seem to reach greater heights in men, on average, than in women? Modern Darwinism has an explanation for all of this, and it's simple: natural selection in a context of status hierarchy.

MIGHT AND RIGHT

One of de Waal's alleged anthropomorphisms puts flesh on a skeletal speculation made by Robert Trivers in his 1971 paper on reciprocal altruism. De Waal believes conduct among chimps may be "governed by the same sense of moral Tightness and justice as it is among humans." This thought was provoked by a female chimp named Puist, who "had supported Luit in chasing Nikkie. When Nikkie later displayed at Puist she turned to Luit and held out her hand to him in search of support. Luit, however, did nothing to protect her against Nikkie's attack. Immediately Puist turned on Luit, barking furiously, chased him across the enclosure and even hit him."⁴⁷ It doesn't take great imagination to see in such fury the heated indignation with which you might chastise a friend who had deserted you in time of need.

The deepest source of this "sense of fairness" is, as Trivers noted, reciprocal altruism. No status hierarchy need be involved. Indeed, what de Waal calls two of the basic rules of chimpanzee conduct — "One good turn deserves another," and "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" — amount to a description of TIT FOR TAT, which evolved in the absence of status.

Still, it is competition for social status — and the attendant phenomenon of social alliance, of collective enmity — that has given these deeply held philosophical intuitions much of their weight. Human coalitions competing for status often feature a vague sense of moral entitlement, a sense that the other coalition deserves to lose. The fact that our species evolved amid both reciprocal altruism and social hierarchy may underlie not just personal grudges and reprisals, but race riots and world wars.

That war may in this sense be "natural" doesn't mean it's good, of course; or even that it's inevitable. And much the same can be said of social hierarchy. That natural selection has opted for social inequality in our species certainly doesn't make inequality right; and it makes it inevitable in only a limited sense. Namely: when groups of people — especially males — spend much time together, some sort of hierarchy, if implicit and subtle, is pretty sure to appear. Whether we know it or not, we tend naturally to rank one another, and we signify the ranking through patterns of attention, agreement, and deference — whom we pay attention to, whom we agree with, whose jokes we laugh at, whose suggestions we take.⁴⁸ But social inequality in the larger sense — gross disparities in wealth and privilege across a whole nation — is another matter. That is a product of government policy, or lack of policy.

Of course, public policy, in the end, must comply with human nature. If people are basically selfish — and they are — then asking them to work hard yet earn no more than their unproductive neighbor is asking more than they'll readily give. But we already know that; communism has failed. We also know that mildly redistributive taxation does not snuff out the will to work. Between these two extremes is a large menu of policies. Each has its cost, but the cost is a product of plain old human selfishness — something that's not exactly news — and not of the human hunger for status per se.

Indeed, the hunger for status may actually lower the costs of redistribution. Humans, it seems, tend to compare themselves to those very near them in the status hierarchy — to those just above them, in particular.⁴⁹ This makes evolutionary sense as a ladder-climbing technique, but that's not the point. The point is that if the government takes a thousand dollars more from everyone in your middle-class neighborhood, you're in about the same position relative to your neighbors as you were before. So if keeping up with the Joneses is what drives you, your work incentive shouldn't be dampened as it would if calibrated in absolute monetary terms.

The modern view of social hierarchy also deals a heavy blow to one of the cruder philosophical excuses for inequality. As I've tried to stress, there is no reason to derive our values from natural selection's "values," no reason to deem "good" what natural selection has "deemed" expedient. Still, some people do. They say that hierarchy is nature's way of keeping the group strong, so inequality can be justified in the name of the greater good. Since it now looks as if nature didn't invent human hierarchies for the good of the group, that piece of logic is twice as flawed as it used to be.

The crowning (alleged) anthropomorphism in de Waal's book is its title, Chimpanzee Politics. If politics is, as political scientists say, the process by which resources are divvied up, then chimps demonstrate, in de Waal's view, that the origins of human politics long predate humanity. In fact, he sees not just a political process, but "even a democratic structure" at work in the Arnhem chimp colony.⁵⁰ Alpha males have trouble ruling without the consent of the governed.

Nikkie, for example, lacked Luit's common touch and never became as popular as either Luit or Yeroen were during their tenures. The females were especially sparing in their submissive greetings, and when Nikkie was needlessly violent, they would pursue him en masse. On one occasion he was chased up a tree by the entire colony. There he sat, alone, surrounded, and screaming — the dominant male, dominated. Maybe this wasn't modern representative democracy, but it wasn't a very smooth dictatorship either. (There's no telling how long Nikkie would have stayed trapped had Mama, the troop's chief conciliator, not climbed the tree, given him a kiss, and led him back down, after which he humbly sought mass forgiveness.)⁵¹

Here's a useful exercise: when watching a politician speak on TV, turn down the volume. Notice the gestures. Note their similarity to the gestures politicians everywhere in the world use — exhortation, indignation, and so on. Then turn up the volume. Listen to what the politician is saying. Here's a virtual guarantee: he (or, more rarely, she) is saying things that appeal to the group of voters most likely to get him into power or keep him there. The interests of the governed — or of some crucial slice of the governed — governs what human politicians say, just as it governs what chimpanzee politicians do. In both cases, the politician's ultimate aim (whether he knows it or not) is status. And in both cases we may see a certain flexibility as to what the politician is willing to do, or say, to get that status and keep it. Even the most stirring oratory can boil down to convenient coalition. In turning up the volume, you've capsulized several million years of evolution.

THE ZUNI WAY

For all the suggestive parallels between ape and human striving, the differences remain large. Human status often has relatively little to do with raw power. It's true that overt physical dominance is often a key to social hierarchy among boys. But, especially in adults, the status story is much more complex, and in some cultures its plainly political aspects have been quite subdued. Here is one scholar's description of life among the Navajo: "No one who actively seeks power is to be trusted. Leaders arise out of example and emulation. If someone is successful at growing corn, he is emulated and to that extent is a leader. If someone knows many verses to a curing chant, he is respected for that accomplishment and his status as a 'singer' is considerable. Politicking, handshaking ... have no place in traditional Navajo society."⁵²

This isn't to say that Navajos don't seek power — only that they seek it subtly. Nor is it to say that status is severed from the goal of reproductive advantage. The expert corn grower and the expert singer probably make for attractive mates. And it's easy to guess why; one has a knack for providing material resources and both show signs of intelligence. Still, these two Navajo didn't gain their reproductive advantage by physically intimidating or otherwise controlling people; they simply found their calling and excelled.

The range of things that can bring status in different cultures and subcultures is astonishing. Making beads, making music, delivering sermons, delivering babies, inventing drugs, inventing tales, collecting coins, collecting scalps. Yet the mental machinery driving these various activities is fundamentally the same. Human beings are designed to assess their social environment, and, having figured out what impresses people, do it; or, having found what people disfavor, avoid it. They're pretty open-minded about what "it" is. The main thing is that they be able to succeed at it; people everywhere want to feel pride, not shame; to inspire respect, not disdain.

This tendency of humankind's psychic unity to hide behind behavioral diversity is what enabled the Boasian anthropologists to minimize human nature. Ruth Benedict wrote in 1934, "We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behaviour, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition."⁵³ Strictly speaking, she was right. Once you get past stereotyped acts such as walking, eating, and suckling, "behaviors" don't get transmitted biologically. Mental organs do, and they're usually limber enough to yield lots of different behaviors, depending on circumstance.

It is easy to see how the mental machinery of status seeking, in particular, eluded Benedict's emphasis. She studied the Zuni, who, like the nearby Navajo, play down competition and overt political striving. She wrote, "The ideal man in Zuni is a person of dignity and affability who has never tried to lead... . Any conflict, even though all right is on his side, is held against him... . The highest praise ... runs: 'He is a nice polite man.' "⁵⁴ Note the subtext. There is an "ideal man," and anyone who approaches the ideal gets "praise," while anyone who falls short has his failure "held against him." In other words: the Zuni confer status on those who don't seek status too fiercely, and deny status to those who do. The very strength of the status-seeking machinery is what keeps Zuni status hierarchies subtle. (Also, as we've seen, the social infrastructure of reciprocal altruism tends in all cultures to exert some pressure toward friendliness, as well as generosity and honesty. Zuni culture may have harnessed this pressure with unusual efficiency, reinforcing the natural link between niceness and status.)

You can look at life among the Zuni as a tribute either to the power of culture or to the suppleness of mental adaptations. It is both, but let's ponder the latter: mental organs, it seems, are so flexible that they can participate in a virtual rebellion against the Darwinian logic behind them. Though the status-seeking machinery lias long energized fistfights and macho politicking, it can also be used to suppress both. In a monastery, serenity and asceticism can be sources of status. In some strata of Victorian England, a nearly ludicrous amount of gentility and humility could help earn status (rather like among the Zuni, perhaps).

In other words, what we call cultural "values" are expedients to social success.⁵⁵ People adopt them because other people admire them. By controlling a child's social environment, by selectively dishing out respect and scorn, we can program his values as if he were a robot. Some people find this troubling. Well, that just goes to show that you can't please everybody. During the sociobiology controversy of the 1970s, a major source of outrage was the fear that, if the sociobiologists were right, people couldn't be programmed as B. F. Skinner and other behaviorists had promised.

The new paradigm does have room for Skinnerian conditioning, complete with positive and negative reinforcement. To be sure, some drives and emotions — say, lust and jealousy — may never be wholly erasable. Still, the great moral diversity among cultures — that is, diversity in the tolerated behavioral expressions of, say, lust and jealousy — suggests much leeway in the values department. Such is the power of social approval and disapproval.

The big question is: How deeply can the patterns of approval and disapproval themselves be shaped? Or to put it another way: How flexible is society about what it will find pleasing?

Here, no doubt, lie some pretty firm tendencies. Social assets that mattered consistently during evolution may stubbornly continue to carry weight. Big strong men and beautiful women may always have a head start in status competition. Stupidity may never provoke widespread admiration. The command of resources — that is, money — will tend to hold a certain appeal. Still, resistance is possible. There are cultures and subcultures that try to put less emphasis on the material and more emphasis on the spiritual. And their success is sometimes impressive, if less than total. And, moreover, there is no reason to believe that any of them have reached the limits of biological potential.

Even our own culture, for all its materialistic excess, starts to seem almost admirable when you look at some of the alternatives. Among the Yanomamo of South America, one route to status for a young man is to kill lots of men in neighboring villages.⁵⁶ If, in the process, he can participate in the abduction and gang rape of women from that village, so much the better. If his wife tries to leave him for another man, he can feel free to, say, cut off her ears. At the risk of sounding morally nonrelativistic, we've come a long way.

In some modern urban neighborhoods, values have lately grown closer to those of the Yanomamo. Young men who kill get respect — at least within the circle of young men whose opinions they care about. This is evidence that the worst parts of human nature are always near the surface, ready to rise when cultural restraint weakens. We are not blank slates, as some behaviorists once imagined. We are organisms whose more egregious tendencies can be greatly, if arduously, subdued. And a primary reason for this tenuous optimism is the abject flexibility with which status is sought. We will do almost anything for respect, including not act like animals.

Chapter 13: DECEPTION AND SELF-DECEPTION

What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame; the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.

— Letter to J. D. Hooker (1848)¹

Natural selection's disdain for the principle of truth in advertising is widely evident. Some female fireflies in the genus Photuris mimic the mating flash of females in the genus Photinus and then, having attracted a Photinus male, eat him. Some orchids look quite like female wasps, the better to lure male wasps that then unwittingly spread pollen. Some harmless snakes have evolved the coloration of poisonous snakes, gaining undeserved respect. Some butterfly pupa bear an uncanny resemblance to a snake's head — fake scales, fake eyes — and, if bothered, start rattling around menacingly.² In short: organisms may present themselves as whatever it is in their genetic interest to seem like.

People appear to be no exception. In the late 1950s and early sixties, the (non-Darwinian) social scientist Erving Goffman made a stir with a book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which stressed how much time we all spend on stage, playing to one audience or another, striving for effect. But there is a difference between us and many other performers in the animal kingdom. Whereas the female Photuris is, presumably, under no illusion as to its true identity, human beings have a way of getting taken in by their acts. Sometimes, Goffman marveled, a person is "sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality."

What modern Darwinism brings to Goffman's observation is, among other things, a theory about the function of the confusion we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better. This hypothesis was tossed out during the mid-1970s by both Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers. In his foreword to Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, Trivers noted Dawkins's emphasis on the role of deception in animal life and added, in a much-cited passage, that if indeed "deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray — by the subtle signs of self-knowledge — the deception being practised." Thus, Trivers ventured, "the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution."⁴

It should come as no surprise that the study of self-deception makes for murky science.⁵ "Awareness" is a region with ill-defined and porous borders. The truth, or certain aspects of it, may float in and out of awareness, or hover on the periphery, present yet not distinct. And even assuming we could confirm that someone is wholly unaware of information relevant to some situation, whether this constitutes self-deception is another question altogether. Is the information somewhere in the mind, blocked from consciousness by a censor designed for that function? Or did the person just fail to take note of the information in the first place? If so, is that selective perception itself a result of specific evolutionary design for self-deception? Or a more general reflection of the fact that the mind can hold only so much information (and the conscious mind even less) Such difficulties of analysis are one reason the science Trivers envisioned two decades ago — a rigorous study of self-deception, which might finally yield a clear picture of the unconscious mind — has not arrived.

Still, the intervening years have tended to validate the drift of Dawkins's and Trivers's and Alexander's worldview: our accurate depiction of reality — to others, and, sometimes, to ourselves — is not high on natural selection's list of priorities. The new paradigm helps us map the terrain of human deception and self-deception, if at a low level of resolution.

We've already explored one realm of deception: sex. Men and women may mislead each other — and even, in the process, themselves — about the likely endurance of their commitment or about their likely fidelity. There are two other large realms in which the presentation of self, and the perception of others, has great Darwinian consequence: reciprocal altruism and social hierarchy. Here, as with sex, honesty can be a major blunder. In fact, reciprocal altruism and social hierarchy may together be responsible for most of the dishonesty in our species — which, in turn, accounts for a good part of the dishonesty in the animal kingdom. We are far from the only dishonest species, but we are surely the most dishonest, if only because we do the most talking.

LEAVING A GOOD IMPRESSION

People don't seek status per se. They don't chart out their desired ascent and pursue it as methodically as a field general prosecutes a war. Well, okay, some do. Maybe all of us do sometimes. But the quest for status is also built more finely into the psyche. People in all cultures, whether they fully realize it or not, want to wow their neighbors, to rise in local esteem.

The thirst for approval appears early in life. Darwin had crystalline memories of impressing people with his tree-climbing skills: "My supposed admirer was old Peter Hailes the bricklayer, & the tree the Mountain Ash on the lawn."⁶ The other side of this coin is an early and continuing aversion to disdain or ridicule. Darwin wrote that his oldest son, at age two and a half, became "extremely sensitive to ridicule, and was so suspicious that he often thought people who were laughing and talking together were laughing at him."⁷ Darwin's son may have been abnormal in this regard, but that's beside the point. (Though it's interesting to note how many psychopathologies, including paranoia, may simply be evolutionarily ingrained tendencies turned up a notch too high.)⁸ The point is that if he was abnormal, he was abnormal in degree and not in kind. For all of us, avoiding ridicule is, from an early age, little short of an obsession. Recall Darwin's remarks about "the burning sense of shame which most of us have felt even after the interval of years, when calling to mind some accidental breach of a trifling though fixed rule of etiquette."⁹ Such a hair-trigger mechanism suggests large stakes. Indeed: just as high public esteem can bring great genetic rewards, very low public esteem can be genetically calamitous. In numerous nonhuman primate communities — and in not a few human ones — extremely unpopular individuals are pushed to the margins of the society and even beyond, where survival and reproduction become perilous.¹⁰ For that matter, a drop in status at any rung on the ladder carries costs. Whatever your place in society, leaving the sort of impression that exerts upward pressure on it is often worth the trouble (in Darwinian terms), even if the effect is slight.

Whether the impression is accurate is, by itself, irrelevant. When a chimp threatens a rival, or responds to a threat from one (or from a predator), its hair stands on end, making it seem larger than life. Vestiges of this illusion can be seen in people whose hair stands on end when they're frightened. But as a rule, humans do their self-inflating verbally. Darwin, in speculating about when in evolution the regard for public opinion became so strong, noted that "the rudest savages" show such a regard "by preserving the trophies of their prowess" and "by their habit of excessive boasting."¹¹

In Victorian England, boasting was frowned on, and Darwin was an expert on how not to do it. Many modern cultures share this taste, and in them "excessive boasting" is merely a phase through which children pass.¹² But what is the next phase? A lifetime of more measured boasting. Darwin himself was good at this. In his autobiography, he noted that his books "have been translated into many languages, and passed through several editions in foreign countries. I have heard it said that the success of a work abroad is the best test of its enduring value. I doubt whether this is at all trustworthy; but judged by this standard my name ought to last for a few years."¹³ Well, if he really doubted that this standard is trustworthy, why judge by it?

Presumably, how much blatant boasting you do depends on the credible means of self-advertisement in your social environment (and was probably calibrated by feedback from kin and peers early on). But if you don't feel even some urge to disseminate news of your triumphs, however subtly, and some reluctance to talk widely about your failures, you aren't functioning as designed.

Does such self-advertisement often involve deception? Not in the grossest sense. To tell huge lies about ourselves, and believe them, would be dangerous. Lies can be found out, and they force us to spend time and energy remembering which lies we've told to whom. Samuel Butler, himself a Victorian evolutionist (and the man who noted that a hen is just an egg's way of making another egg) observed that "the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way."¹⁴ Indeed. There are kinds of lies that, being slight, or hard to discredit, are hard to get tangled up in, and these are the sorts of lies we should expect people to tell. Among fishermen, the notorious and heartfelt embellishment of "the one that got away" has become a staple source of humor.

Such distortion may initially be conscious, or, at least, half-conscious. But if it goes unchallenged, the vague awareness of exaggeration can subside upon successive retellings. Cognitive psychologists have shown how the details of a story, even if false, embed themselves in the original memory with repetition.¹⁵

It goes without saying that the fish got away through no fault of the fisherman's. The assignment of blame and of credit, an area where objective truth is elusive, offers rich terrain for self-inflation. The tendency to attribute our successes to skill, and our failures to circumstance — luck, enemies, Satan — has been demonstrated in the laboratory and, anyway, is obvious.¹⁶ In games where chance plays a role, we tend to chalk up our losses to the luck of the draw and our victories to cleverness.

And we don't just say this; we believe it. Darwin was an enthusiastic backgammon player and, not surprisingly, he often won when playing against his children. One of his daughters recalls that "we kept a list of the doublets thrown by each, as I was convinced that he threw better than myself."¹⁷ This conviction is familiar to losing backgammon players everywhere. It helps preserve our belief in our competence and thus helps us convince others of it. It also provides a steady source of income for backgammon hustlers.

Self-aggrandizement always comes at the expense of others. To say that you lost a game through luck is to say that your opponent won through luck. And even leaving aside games and other openly competitive endeavors, to toot your own horn is to mute other horns for status is a relative thing. Your gain is someone else's loss.

And vice versa: someone else's loss is your gain. This is where the unconscious pursuit of status can turn nasty. In a small group (a group, say, the size of a hunter-gatherer village), a person has a broad interest in deflating the reputations of others, especially others of the same sex and similar age, with whom there exists a natural rivalry And again, the best way to convince people of something, includ ing their neighbors' shortcomings, is to believe what you're saying. One would therefore expect, in a hierarchical species endowed with language, that the organisms would often play up their own feats, downplay the feats of others, and do both things with conviction. Indeed, in the social psychology laboratory, people not only tend to attribute success to skill and failure to circumstance; they tend to reverse the pattern when evaluating others.¹⁸ Luck is the thing that makes you fail and other people succeed; ability works the other way around.

Often the derogation of others hovers at a barely detectable level, and it may disappear if they are kin or friends. But expect it to reach high volume when two people are vying for something that there's only one of — a particular woman, a particular man, a particular professional distinction.¹⁹ One reviewer who savaged The Origin of Species was Richard Owen, an eminent zoologist and paleontolo gist who had his own ideas about how species might change. After the review came out, Darwin noted that "the Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book has been talked about." Had Owen self-servingly convinced himself (and hence others) that a rival's work was inferior? Or had Darwin self-servingly convinced himself (and hence others) that a man who threatened his status was driven by selfish motives? Probably one or the other, and possibly both.

The keen sensitivity with which people detect the flaws of their rivals is one of nature's wonders. It takes a Herculean effort to control this tendency consciously, and the effort must be repeated on a regular basis. Some people can summon enough restraint not to talk about their rivals' worthlessness; they may even utter some Victorian boilerplate about a "worthy opponent." But to rein in the perception itself — unending, unconscious, all-embracing search for signs of unworthiness — is truly a job for a Buddhist monk. Honesty of evaluation is simply beyond the reach of most mortals.

If advertisement is so deeply ingrained in people, why are there self-deprecators? One answer is that self-deprecation is without cost when everyone knows better, and can actually have some benefit; a reputation for humility boosts the credibility of subtle boasting. (Witness Darwin.) Another answer is that the genetic program for mental development is very complex and unfolds in a world full of uncertainty (a world quite unlike the ancestral environment); don't expect all human behavior to serve genetic interest. The third answer is the most interesting: social hierarchy has, via natural selection, had some ironic effects on the human mind. There are times when it makes good evolutionary sense to have a genuinely low opinion of "yourself and to share that opinion with others.

The whole origin of status, remember, lies in the fact that some neighbors — some of a chicken's fellow chickens, say — are too formidable to challenge profitably. Genes that build brains that tell the animal which neighbors are worth challenging, and which aren't, flourish. How exactly do the brains convey this message? Not by sending little "Challenge" or "Don't Challenge" subtitles across the eyeball. Presumably, the message travels via feeling; animals feel either up to the challenge or not up to it. And animals at the very bottom of the hierarchy — animals that get pummeled by all comers — will get the latter feeling chronically. You could call it low self-esteem.

In fact, you could say that low self-esteem evolved as a way to reconcile people to subordinate status when reconciliation is in their genetic interest.

Don't expect people with low self-esteem to hide it. It may be in their genetic interest not only to accept low status, but, in at least some circumstances, to convey their acceptance of it — to behave submissively so that they aren't erroneously perceived as a threat and treated as such.²¹

There's nothing necessarily self-deceptive about low self-esteem. Indeed, any feeling designed to keep people from aspiring to more than they can attain should, in theory, bear at least rough correspondence to reality. But not always. If one function of low self-esteem is to keep high-status people satisfied with your deference, then its level, strictly speaking, should depend on how much deference it takes to do that; you may, in the presence of someone powerful, feel a deeper humility — about your intelligence, for example — than an objective observer would see as warranted. The anthropologist John Hartung, who in 1988 raised the possibility of self-deceptively lowering self-esteem — "deceiving down," he called it — has come up with another kind of example. Women, he suggested, may sometimes falsely subordinate themselves to men. If, say, household income depends partly on the husband having high self-esteem at the workplace, a woman may find herself unwittingly "building her husband's self-confidence by providing a standard of lower competence."²²

An ingenious experiment has shown how deeply the truth about ourselves can be buried. When people hear a recorded voice, their galvanic skin response (GSR) rises, and it rises even more if the voice they hear is their own. Surprisingly, when people are asked whether the voice is theirs, they are, on average, right less often than is their GSR. What's intriguing is the pattern of error. After self-esteem is lowered, by making subjects "fail" on some contrived task, they tend to deny that the voice is theirs even though their GSR shows that at some level they "know" the truth. When self-esteem is raised, they start claiming other voices as their own, although again their GSR shows that somewhere within, the information is tallied correctly. Robert Trivers, reviewing this experiment, wrote, "it is as if we expand ourselves ... when succeeding and shrink our presentation of self when failing, yet we are largely unconscious of this process."²³

Feeling bad about yourself is good for things other than sending people self-serving signals. To begin with, there is the function, mentioned above, of burning shame: a wrist-slapping for social blunders, a way of discouraging the repeat of status-reducing behaviors. Also, as the evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse has stressed, mood can efficiently focus energy.²⁴ People of all statuses may get lethargic and glum when social, sexual, or professional prospects look dim, and then grow optimistic and energetic when opportunities arise. It's as if they had been resting up for a big match. And if no opportunities arise, and lethargy passes into mild depression, this mood may goad them into a fruitful shift of course — changing careers, jettisoning ungrateful friends, abandoning the pursuit of an elusive mate.

Darwin offers a good example of the manifold utility of bad feelings. In July of 1857, two years before publishing The Origin of Species, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker, "I have been making some calculations about varieties talking yesterday with Lubbock, he has pointed out to me the grossest blunder which I have made in principle, & which entails 2 or 3 weeks lost work." This left Darwin feeling even less inclined than usual to stress his worth. "I am the most miserable, bemuddled, stupid Dog in all England," he wrote, "& am ready to cry at [sic] vexation at my blindness & presumption."²⁵

Count the ways this glumness might be valuable. One: as a self-esteem deflator. Darwin had suffered a social humiliation. In a face-to face encounter, he was shown to be gravely confused on an issue within his supposed expertise. Perhaps some long-term slippage in self-esteem was in order; perhaps he should tone down the ambition of his scholarship, so as not to be perceived as a threat to England's great intellectual stars, who would in the end outshine him anyway.

Two: as a negative reinforcement. Lingering pain from this incident may have served to discourage Darwin from repeating behaviors (the confused analysis, in this case) that lead to humiliation. Perhaps he'd be more careful next time.

And three: as a course changer. If this gloom had persisted, even verging on depression, it might have altered Darwin's behavior more radically, diverting his energy into wholly new channels. "It is enough to make me tear up all my M.S. & give up in despair," he wrote the same day to Lubbock, thanking him for the correction and apologizing for being so "muddled."²⁶ As we know, Darwin didn't tear up the manuscript. But if he had encountered a string of setbacks of this magnitude, he might well have abandoned the project. And this would probably have been a good thing for his long-term social status, if he indeed had been too consistently muddled to write an impressive book on the origin of species.

These three explanations for Darwin's gloom aren't mutually exclusive. Natural selection is a frugal and resourceful process, making multiple use of existing chemicals, and of the feelings those chemicals carry. This is one reason simple statements about the function of any neurotransmitter, such as serotonin, or any one mood, such as gloom, are tricky. But it is also a reason that a Darwinian doesn't feel stymied when something like a low (or high) opinion of oneself turns out to have several equally plausible purposes. They may all be genuine.

Where does truth belong on the spectrum of self-esteem? If one month, following a string of professional and social successes, you're fairly brimming with serotonin and feel enduringly competent, likable, and attractive, and the next month, after a few setbacks, and some serotonin slippage, you feel enduringly worthless, you can't have been right both times. Which time were you wrong? Is serotonin truth serum or a mind-numbing narcotic?

Maybe neither. When you're feeling either very good or very bad about yourself, it probably means that a large body of evidence is being hidden from view. The most truthful times come between the extremes.

Anyway, maybe "truth" is best left out of this altogether. Whether you're a "good" or a "worthless" person is a question whose objective meaning is, at best, elusive. And even when "truth" can be clearly defined, it is a concept to which natural selection is indifferent. To be sure, if an accurate portrayal of reality, to oneself or to others, can help spread one's genes, then accuracy of perception or communication may evolve. And often this will be the case (when, say, you remember where food is stored, and share the data with offspring or siblings). But when accurate reporting and genetic interest do thus intersect, that's just a happy coincidence. Truth and honesty are never favored by natural selection in and of themselves. Natural selection neither "prefers" honesty nor "prefers" dishonesty. It just doesn't care.

STRONG YET SENSITIVE

Reciprocal altruism brings its own agenda to the presentation of self, and thus to the deception of self. Whereas status hierarchies place a premium on our seeming competent, attractive, strong, smart, et-cetera, reciprocal altruism puts its accent on niceness, integrity, fairness. These are the things that make us seem like worthy reciprocal altruists. They make people want to strike up relationships with us. Puffing up our reputations as decent and generous folks can't hurt, and it often helps.

Richard Alexander, in particular, has stressed the evolutionary importance of moral self-advertisement. In The Biology of Moral Systems he writes that "modern society is filled with myths" about our goodness: "that scientists are humble and devoted truth-seekers; that doctors dedicate their lives to alleviation of suffering; that teachers dedicate their lives to their students; that we are all basically law-abiding, kind, altruistic souls who place everyone's interests before our own."²⁸

There's no reason moral self-inflation has to involve self-deception. But there's little doubt that it can. The unconscious convolutions by which we convince ourselves of our goodness were seen in the laboratory before the theory of reciprocal altruism was around to explain them. In various experiments, subjects have been told to behave cruelly toward someone, to say mean things to him or even deliver what they thought were electric shocks. Afterwards, the subjects tended to derogate their victim, as if to convince themselves that he deserved his mistreatment — although they knew he wasn't being punished for any wrongdoing and, aside from that, knew only what you can learn about a person by briefly mistreating him in a laboratory netting. But when subjects delivered "shocks" to someone after being told he would get to retaliate by shocking them later, they tended not to derogate him.²⁹ It is as if the mind were programmed with a simple rule: so long as accounts are settled, no special rationalization is in order; the symmetry of exchange is sufficient defense of your behavior. But if you cheat or abuse another person who doesn't cheat or abuse you, you should concoct reasons why he deserved it. Either way, you'll be prepared to defend your behavior if challenged; either way, you'll be prepared to fight with indignation any allegations that you're a bad person, a person unworthy of trust.

Our repertoire of moral excuses is large. Psychologists have found that people justify their failure to help others by minimizing, variously, the person's plight ("That's not an assault, it's a lover's quarrel"), their own responsibility for the plight, and their own competence to help.³⁰

It's always hard to be sure that people really believe such excuses. But a famous series of experiments shows (in a quite different context) how oblivious the conscious mind can be to its real motivation, and how busily it sets about justifying the products of that motivation.

The experiments were conducted on "split-brain" patients — people who have had the link between left and right hemispheres cut to stop severe epileptic seizures. The surgery has surprisingly little effect on everyday behavior, but under contrived conditions, strange things can happen. If the word nut is flashed onto the left half of the visual field (which is processed by the right hemisphere), but not onto the right half (processed by the left hemisphere), the subject reports no conscious awareness of the signal; the information never enters the left hemisphere, which in most people controls language and seems to dominate consciousness. Meanwhile, though, the subject's left hand — controlled by the right hemisphere — will, if allowed to rummage through a box of objects, seize on a nut. The subject reports no awareness of this fact unless allowed to see what his left hand is up to.³¹

When it comes time for the subject to justify his behavior, the left brain passes from professed ignorance into unknowing dishonesty. One example: the command walk is sent to a man's right brain, and he complies. When asked where he's going, his left brain, not privy to the real reason, comes up with another one: he's going to get a soda, he says, convinced. Another example: a nude image is flashed to the right brain of a woman, who then lets loose an embarrassed laugh. Asked what's so funny, she gives an answer that's less racy than the truth.³²

Michael Gazzaniga, who conducted some of the split-brain experiments, has said that language is merely the "press agent" for other parts of the mind; it justifies whatever acts they induce, convincing the world that the actor is a reasonable, rational, upstanding person.³³ It may be that the realm of consciousness itself is in large part such a press agent — the place where our unconsciously written press releases are infused with the conviction that gives them force. Consciousness cloaks the cold and self-serving logic of the genes in a variety of innocent guises. The Darwinian anthropologist Jerome Barkow has written, "It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker)."

One could go further and suggest that the folk psychology itself is built into our genes. In other words, not only is the feeling that we are "consciously" in control of our behavior an illusion (as is suggested by other neurological experiments as well); it is a purposeful illusion, designed by natural selection to lend conviction to our claims. For centuries people have approached the philosophical debate over free will with the vague but powerful intuition that free will does exist; we (the conscious we) are in charge of our behavior. It is not beyond the pale to suggest that this nontrivial chunk of intellectual history can be ascribed fairly directly to natural selection — that one of the most hallowed of all philosophical positions is essentially an adaptation.

DUBIOUS ACCOUNTING

The warping effect of reciprocal altruism goes beyond a general belief in our own uprightness. It can also be seen in our skewed social accounting systems. Central to reciprocal altruism is the monitoring of exchanges — the record of whom you owe, who owes you, and how much is owed. From the gene's point of view, monitoring the two sides of the record with equal diligence would be foolish. If you end up getting slightly more than you give, so much the better. But if you give more than you get by even the smallest increment, that's an increment of loss.

That people keep closer track of what they're owed than of what they owe is hardly a news flash from the frontiers of behavioral science. It has been so obvious for so long that a century and a half ago it served as the unspoken basis for a little joke Darwin relayed to his sister Caroline. In a letter from the Beagle, he wrote of a man who "in one of Lord Byrons [sic] letters is said to be so altered after an illness that his oldest Creditors would not know him." Darwin himself amassed some debts in college, and one biographer reports that he "felt rather badly about these debts and, when mentioning his extravagances in after years, seems to have scaled them down by a half."³⁶

Darwin selectively remembered debts of an intellectual sort as well. At a young age, he had read his grandfather Erasmus's writings on evolution. They include a sentence that strikingly anticipates sexual selection, the variant of natural selection that has made males so combative: "The final cause of this contest amongst the males seems to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved." Yet when Darwin included, in the third edition of the Origin, a prefatory outline of intellectual precursors, he dismissed his grandfather in a footnote as a pre-Lamarckian harbinger of Lamarck's confusion. And in his Autobiography, Darwin spoke disparagingly of Erasmus's Zoonomia, the book that, judging by the above quotation, may well have planted in Darwin's mind the seed not only of evolutionism, but of the theory of natural selection. It is a safe bet that Darwin's ever-vigilant conscience wouldn't have let him consciously give such short shrift to his own grandfather.

Darwin was not generally remiss in giving intellectual credit. He was selectively remiss. As one biographer wrote, "generous though Darwin always was to those whose empirical observations he found useful, he barely acknowledged those whose ideas had influenced him."³⁸ What a useful pattern. Darwin lavished credit on scores of minor-league researchers, while diminishing the few predecessors who might have been even remote contenders for his crown; he thus incurred the debt of many young, rising scientists, while risking the offense mainly of the old and the dead. All in all, a fairly sound formula for high status. (Of course, the formula itself — "don't credit people who foreshadowed your theory" — isn't written in the genes.

But there could well be a built-in tendency to refrain from bestowing status-enhancing benefits on people whose status threatens your own.)

The egocentric bias in accounting ranges from the epic to the minor. Wars routinely feature a deep and sure sense of grievance on both sides, a weighty belief in the enemy's guilt. And next-door neighbors, even good friends, can bring comparable conviction to their differing historical records. This fact can get lost in some strata of modern society, where a gloss of cordiality covers everyday life. But there is every reason to believe that through history and prehistory, reciprocal altruism has carried an everyday tension, an implicit or explicit haggling. Bronislaw Malinowski observed that the Trobriand Islanders seemed absorbed in the giving of gifts and were "inclined to boast of their own gifts, with which they are entirely satisfied, while disputing the value and even quarrelling over what they themselves receive."³⁹

Was there ever a culture in which people didn't regularly disagree — over goods in a market, over salaries at work, over zoning variances, over whose child was wronged by whose child? The resulting arguments can have real consequence. They're seldom, by themselves, life or death matters, but they affect material well-being, and during human evolution a small slice of material well-being has at times been the difference between life and death, between attracting a mate and not attracting one, between three surviving offspring and two. So there is reason to suspect an innate basis for biased social accounting. The bias appears to be universal, and seems intuitively to be a corollary of the theory of reciprocal altruism.

Still, once you look at the situation with something other than intuition, things grow less clear. In Axelrod's computer, the key to TIT FOR TAT's success was that it didn't try to get the better of its neighbors; it was always willing to settle for an exactly equal exchange. Creatures that weren't this easily satisfied — creatures that tried to "cheat," to get more than they gave — went extinct. If evolution thus punishes the greedy, why do humans seem unconsciously compelled to give a bit less than they get?

The first step toward an answer is to see that getting more than you give isn't the same as "cheating."⁴⁰ Axelrod's computer conflated the two by making life binary: either you cooperate, or you don't; you're nice or you're a cheater. Real life is more finely graded. So bountiful are the benefits of non-zero-sumness that slightly uneven exchanges can make sense for both people. If you do forty-nine favors for your friend and get fifty-one in return, the friendship is probably still worth your friend's while. You haven't really "cheated" him. You've gotten the better of him, yes, but not so much that he should prefer no deal at all to the deal he got.

So it's possible, in theory, to be a little more stingy than TIT FOR TAT without really cheating, and thus without triggering painful retaliation. This sort of stinginess, as ingrained by natural selection, might well assume the form of shady accounting — a deep sense of justice slightly slanted toward the self.

Why would it be so important that the bias be unconscious? A clue may lie in a book called The Strategy of Conflict by the economist and game theorist Thomas Schelling. In a chapter called "An Essay on Bargaining" — which isn't about evolution, but could apply to it — Schelling noted an irony: in a non-zero-sum game, "the power to constrain an adversary may depend on the power to bind oneself." The classic example is the non-zero-sum game of "chicken." Two cars head toward each other. The first driver to swerve loses the game, along with some stature among his adolescent peers. On the other hand, if neither driver bails out, both lose in a bigger way. What to do? Schelling suggests tossing your steering wheel out the window in full view of the other driver. Once convinced that you're irrevocably committed to your course, he will, if rational, do the swerving himself.

The same logic holds in more common situations, like buying a car. There is a range of prices within which a deal makes sense for both buyer and seller. Within that range, though, interests diverge: the buyer prefers the low end, the seller the high end. The path to success, says Schelling, is essentially the same as in the game of chicken: be the first to convince the other party of your rigidness. If the dealer believes you're walking away for good, he'll cave in. But if the dealer stages a preemptive strike, and says "I absolutely cannot accept less than x," and appears to be someone whose pride wouldn't let him swallow those words, then he wins. The key, said Schelling, is to make a "voluntary but irreversible sacrifice of freedom of choice" — and to be the first to do it.

For our purposes, take out the word voluntary. The underlying logic may be excluded from consciousness to make the sacrifice seem truly "irreversible." Not when we're on a used-car lot, maybe. Car salesmen, like game theorists, actually think about the dynamics of bargaining, and the savvier car buyers do too. Still, everyday haggling — over fender benders, salaries, disputed territory — often begins with an actual belief, on each side, in its own Tightness. And such a belief, a quickly reached and hotly articulated sense of what we deserve, is a quick route to the preemptive strikes Schelling recommends. Visceral rigidity is the most convincing kind.

Still, puzzles remain. Utter rigidity could be self-defeating. As "shady accounting" genes spread through the population, shady accountants would more and more often run into each other. With each insisting on the better half of the deal, both would fail to strike any deal. Besides, in real life, the rigidity wouldn't know where to set in, because it's often hard to say what deals the other party will Accept. A car buyer doesn't know how much the car actually cost the dealer or how much other buyers are offering. And in less structured situations — swapping favors with someone, say — these calculations are even dimmer, because things are less quantifiable. Thus has it been throughout evolution: hard to fathom precisely the range of deals that are in the interest of the other party. If you begin the bargaining by insisting irreversibly on a deal outside of that range, you're left without a deal.

The ideal strategy, perhaps, is a pseudorigidity, a flexible firmness. You begin the discourse with an emphatic statement of what you deserve. Yet you should retreat — up to a point, at least — in the lace of evidence as to the other person's firmness. And what sort of evidence might that be? Well, evidence. If people can explain the reasons behind their conviction, and the reasons seem credible (and sound heartfelt), then some retreat is in order. If they talk about how much they've done for you in the past, and it's true, you have to concede the point. Of course, to the extent that you can muster countervailing evidence, with countervailing conviction, you should. And so it goes.

What we've just described are the dynamics of human discourse. People do argue in precisely this fashion. (In fact, that's what the word argue means.) Yet they're often oblivious to what they're doing, and to why they're doing it. They simply find themselves constantly in touch with all the evidence supporting their position, and often having to be reminded of all the evidence against it. Darwin wrote in his autobiography of a habit he called a "golden rule": to immediately write down any observation that seemed inconsistent with his theories — "for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. " The reason the generic human arguing style feels so effortless is that, by the time the arguing starts, the work has already been done. Robert Trivers has written about the periodic disputes — contract renegotiations, you might call them — that are often part of a close relationship, whether a friendship or a marriage. The argument, he notes, "may appear to burst forth spontaneously, with little or no preview, yet as it rolls along, two whole landscapes of information appear to lie already organized, waiting only for the lightning of anger to show themselves."⁴²

The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right — and thus a machine for convincing its owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.

Long before Trivers wrote about the selfish uses of self-deception, social scientists had gathered supporting data. In one experiment, people with strongly held positions on a social issue were exposed to four arguments, two pro and two con. On each side of the issue, the arguments were of two sorts: (a) quite plausible, and (b) implausible to the point of absurdity. People tended to remember the plausible arguments that supported their views and the implausible arguments that didn't, the net effect being to drive home the correctness of their position and the silliness of the alternative.⁴³

One might think that, being rational creatures, we would eventually grow suspicious of our uncannily long string of rectitude, our unerring knack for being on the right side of any dispute over credit, or money, or manners, or anything else. Nope. Time and again — whether arguing over a place in line, a promotion we never got, or which car hit which — we are shocked at the blindness of people who dare suggest that our outrage isn't warranted.

FRIENDSHIP AND COLLECTIVE DISHONESTY

In all the psychological literature that predates and supports the modern Darwinian view of deception, one word stands out for its crisp rconomy: beneffectance. It was invented in 1980 by the psychologist Anthony Greenwald to describe the tendency of people to present themselves as being both beneficial and effective. The two halves of this compound coinage embody the legacies, respectively, of reciprocal altruism and status hierarchies.⁴⁴

This distinction is a bit oversimplified. In real life, the mandates of reciprocal altruism and status — to seem beneficial and effective — can merge. In one experiment, when people who had been part of a team effort were asked about their role in it, they tended to answer expansively if first told that the effort was a success. If told it had failed, they left more room for the influence of a teammate.⁴⁵ This hoarding of credit and sharing of blame makes both kinds of evolutionary sense. It makes a person seem beneficial, having helped others in the group achieve success, and thus deserving future repayment; it also makes that person seem effective, deserving high status.

One of the most famous triumphs for Darwin's supporters came in 1860, when Thomas Huxley, a.k.a. "Darwin's bulldog," took on Bishop Samuel Wilberforce during a debate on The Origin of Species. Wilberforce sarcastically asked on which side of his family Huxley was descended from an ape, and Huxley replied that he would rather have an ape as an ancestor than a man "possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion." At least, that's how Huxley told the story to Darwin — and Huxley's account is the one that made it into the history books. But Darwin's close friend Joseph Hooker was also present, and he remembered things differently. He told Darwin that Huxley "could not throw his voice over so large an assembly, nor command the audience; & he did not allude to Sam's [Bishop Wilberforce's] weak points nor put the matter in a form or way that carried the audience."

Fortunately, reported Hooker, he himself had taken on Wilber-force: "I smacked him amid rounds of applause" and went on to show "that he could never have read your book" and that he "was absolutely ignorant" of biology. Wilberforce "had not one word to say in reply & the meeting was dissolved forthwith leaving you master of the field after 4 hours battle." Since the encounter, said Hooker, "I have been congratulated & thanked by the blackest coats & whitest stocks in Oxford." Huxley, meanwhile, reported being "the most popular man in Oxford for full four & twenty hours afterwards."⁴⁶ Both Huxley and Hooker were telling stories that would do two things: raise their stature in Darwin's eyes, and leave him indebted to them.

Reciprocal altruism and status intersect in a second way. A common exception to our tendency to deflate the contributions of others comes when those others have high status. If we have a friend who is, say, mildly famous, we cherish even his meager gifts, forgive his minor offenses, and make extra sure not to let him down. In one sense this is a welcome corrective to egocentrism; our balance sheets are perhaps more honest for high-status people than for others. But the coin has two sides. These high-status people, meanwhile, are viewing us with even greater distortion than usual, as our side of the ledger is discounted steeply to reflect our lowliness.

Still, we seem to consider the relationship worthwhile. A high-status friend may, in time of need, wield decisive influence on our behalf, often at little cost. Just as an alpha male ape can protect an ally by looking askance at the would-be attacker, a highly placed sponsor can, with a two-minute phone call, make a world of difference for an upstart.

Seen in this light, social hierarchy and reciprocal altruism not only intersect but merge into a single dimension. Status is simply another kind of asset that people bring to the bargaining table. Or, more precisely: it is an asset that leverages other assets; it means that 4t little cost a person can do big favors.

Status can also be one of the favors. When we ask friends for help, we are often asking not only that they use their status, but that they raise ours in the process. Among the chimps of Arnhem, the swapping of status support was sometimes simple; chimp A helps chimp B fend off a challenger and maintain its status; chimp B later returns the favor. Among people, status support is less tangible. Except in barrooms, junior-high schoolyards, and other venues of high testosterone, the support consists of information, not muscle, hacking a friend means verbally defending him when his interests are in dispute — and, more generally, saying good, status-raising things about him. Whether these things are true doesn't especially matter. They're just the things friends are supposed to say. Friends engage in mutual inflation. Being a person's true friend means endorsing the untruths he holds dearest.

Whether this bias toward a friend's interests is deeply unconscious is a matter for research that hasn't yet been done. A purely positive answer would clash with the treachery that has been known to infest friendships. Still, it may be that the hallmark of the strongest, longest friendships is the depth of the shared bias; the best friends are the ones who see each other least clearly. Anyway, however conscious or unconscious the lies, one effect of friendship is to take individual nodes of self-serving dishonesty and link them up into webs of collective dishonesty. Self-love becomes a mutual-admiration society.

And enmity becomes two mutual-detestation societies. If your true friend has a true enemy, you're supposed to adopt that enemy as your own; that's how you support your friend's status. By the same token, that enemy — and that enemy's friends — are expected to dislike not just your friend, but you. This isn't a rigid pattern, but it's a tendency. To maintain close friendship with two avowed enemies is to be in a position whose awkwardness is viscerally felt.

The malevolent conspiracy between reciprocal altruism and status hierarchies runs one level deeper. For enmity itself is a cocreation of the conspirators. On the one hand, enmity grows out of rivalry, the mutual and incompatible pursuit of status. On the other hand, it is the flip side of reciprocal altruism. Being a successful reciprocal altruist, as Trivers noted, means being an enforcer — keeping track of those who take your aid but don't return it, and either withholding future aid or actively punishing them.

Once again, all of this enmity may be expressed not plainly and physically, as among chimps, but verbally. When people are our enemies, or when they support our enemies, or fail to support us after we've supported them, the standard response is to convincingly say bad things about them. And, again, the best way to convincingly say such things is to believe them — believe that the person is incompetent or stupid or, best of all, bad, morally deficient, a menace to society. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin captured the morally charged nature of enmity: "[F]ew individuals ... can long reflect about a hated person, without feeling and exhibiting signs of indignation or rage."

Darwin's own assessments of people sometimes had a flavor of retaliation. While at Cambridge, he met a man named Leonard Jenyns, a gentleman entomologist who, like Darwin, collected beetles. It seemed possible that, notwithstanding a natural rivalry between them, the two men could become friends and allies. Indeed, Darwin made the overture, giving Jenyns "a good many insects" for which, Darwin reported, Jenyns seemed "very grateful." But when the time came to reciprocate, Jenyns "refused me a specimen of the Necroph. sepultor ... although he has 7 or 8 specimens." In relaying this news to his cousin, Darwin commented not only on Jenyns's selfishness, but on his "weak mind." Eighteen months later, though, Darwin considered Jenyns "an excellent naturalist." This revised opinion may be related to Jenyns having bestowed on Darwin, in the meanwhile, a "magnificent present of Diptera."

When grudges are expanded into networks, as friends form coalitions to support each other's status, the result is vast webs of self-deception and, potentially, of violence. Here is a sentence from the New York Times: "In a week's time, both sides have constructed deeply emotional stories explaining their roles, one-sided accounts that are offered with impassioned conviction, although in many respects they do not stand up, in either case, under careful scrutiny."⁴⁹

The sentence refers to an incident in which Israeli soldiers shot Palestinian civilians, and each side clearly saw that the other had started the trouble. But the sentence could be applied with equal accuracy to all kinds of clashes, big and little, through the centuries. By itself this sentence tells a large part of human history.

The mental machinery that drives modern wars — patriotic fervor, mass self-righteousness, contagious rage — has often been traced by evolutionists to eons of conflict among tribes or bands. Certainly such large-scale aggression has surfaced repeatedly during the life of our species. And no doubt warriors have often gotten Darwinian rewards through the rape or abduction of enemy women. Still, even of the psychology of war has indeed been shaped by out-and-out wars, they may well have been of secondary importance. Feelings of enmity, of grievance, of righteous indignation — of collective enmity and grievance and righteous indignation — probably have their deepest roots in ancient conflicts within bands of humans and pre-humans. In particular: in conflicts among coalitions of males for status.

INTEREST GROUPS

The tendency of friends to dislike each other's enemies needn't be merely an exchange of favors. Often it's simple redundancy. One of the strongest bonds two friends can have — the great starter and sustainer of friendships — is a common enemy. (Two people playing a game of prisoner's dilemma will play more cooperatively in the presence of someone they both dislike.)⁵²

This strategic convenience is often obscured in modern society. Friendships may rest not on common enemies but on common interests: hobbies, tastes in movies or sports. Affinities emerge from shared passions of the most innocent sort. But this reaction presumably evolved in a context in which shared passions tended to be less innocent: a context of frankly political opinions about who should lead a tribe, say, or how meat should be divided. In other words, the affinity of common interest may have evolved as a way to cement fruitful political alliances, and only later attached itself to matters of little consequence. This, at any rate, would help explain the absurd gravity surrounding disputes over seemingly trivial matters. Why is it that a smooth dinner party can turn suddenly awkward over a disagreement about the merits of John Huston's movies?

And, moreover, "matters of little consequence" often turn out, on close examination, to involve real stakes. Take two Darwinianly minded social scientists, for example. Their binding interest is "purely intellectual" — a fascination with the evolutionary roots of human behavior. But this is also a common political interest. Both scholars are tired of being ignored or attacked by the academic establishment, tired of the dogma of cultural determinism, tired of its stubborn prevalence within so many anthropology and sociology departments. Both scholars want to be published in the most esteemed journals. They want tenure at the best universities. They want power and status. They want to depose the ruling regime.

Of course, if they do depose the ruling regime, and thus become famous and write best-selling books, there may be no Darwinian payoff. They may not convert their status into sex, and if they do they may use contraception. But in the environment in which we evolved — indeed, until the last few hundred years — status got converted into Darwinian currency more efficiently. This fact seems to have deeply affected the texture of intellectual discourse, especially among men.

We'll explore an example of this effect in the next chapter, in describing the particular intellectual discourse that made Darwin fa mous. For now, let's simply note Darwin's delight, in 1846, at dis covering common scientific interests with Joseph Hooker, who more than a decade later would join with Darwin in the scientific battle of the century and devote much energy to the elevation of Darwin's social status. "[W]hat a good thing is community of tastes," Darwin wrote to Hooker. "I feel as if I had known you for fifty years... ."

Chapter 14: DARWIN'S TRIUMPH

I am got most deeply interested in my subject; though I wish I could set less value on the bauble fame, either present or posthumous, than I do,
 but not I think, to any extreme degree; yet, if I know myself,
I would work just as hard, though with less gusto, if I knew
that my Book would be published for ever anonymously.

— Letter to W. D. Fox (1857)¹

Darwin was one of our finest specimens. He did superbly what human beings are designed to do: manipulate social information to personal advantage. The information in question was the prevailing account of how human beings, and all organisms, came to exist; Darwin reshaped it in a way that radically raised his social status. When he died in 1882, his greatness was acclaimed in newspapers around the world, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey, not far from the body of Isaac Newton.² Alpha-male territory.

And to top it all off: he was a good guy. The Times of London observed, "Great as he was, wide as was the reach of his intelligence, what endeared him to his many friends, what charmed all those who were brought into even momentary contact with him, was the beauty of his character."³ Darwin's legendary lack of pretense persisted until the very end, when it slipped beyond his control. The local coffin maker recalled: "I made his coffin just the way he wanted it, all rough, just as it left the bench, no polish, no nothin'." But then, after the sudden decision to bury him at Westminster Abbey, "my coffin wasn't wanted and they sent it back. This other one you could see to shave in."⁴

This is the basic, oft-noted paradox of Charles Darwin. He became world famous yet seemed to lack the traits that typically fuel epic social ascents. He appears, as one biographer put it, "an unlikely survivor in the immortality stakes, having most of the decent qualities that deter a man from fighting with tooth and claw. "

The paradox can't be resolved simply by noting that Darwin authored the correct theory of how people came to exist, for he wasn't alone in doing this. Alfred Russel Wallace, who arrived at natural selection independently, began circulating a written description of it before Darwin had gone public. The two men's versions of the theory were formally unveiled on the same day, in the same forum. But today Darwin is Darwin, and Wallace is an asterisk. Why did Darwin triumph?

In chapter ten we partly reconciled Darwin's decency with his fame, noting that he lived in a society in which doing good was typically a prerequisite for doing well. Moral reputation meant much, and just about everything you did caught up with your reputation.

But the story is more complex than that. A closer look at Darwin's long and winding road to fame calls into question some common assessments of him — that, for example, he had little ambition and not a shred of Machiavellianism, that his commitment to truth was unadulterated by the thirst for fame. Viewed through the new paradigm, Darwin looks a bit less like a saint and a bit more like a male primate.

SOCIAL CLIMBING

From early on, Darwin exhibited a common ingredient of social success: ambition. He competed with rivals for status, and longed for the esteem it brings. "My success ... has been very good amongst the water beettles [sic]," he wrote to a cousin from Cambridge. "I think I beat Jenyns in Colymbetes." When his insect collecting got him cited in Illustrations of British Insects, he wrote, "You will see my name in Stephens' last number. I am glad of it if it is merely to spite Mr. Jenyns."⁶

The notion of Darwin as a typical young male, bent on conquest, seems at odds with standard appraisals. The Darwin described by John Bowlby — "nagging self-contempt," a "tendency to disparage his own contributions," an "ever-present fear of criticism, both from himself and from others," an "exaggerated respect for authority and the opinions of others" — doesn't sound like an alpha male in the making.⁷ But remember: often in chimpanzee societies, and almost always in human societies, the social scale can't be ascended alone; a common first step is to forge a bond with a primate of higher status, and this involves an act of submission, a profession of inferiority. One biographer has described Darwin's purported pathology in especially suggestive terms: "some flaw of self-confidence, some absence of certainty, that made him emphasize his shortcomings when dealing with those in authority."⁸

In his autobiography, Darwin recalled the "glow of pride" he felt when, as a teenager, he heard that an eminent scholar, after chatting with him, had said, "There is something in that young man that interests me." The compliment, Darwin said, "must have been chiefly due to his perceiving that I listened with much interest to everything which he said, for I was as ignorant as a pig about his subjects of history, politicks and moral philosophy."⁹ Here, as usual, Darwin is too humble by half, but he is probably right to suggest that his humility itself had played a role. (Darwin goes on to note: "To hear of praise from an eminent person, though no doubt apt or certain to excite vanity, is, I think, good for a young man, as it helps to keep him in the right course."¹⁰ Yes: upward.)

To call Darwin's humility tactically sound isn't to call it disingenuous. The tendency of people to view the next rung on the social ladder with respect is most effective when they're thoroughly in its thrall, and not conscious of its purpose: we feel genuinely in awe of people before whom, it so happens, we might profitably grovel. Thomas Carlyle, one of Darwin's contemporaries (and acquaintances), was probably right to say that hero worship is an essential part of human nature. And it is probably no coincidence that hero wot ship grows powerful at the time of life when people begin their social competition in earnest. "Adolescence," one psychiatrist has observed, "is a time of a renewed search for ideals... . [T]he adolescent is seeking a model, a perfect person to emulate. It's much like the moment in infancy before they realized their parents' imperfections."

Yes, the awe for role models feels much like the early awe for a parent — and may spring from the same neurochemistry. But its function is not only to encourage instructive emulation; it also helps write the implicit contract between senior and junior partners in a coalition. The latter, lacking the social status that counts heavily in reciprocal altruism, will compensate for this shortcoming through deference.

While Darwin was at Cambridge, his most extreme deference was reserved for the professor (and reverend) John Stevens Henslow. Darwin had heard from his older brother that Henslow was "a man who knew every branch of science, and I was accordingly prepared to reverence him."¹² After striking up an acquaintance, Darwin reported that "he is quite the most perfect man I ever met with."¹³

Darwin became known at Cambridge as "the man who walks with Henslow." Their relationship was like the millions of other such relationships in the history of our species. Darwin benefited from Henslow's example and counsel and drew on his social connections, and repaid him with, among other things, subservience, arriving early for Henslow's lectures to help set up equipment.¹⁴ One is reminded of Jane Goodall's description of Goblin's social ascent: he was "respectful" of his mentor Figan, followed him around, watched what he did, and often groomed him.¹⁵

After earning Figan's acceptance and absorbing his wisdom, Goblin turned on him, displacing him as alpha male. But Goblin may have felt truly reverent until the moment when greater detachment was in order. And so it is with us: our gauging of people's worth — their professional caliber, their moral fiber, whatever — reflects partly the place they occupy in our social universe at the time. We are selectively blinded to those qualities that it would be inconvenient to acknowledge.

Darwin's worship of Henslow isn't the best example of this blindness, as Henslow was a widely admired man. But consider the captain of the Beagle, Robert FitzRoy. When Darwin met FitzRoy for the interview that would decide whether he sailed with the Beagle, the situation was simple: here was a man of high status whose approval might eventually elevate Darwin's own status markedly. So it's not surprising that Darwin seems to have come prepared to "reverence"

FitzRoy. After the meeting, he wrote to his sister Susan: "[I]t is no use attempting to praise him as much as I feel inclined to do, for you would not believe me... ." He wrote in his diary that FitzRoy was "as perfect as nature can make him." To Henslow (who was the rung on Darwin's ladder that had led to the Beagle) he wrote, "Cap. FitzRoy is every thing that is delightful... ."

Years later, Darwin would describe FitzRoy as a man who "has the most consummate skill in looking at everything & every body in a perverted manner." But then, years later he could afford to. Now was no time to be scanning FitzRoy for flaws, or probing beneath the civil facade commonly mustered for first encounters. Now was 4 time for deference and amity, and their deployment proved a success. On the evening Darwin was writing his letters, FitzRoy was writing to a naval officer — "I like what I see and hear of him, much" — and requesting that Darwin be named the ship's naturalist. Darwin, in one of the calmer passages in his letter to Susan, had written, "I hope I am judging reasonably, & not through prejudice about Cap. Fitz." He was doing both; he was rationally pursuing long-term self-interest with the aid of short-term prejudice.

Toward the end of the Beagle's voyage, Darwin got his strongest early taste of professional esteem. He was (aptly enough) on Ascension Island when he got a letter from Susan relaying the interest aroused by his scientific observations, which had been read before the Geological Society of London. Most notably, Adam Sedgwick, the eminent Cambridge geologist, had said that some day Darwin would "have a great name among the Naturalists of Europe." It's not yet clear exactly which neurotransmitters are unleashed by status-raising news such as this (serotonin, we've seen, is one candidate), but Darwin described their effect clearly: "After reading this letter I clambered over the mountains of Ascension with a bounding step and made the volcanic rocks resound under my geological hammer!"

In reply Darwin affirmed to Susan that he would now live by the creed "that a man who dares to waste one hour of time, has not discovered the value of life."¹⁸

Elevations of status may bring a reevaluation of one's social constellation. The relative positions of the stars have changed. People who used to be central are now peripheral; the focus must be shifted toward brighter bodies that once seemed beyond reach. Darwin was not the sort of person to perform this maneuver crudely; he never forgot the little people. Still, there are hints of a shifting social calculus while he was aboard the Beagle. His older cousin, William Fox, had introduced him to entomology (and to Henslow); at Cambridge Darwin had profited much from their ongoing exchange of insect lore and specimens. During that correspondence, while seeking guidance and data from Fox, Darwin had assumed his customary stance of abject submission. "I should not send this very shamefully stupid letter," he wrote, "only I am very anxious to get some crumbs of information about yourself & the insects." He sometimes reminded Fox of "how long I have been hoping in vain to receive a letter from my old master" and enjoined him to "remember I am your pupil... ."¹⁹

It is thus poignant when, six years later, as Darwin's researches aboard the Beagle signal his rise in stature, Fox senses a new asymmetry in their friendship. Suddenly it is he who apologizes for the "dullness" of his letter, he who stresses that "You are never a whole Day absent from my thoughts," he who begs for mail. "It is now so long since I saw your handwriting that I cannot tell you the pleasure it would give me. I feel however that your time is valuable & mine worth nothing, which makes a vast difference."²⁰ This shifting balance of affection is a regular feature of friendships amid sharp changes in status, as the reciprocal-altruism contract is silently renegotiated. Such renegotiations may have been less common in the ancestral environment, where, to judge by hunter-gatherer societies, status hierarchies were less fluid after early adulthood than they are now.

LOVING LYELL

During the voyage, Henslow, Darwin's mentor, remained his main link to British science. The geological reports that had so impressed Sedgwick were extracts from letters to Henslow, which he had dutifully publicized. It was to Henslow that Darwin wrote near the voyage's end, asking him to lay the groundwork for membership in the Geological Society. And throughout, Darwin's letters left no doubt about his continuing allegiance to "my President & Master." Upon arriving in Shrewsbury after the Beagle docked, he wrote: "My dear Henslow, I do long to see you; you have been the kindest friend to me, that ever Man possessed."²²

But Henslow's days as main mentor were numbered. On the Beagle, Darwin had (at Henslow's suggestion) read Principles of Geology, by Charles Lyell. Therein, Lyell championed the much-disputed theory, advanced earlier by James Hutton, that geological formations are mainly the product of gradual, ongoing wear and tear, as opposed to catastrophic events, such as floods. (The catastrophist version of natural history had found favor with the clergy, since it seemed to suggest divine interventions.) Darwin's work on the Beagle — his evidence, for example, that the coast of Chile had been rising imperceptibly since 1822 — tended to support the gradualist view, and he soon was calling himself a "zealous disciple" of Lyell.²³

As John Bowlby notes, it's not surprising that Lyell should become Darwin's chief counselor and role model; "their partnership in advocating the same geological principles gave them a common cause that was lacking in Darwin's relationship with Henslow."²⁴ Common causes, as we've seen, are a frequent sealer of friendships, apparently for Darwinian reasons. Once Darwin had endorsed Lyell's view of geology, both men's status would rise or fall with its fortunes.

Still, the bond of reciprocal altruism between Lyell and Darwin was more than mere "common cause." Each man brought his own assets to the table. Darwin brought mountains of fresh evidence for the views to which Lyell's reputation was inseverably attached. Lyell, in addition to providing a sturdy theoretical rack on which Darwin could array his researches, brought the guidance and social sponsorship for which mentors are known. Within weeks of the Beagle's return, Lyell was inviting Darwin to dinner, counseling him on the wise use of time, and assuring him that, as soon as a spot opened in the elite Athenaeum Club, he could fill it.²⁵ Darwin, Lyell told a colleague, would make "a glorious addition to my society of geologists... ,"²⁶

Though Darwin could at times be a detached and cynical student of human motivation, he seems to have been numb to the pragmatic nature of Lyell's interest. "Amongst the great scientific men, no one has been nearly so friendly & kind, as Lyell," he wrote to Fox a month after his return. "You cannot imagine how good-naturedly he entered into all my plans."²⁷ What a nice man!

It is time for yet another reminder that self-serving behavior needn't involve conscious calculation. In the 1950s, social psychologists showed that we tend to like people we find we can influence. And we tend to like them even more if they have high status.²⁸ It isn't necessary that we think, "If I can influence him, he could houseful, so I should nourish this friendship," or "His compliance will be especially useful if he has high status." Once again, natural selection seems to have done the "thinking."

Of course, people may supplement this "thinking" with their own thinking. There must have been some awareness within both Lyell and Darwin of the other man's utility. But they surely also felt, at the same time, a substratum of solid and innocent-feeling amity. It probably was, as Darwin wrote to Lyell, "the greatest pleasure to me to write or talk Geolog. with you." And Darwin was no doubt sincerely overwhelmed by the "most goodnatured manner" in which Lyell gave him guidance, "almost without being asked."²⁹

Darwin was probably equally sincere when, several decades later, he complained that Lyell had been "very fond of society, especially of eminent men, and of persons high in rank; and this over-estimation of a man's position in the world, seemed to me his chief foible." But this was after Darwin, now world famous, had acquired some, shall we say, perspective. Earlier Darwin had been too dazzled by Lyell's own position in the world to pay much mind to his flaws.

DARWIN'S DELAY REVISITED

We've seen how Darwin spent the two decades after his return to England: discovering natural selection and then doing a series of tilings other than disclose it. We have also seen several theories about this delay. The Darwinian slant on Darwin's delay isn't really an alternative to existing theories so much as a backdrop for them. To begin with, evolutionary psychology silhouettes the two forces that wrenched Darwin, one attracting him toward publication, the other repelling him.

First is the inherent love of esteem, a love that Darwin had his share of. One route to esteem is to author a revolutionary theory.

But what if the theory fails to revolutionize? What if it's roundly dismissed — dismissed, indeed, as a threat to the very fabric of society? In that event (the sort of event Darwin was the type to dwell on) our evolutionary history weighs against publication. There's hardly been a genetic payoff, over the ages, for loudly espousing deeply unpopular views, especially when they antagonize the powers that be.

The human bent for saying things that please people was clear long before its evolutionary basis was. In a famous experiment from the 1950s, a surprisingly large number of people were willing to profess incorrect opinions — patently, obviously incorrect opinions — about the relative length of two lines if placed in a room with other people who professed them. Psychologists also found decades ago that they can strengthen or weaken a person's tendency to offer opinions by adjusting the rate at which a listener agrees. Another fifties-era experiment showed that a person's recollections vary according to the audience he is to share them with: show him a list of the pros and cons of raising teachers' salaries, and which ones make a lasting impression depends on whether he expects to address a teachers' or a taxpayers' group. The authors of this experiment wrote, "It is likely that a good deal of a person's mental activity consists, in whole or part, of imagined communication to audiences imagined or real, and that this may have a considerable effect on what he remembers and believes at any one point in time... ,"³³ This jibes with a Darwinian angle on the human mind. Language evolved as a way of manipulating people to your advantage (your advantage in this case being popularity with an audience that holds firm opinions); cognition, the wellspring of language, is warped accordingly.

In light of all this, the question of Darwin's delay becomes less of a question. Darwin's famous bent for self-doubt in the face of disagreement (especially, it is said, disagreement from authority figures) is quintessentially human — unusual in degree, maybe, but not in kind. It isn't remarkable that he spent many years studying barnacles rather than unveil a theory widely considered heretical — heretical in a sense that is hard to grasp today, when the word heresy is almost always used with irony. Nor is it remarkable that Darwin, in the many years of the Origin's gestation, often felt anxious or even mildly depressed; natural selection "wants" us to feel uneasy when pondering actions that augur a massive loss of public esteem.

What's amazing, in a way, is that Darwin could be steadfast in his belief in evolution, given the pervasive hostility toward the idea. Leading the assault on Vestiges, Robert Chambers's 1844 evolutionist tract, had been Adam Sedgwick, the Cambridge geologist (and reverend) whose praise, relayed to Darwin at Ascension Island, had so thrilled him. Sedgwick's review of the Chambers book was candid about its own agenda. "The world cannot bear to be turned upside down; and we are ready to wage an internecine war with any violation of our modest principles and social manners." Not encouraging.

What was Darwin to do? The standard view is that he vacillated, like a laboratory rat eyeing food whose procurement will bring a shock. But there's also a minority view: during his celebrated barnacle detour, while failing to publish his theory about evolution, he was busy paving the way for its eventual reception. The strategy can be seen as three-pronged.

First, Darwin strengthened his argument. While immersed in barnacles, he continued to gather evidence for his theory, partly through the postal interrogation of far-flung experts on flora and fauna. One reason for the Origin's ultimate success was Darwin's meticulous anticipation of, and preemptive response to, criticism. Two years before the book's publication, he correctly wrote, "[I] think I go as far as almost anyone in seeing the grave difficulties against my doctrine."

This thoroughness grew out of self-doubt — out of Darwin's legendary humility and grave fear of criticism. Frank Sulloway, an authority on both Freud and Darwin, has made this point by comparing the two men: "Although both were revolutionary personalities, Darwin was unusually concerned about personal error and was modest to a fault. He also erected a new scientific theory that has successfully stood the test of time. Freud, in contrast, was tremendously ambitious and highly self-confident — a self-styled 'conquistador' of science. Yet he developed an approach to human nature that was largely a collection of nineteenth-century psychobiological fantasies masquerading as real science."³⁶

In reviewing John Bowlby's biography of Darwin, Sulloway made the point Bowlby failed to make. "[I]t seems reasonable to argue that a moderate degree of lowered self-esteem, which in Darwin was coupled with dogged persistence and unflagging industry, is actually a valuable attribute in science by helping to prevent an over-estimation of one's own theories. Constant self-doubt, then, is a methodological hallmark of good science, even if it is not especially congenial to good psychological health."³⁷

The question naturally arises as to whether such useful self-doubt, however painful, might be part of the human mental repertoire, preserved by natural selection because of its success, in some circumstances, at propelling social ascent. And the question grows only more intriguing in light of Darwin's father's role in forging his son's self-doubt. Bowlby asks: Was Charles "the disgrace to his family his father had so angrily predicted, or had he perhaps made good? ... Throughout his scientific career, unbelievably fruitful and distinguished though it would be, Charles's ever-present fear of criticism, both from himself and from others, and never satisfied craving for reassurance, seep through." Bowlby also notes that "a submissive and placatory attitude towards his father became second nature to Charles" and suggests that his father is at least partly to blame for Charles's "exaggerated" respect for authority and his "tendency to disparage his own contributions."

The speculation is irresistible: perhaps the elder Darwin, in implanting this lifelong source of discomfort, was functioning as designed Parents may be programmed — whether they know it or not — to adjust their children's psyches, even if painfully, in ways that promise to raise social status. For that matter, the younger Darwin, in absorbing the painful adjustment, may have been functioning as designed. We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. (Of course, we're designed to pursue happiness; and the attainment of Darwinian goals — sex, status, and so on — often brings happiness, at least for a while. Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive. Darwin's heightened fear of criticism kept him almost chronically distanced from serenity, and therefore kept him busy trying to reach it.)

Thus, Bowlby may be right about all the painful paternal influence on Darwin's character yet wrong to make it sound so pathological. Of course, even things that aren't pathological in the strict sense may be regrettable, and valid targets of psychiatric intervention. But presumably psychiatrists can more ably intervene once they get clear on what sorts of pain are and aren't "natural."

The second prong of Darwin's three-pronged strategy was to beef up his credentials. It's a commonplace of social psychology that cred ibility grows with prestige. Forced to believe either a college pro fessor or a grade-school teacher on some question of biology, we usually choose the professor. In one sense, this is a valid choice, as the professor is more likely to be right. In another sense, this is just another arbitrary by-product of evolution — a reflexive regard for status.

Either way, an air of mastery is a handy thing when you're trying to change minds. Hence barnacles: even aside from what Darwin learned from the barnacles, he knew that the sheer weight of his four volumes on the subclass Cirripedia would lend prestige to his theory of natural selection.

That, at least, is the suggestion of one biographer, Peter Brent: "[P]erhaps ... Darwin was not training himself with the Cirripede, he was qualifying himself." Brent cites an exchange between Darwin and Joseph Hooker. In 1845, Hooker had offhandedly professed doubts about the grand pronouncements of a French naturalist who "does not know what it is to be a specific Naturalist himself." Darwin, characteristically, took the remark to reflect on his own "presumption in accumulating facts & speculating on the subject of variation, without having worked out my due share of species." A year later Darwin went to work on barnacles.

Brent may be right. Several years after the Origin was published, Darwin advised a young botanist, "let theory guide your observations, but till your reputation is well established, be sparing in publishing theory. It makes persons doubt your observations."

The third prong of Darwin's strategy was to marshal potent social forces — to meld a coalition that included men of stature, men of rhetorical power, and men who fit both descriptions. There was Lyell, who would bring Darwin's first paper on natural selection before thes Linnean Society of London, lending it his authority (though Lyell was then an agnostic on natural selection); Thomas Huxley, who would famously confront Bishop Wilberforce in the Oxford evolution debate; Hooker, who would less famously confront Wilberforce and would join Lyell in unveiling Darwin's theory; and Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist who, through his writings in the Atlantic Monthly, would become Darwin's chief publicist in America. One by one, Darwin let these men in on his theory.

Was Darwin's assembly of troops really so calculated? Certainly Darwin was aware, by the time the Origin was published, that the battle for truth is fought by people, not just ideas. "[W]e are now a good and compact body of really good men, and mostly not old men," he assured one supporter only days after publication. "In the long-run we shall conquer." Three weeks after the Origin's publication, he wrote his young friend John Lubbock, whom he had sent a copy, and asked, "Have you finished it? If so, pray tell me whether you are with me on the general issue, or against me." He assured Lubbock in a postscript that "I have got — I wish and hope I might say that we have got — a fair number of excellent men on our side of the question... ." Translation: If you act now, you can be part of a winning coalition of male primates.

Darwin's pleas for Charles Lyell's full support — almost pathetic in their persistence — are similarly pragmatic. Darwin sees that it is the prestige of his allies, not just their number, that will shape public opinion. September 11, 1859: "Remember that your verdict will probably have more influence than my book in deciding whether such views as I hold will be admitted or rejected at present. ..." September 20: "[A]s I regard your verdict as far more important in my own eyes, and I believe in the eyes of the world than of any other dozen men, I am naturally very anxious about it."⁴⁶

Lyell's long delay in granting unequivocal support would bring Oanvin to the point of bitterness. He wrote to Hooker in 1863: "I am deeply disappointed (I do not mean personally) to find that his ti rrnidity prevents him giving any judgment... . And the best of the joke is that he thinks he has acted with the courage of a martyr of old."⁴⁷ But in terms of reciprocal altruism, Darwin was asking for too much. Lyell was by then sixty-five years old, with an ample intellectual legacy that wouldn't much benefit from his endorsing another man's theory and which could suffer appreciably from identification with a radical doctrine that later proved false. Besides, Lyell had opposed evolutionism in its Lamarckian guise, and thus might be viewed as backtracking. So Darwin's theory wasn't "common ca,xise" for the two men, as Lyell's had been two decades earlier, when Darwin needed a display case for his freshly gathered data. And Lyell, hauving repaid Darwin's support in various ways, had little if any debt outstanding. Darwin seems to have suffered here from a quaintly pre-Darwinian conception of what friendship is. Or, perhaps, he was under the sway of an egocentric accounting system.

That Darwin was urgently recruiting allies as of 1859 does not, of course, prove that he had for years been plotting strategy. The origin of his alliance with Hooker seems ingenuous enough. Their bond matured during the 1840s as a friendship of the classic variety — based on common interests and common values and consecrated by affection.⁴⁸ As it became clear that one of those common interests was openness to the possibility of evolution, Darwin's affection can only have deepened. But we needn't assume that Darwin then envisioned Hooker becoming an avid defender of his theory. The affect tion inspired by common interests is natural selection's implicit recognition of the political usefulness of friends.

Much the same can be said of the way Darwin warmed to Hooker' s sterling character. ("One can see at once that he is honourable to the back-bone.")⁴⁹ Yes, Hooker's trustworthiness would prove essential; Darwin used him as a confidential sounding board long before natural selection entered public discourse. But no, that doesn't mean Darwin was from the beginning calibrating the value of Hooker's trustworthiness. Natural selection has given us an affinity for people who will be reliable reciprocal-altruism partners. In all cultures, trust joins common interest as the sine qua non of friendship.

Darwin's very compulsion to have a confidant — and, as he comes closer to making the theory public, to have additional confidants in Lyell, Gray, Huxley, and others — can be viewed as the product of evolutionary, and not just conscious, calculation. "I do not think I am brave enough to have stood being odious without support," he wrote days after the Origin was published.⁵⁰ Who would have been? You would have to be just about literally not human to launch a massive attack on the status quo without first seeking social support. In fact, you would almost have to be non-hominoid.

Imagine how many times since our ape days social challenges have hinged on the challenger's success in forging a sturdy coalition. Imagine how many times the challengers have suffered from acting too soon, or from being too open in their machinations. And imagine the ample reproductive stakes. Is it any wonder that mutinies of all kinds, in all cultures, begin with whispers? That even an untutored six-year-old schoolboy feels intuitively the wisdom of discreetly eliciting opinions about the local bully before mounting a challenge? When Darwin confided his theory in a select few, employing his trademark defensiveness (to Asa Gray: "I know that this will make you despise me"),51 he was probably driven as much by emotion as by reason.

THE PROBLEM OF WALLACE

The greatest crisis of Darwin's career began in 1858. While trudging along on his epic manuscript, he found he had waited too long. Alfred Russel Wallace had now discovered the theory of natural selection — two decades after Darwin did — and stood poised to preempt him. In response, Darwin fiercely pursued his self-interest, but he pursued it so smoothly, and shrouded it in so much moral angst, that, ever since, observers have been calling the episode yet another example of his superhuman decency.

Wallace was a young British naturalist who, like the young Darwin, had set sail for foreign lands to study life. Darwin had known for some time that Wallace was interested in the origin and distribution of species. In fact, the two men had corresponded about the matter, with Darwin noting that he already had a "distinct & tangible idea" on the subject and claiming that "it is really impossible to explain my views in the compass of a letter." But Darwin continued to resist any impulse to publish a short paper outlining his theory. "I rather hate the idea of writing for priority," he had written to Lyell, who had urged him to get his views on the record. "[Y]et I certainly should be vexed if any one were to publish my doctrines before me."⁵²

The vexation hit on June 18, 1858, when the mail brought a letter from Wallace. Darwin opened it and found a precise sketch of Wallace's theory of evolution, whose likeness to his own theory was stunning. "Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters," he observed.⁵³

The panic that must have struck Darwin that day is a tribute to natural selection's resourcefulness. The biochemical essence of the panic probably goes back to our reptilian days. Yet it was triggered not by its primordial trigger — threat to life and limb — but rather by a threat to status, a concern more characteristic of our primate days. What's more, the threat wasn't of the physical sort common among our primate relatives. Instead it came as an abstraction: words, sentences — symbols whose comprehension depended on brain tissue ac quired only within the past few million years. Thus does evolution take ancient raw materials and continually adapt them to current needs.

Presumably Darwin did not pause to reflect on the natural beauty of his panic. He sent Wallace's paper to Lyell — whose opinion of it Wallace had asked Darwin to solicit — and sought advice. Actually, "sought" is a little strong; I'm reading between the lines. Darwin proposed a pious course of action and left it for Lyell to propose .1 less pious one. "Please return me the MS., which he does not say he wishes me to publish, but I shall, of course, at once write and offer to send to any journal. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed, though my book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated; as all the labour consists in the application of the theory."

I yell's reply — which, oddly, has not survived, even though Darwin saved correspondence religiously — seems to have succeeded in checking Darwin's piety. Darwin wrote back: "There is nothing in Wallace's sketch which is not written out much fuller in my sketch, copied out in 1844, and read by Hooker some dozen years ago. About a year ago I sent a short sketch, of which I have a copy, of my views ... to Asa Gray, so that I could most truly say and prove that I take nothing from Wallace."

Then Darwin gets into an epic wrestling match with his conscience, in full view of Lyell. At the risk of sounding cynical, I include in brackets the letter's subtext, as I interpret it: "I should be extremely glad now to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so; but I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably. [Maybe you can persuade me.] Wallace says nothing about publication, and I enclose his letter. But as I had not intended to publish any sketch, can I do so honourably, because Wallace has sent me an outline of his doctrine? [Say yes. Say yes.] ... Do you not think his having sent me this sketch ties my hands? [Say no. Say no.] ... I would send Wallace a copy of my letter to Asa Gray, to show him that I had not stolen his doctrine. But I cannot tell whether to publish now would not be base and paltry. [Say nonbase and nonpaltry.]" In a postscript added the next day, Darwin washed his hands of the affair, appointing Lyell arbitrator: "I have always thought you would make a first-rate Lord Chancellor; and I now appeal to you as a Lord Chancellor."

Darwin's anguish was deepened by events at home. His daughter Etty had diphtheria, and his mentally retarded baby, Charles Waring, had just contracted scarlet fever, from which he would soon die.

Lyell consulted with Hooker, whom Darwin had also alerted to the crisis, and the two men decided to treat Darwin's and Wallace's theories as equals. They would introduce Wallace's paper at the next meeting of the Linnean Society, along with the sketch Darwin had sent to Asa Gray and parts of the 1844 draft he had given Emma, and all of this would then be published together. (Darwin had sent Gray the 1,200-word sketch only a few months after telling Wallace it would be "impossible" to sketch the theory in a letter. Whether he wanted to produce unimpeachable evidence of his priority, after sensing Wallace gaining on him, will never be known.) Since Wallace was then in the Malay Archipelago, and the next meeting of the society was imminent, Lyell and Hooker decided to proceed without consulting him. Darwin let them.

When Wallace learned what had happened, he was in a position much like Darwin's during the Beagle's voyage, when the thrilling word of Sedgwick's endorsement arrived. Wallace was a young naturalist, eager to make a name for himself, isolated from professional feedback, still not sure if he had much to give science. Suddenly he found that his work was being read by great men before a great scientific society. He wrote proudly to his mother that, "I sent Mr. Darwin an essay on a subject on which he is now writing a great work. He showed it to Dr. Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, who thought so highly of it that they immediately read it before the Linnean Society. This assures me the acquaintance and assistance of these eminent men on my return home."⁵⁶

DARWIN'S BIGGEST MORAL BLEMISH?

This ranks as one of the most poignant passages in the history of science. Wallace had just been taken to the cleaners. His name, though given equal billing with Darwin's, was now sure to be eclipsed by it. After all, it wasn't news that some young upstart had declared himself an evolutionist and proposed an evolutionary mechanism; it was news that the well-known and respected Charles Darwin had done so. And any lingering doubt about whose name should be attached to the theory would be erased by Darwin's book, which he would now finally produce with due speed. Lest the relative status of the two men escape anyone's attention, Hooker and Lyell, in introducing the papers to the Linnean Society, had noted that, "while the scientific world is waiting for the appearance of Mr. Darwin's complete work, some of the leading results of his labours, as well as those of his able correspondent, should together be laid before the public."⁵⁷ "Able correspondent" isn't a phrase likely to wind up at the top of a marquee.

Now, it may be that Darwin's having put the pieces together so many years before Wallace makes Wallace's eventual obscurity just. But the fact is that as of June 1858, Wallace, unlike Darwin, had written a paper on natural selection that he was ready to publish, even if he didn't ask Darwin to publish it. If Wallace had sent his paper to a journal instead of to Darwin — indeed, if he had sent it almost anywhere instead of to Darwin — he might be remembered today as the first man to posit the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin's great book, technically speaking, would have been an extension and popularization of another scientist's idea. Whose name the theory would then have carried will forever be an open question.

However just Darwin's worldwide fame, it seems hard to argue that when given the toughest moral test of his life, he passed with flying colors. Consider the options confronting him, Lyell, and Hooker. They could publish only Wallace's version of the theory. They could write Wallace and offer to thus publish his version, as Darwin had originally suggested — without, perhaps, even mentioning Darwin's version. They could write Wallace and explain the sit-nation, suggesting joint publication. Or they could do what they did. Since Wallace might, for all they knew, have resisted joint publication, the option they pursued was the only one which ensured that natural detection would go down in history as Darwin's theory. And that opt ion entailed publishing Wallace's paper without his expressed permission — an act whose propriety someone with Darwin's king-size scruples might normally question.

Remarkably, observers have time and again depicted this ploy as some sort of testament to human morality. Julian Huxley, Thomas Huxley's grandson, called the outcome "a monument to the natural generosity of both the great biologists." Loren Eiseley called it an example of "that mutual nobility of behavior so justly celebrated in the annals of science." They're both half right. Wallace, ever gracious, would long insist — correctly, but still generously and nobly — that Darwin's length and depth of thought about evolution had earned him the title of premier evolutionist. Wallace even titled a book of his Darwinism.

Wallace defended the theory of natural selection for the rest of his life, but he crucially narrowed its scope. He began to doubt that the theory could account for the full powers of the human mind; people seemed smarter than they really had to be to survive. He concluded that although man's body was built by natural selection, his mental capacities were divinely implanted. It may be too cynical (even by Darwinian standards) to suggest that this revision would have been less likely had the theory of natural selection been called "Wallacism." At any rate, the man whose name was synonymous with the theory mourned the weakening of Wallace's faith. "I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child," Darwin wrote to him. (This from the man who, after mentioning Wallace in the introduction of the Origin, referred to natural selection in subsequent chapters as "my theory.")

The common idea that Darwin behaved like a perfect gentleman throughout the Wallace episode rests partly on the myth that he had some option other than those outlined above — that he could have rushed his theory to press without so much as mentioning Wallace. But unless Wallace was even more saintly than he seems to have been, this would have brought a scandal that left Darwin's name tainted, even to the point of endangering its connection to his theory. In other words: this option was not an option. The biographer who admiringly observes that Darwin "hated losing his priority, but he hated even more the chance of being suspected of ungentlemanly or nonsporting conduct"⁶³ is creating a distinction where none existed; to have been thought unsporting would have threatened his priority. When Darwin wrote to Lyell, on the day he received Wallace's sketch, "I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit," he wasn't being conscientious so much as savvy.⁶⁴ Or rather: he was being conscientious, which, especially in his social environment, was the same as being savvy. Sawiness is the function of the conscience.

The other source of retrospective naivete about Darwin's behavior is his brilliant decision to place the matter in Lyell's and Hooker's hands. "In despair, he abdicated," as one biographer obligingly puts it. Darwin would forever use this "abdication" as moral camouflage. After Wallace signaled his approval of the affair, Darwin wrote to him: "Though I had absolutely nothing whatever to do in leading Lyell and Hooker to what they thought a fair course of action, yet I naturally could not but feel anxious to hear what your impression would be... ." Well, if he wasn't sure Wallace would approve, why didn't he bother to check? Couldn't Darwin, having gone two decades without publishing his theory, have waited a few months longer? Wallace had asked that his paper be sent to Lyell, but he hadn't asked that Lyell determine its fate.

For Darwin to say he exerted no influence "whatever" on Hooker and Lyell strains the facts and, anyway, is irrelevant; these were two of his closest friends. Surely Darwin wouldn't have felt he could., appoint his brother Erasmus as a disinterested judge. Yet, there is every reason to believe that evolution, in embedding friendship in the human species, has resourcefully used many of the impulses of affection, devotion, and loyalty that it first used to bind kin.

Darwin didn't know this, of course, but surely he knew that friends tend toward partiality — that the whole idea of a friend is someone who at least partly shares your self-serving biases. For him to depict Lyell as impartial — "a Lord Chancellor" — is remarkable. And it only appears more so in light of Darwin's later appeals to their friendship, when he virtually asks Lyell to endorse the theory of natural selection as a personal favor.

POSTGAME ANALYSIS

Enough moral outrage. Who am I to judge? I've done things worse than this, Darwin's biggest single crime. In fact, my ability to muster all this righteous indignation, and assume a stance of moral superiority, is a tribute to the selective blindness with which evolution has endowed us all. Now, I'll try to transcend biology and summon enough detachment for a brisk appraisal of the salient Darwinian features of the Wallace episode.

Note, first of all, the exquisite pliability of Darwin's values. As a rule he was gravely disdainful of academic territoriality; for scientists to guard against rivals who might steal their thunder was, he believed, "unworthy of searchers after truth." And though he was too perceptive and honest to deny that fame had a tempting effect on him, he generally held the effect to be minor. He claimed that even without it he would work just as hard on his species book. Yet when his turf was threatened, he took steps to defend it — which included producing the Origin at a rather stepped-up pace once there was doubt as to whose name would become synonymous with evolutionism. Darwin saw the contradiction. Weeks after the Wallace episode, he wrote to Hooker that, as far as priority goes, he had always "fancied that I had a grand enough soul not to care; but I found myself mistaken and punished."

As the crisis receded into the past, though, Darwin's old pieties resurfaced. He claimed in his autobiography that he "cared very little whether men attributed most originality to me or Wallace."⁷⁰ Anyone who has read Darwin's distraught letters to Lyell and Hooker will have to marvel at the power of Darwin's self-deception.

The Wallace episode highlights a basic division within the conscience, the line between kin selection and reciprocal altruism. When we feel guilty about having harmed or cheated a sibling, it is, generally, because natural selection "wants" us to be nice to siblings, since they share so many of our genes. When we feel guilty about having harmed or cheated a friend, or a casual acquaintance, it is because natural selection "wants" us to look like we're being nice; the perception of altruism, not the altruism itself, is what will bring the reciprocation. So the aim of the conscience, in dealings with nonkin, is to cultivate a reputation for generosity and decency, whatever the reality. Of course, gaining and holding this reputation will often entail actual generosity and decency. But sometimes it won't.

In this light we see Darwin's conscience working in top form. It made him generally reliable in his bestowal of generosity and decency — in a social environment so intimate that actual generosity and decency were essential to maintaining a good moral reputation. But his goodness turned out not to be absolutely constant. His vaunted conscience, seemingly a bulwark against all corruption, was discerning enough to weaken a trifle just when his lifelong quest for status most needed a slight moral lapse. This brief dimming of the lights allowed Darwin to subtly, even unconsciously, pull strings, employing his ample social connections to the detriment of a young and powerless rival.

Some Darwinians have suggested that the conscience can be viewed as the administrator of a savings account in which moral reputation is stored. For decades Darwin painstakingly amassed capital, vast and conspicuous evidence of his scruples; the Wallace episode was a time to risk some of it. Even if he lost a little — even of the affair produced a few suspicious whispers about the propriety of publishing Wallace's paper without his permission — this would still be a risk worth taking, in terms of the ultimate elevation of Darwin's status. Making such judgments about resource allocation is what the human conscience is designed to do, and during the Wallace episode Darwin's did it well.

As it happened, none of Darwin's capital was lost. He came out smelling like a rose. Before the Linnean Society, Hooker and Lyell described what had happened after Darwin received Wallace's paper. "So highly did Mr. Darwin appreciate the value of the views therein set forth, that he proposed, in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, to obtain Mr. Wallace's consent to allow the Essay to be published as soon as possible. Of this step we highly approved, provided Mr. Darwin did not withhold from the public, as he was strongly inclined to do (in favour of Mr. Wallace), the memoir he had himself written on the same subject, and which, as before stated, one of us had perused in 1844, and the contents of which we had both of us been privy to for many years... ,"

More than a century later, this sanitized version of events was still the standard version — an utterly scrupulous Darwin virtually coerced into letting his name appear alongside Wallace's. Darwin, one biographer wrote, "seems hardly to have been a free agent in the face of Lyell's and Hooker's pressure for publication."

There is no basis for concluding that Darwin consciously orchestrated his eclipse of Wallace. Consider the judicious appointment of Lyell as "Lord Chancellor." The natural impulse, in times of crisis, to seek the guidance of friends feels perfectly innocent. We don't necessarily think, "I'll call a friend, rather than some stranger, because a friend will share my warped ideas about what I deserve and what my rivals deserve." So too with Darwin's pose of moral anguish: it worked because he didn't know it was a pose — because, in other words, it wasn't a pose; he actually felt the anguish.

And not for the first time. Darwin's guilt about asserting priority — pulling rank on Wallace in a quest for still higher rank — was just the latest in a lifelong series of comparable pangs. (Recall John Bowlby's diagnosis: Darwin suffered "self-contempt for being vain." "Time and again throughout his life his desire for attention and fame is coupled with the deep sense of shame he feels for harbouring such motives.")⁷⁵ Indeed, it was the proven authenticity of Darwin's anguish which helped convince Hooker and Lyell that Dar win "strongly" resisted glory and thus helped them convince the world of it. All the moral capital Darwin built up over the years had come at a large psychological cost, but in the end the investment paid dividends.

None of this is meant to imply that Darwin behaved in perfectly adaptive fashion, constantly attuned to the task of genetic prolifei ation, with every bit of his ample striving and suffering warranted by that end. Given the difference between nineteenth-century Eng land and the environment(s) of our evolution, this sort of functional perfection is the last thing one should expect. Indeed, as we suggested several chapters ago, Darwin's moral sentiments were manifestly more acute than self-interest dictated; he had plenty of capital in his moral savings account without losing sleep over unanswered letters, without crusading on behalf of dead sheep. The claim here is simply that lots of odd and much-discussed things about Darwin's mind and character can make a basic kind of sense when viewed through the lens of evolutionary psychology.

Indeed, his whole career assumes a certain coherence. It looks less like an erratic quest, often stymied by self-doubt and undue deference, and more like a relentless ascent, deftly cloaked in scruples and humility. Beneath Darwin's pangs of conscience lay moral positioning. Beneath his reverence for men of accomplishment lay social climbing. Beneath his painfully recurring self-doubts lay a fevered defense against social assault. Beneath his sympathy toward friends lay savvy political alliance. What an animal!

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Part Four: MORALS OF THE STORY

Chapter 15: DARWINIAN (AND FREUDIAN) CYNICISM

The possibility of the brain having whole train of thoughts, feeling & perception separate, from the ordinary state of mind, is probably analogous to the double individuality implied by habit,
when one acts unconsciously with respect
 to more energetic self ...

— M Notebook (1938)

The picture of human nature painted thus far isn't altogether flattering.

We spend our lives desperately seeking status; we are addicted to social esteem in a fairly literal sense, dependent on the neurotransmitters we get upon impressing people. Many of us claim to be self-sufficient, to have a moral gyroscope, to hold fast to our values, come what may. But people truly oblivious to peer approval get labeled sociopaths. And the epithets reserved for people at the other end of the spectrum, people who seek esteem most ardently — "self-promoter", "social climber" — are only signs of our constitutional blindness. We are all self-promoters and social climbers. The people known as such are either so effective as to arouse envy or so graceless as to make their effort obvious, or both.

Our generosity and affection have a narrow underlying purpose. They're aimed either at kin, who share our genes, at nonkin of the opposite sex who can help package our genes for shipment to the next generation, or at nonkin of either sex who seem likely to return the favor. What's more, the favor often entails dishonesty or malice; we do our friends the favor of overlooking their flaws, and seeing (if not magnifying) the flaws of their enemies. Affection is a tool of hostility. We form bonds to deepen fissures.²

In our friendships, as in other things, we're deeply inegalitarian. We value especially the affection of high-status people, and are willing to pay more for it — to expect less of them, to judge them leniently. Fondness for a friend may wane if his or her status slips, or if it simply fails to rise as much as our own. We may, to facilitate the cooling of relations, justify it. "He and I don't have as much in common as we used to." Like high status, for example.

It is safe to call this a cynical view of behavior. So what's new? There's nothing revolutionary about cynicism. Indeed, some would call it the story of our time — the by now august successor to Victorian earnestness.³

The shift from nineteenth-century earnestness to twentieth-century cynicism has been traced, in part, to Sigmund Freud. Like the new Darwinism, Freudian thought finds sly unconscious aims in our most innocent acts. And like the new Darwinism, it sees an animal essence at the core of the unconscious.

Nor are those the only things Freudian and Darwinian thought have in common. For all the criticism it has drawn in recent decades, Freudianism remains the most influential behavioral paradigm — academically, morally, spiritually — of our time. And to this position the new Darwinian paradigm aspires.

On grounds of this rivalry alone, disentangling Freudian psychology and evolutionary psychology would be worthwhile. But there are other grounds, too, perhaps more important: the forms of cynicism ultimately entailed by the two schools are different, and different in ways that matter.

Both Darwinian and Freudian cynicism carry less bitterness than garden-variety cynicism. Because their suspicion of a person's motives is in large part a suspicion of unconscious motives, they view the person — the conscious person, at least — as a kind of unwitting accomplice. Indeed, to the extent that pain is the price paid for the internal subterfuge, the person may be worthy of compassion as well as suspicion. Everyone comes out looking like a victim. It is in describing how and why the victimization takes place that the two schools of thought diverge.

Freud thought of himself as a Darwinian. He tried to look at the human mind as a product of evolution, a fact that — by itself, at least — would forever endear him to evolutionary psychologists. Anyone who sees humans as animals, driven by sexual and other coarse impulses, can't be all bad. But Freud misunderstood evolution in basic and elementary ways.⁴ He put much emphasis, for example, on the Lamarckian idea that traits acquired through experience get passed on biologically. That some of these misconceptions were common in his day — and that some were held by Darwin, or at least encouraged by his equivocations — may be a good excuse. But the fact remains that they led Freud to say many things that sound nonsensical to today's Darwinians.

Why would people have a death instinct ("thanatos")? Why would girls want male genitals ("penis envy")? Why would boys want to have sex with their mothers and kill their fathers (the "Oedipus complex")? Imagine genes that specifically encourage any of these impulses, and you're imagining genes that aren't exactly destined to spread through a hunter-gatherer population overnight.

There's no denying Freud's sharp eye for psychic tension. Something resembling the Oedipal conflict between father and son may well exist. But what are its real roots? Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have argued that here Freud conflated several distinct Darwinian dynamics, some of them grounded ultimately in the parent-offspring conflict described by Robert Trivers.⁵ For example, when boys reach adolescence, they may, especially in a polygynous society (such as our ancestral environment) find themselves competing with their fathers for the same women. But among those women is not the boy's mother; incest often produces deficient offspring, and it's not in the son's genetic interest to have his mother assume the risks and burdens of pregnancy to create a reproductively worthless sibling. (Hence the dearth of boys who try to seduce their mothers.) At a younger age the boy (or for that matter a girl) may have a paternal conflict that is over the mother — but not with sex as its goal. Rather, the son and father are fighting over the mother's valuable time and attention. It the struggle has sexual overtones at all, they are only that the father's genetic interest may call for impregnating the mother, while the son's would call for delaying the arrival of a sibling (by, for example, continued breast-feeding, which forestalls ovulation).

These sorts of Darwinian theories are often speculative and, at this early stage in the growth of evolutionary psychology, meagerly tested. But unlike Freud's theories, they are tethered to something firm: an understanding of the process that designed the human brain. Evolutionary psychology has embarked on a course whose broad contours are well-marked and which should, as it proceeds, find continual correction in the dialectic of science.

The path to progress begins by specifying the knobs of human nature — the things that Charles Darwin, for example, shared with all humanity. He cared for his kin, within limits. He sought status. He sought sex. He tried to impress peers and to please them. He tried to be seen as good. He formed alliances and nurtured them. He tried to neutralize rivals. He deceived himself when the preceding goals so dictated. And he felt all the feelings — love, lust, compassion, reverence, ambition, anger, fear, pangs of conscience, of guilt, of obligation, of shame, and so on — that push people toward these goals.

Having located — in Darwin or anyone else — the basic knobs ot human nature, the Darwinian next asks: What is distinctive about the tuning of the knobs? Darwin had an unusually active conscience. He nurtured his alliances with unusual care. He worried unusually about the opinions of others. And so on.

Where did these distinctive tunings come from? Good question. Almost no developmental psychologists have taken up the tools of the new paradigm, so there's a shortage of answers. But the route to the answers, at least broadly speaking, is clear. The young, plastic mind is shaped by cues that, in the environment of our evolution, suggested what behavioral strategies were most likely to get genes spread. The cues presumably tend to mirror two things: the sort ot social environment you find yourself in; and the sorts of assets and liabilities you bring into that environment.

Some cues are mediated by kin. Freud was right to sense that relatives — parents, in particular — have a lot to say about the shape of the emerging psyche. Freud was also right to sense that parents are not wholly benign, and that deep conflicts between parents and offspring are possible. Trivers's theory of parent-offspring conflict holds that some of the psychic fine-tuning may be for the genetic benefit not of the tunee (the child), but of the tuner (the parent). Disentangling the two types of kin influence — to teach and to exploit — is never easy. And in Darwin's case it's especially hard, for some of his trademark traits — great respect for authority, weighty scruples — are, in addition to being useful in the wider social world, conducive to sacrifice for the family.

If behavioral scientists are to use the new Darwinism to trace mental and emotional development, they will have to abandon one assumption often implicit in the thought of Freud and psychiatrists in general (and, for that matter, just about everyone else): that pain is a symptom of something abnormal, unnatural — a sign that things have gone awry. As the evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse has stressed, pain is part of natural selection's design (which isn't, of course, to say that it's good). Vast quantities of pain were generated by traits that helped make Darwin an effective animal: his "overactive" conscience, his relentless self-criticism, his "craving for reassurance," his "exaggerated" respect for authority. If indeed Darwin's father, as alleged, encouraged some of this pain, it may be a mistake to ask what demons drove him to do it (unless, perhaps, you then answer: "Genes that were working like a Swiss watch"). What's more, it may be a mistake to assume that the young Darwin didn't himself, at some level, encourage this painful influence; people may well be designed to absorb painful guidance that conduces to genetic proliferation (or would have in the ancestral environment). Many things that look like parental cruelty may not be an example of Trivers's parent-offspring conflict.

One condition that may resist comprehension so long as psychologists deem it unnatural is something Darwin suffered from: insecurity. Perhaps over the eons it has made sense for people who couldn't ascend the social hierarchy through classic means (brute force, good looks, charisma) to focus on other routes. One route would be a redoubled commitment to reciprocal altruism — that is, a sensitive, even painfully sensitive, conscience, and a chronic fear ot being unliked. The stereotypes of the arrogant, inconsiderate jock and the ingratiating, deferential wimp are no doubt overdrawn, but they may reflect a statistically valid correlation, and they seem to make Darwinian sense. At any rate, they seem to capture Darwin's experience well enough. He was a good-sized boy but awkward and introverted, and at grade school, he wrote, "I could not get up my courage to fight." Though his reserve was misinterpreted by some children as disdain, he was also known as kind — "pleased to do any little acts to gratify his fellows," one schoolmate recalled.⁸ Captain FitzRoy would later marvel at how Darwin "makes everyone his friend."⁹

Sharp intellectual self-scrutiny, likewise, might grow out of early social frustration. Children to whom status doesn't come naturally may work harder to become rich sources of information, especially if they seem to have a natural facility with it. Darwin turned his fits of intellectual self-doubt into a series of polished scientific works that both raised his status and made him a valued reciprocal altruist.

If these speculations hold water, then Darwin's two basic kinds of self-doubt — moral and intellectual — are two sides of the same coin, both of them manifestations of social insecurity, and both of them designed as a way to make him a prized social asset when other ways seemed to be failing. Darwin's "acute sensitiveness to praise and blame," as Thomas Huxley put it, can account for his fastidiousness in both realms, and may be rooted in a single principle of mental development.¹⁰ And Darwin's father may have done much — with Darwin's implied consent — to nourish that acute sensitiveness.

When we call people "insecure" we generally mean that they worry a lot: they worry that people don't like them; they worry that they'll lose what friends they have; they worry that they've offended people; they worry that they've given someone bad information. It is common to casually trace insecurity to childhood: rejection on the grade-school playground; romantic failures in adolescence; an unstable home; the death of a family member; moving around too often to make lasting friends, or whatever. There is a vague and usually unspoken assumption that various kinds of childhood failure or turbulence will lead to adult insecurity.

One can think up reasons (such as those I've just tossed out) why natural selection might have forged some of these links between early experience and later personality. (The early death of Darwin's mother is fertile ground for speculation; in the ancestral environment, complacency was a luxury that a motherless child could not afford.) One can also find, in the data of social psychology, at least loose support for such correlations. Clarity will come when these two sides of the dialectic get in touch with one another: when psychologists start thinking precisely about what kinds of developmental theories make Darwinian sense and then designing research to test those theories.

It is by the same process that we'll start understanding how various other tendencies get forged: sexual reserve or promiscuity, social tolerance and intolerance, high or low self-esteem, cruelty and gentleness, and so on. To the extent that these things are indeed consistently linked to commonly cited causes — the degree and nature of parental love, the number of parents in the household, early romantic encounters, dynamics among siblings, friends, enemies — it is probably because such linkage made evolutionary sense. If psychologists want to understand the processes that shape the human mind, they must understand the process that shaped the human species.¹¹ Once they do, progress is likely. And unequivocal progress — growing, objective corroboration of ever-more-precise theories — would distinguish the Darwinism of the twenty-first century from the Freudianism of the twentieth.

When the topic turns to the unconscious mind, differences between Freudian and Darwinian thought persist; and again, some of the difference revolves around the function of pain. Recall Darwin's "golden rule": to immediately write down any observation that seemed inconsistent with his theories — "for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones." Freud cited this remark as evidence of the Freudian tendency "to ward off from memory that which is unpleasant." This tendency was for Freud a broad and general one, found among the mentally healthy and ill alike, and central to the dynamics of the unconscious mind. But there is one problem with this supposed generality: sometimes painful memories are the very hardest to forget. Indeed, Freud acknowledged, only a few sentences after citing Darwin's golden rule, that people had mentioned this to him, stressing in particular the painfully persistent "recollection of grievances or humiliations."

Did this mean the tendency to forget unpleasant things wasn't general after all? No. Freud opted for another explanation: it was just that sometimes the tendency to discard painful memories is successful and sometimes it isn't; the mind is "an arena, a sort of tumbling-ground," where opposing tendencies collide, and it isn't easy to say which tendency will win.¹⁴

Evolutionary psychologists can handle this issue more deftly, because, in contrast to Freud, they don't have such a simple, schematic view of the human mind. They believe the brain was jerry-built over the eons to accomplish a host of different tasks. Having made no attempt to lump the memory of grievances, humiliations, and inconvenient facts under the same rubric, Darwinians don't have to hand out special exemptions to the cases that don't fit. Faced with three questions about remembering and forgetting — (1) why we for get facts inconsistent with our theories; (2) why we remember grievances; (3) why we remember humiliations — they can relax and come up with a different explanation for each one.

We've already touched on the three likely explanations. Forget ting inconvenient facts makes it easier to argue with force and con viction, and arguments often had genetic stakes in the environment of our evolution. Remembering grievances may bolster our haggling in a different way, making us remind people of reparations we're owed; also, a well-preserved grievance may ensure the punishment of our exploiters. As for the memory of humiliations, their uncom fortable persistence dissuades us from repeating behaviors that can lower social status; and, if the humiliations are of sufficient magni tude, their memory may adaptively lower self-esteem (or, at least, lower self-esteem in a way that would have been adaptive in the environment of our evolution).

Thus, Freud's model of the human mind may have been — believe it or not — insufficiently labyrinthine. The mind has more dark corners than he imagined, and plays more little tricks on us.

THE BEST OF FREUD

What is best in Freud is his sensing the paradox of being a highly social animal: being at our core libidinous, rapacious, and generally selfish, yet having to live civilly with other human beings — having to reach our animal goals via a tortuous path of cooperation, compromise, and restraint. From this insight flows Freud's most basic idea about the mind: it is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality.

One biological view of this sort of conflict has come from Paul D. MacLean. He calls the human brain a "triune" brain whose three basic parts recapitulate our evolution: a reptilian core (the seat of our basic drives), surrounded by a "paleomammalian" brain (which endowed our ancestors with, among other things, affection for offspring), surrounded in turn by a "neomammalian" brain. The voluminous neomammalian brain brought abstract reasoning, language, and, perhaps, (selective) affection for people outside the family. It is, MacLean writes, "the handmaiden for rationalizing, justifying and giving verbal expression to the protoreptilian and limbic [paleomammalian] parts of our brains... ."¹⁵ Like many neat models, this one may be misleadingly simple; but it nicely captures a (perhaps the) critical feature of our evolutionary trajectory: from solitary to social, with the pursuit of food and sex becoming increasingly subtle and elaborate endeavors.

Freud's "id" — the beast in the basement — presumably grows out of the reptilian brain, a product of presocial evolutionary history. The "superego" — loosely speaking, the conscience — is a more recent invention. It is the source of the various kinds of inhibition and guilt designed to restrain the id in a genetically profitable manner; the superego prevents us, say, from harming siblings, or from neglecting our friends. The "ego" is the part in the middle. Its ultimate, if unconscious, goals are those of the id, yet it pursues them with long-term calculation, mindful of the superego's cautions and reprimands.

Congruence between the Freudian and Darwinian views of psychic conflict has been stressed by Randolph Nesse and the psychiatrist Alan T. Lloyd. They see the conflict as a clash among competing advocacy groups, designed by evolution to yield sound guidance, much as the tension among branches of government is designed to yield good governance. The basic conflict — the basic discourse — is "between selfish and altruistic motivation, between pleasure-seeking and normative behavior, and between individual and group interests. The functions of the id match the first half of each of these pairs, while the functions of the ego/superego match the second half." And the basic truth behind the second half of the discourse is the "delayed nature of benefits from social relationships."¹⁶

In describing this tension between short-term and long-term selfishness, Darwinians have sometimes used the image of "repression." The psychoanalyst Malcolm Slavin suggests that selfish motives may be repressed by children as a way to stay in the good graces of parents — and retrieved moments later, when the need to please passes.¹⁷ Others have stressed the repression of selfish impulses toward friends. We may even repress the memory of a friend's transgressions — an especially wise trick if the friend is of high status or otherwise valuable.¹⁸ The memory could then resurface should the friend see his status plummet or for some other reason merit a more frank appraisal. And, of course, the arena of sex is rife with occasions for tactical repression. Surely a man can better convince a woman of his future devotion if he isn't vividly imagining sexual intercourse with her. That impulse can blossom later, once the ground has been prepared.

As Nesse and Lloyd have noted, repression is just one of the many "ego defenses" that have become part of Freudian theory (largely via Freud's daughter Anna, who wrote the book on ego defenses). And, they add, several other ego defenses are similarly intelligible in Darwinian terms. For example, "identification" and "introjection" — absorbing the values and traits of others, including powerful others — may be a way of cozying up to a high-status person who "distributes status and rewards to those who support his be liefs."¹⁹ And "rationalization," the concoction of pseudoexplanations that conceal our true motives — well, need I elaborate?

All told, Freud's scorecard is not bad: he (and his followers) have identified lots of mental dynamics that may have deep evolutionary roots. He rightly saw the mind as a place of turbulence, much of it subterranean. And, in a general way, he saw the source of the turbulence: an animal of ultimately complete ruthlessness is born into a complex and inescapable social web.

But when he got less general than this, Freud's diagnosis was sometimes misleading. He often depicted the tension at the center of human life as essentially between not self and society but self and civilization. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he described the paradox this way: people are pushed together with other people, told to curb their sexual impulses and enter "aim-inhibited relationships of love," and told not just to get along with their neighbors cooperatively but to "love thy neighbor as thyself." Yet, Freud observes, humans are simply not gentle creatures: "[T]heir neighbour is for them not only a potential helper ... but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. [Man is a wolf to man. ]" No wonder people are so miserable. "In fact, primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct."

This last sentence contains a myth whose correction underlies much of evolutionary psychology. It has been a long, long time since any of our ancestors enjoyed "no restrictions" on these "instincts." Even chimpanzees must weigh their predatory impulses against the fact that another chimp can be "a potential helper," as Freud put it, and thus may be profitably treated with restraint. And male chimpanzees (and bonobos) find their sexual impulses frustrated by females that demand food and other favors in exchange for sex. In our own lineage, as growing male parental investment expanded those demands, males found themselves facing extensive "restrictions" on sexual impulses well before modern cultural norms made life even more frustrating.

The point is that repression and the unconscious mind are the products of millions of years of evolution and were well developed long before civilization further complicated mental life. The new paradigm allows us to think clearly about how these things were designed over those millions of years. The theories of kin selection, parent-offspring conflict, parental investment, reciprocal altruism, and status hierarchy tell us what kinds of self-deception are and aren't likely to be favored by evolution. If present-day Freudians start taking these hints and recast their ideas accordingly, maybe they can save Freud's name from the eclipse it will probably suffer if the task is left to Darwinians.

THE POSTMODERN MIND

All told, the Darwinian notion of the unconscious is more radical than the Freudian one. The sources of self-deception are more nu merous, diverse, and deeply rooted, and the line between conscious and unconscious is less clear. Freud described Freudianism as an attempt to "prove to the 'ego' of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on un consciously in his own mind."²¹ By Darwinian lights, this word ing almost gives too much credit to the "self." It seems to suggest an otherwise clear-seeing mental entity getting deluded in various ways. To an evolutionary psychologist, the delusion seems so pervasive that the usefulness of thinking about any distinct core of honesty falls into doubt.

Indeed, the commonsense way of thinking about the relation between our thoughts and feelings, on the one hand, and our pursuit of goals, on the other, is not just wrong, but backward. We tend to think of ourselves as making judgments and then behaving accord ingly: "we" decide who is nice and then befriend them; "we" decide who is upstanding and applaud them; "we" figure out who is wrong and oppose them; "we" figure out what is true and abide by it. To this picture Freud would add that often we have goals we aren't aware of, goals that may get pursued in oblique, even counterproductive, ways — and that our perception of the world may get warped in the process.

But if evolutionary psychology is on track, the whole picture needs to be turned inside out. We believe the things — about morality personal worth, even objective truth — that lead to behaviors that get our genes into the next generation. (Or at least we believe the kinds of things that, in the environment of our evolution, would have been likely to get our genes into the next generation.) It is the behavioral goals — status, sex, effective coalition, parental investment, and so on — that remain steadfast while our view of reality adjusts to accommoderate this constancy. What is in our genes' interests is what seems "right" — morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of Tightness is in order. In short: if Freud stressed people's difficulty in seeing the truth about themselves, the new Darwinians stress the difficulty of seeing, truth, period. Indeed, Darwinism comes close to calling into question the very meaning of the word truth. For the social discourses that supposedly lead to truth — moral discourse, political discourse, even, sometimes, academic discourse — are, by Darwinian lights, raw power struggles. A winner will emerge, but there's often no reason to expect that winner to be truth. A cynicism deeper than Freudian cynicism may have once seemed hard to imagine, but here it is.

This Darwinian brand of cynicism doesn't exactly fill a gaping cultural void. Already, various avant-garde academics — "deconstructionist" literary theorists and anthropologists, adherents of "critical legal studies" — are viewing human communication as "discourses of power." Already many people believe what the new Darwinism underscores: that in human affairs, all (or at least much) is artifice, a self-serving manipulation of image. And already this belief helps nourish a central strand of the postmodern condition: a powerful inability to take things seriously. Ironic self-consciousness is the order of the day. Cutting-edge talk shows are massively self-referential, with jokes about cue cards written on cue cards, camera shots of cameras, and a general tendency for the format to undermine itself. Architecture is now about architecture, as architects playfully and, sometimes, patronizingly meld motifs of different ages into structures that invite us to laugh along with them. What is to be avoided at all costs in the postmodern age is earnestness, which betrays an embarrassing naivete. Whereas modern cynicism brought despair about the ability of the human species to realize laudable ideals, postmodern cynicism doesn't — not because it's optimistic, but because it can't take ideals seriously in the first place. The prevailing attitude is absurdism. A postmodern magazine may be irreverent, but not bitterly irreverent, for it's not purposefully irreverent; its aim is indiscriminate, because everyone is equally ridiculous. And anyway, there's no moral basis for passing judgment. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

It is conceivable that the postmodern attitude has already drawn some strength from the new Darwinian paradigm. Sociobiology, however astringent its reception in academia, began seeping into pop ular culture two decades ago. In any event, the future progress of Darwinism may strengthen the postmodern mood. Surely, within academia, deconstructionists and critical legal scholars can find much to like in the new paradigm. And surely, outside of academia, one reasonable reaction to evolutionary psychology is a self-consciousness so acute, and a cynicism so deep, that ironic detachment from the whole human enterprise may provide the only relief.

Thus the difficult question of whether the human animal can be a moral animal — the question that modern cynicism tends to greet with despair — may seem increasingly quaint. The question may be whether, after the new Darwinism takes root, the word moral can be anything but a joke.

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Chapter 16: EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions! —
The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.

— M Notebook (1838)

It is other question what it is desirable to be taught, —
all are agreed general utility.

— "Old and Useless Notes" (undated)

In 1871, twelve years after The Origin of Species appeared, Darwin published The Descent of Man, in which he set out his theory of the "moral sentiments." He didn't trumpet the theory's unsettling implications; he didn't stress that the very sense of right and wrong, which feels as if heaven-sent, and draws its power from that feeling, is an arbitrary product of our peculiar evolutionary past. But the book did feature, in places, an air of moral relativism. If human society were patterned after bee society, Darwin wrote, "there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering."

Some people got the picture. The Edinburgh Review observed that, if Darwin's theory turned out to be right, "most earnest-minded men will be compelled to give up these motives by which they have attempted to live noble and virtuous lives, as founded on a mistake; our moral sense will turn out to be a mere developed instinct. ... If these views be true, a revolution in thought is imminent, which will shake society to its very foundations by destroying the sanctity of the conscience and the religious sense."³

However breathless this prediction may sound, it wasn't entirely off base. The religious sense has indeed waned, especially among the intelligentsia, the kinds of people who read today's equivalents of the Edinburgh Review. And the conscience doesn't seem to carry quite the weight it carried for the Victorians. Among ethical philosophers, there is nothing approaching agreement on where we might turn for basic moral values — except, perhaps, nowhere. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the prevailing moral philosophy within many philosophy departments is nihilism. A hefty, though unknown, amount of all this can be attributed to the one-two punch Darwin delivered: the Origin's assault on the biblical account of creation, followed by the Descent's doubts about the status of the moral sense.

If plain old-fashioned Darwinism has indeed sapped the moral strength of Western civilization, what will happen when the new version fully sinks in? Darwin's sometimes diffuse speculations about the "social instincts" have given way to theories firmly grounded in logic and fact, the theories of reciprocal altruism and kin selection. And they don't leave our moral sentiments feeling as celestial as they used to. Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse, even the very sense of justice, the sense that doers of good deserve reward and doers of bad deserve punishment — all these can now be viewed as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet.

What's more, we can't take solace, as Darwin did, in the mistaken belief that these things evolved for the greater good — the "good of the group." Our ethereal intuitions about what's right and what's wrong are weapons designed for daily, hand-to-hand combat among individuals.

It isn't only moral feelings that now fall under suspicion, but all of moral discourse. By the lights of the new Darwinian paradigm, a moral code is a political compromise. It is molded by competing interest groups, each bringing all its clout to bear. This is the only discernible sense in which moral values are sent down from on high — they are shaped disproportionately by the various parts of society where power resides.

So where does this leave us? Alone in a cold universe, without a moral gyroscope, without any chance of finding one, profoundly devoid of hope? Can morality have no meaning for the thinking person in a post-Darwinian world? This is a deep and murky question that (readers may be relieved to hear) will not be rigorously addressed in this book. But we might at least take the trouble to see how Darwin handled the question of moral meaning. Though he didn't have access to the new paradigm, with its several peculiarly dispiriting elements, he definitely caught, as surely as the Edinburgh Review did, the morally disorienting drift of Darwinism. Yet he continued to use the words good and bad, right and wrong, with extreme gravity. How did he keep taking morality seriously?

DOOMED RIVALS

As Darwinism was catching on, and the Edinburgh Review's fears were sinking in, a number of thinkers scrambled to avert a collapse of all moral foundation. Many of them skirted evolutionism's threat to religious and moral tradition with a simple maneuver: they redirected their religious awe toward evolution itself, turning it into a touchstone for right and wrong. To see moral absolutes, they said, we need only look to the process that created us; the "right" way to behave is in keeping with evolution's basic direction: we should all go with its flow.

What exactly was its flow? Opinions differed. One school, later called social Darwinism, dwelt on natural selection's pitiless but ultimately creative disposal of the unfit. The moral of the story seemed to be that suffering is the handmaiden of progress, in human as in evolutionary history. The Bartlett's Familiar Quotations version of social Darwinism comes from Herbert Spencer, generally regarded as its father: "The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many 'in shallows and in miseries,' are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence."

Actually, Spencer wrote that in 1851, eight years before the Origin appeared. And, for that matter, various people had long had the feeling that gain through pain was nature's way. This was part of the free-market faith that had brought England such rapid material progress. But the theory of natural selection, in the eyes of many capitalists, gave this view an added measure of cosmic affirmation. John D. Rockefeller said that the withering of weak companies in a laissez-faire economy was "the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God."

Darwin found crude moral imputations to his theory laughable. He wrote to Lyell, "I have noted in a Manchester newspaper a rather good squib, showing that I have proved 'might is right' and therefore Napoleon is right and every cheating tradesman is also right." For that matter, Spencer himself would have disavowed that squib. He wasn't as heartless as his more severe utterances imply, nor as heartless as he is now remembered. He put lots of emphasis on the goodness of altruism and sympathy, and he was a pacifist.

How Spencer arrived at these kinder, gentler values illustrates a second approach to figuring out evolution's "flow." The idea was to view evolution's direction, not just its dynamics, as a source of guidance; to know how humans should behave, we must first ask toward what end evolution is heading.

There are various ways to answer this question. Today, among biologists, one common answer is that evolution has no discernible end. Spencer, at any rate, believed evolution had tended to move species toward longer and more comfortable lives and the more secure rearing of offspring. Our mission, then, was to nourish these values. And the way to do so was to cooperate with one another, to be nice — to live in "permanently peaceful societies."⁶

All of this now lies in the dustbin of intellectual history. In 1903, the philosopher G. E. Moore decisively assaulted the idea of drawing values from evolution or, for that matter, from any aspect of observed nature. He labeled this error the "naturalistic fallacy." Ever since, philosophers have worked hard not to commit it.

Moore wasn't the first to question the inference of "ought" from "is." John Stuart Mill had done it a few decades earlier. Mill's dismissal of the naturalistic fallacy, much less technical and academic than Moore's, was more simply compelling. Its key was to articulate clearly the usually unspoken assumption that typically underlies attempts to use nature as a guide to right conduct: namely, that nature was created by God and thus must embody his values. And, Mill added, not just any God. If, for example, God is not benevolent, then why honor his values? And if he is benevolent, but isn't omnipotent, why suppose that he has managed to precisely embed his values in nature? So the question of whether nature deserves slavish emulation boils down to the question of whether nature appears to be the handiwork of a benevolent and omnipotent God.

Mill's answer was: Are you kidding? In an essay called "Nature," he wrote that nature "impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve." And she does all this "with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst... ."Mill observed, "If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals." Anyone, "whatever kind of religious phrases he may use," must concede "that if Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man." Nor, believed Mill, should we look for guidance to our moral intuition, a device "for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices."

Mill wrote "Nature" before the Origin came out (though he published it after), and didn't consider the possibility that suffering in a price paid for organic creation. Still, the question, even then, would remain: If God were benevolent and truly omnipotent, why couldn't he invent a painless creative process? Darwin himself, at any rate, saw the voluminous pain in the world as working against common religious beliefs. In 1860, the year after the Origin appeared and long before Mill's "Nature" did, he wrote in a letter to Asa Gray: "I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."

THE ETHICS OF DARWIN AND MILL

Darwin and Mill not only saw the problem in much the same terms; they also §aw the solution in much the same terms. Both believed that, in a universe which for all we know is godless, one reasonable place to find moral guidance is utilitarianism. Mill, of course, did more than subscribe to utilitarianism. He was its premier publicist. In 1861, two years after On Liberty and the Origin appeared, he published a series of articles in Fraser's magazine that are now known by the single title Utilitarianism and have become the doctrine's classic defense.

The idea of utilitarianism is simple: the fundamental guidelines for moral discourse are pleasure and pain. Things can be called good to the extent that they raise the amount of happiness in the world and bad to the extent that they raise the amount of suffering. The purpose of a moral code is to maximize the world's total happiness. Darwin quibbled with this formulation. He distinguished between "the general good or welfare of the community," and "the general happiness," and embraced the former, but then conceded that since "happiness is an essential part of the general good, the greatest-happiness principle indirectly serves as a nearly safe standard of right and wrong."¹² He was, for practical purposes, a utilitarian.¹³ And he was a great admirer of Mill, both for his moral philosophy and for his political liberalism.

One virtue of Mill's utilitarianism in a post-Darwinian world is its minimalism. If it is harder now to find a grounding for assertions about basic moral values, then, presumably, the fewer and the simpler the foundational assertions, the better. Utilitarianism's foundation consists largely of the simple assertion that happiness, all other things being equal, is better than unhappiness. Who could argue with that?

You'd be surprised. Some people believe that even this seemingly modest moral claim is an unwarranted inference of "ought" from "is" — that is, from the real-world fact that people do like happiness. G. E. Moore himself argued as much (though later philosophers have traced Moore's complaint to a misunderstanding of Mill).

It's true that Mill sometimes worded his argument in a way that invited such criticism.¹⁵ But he never professed to have quite "proven" the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain; he believed "first principles" beyond proof. His argument followed more modest and pragmatic lines. One of them consisted of saying, basically: Let's face it, we all subscribe at least partly to utilitarianism; some of us just don't use the term.

First of all, we all conduct our own lives as if happiness were the object of the game. (Even people who practice severe self-denial typically do so in the name of future happiness, either here or in the hereafter.) And once each of us admits that, yes, we find our own happiness in some basic sense good, something that is not rightly trampled upon without reason, it becomes hard to deny everyone else's identical claim without sounding a bit presumptuous. Indeed, the point is widely conceded: everyone — except sociopaths, whom the rest of us consider poor moral beacons — agrees that the question of how their acts affect the happiness of others is an important part of moral evaluation. You may believe in any number of absolute rights (freedom, say) or obligations (never cheat). You may consider these things divinely ordained, or unerringly intuited. You may believe that they always override — "trump," as some philosophers say — solely utilitarian arguments. But you don't believe the utilitarian arguments are irrelevant; you implicitly agree that, in the absence of your trump card, they would win.

What's more, when pressed, you probably have a tendency to justify your trump cards in utilitarian terms. You might argue, for example, that even if the occasional isolated act of cheating somehow inrcased overall welfare in the short run, cheating on a regular basis would erode integrity, so that moral chaos would eventually ensue, to everyone's detriment. Or, similarly, once freedom is denied even to a small group of people, no one will feel secure. This sort of underlying logic — closet utilitarianism — often emerges when the logic behind basic "rights" is teased out. "The greatest-happiness principle," Mill wrote, "has had a large share in forming the moral doctrines even of those who most scornfully reject its authority. Nor is there any school of thought which refuses to admit that the influence of actions on happiness is a most material and even predominant consideration in many of the details of morals, however unwilling to acknowledge it as the fundamental principle of morality, and the source of moral obligation."¹⁶

The above arguments for "trump cards" illustrate a scantly appreciated fact: utilitarianism can be the basis for absolute rights and obligations. A utilitarian can fiercely defend "inviolable" values, so long as their violation would plausibly lead to big problems in the long run. Such a utilitarian is a "rule" utilitarian, as Mill seems to have been, rather than an "act" utilitarian.¹⁷ Such a person doesn't ask: What is the effect on overall human happiness of my doing such and such today? Instead the question is: What would be the effect if people always did such and such in comparable circumstances, as a rule?

Belief in the goodness of happiness and the badness of suffering isn't just a basic part of moral discourse that we all share. Increasingly it seems to be the only basic part that we all share. Thereafter, fragmentation ensues, as different people pursue different divinely imparted or seemingly self-evident truths. So if a moral code is indeed a code for the entire community, then the utilitarian mandate — happiness is good, suffering bad — seems to be the most practical, if not the only practical, basis for moral discourse. It is the common denominator for discussion, the only premise everyone stands on. It's just about all we have left.

Of course, you could dig up a few people who wouldn't go even that far; perhaps citing the naturalistic fallacy, they would insist that there's nothing good about happiness. (My own view is that the goodness of happiness is, in fact, a moral value that remains unscathed by the naturalistic fallacy. Conveniently, space doesn't permit the dissertation-length defense that this claim requires.) Some other people might say that although happiness is a fine thing, they don't think there should be any such thing as a consensually accepted moral code. That's their prerogative. They are free to opt out of moral discourse, and out of any obligations, and benefits, that the resulting code might bring. But if you believe that the idea of a public moral code makes sense, and you want it to be broadly accepted, then the utilitarian premise would seem to be a logical starting point.

Still, the question is a good one: Why should we have a moral code? Even accepting the basis of utilitarianism — the goodness of happiness — you might ask: Why should any of us worry about the happiness of others? Why not let everyone worry about their own happiness — which seems, anyway, to be the one thing they can be more or less counted on to do?

Perhaps the best answer to this question is a sheerly practical one: thanks to our old friend non-zero-sumness, everyone's happiness can, in principle, go up if everyone treats everyone else nicely. You refrain from cheating or mistreating me, I refrain from cheating or mistreating you; we're both better off than we would be in a world without morality. For in such a world the mutual mistreatment would roughly cancel itself out anyway (assuming neither of us is a vastly more proficient villain than the other). And, meanwhile, we would each incur the added cost of fear and vigilance.

To put the point another way: life is full of cases where a slight expenditure on one person's part can yield a larger saving on another person's part. For example: holding open a door for the person walking behind you. A society in which everyone holds the door open for people behind them is a society in which everyone is better off (assuming none of us has an odd tendency to walk through doors in front of people). If you can create this sort of system of mutual consideration — a moral system — it's worth the trouble from everyone's point of view.

In this light, the argument for a utilitarian morality can be put concisely: widely practiced utilitarianism promises to make everyone better off; and so far as we can tell, that's what everyone wants.

Mill followed the logic of non-zero-sumness (without using the term, or even being very explicit about the idea) to its logical conclusion. He wanted to maximize overall happiness; and the way to maximize it is for everyone to be thoroughly self-sacrificing. You shouldn't hold doors open for people only if you can do so quite easily and thereby save them lots of trouble. You should hold doors open whenever the amount of trouble you save them is even infinitesimally greater than the trouble you take. You should, in short, go through life considering the welfare of everyone else exactly as important as your own welfare.

This is a radical doctrine. People who preach it have been known to get crucified. Mill wrote: "In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality."¹⁸

DARWIN AND BROTHERLY LOVE

It is surprising to see such a warm, mushy idea — brotherly love — grow out of a word as cold and clinical as "utilitarianism." But it shouldn't be. Brotherly love is implicit in the standard formulations of utilitarianism — maximum total happiness, the greatest good for the greatest number. In other words: everyone's happiness counts equally; you are not privileged, and you shouldn't act as if you are. This is the second, less conspicuous foundational assumption of Mill's argument. From the beginning he is asserting not only that happiness is good, but that no one person's happiness is special.

It is hard to imagine an assertion that more directly assaults the values implicit in nature. If there's one thing natural selection "wants" us to believe, it's that our individual happiness is special. This is the basic gyroscope it has built into us; by pursuing goals that promise to make us happy, we will maximize the proliferation of our genes (or, at least, would have stood a good chance of doing that in the ancestral environment). Leave aside for the moment that pursuing goals which promise to make us happy, in the long run, often doesn't; leave aside that natural selection doesn't really "care" about our happiness in the end and will readily countenance our suffering if that will get our genes into the next generation. For now the point is that the basic mechanism by which our genes control us is the deep, often unspoken (even unthought), conviction that our happiness is special. We are designed not to worry about anyone else's happiness, except in the sort of cases where such worrying has, during evolution, benefited our genes.

And it isn't just us. Self-absorption is the hallmark of life on this planet. Organisms are things that act as if their welfare were more important than the welfare of all other organisms (except, again, when other organisms can help spread their genes). It may sound innocuous for Mill to say that your happiness is a legitimate goal only so long as it doesn't interfere with the happiness of others, but this is an evolutionary heresy. Your happiness is designed to interfere with the happiness of others; the very reason it exists is to inspire selfish preoccupation with it.

Long before Darwin knew about natural selection, long before he could have thought about its "values," his own contrary values were well formed. The ethics embraced by Mill were a Darwin family tradition. Grandfather Erasmus had written about the "greatest happiness principle." And on both sides of the family universal compassion had long been an ideal. In 1788 Darwin's maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, made hundreds of antislavery medallions showing a black man in chains under the words "AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?" Darwin sustained the tradition, feeling deeply the anguish of black men who, he observed bitterly, "are ranked by the polished savages in England as hardly their breth-ren, even in God's eyes."

This sort of simple and deep compassion is what Darwin's utilitarianism ultimately rested on. To be sure, he did, like Mill, pen a rationale for his ethics (a rationale that, oddly, flirts more openly than Mill's with the naturalistic fallacy).²² But in the end, Darwin was simply a man who empathized boundlessly; and in the end, boundless empathy is what utilitarianism is.

Once Darwin fathomed natural selection, he surely saw how deeply his ethics were at odds with the values it implies. The insidious lethality of a parasitic wasp, the cruelty of a cat playing with a mouse — these are, after all, just the tip of the iceberg. To ponder natural selection is to be staggered by the amount of suffering and death that can be the price for a single, slight advance in organic design. And it is to realize, moreover, that the purpose of this "advance" — longer, sharper canine teeth in male chimpanzees, say — is often to make other animals suffer or die more surely. Organic design thrives on pain, and pain thrives on organic design.

Darwin doesn't seem to have spent much time agonizing over this conflict between natural selection's "morality" and his own. If a parasitic wasp or a cat playing with mice embodies nature's values — well, so much the worse for nature's values. It is remarkable that a creative process devoted to selfishness could produce organisms which, having finally discerned this creator, reflect on this central value and reject it. More remarkable still, this happened in record time; the very first organism ever to see its creator did precisely that. Darwin's moral sentiments, designed ultimately to serve selfishness, renounced this criterion of design as soon as it became explicit.²³

DARWINISM AND BROTHERLY LOVE

It's conceivable that Darwin's values, ironically, drew a certain strength from his pondering of natural selection. Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another: "My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death." And you are one of these organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity. It's enough to make you feel a little alienated — if not, indeed, out and out rebellious.

There is another sense in which Darwinian reflection works against selfishness, a sense Darwin himself could not fully appreciate; there is a sense in which the new Darwinian paradigm can lead one appreciably in the direction of Mill's and Darwin's and Jesus' values.

This is meant informally. I'm not claiming that any moral absolutes follow from Darwinism. Indeed, as we've seen, the very idea of moral absolutes has suffered a certain amount of damage at Darwin's hands. But I do believe that most people who clearly understand the new Darwinian paradigm and earnestly ponder it will be led toward greater compassion and concern for their fellow human beings. Or, at least toward the admission, in moments of detachment, that greater compassion and concern would seem to be in order.

The new paradigm strips self-absorption of its noble raiment. Selfishness, remember, seldom presents itself to us in naked form. Belonging as we do to a species (the species) whose members justify their actions morally, we are designed to think of ourselves as good and our behavior as defensible, even when these propositions are objectively dubious. The new paradigm, by exposing the biological machinery behind this illusion, makes the illusion harder to buy.

For example, nearly all of us say, and believe, that we don't dislike people without reason. If someone is an object of our wrath, or even of our callous indifference — if we can enjoy his suffering, or easily countenance it — it is because of something he did, we say; he deserves to be treated coldly.

Now, for the first time, we understand clearly how humans came to have this feeling that the deserts they dish out are just. And its origins don't inspire great moral confidence.

At the root of this feeling is the retributive impulse, one of the basic governors of reciprocal altruism. It evolved not for the good of the species, or the good of the nation, or even for the good of the tribe, but for the good of the individual. And, really, even this is misleading; the impulse's ultimate function is to get the individual's genetic information copied.

This doesn't necessarily mean the impulse of retribution is bad. But it does mean that some of the reasons we've been thinking of it as good are now open to question. In particular, the aura of reverence surrounding the impulse — the ethereal sense that retribution embodies some higher ethical truth — is harder to credit once the aura is seen to be a self-serving message from our genes, not a beneficent message from the heavens. Its origin is no more heavenly than that of hunger, hatred, lust, or any of the other things that exist by virtue of their past success in shoving genes through generations.

There is, actually, a defense of retribution that can be cast in moral terms — in utilitarian terms, or in terms of any other morality whose aim is to get people to behave considerately toward one another. Retribution helps solve the "cheater" problem that any moral system faces; people who are seen to take more than they give are thereafter punished, discouraged from always being a door holdee and never a door holder. Even though the retributive impulse wasn't designed for the good of the group, as Mill's moral system is, it can, and often does, raise the sum of social welfare. It keeps people mindful of the interests of others. However lowly its origins, it has come to serve a lofty purpose. This is something to be thankful for.

And it might be enough to exonerate the retributive impulse except for one fact: the grievances redressed by retribution aren't tallied with the sort of divine objectivity that Mill would prescribe. We don't try to punish only people who truly have cheated or mis treated us. Our moral accounting system is wantonly subjective, in formed by a deep bias toward the self.

And this general bias in calculating what we're owed is only one of several departures from clarity of moral judgment. We tend to find our rivals morally deficient, to find our allies worthy of compassion, to gear that compassion to their social status, to ignore the socially marginal altogether. Who could look at all this and then claim with a straight face that our various departures from brotherly love possess the sort of integrity we ascribe to them?

We are right to say that we never dislike people without a reason. But the reason, often, is that it is not in our interests to like them; liking them won't elevate our social status, aid our acquisition of material or sexual resources, help our kin, or do any of the other things that during evolution have made genes prolific. The feeling of "rightness" accompanying our dislike is just window dressing. Once you've seen that, the feeling's power may diminish.^*

But wait a minute. Couldn't we similarly discount the sense of rightness accompanying compassion, sympathy, and love? After all, love, like hate, exists only by virtue of its past contribution to genetic proliferation. At the level of the gene, it is as crassly self-serving to love a sibling, an offspring, or a spouse as it is to hate an enemy. If the base origins of retribution are grounds for doubting it, why shouldn't love be doubted too?

The answer is that love should be doubted, but that it survives the doubt in pretty good shape. At least, it survives in good shape by the lights of a utilitarian, or indeed of anyone who considers happiness a moral good. Love, after all, makes us want to further the happiness of others; it makes us give up a little so that others (the loved ones) may have a lot. More than that: love actually makes this sacrifice feel good, thus magnifying total happiness all the more. Of course, sometimes love is hurtful. Witness the woman in Texas who plotted the murder of the mother of her daughter's rival for a cheer-leading slot. Her maternal love, though undeniably intense, doesn't go down the positive side of the moral ledger. And so too whenever love ends up doing more harm than good. But either way — whether the new result is good or bad — the moral evaluation of love is the same as the evaluation of retribution: we must first clear away the window dressing, the intuitive feeling of "rightness," and then soberly assess the effect on overall happiness.

Thus the service performed by the new paradigm isn't, strictly speaking, to reveal the baseness of our moral sentiments; that baseness, per se, counts neither for nor against them; the ultimate genetic selfishness underlying an impulse is morally neutral — grounds neither for embracing the impulse nor for condemning it. Rather, the paradigm is useful because it helps us see that the aura of rightness surrounding so many of our actions may be delusional; even when they feel right, they may do harm. And surely hatred, more often than love, does harm while feeling right. That is why I contend that the new paradigm will tend to lead the thinking person toward love and away from hate. It helps us judge each feeling on its merits; and on grounds of merit, love usually wins.

Of course, if you're not a utilitarian, sorting these issues out may be more complex. And although utilitarianism was Darwin's and Mill's solution to the moral challenge of modern science, it isn't everyone's. Nor is this chapter intended to make it everyone's (although, I admit, it's mine). The point, rather, is to show that a Darwinian world needn't be an amoral world. If you accept even the simple assertion that happiness is better than unhappiness (all other things being equal), you can go on to construct a full-fledged mo rality, with absolute laws and rights and all the rest. You can keep finding laudable some of the things we've always found laudable love, sacrifice, honesty. Only the most die-hard nihilist, who insists that there's nothing good about the happiness of human beings, could find the word moral meaningless in a post-Darwinian world.

ENGAGING THE ENEMY

Darwin was not the only Victorian evolutionist who took a dim view of evolution's "values." Another was his friend and advocate Thomas Huxley. In a lecture titled "Evolution and Ethics," which he delivered at Oxford University in 1893, Huxley took aim at the whole premise of social Darwinism, the idea of deriving values from evolution. Echoing the logic of Mill's essay "Nature," he said that "cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before." Indeed, a close look at evolution, with its massive toll in death and suffering, suggested to Huxley that it is rather at odds with what we call good. Let us understand, he said, "once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it." Peter Singer, one of the first philosophers to take the new Dar winism seriously, has noted, in this context, that "the more you know about your opponent, the better your chances of winning." And George Williams, who did so much to define the new paradigm, has embraced both Huxley's and Singer's points, and stressed how strongly the new paradigm underscores them. His revulsion at natural selection's values, he writes, is even greater than Huxley's, "based both on the more extreme contemporary view of natural selection as a process for maximizing selfishness, and on the longer list of vices now assignable to the enemy." And if the enemy is indeed "worse than Huxley thought, there is a more urgent need for biological understanding."²⁶

Biological understanding to date suggests some basic rules for engaging the enemy. (My enumeration of them isn't meant to imply that I'm notably successful in following them.) A good starting point would be to generally discount moral indignation by 50 percent or so, mindful of its built-in bias, and to be similarly suspicious of moral indifference to suffering. We should be especially vigilant in certain situations. We seem, for example, prone to grow indignant about the behavior of distinct groups of people (nations, say) whose interests conflict with a distinct group to which we belong. We also tend to be inconsiderate of low-status people and exceedingly tolerant of high-status people; making life somewhat easier on the former at the expense of the latter is probably warranted, at least by utilitarian V lights (and the lights of other egalitarian moralities).

This isn't to say that utilitarianism is mindlessly egalitarian. A powerful person who uses his or her station humanely is a valuable social asset, and thus may merit special treatment, so long as the treatment facilitates such conduct. A famous example in the annals of utilitarian writing is the question of whether you would first save an archbishop or a chambermaid if the two were trapped in a burning building. The standard answer is that you should save the archbishop — even if the chambermaid is your mother — since he will do more good in the future.

Well, maybe so, if the high-status person is an archbishop (and even then, perhaps, it depends on the archbishop). But most high-status people aren't. And there is little evidence that high-status people have any particular proclivity toward conscience or sacrifice. Indeed, the new paradigm stresses that they have attained their status not for "the good of the group" but for themselves; they can be expected to use it accordingly, just as they can be expected to pretend otherwise. Status merits much less indulgence than it generally gets. It is only human nature to extend deference to Mother Teresa and Donald Trump; in the second case, this part of human nature is perhaps unfortunate.

Of course, these prescriptions assume a utilitarian premise — that the happiness of other people is the object of a moral system. What about the nihilists? What about people who insist that not even happiness is a good thing, or that only their happiness is a good thing, or that for some other reason the welfare of others shouldn't concern them? Well, for one thing, they probably go around acting as if it did. For the pretense of selflessness is about as much a part of human nature as is its frequent absence. We dress ourselves up in tony moral language, denying base motives and stressing our at least minimal consideration for the greater good; and we fiercely and self-righteously decry selfishness in others. It seems fair to ask that even people who don't buy the stuff about utilitarianism and brotherly love at least make one minor adjustment in light of the new Darwinism: be consistent; either start subjecting all that moral posturing to skeptical scrutiny or quit the posturing.

For people who choose the former, the simplest single source of guidance is to bear in mind that the feeling of moral "rightness" is something natural selection created so that people would employ it selfishly. Morality, you could almost say, was designed to be misused by its own definition. We've seen what may be the rudiments of self-serving moralizing in our close relatives the chimpanzees as they pursue their agendas with righteous indignation. Unlike them, we can distance ourselves from the tendency long enough to see it — long enough, indeed, to construct a whole moral philosophy that consists essentially of attacking it.

Darwin, on grounds such as this, believed that the human species is a moral one — that, in fact, we are the only moral animal. "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them," he wrote, "We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity."²⁹

In this sense, yes, we are moral; we have, at least, the technical capacity for leading a truly examined life; we have self-awareness, memory, foresight, and judgment. But the last several decades of evolutionary thought lead one to emphasize the word technical. Chronically subjecting ourselves to a true and bracing moral scrutiny, and adjusting our behavior accordingly, is not something we are designed for. We are potentially moral animals — which is more than any other animal can say — but we aren't naturally moral animals. To be moral animals, we must realize how thoroughly we aren't.

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Chapter 17: BLAMING THE VICTIM

As all men desire their own happiness, praise or blame is bestowed on actions and motives, according as they lead to this end.

— The Descent of Man (1871)

We acquire many notions unconsciously, without abstracting them & reasoning on them (as justice ...)

In the mid-1970s, the book Sociobiology gave the new Darwinian paradigm its first burst of publicity. It also gave its author, E. O. Wilson, his first burst of public abuse. He was called a racist, a sexist, a capitilist imperialist. His book was characterized as a right-wing plot, a blueprint for the continued oppression of the oppressed.

It may seem odd that such fears would persist many decades after the unmasking of the "naturalistic fallacy" and the crumbling of social Darwmism's intellectual foundation. But the word natural has more than one application to moral questions. If a man cheating on his wife, or exploiting the weak, excuses himself by saying it's "only natural," he doesn't necessarily mean it's divinely ordained. He may just mean that the impulse runs so deep as to be practically irresistible; what he's doing may not be good, but he can't much help it.

For years, the "sociobiology debate" subsisted largely on this one issue. Darwinians were accused of "genetic determinism" or "biological determinism" — which, it was said, left no room for "free will." They then accused their accusers of confusion; Darwinism, rightly understood, posed no threat to lofty political and moral ideals.

It is true that the accusations were often confused (and that the charges directed specifically against Wilson were gratuitous). But it's also true that some fears on the left have a firm grounding even after the confusion is dispelled. The question of moral responsibility in the view of evolutionary psychology is a large one, and dicey. In fact, it is large enough, properly understood, to alarm the right as well as the left. There are deep and momentous issues lying out there, going largely unaddressed.²

As it happens, Charles Darwin addressed the deepest of them more than a century ago in thoroughly acute and humane fashion. But he didn't tell the world. As aware as any modern Darwinian ol how explosive a truly honest analysis of moral responsibility might be, he never published his thoughts. They have remained in obscurity, in the darkest recesses of his private writings — a grab bag of papers that he labeled, with typically emphatic modesty, "Old & USELESS notes about the moral sense & some metaphysical points." Now, with the biological basis of behavior coming rapidly to light, is .1 good time to excavate Darwin's treasure.

REALITY REARS ITS UGLY HEAD

The occasion for Darwin's analysis is a conflict between ideal and real. Brotherly love is great in theory. In practice, however, problems arise. Even if you could somehow convince lots of people to pursue brotherly love — reality problem number one — you would run into reality problem number two: brotherly love tends to make society fall apart.

After all, true brotherly love is unconditional compassion; it har bors utter doubt about the validity of harming anyone, however repugnant their behavior. And in a society where no one gets punished for anything, repugnant behavior will grow.

This paradox lurks in the background of utilitarianism, especially John Stuart Mill's rendering of it. Mill may say that a good utilitar ian is someone who loves unconditionally, but until the day when everyone does love unconditionally, the realization of utilitarianism's goal — maximum overall happiness — will entail highly conditional love. Those who haven't seen the light must be encouraged to act nice. Murder must be punished, altruism praised, and so on. People must be held accountable.³

Remarkably, Mill didn't confront this tension anywhere in his basic text on the subject, Utilitarianism. A few dozen pages after embracing the universal love taught by Jesus, he endorsed the principle "of giving to each what they deserve, that is, good for good as well as evil for evil."⁴ This is an irreconcilable difference — between saying "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" and saying, "Do unto others as they have done to you"; between saying "Love your enemies" or "Turn the other cheek" and saying "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."⁵

Maybe Mill can be excused for taking a charitable view of the sense of justice, the governor of reciprocal altruism.⁶ As we've noted, the machinery of reciprocal altruism is, for a utilitarian, a real evolutionary godsend; by dishing out a steady stream of tits for tats, it provides the sticks and carrots that keep people in touch with the needs of others. Given that human nature didn't evolve to elevate the community's welfare, it does a none too shabby job of it. Lots of non-zero-sum fruits get reaped.

Still, thanking the retributive impulse for services rendered isn't the same as thanking it for light shed. Whatever its practical value, there is no reason to believe that the inherent sense of justice — the sense that people deserve punishment, that their suffering is a good thing in and of itself — reflects a higher truth. The new Darwinian paradigm, indeed, reveals the sense of rightness surrounding retribution to be mere genetic expediency, and to be warped accordingly. This unmasking was part of the basis for my suggestion in the previous chapter that the new paradigm will tend to steer people toward compassion.

There is a second powerful reason that the idea of retributive punishment looks dubious from the standpoint of modern Darwinisn. Evolutionary psychology professes to be the surest path to a complete explanation of human behavior, good and bad, and of the underlying psychological states: love, hate, greed, and so on. And to know all is to forgive all. Once you see the forces that govern behavior, it's harder to blame the behaver.

This has nothing to do with a supposedly right-wing doctrine of "genetic determinism." To begin with, the question of moral responsibility has no exclusive ideological character. Though some on the far right might be thrilled to hear that businessmen can't help but exploit laborers, they would be less happy to hear that criminals can't help but commit crimes. And neither Bible-thumpers in the "moral majority" nor feminists especially want to hear male philanderers say they're slaves to their hormones.

More to the point: the phrase "genetic determinism" exudes ignorance as to what the new Darwinism is about. As we've seen, everyone (including Darwin) is a victim not of genes, but of genes and environment together: knobs and tunings.

Then again, a victim is a victim. A stereo has no more control over its tunings than over the knobs it was born with; whatever importance you attach to the two factors, there's no sense in which the stereo is to blame for its music. In other words: though the fears of "genetic determinism" that were current in the 1970s were unfounded, the fears of "determinism" weren't. Yet that's also the good news — more reason to doubt impulses of blame and censure and extend our compassion beyond its natural confines of family and friends. Then again, that's also the bad news: this philosophically valid endeavor has some pernicious real-world effects. The situation, in short, is a mess.

Of course, you can argue with the proposition that all we are is knobs and tunings, genes and environment. You can insist that there's something ... something more. But if you try to visualize the form this something would take, or articulate it clearly, you'll find the task impossible, for any force that is not in the genes or the environment is outside of physical reality as we perceive it. It's beyond scientific discourse.

This doesn't mean it doesn't exist, of course. Science may not tell the whole story. But just about everyone on both sides of the sociobiology debate in the 1970s professed to be scientifically minded. That's what was so ironic about all the anthropologists and psychologists who complained of sociobiology's "genetic determinism." The then-reigning philosophy of the social sciences was "cultural determinism" (as anthropologists put it) or "environmental determinism" (as psychologists put it). And when it comes to free will, and thus to blame and credit, determinism is determinism is determinism. As Richard Dawkins has noted, "Whatever view one takes on the question of determinism, the insertion of the word 'genetic' is not going to make any difference."⁷

DARWIN'S DIAGNOSIS

Darwin saw all of this. He didn't know about genes, but he certainly knew about the concept of heredity, and he was a scientific materialist; he didn't think any nonphysical forces were needed to explain human behavior or anything else in the natural world.⁸ He saw that all behavior must therefore boil down to heredity and environment. "[O]ne doubts existence of free will," he wrote in his notebooks, because "every action determined by heredetary [sic] constitution, example of others or teaching of others."⁹

What's more, Darwin saw how these forces have their combined effect: by determining a person's physical "organization," which in turn determines thought and feeling and behavior. "My wish to improve my temper, what does it arise from but organization," he asked in his notebook. "That organization may have been affected by circumstances & education, & by choice which at that time organization gave me to will."

Here Darwin is making a point that even today often goes ungrasped: all influences on human behavior, environmental as well as hereditary, are mediated biologically. Whatever combination of things has given your brain the exact physical organization it has at this moment (including your genes, your early environment, and your assimilation of the first half of this sentence), that physical organization is what determines how you will respond to the second half of this sentence. So, even though the term genetic determinism is confused, the term biological determinism isn't — or, at least, it wouldn't be if people would realize that it's not a mere synonym for genetic determinism. Then again, if they realized that, they'd realize they could drop the word "biological" without losing anything. The sense in which E. O. Wilson is a "biological determinist" is the sense in which B. F. Skinner was a "biological determinist" — which is to say, he was a determinist.¹¹ The sense in which evolutionary psychology is "biologically determinist" is the sense in which all psychology is "biologically determinist."

As for why, if all behavior is determined, we "feel" as if we're making free choices, Darwin had a strikingly twentieth-century explanation: our conscious mind isn't privy to all the motivating forces. "The general delusion about free will obvious. — because man has power of action, & he can seldom analyse his motives (originally mostly INSTINCTIVE, & therefore now great effort of reason to discover them: this is important explanation) he thinks they have none.'

Darwin doesn't seem to have suspected what the new Darwinism suggests: that some of our motives are hidden from us not incidentally but by design, so that we can credibly act as if they aren't what they are; that, more generally, the "delusion about free will" may be an adaptation. Still, he got the basic idea: free will is an illusion, brought to us by evolution. All the things we are commonly blamed or praised for — ranging from murder to theft to Darwin's eminently Victorian politeness — are the result not of choices made by some immaterial "I" but of physical necessity. "This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything," Darwin wrote in his notes. "[N]or ought one to blame others."¹³ Here Darwin has unearthed the most humane scientific insight of all — and, at the same time, one of the most dangerous.

Darwin saw the danger in the forgiveness brought by understand ing; he saw that determinism, by eroding blame, threatens society's moral fiber. But he wasn't too worried about this doctrine spreading. However compelling the logic seemed to a thoughtful scientific ma terialist, most people aren't thoughtful scientific materialists. "This view will not do harm, because no one can be really fully convinced of its truth, except man who has thought very much, & he will know his happiness lays in doing good & being perfect, & therefore will not be tempted, from knowing every thing he does is independent of himself to do harm."¹⁴ In other words: So long as this knowledge is confined to a few English gentlemen, and doesn't infect the masses, everything will be all right.

The masses are now getting infected. What Darwin didn't realize is that the technology of science would eventually make the case for determinism vivid. He saw that "thought, however unintelligible it may be, seems as much function of organ, as bile of liver," but he probably didn't dream that we would start pinpointing specific connections between the organ and the thoughts.¹⁵

Today these connections regularly make headlines. Scientists link crime to low serotonin. Molecular biologists try — with slight but growing success — to isolate genes that incline the brain toward mental illness. A natural chemical called oxytocin is found to underlie love. And an unnatural chemical, the drug Ecstasy, induces a deeply benign state of mind; now anyone can be Gandhi for a day. People are getting the sense — from news in genetics, molecular biology, pharmacology, neurology, endocrinology — that we are all machines, pushed and pulled by forces that we can't discern but that science can.

This picture, though utterly biological, has no special connection with evolutionary biology. Genes, neurotransmitters, and the various other elements of mind control are being studied, for the most part, without special inspiration from Darwinism.

But Darwinism will increasingly frame this picture and give it narrative force. We will see not only that, for example, low serotonin encourages crime, but why: it seems to reflect a person's perception of loreclosed routes to material success; natural selection may "want" that person to take alternate routes. Serotonin and Darwinism together could thus bring sharp testament to otherwise vague complaints about how criminals are "victims of society." A young inner-city thug is pursuing status by the path of least resistance, no less than you; and he is compelled by forces just as strong and subtle as the ones that have made you what you are. You may not reflect on this when he kicks your dog or snatches your purse, but afterwards, on reflection, you may. And you may then see that you would have been him had you been born in his circumstances.

The landslide of news about the biology of behavior is just beginning. People, by and large, haven't succumbed to it and concluded that we're all mere machines. So the notion of free will lives on. But it shows signs of shrinking. Every time a behavior is found to rest on chemistry, someone tries to remove it from the realm of volition. That "someone" is typically a defense lawyer. The most famous example is the "Twinkie defense." A lawyer convinced a California jury that a junk-food diet had left his client with a "diminished capacity" to think clearly, and that full "premeditation" of his crime — murder — was thus impossible. Other examples abound. In both British and American courts, women have used premenstrual syndrome to partly insulate themselves from criminal responsibility. As Martin Daly and Margo Wilson rhetorically asked in their book Homicide, can a "high-testosterone" defense of male murderers bo far behind?¹⁶

Of course, psychology was eroding culpability even before biology came along to help it. "Posttraumatic stress disorder" is a defense lawyer's favorite malady — said to encompass everything from "battered-woman syndrome" to "depression-suicide syndrome" (which purportedly leads people not only to commit crimes, but to bungle them, with the unconscious goal of being caught). The dis order was originally couched in purely psychological terms, with little reference to biology. But work is constantly under way to link such maladies to biochemistry, because physical evidence is what really gets a jury's attention. Already, an expert witness touting a conjectured posttraumatic stress disorder subcategory called "action-addict syndrome" (a dependency on the thrill of danger) has traced the problem to endorphins, which the criminal desperately craves, and obtains via crime.¹⁷ And compulsive gamblers, it turns out, have abnormally high levels of endorphins in their blood when they gamble. Thus (the argument goes) gambling is a disease. Well, we all like our endorphins, and we all do things to get them, ranging from jogging to sex. And when we do those things, our endorphin levels are abnormally high. No doubt rapists feel good at some point during or after their crimes; no doubt that pleasure has a biochemical basis; and no doubt this basis will come to light. If defense lawyers get their way and we persist in removing biochemically mediated actions from the realm of free will, then within decade that realm will be infinitesimal. As, indeed, it should be — on strictly intellectual grounds, at least.

There are at least two ways to respond to the growing body of evidence that biochemistry governs all. One is to use the data, perversely, as proof of volition. The argument runs as follows: Of course all these criminals have free will, regardless of the state of their endorphins, blood-sugar levels, and everything else. Because if bio-chemistry negated free will, then none of us would have free will! And we know that's not the case. Right? (Pause.) Right?

This sort of whistling in the dark is often heard in the books and articles that bemoan crumbling culpability. It was also implicit in the referendum that finally removed the "diminished capacity" defense from California law. Presumably the voters sensed that if something as natural as sugar could indeed turn you into a robot, that would mean everyone's a robot, and no one deserves punishment. Precisely. The second response to dehumanizing biochemical data is Darwin's — complete surrender. Give up on free will; no one really deserves blame or credit for anything; we are all slaves of biology. We must view a wicked man, Darwin wrote in his notes, "like a sickly one." It would "be more proper to pity than to hate & be disgusted."

In short: brotherly love is a valid doctrine. The hatred and revulsion that send people to jail and to the gallows — and, in other contexts, lead to arguments, fights, and wars — are without intellectual foundation. Of course, they may have a practical foundation, Indeed, that's the problem: blame and punishment are as practically neccssary as they are intellectually vacuous. That's why Darwin took comfort in the hope that his insights would never become common.

DARWIN'S PRESCRIPTION

What to do? If Darwin knew that the cat, alas, was out of the bag, that the material underpinnings of behavior were on public display, what would he suggest? How should society respond to creeping knowledge of our robotic nature? There are hints in his notes. To begin with, we should try to disentangle punishment from the visceral impulses that drive it. This will sometimes mean narrowing its use, restricting it to the cases where it actually does some good. "[I]t is right to punish criminals; but solely to deter others," Darwin wrote. This is very much in the spirit of the time-honored utilitarian prescription. We should punish people only so long as that will raise overall happiness. There is nothing good, in itself, about retribution, the suffering inflicted on wrongdoers is just as sad as the suffering of everyone else, and counts equally in the grand utilitarian calculus. It is warranted only when outweighed by the growth it brings in the welfare of others, "through the prevention of future crime."¹⁹

This idea strikes many people as reasonable and not terribly radical, but taking it seriously would mean overhauling legal doctrine In American law, punishment has several explicit functions. Most are strictly practical: keeping the criminal off the streets, discouraging him from crime after his release, discouraging others who witness his fate, rehabilitating him — all of which a utilitarian would applaud. Bui one of the stated functions of punishment is strictly "moral": retri bution, pure and simple. Even if punishment serves no discernible purpose, it is supposedly good. If on some desert island you happen upon a ninety-five-year-old prison escapee whose very existence was long ago forgotten, you will serve the cause of justice by somehow making him suffer. Even if you don't enjoy dishing out the punishment, and if no one back on the mainland ever hears about it, you can rest assured that, somewhere in the heavens, the God of Justice is smiling.

The doctrine of retributive justice doesn't play the prominent roll-it once played in the courts. But there is discussion these days, es pecially among conservatives, of reemphasizing it. And even now it is one reason courts spend so much time deciding whether people "volitionally" committed a crime — as opposed to being "insane" or "temporarily insane" or having "diminished capacity," or whatever If utilitarians ran the world, messy words like "volition" would never enter the picture. The courts would ask two questions: (a) Did the defendant commit the crime? and (b) What is the practical effect of punishment — on the criminal's own future behavior, and on the behavior of other would-be criminals?

Thus, when a woman who has been beaten or raped by her husband kills or mutilates him, the question wouldn't be whether she has a "disease" called battered-woman syndrome. And when a man kills his wife's lover, the question wouldn't be whether jealousy is "temporary insanity." The question, in both cases, would be whether punishment would prevent these people, and similarly situated people, from committing crimes in the future. This question is impossible to answer precisely, but it's less messy than the question of volition, and it has the added virtue of not being rooted in an outmoded worldview.

Of course, the two questions have a certain amount in common. The courts tend to recognize "free will," and hence justifiable "blame," in the kinds of acts that can be deterred by the anticipation of punishment. Thus, neither a utilitarian nor an old-fashioned judge would send an out-and-out psychotic to jail (though both might institutionalize him if he seemed likely to repeat the crime). As Daly and Wilson write, "The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher, detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil."²⁰

All told, then, "free will" has been a fairly useful fiction, a rough proxy for utilitarian justice. But all the time-wasting debates now in progress (Is alcoholism a disease? Are sex crimes an addiction? Does premenstrual syndrome nullify volition?) suggest that it is beginning to outlive its usefulness. After another decade or two of biological research, it may be more trouble than it's worth; and in the meantime, the scope of "free will" may have shrunk considerably. We will then face (at least) two choices: either (a) artificially restore free will to robustness by redefining it (proclaim, for example, that the existence of a biochemical correlate has no bearing on whether a behavior is volitional); or (b) dispense with volition altogether and adopt explicitly utilitarian criteria of punishment. Both of these options amount to roughly the same thing: as the biological (that is, environmental-genetic) underpinnings of behavior come into view, we must get used to the idea of holding robots responsible for their malfunctions — so long, at least, as this accountability will do some good.

Dispensing with the idea of volition might strip the legal system of some emotional support. Jurors so readily mete out punishment in part because of their vague sense that it's an inherently good thing. Still, this vague sense is a stubborn sense, unlikely to be extinguished by a change of legal doctrine. And even where it weakens, the practical value of punishment will likely remain clear enough to keep jurors doing their jobs.

THOROUGHLY POSTMODERN MORALITY

The truly formidable threat posed by scientific enlightenment is in the moral, not the legal, realm. The problem here isn't that the sense of justice, the governor of reciprocal altruism, will break down entirely. Even people of extreme detachment and humanity, if they feel cheated, lied to, or otherwise mistreated, manage to summon enough indignation for utilitarian purposes. Darwin believed in everyone's ultimate blamelessness, but he could conjure up anger when pressed. He found himself "burning with indignation" at the behavior of his bitter critic, Richard Owen. Writing to Huxley, Darwin said, "I believe I hate him more than you do."²¹

As a rule, if we all worked toward the ideal of universal com passion and forgiveness, drawing on all the enlightenment modern science has to offer, the meager progress we made would hardly bring civilization tumbling down around us. Few of us are anywhere near overkill in the brotherly-love department. And it is unlikely that all the demystifying logic of modern biology will get us there. The hard animal core of TIT FOR TAT is secure against the ravages of truth.

The real moral danger is less direct. Moral systems draw their strength not just from the principles behind TIT FOR TAT-aggrieved parties punishing offenders — but from society at large pun ishing offenders. Charles Dickens was afraid to take up publicly with his mistress not because his wife would have punished him. (He had already left her; and how much power did she have anyway?) He was afraid, rather, of infamy.

And so it is whenever a strong animal impulse is consistently thwarted by a moral code: violation would bring low repute, the avoidance of which is also a strong animal impulse. Effective moral codes fight fire with fire.

Indeed, they fight fire with an elaborate fire-making machine. Robert Axelrod, whose computer tournament so nicely supported the theory of reciprocal altruism, has also studied the ebb and flow of norms. He finds that robust moral codes rest not just on norms but on "metanorms": society disapproves not only of the code's violators but also of those who tolerate violators by failing to disapprove.²² Had Dickens gone public with his adultery, his friends might well have had to cut ties with him or else suffer punishment themselves for failing to punish.

It is in the world of norms and metanorms, with its oblique and diff use retaliation, that modern science takes its toll on moral fiber. We needn't worry about creeping determinism muting a victim's rage. But the rage of spectators may wane as they come to believe that, for example, male philandering is "natural," a biochemical compulsion — and that, anyway, the wife's retributive furor is an arbitrary product of evolution. Life — the life, at least, of those other than ourselves, our kin, and our close friends — becomes a movie that we watch with the bemused detachment of an absurdist. This is the specter of a thoroughly postmodern morality. Darwinism isn't its only source, nor is biology more broadly, but together the two could do much to feed it.

The basic paradox here — the intellectual groundlessness of blame, and the practical need for it — is something few people seem eager to aknowledge. One anthropologist has made the following two statements about divorce: (a) "I do not want to encourage someone saying, 'Well, it's programmed in and I can't help it.' We can help it. While these behaviors may be powerful, many people in fact resist them quite successfully"; and (b) "[T]here are men and women walking the streets today saying to themselves, 'I'm a failure! I've had two marriages, and neither of them has worked.' Well, that's probably a natural human behavior pattern, and they feel a little better when they hear what I have to say. I don't think people need to feel failure following a divorce."²³

Each of these statements is defensible, but you can't have it both ways. It's accurate, on the one hand, to say that any given divorce was inevitable, driven by a long chain of genetic and environmental forces, all mediated biochemically. Still, to stress this inevitability is to affect public discourse, and thus to affect future environmental forces and future neurochemistry, rendering inevitable future divorces that otherwise wouldn't have been. To call things in the past inexorable makes more things in the future inexorable. To tell people they're not to blame for past mistakes is to make future mistakes more likely. The truth is hardly guaranteed to set us free.

Or, to put the point another, perhaps more upbeat, way: the truth depends on what we say the truth is. If men are told that the impulse to philander is deeply "natural," essentially irrepressible, then the impulse — for those men, at least — may indeed be so. In Darwin's day, though, men were told something else: that animal impulses are formidable foes but can, with constant and arduous effort, be defeated. This then became, for many men, the truth. Free will was, in an important sense, created by their belief in it.

In the same sense, one might argue, their "successful" belief in free will justifies our own belief in it. But not belief in the metaphysical doctrine of free will. There is nothing in the behavior of self-disciplined Victorians that upsets the doctrine of determinism; they were just products of their environment, of a time and place where belief in the possibility of self-control was in the air — as were (therefore) stiff moral sanctions against those who failed at the task. Still, these men represent, in a sense, an argument for putting the same influences in our air. At least, these men are evidence that the influ ences can work; they are cause to consider the doctrine of free will "true" in a sheerly pragmatic sense of the word.²⁴ But whether such pragmatism can outweigh real truth — whether a self-fulfilling "belief" in free will can survive the ever-more-manifest dubiousness of free will as a metaphysical doctrine — is another question altogether.

And, anyway, even if this artifice succeeds, and the idea of "blame" remains conveniently robust, we are back to the challenge of confining it to useful proportions: blaming people only when blame serves the greater good, not letting self-righteousness get carried away (as it naturally tends to do). And, meanwhile, we will still face the deeper challenge of reconciling necessary moral sanction with the limitless compassion that is always, in fact, appropriate.

MILL AS A PURITAN

Launching a war against divorce, complete with harsher sanctions against philanderers, and zero tolerance for their claims that philandering is "natural," may or may not be worth the miscellaneous costs. This is a question about which reasonable people may disagree. But creeping determinism is, in any case, a problem, because moral codes of some sort are surely desirable. Morality, after all, is the only way to harvest various fruits of non-zero-sumness — notably those fruits that aren't harvested by kin-selected altruism or reciprocal altruism. Morality makes us mindful of the welfare of people other than family and friends, raising society's overall welfare. You don't have to be a utilitarian to think that's a good thing.

Actually, morality isn't the only way to harvest these particular fruits. But it's the cheapest way, and the least creepy. If no one drinks before driving, society is better off. And most of us would rather see compliance enforced by an internalized moral code than by a ubiquitous police force. This is the rigorous answer to people who ask why terms like morality and values should be taken seriously. Not because tradition is a good thing in itself. But because of what a strong moral code is uniquely able to offer: the more elusive benefits of non-zero-sumness, without lots of police.

John Stuart Mill felt that moral codes could be as stifling and eerie as ubiquitous police. He complained, in On Liberty, of living "under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship."²⁵ So it may seem ironic, at the very least, to pen this ode to moral toughness right after penning an ode to Mill's ethical philosophy, utilitarianism.

But Mill's real complaint wasn't about strong moral codes; it was about strong and mindless moral codes. Specifically: codes banning behaviors that wouldn't have harmed anyone — codes, in other words, that weren't sound from a utilitarian standpoint. In those days, various statistically aberrant lifestyles, such as homosexuality, were considered grave crimes against humanity, even though it was hard to find a human they hurt. And divorce was fairly scandalous even if both husband and wife wanted it and were childless.

But not all rules looked so absurd to Mill. In fact, he pointedly did not embrace a general right to leave a marriage.²⁶ Couching his views on marital responsibility in almost unrecognizably abstract terms, he wrote: "When a person, either by express promise or by conduct, has encouraged another to rely upon his continuing to act in a certain way — to build expectations and calculations, and stake any part of his plan of life upon that supposition — a new series of moral obligations arises on his part towards that person, which may possibly be overruled, but cannot be ignored." And as for leaving a marriage after having children: "[I]f the relation between two con tracting parties ... as in the case of marriage, has even called third parties into existence, obligations arise on the part of both the con tracting parties toward those third persons, the fulfillment of which, or at all events the mode of fulfillment, must be greatly affected by the continuance or disruption of the relation between the original parties to the contract."²⁷ In other words: it's bad to walk out on your family.

Mill's gripe in On Liberty is with Victorian moral gravity, not with moral gravity itself. There had been a time in the distant past, he wrote, when "the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess, and the social principle had a hard struggle with it... ." Back then, the difficulty was "to induce men of strong bodies of minds to pay obedience to any rules which required them to control their impulses." But, "society has now fairly got the better of indi viduality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences." It isn't clear that if Mill were around today he would make the same judgment.

Certainly Mill would attack residues of mindless Victorianism, such as homophobia. But he might well not favor the sort of hedonism that, in the late 1960s, was identified with the left (hallucinogenic drugs and sex) nor the sort that, in the 1980s, was identified with the right (nonhallucinogenic drugs and BMWs).

In fact, Mill considered hedonism fair game for moral judgment even when it hurt no one except the hedonist. We shouldn't punish people for ceding their long-term welfare to the animal within, Mill wrote; still, they can only expect that, since they are hazardous models for emulation, we may choose not to associate with them, and indeed may warn our friends against doing so. "A person who shows rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit — who cannot live within moderate means — who cannot restrain himself from hurtful indulgences — who pursues animal pleasures at the expense of those of feeling and intellect — must expect to be lowered in the opinion of others, and to have a less share of their favourable sentiments... ."²⁹

Here John Stuart Mill, libertarian, meets Samuel Smiles, puritan. Though Mill ridiculed the idea of a "radically corrupt" human nature that must be suffocated in the name of spiritual progress, he also doubted that the higher sentiments, which yield morality, would flower without cultivation. "The truth is," he wrote, "that there is hardly a single point of excellence belonging to human character, which is not decidedly repugnant to the untutored feelings of human nature."³⁰ Smiles himself couldn't have said it better; a not altogether rosy view of human nature underlay his emphasis in Self-Help on strenuous self-restraint. Indeed, notwithstanding the seemingly opposite drifts of Smiles's and Mill's 1859 books, the two men saw eye-to-eye quite broadly. Both (along with Darwin) embraced the left-of-center political reforms of the day, as well as their philosophical framework; Smiles was a big fan of utilitarianism, which was known in those days as "philosophical radicalism."

Mill's position on human nature accords well enough with modern Darwinism. Surely it would be an exaggeration to say that we are innately evil — that, as Mill's caricature of Calvinism would have it, we cannot be good without ceasing to be human. Indeed, the ingredients of morality, from empathy to guilt, have a deep basis in human nature. At the same time, these ingredients don't spontaneously coalesce into a mind that is truly benevolent; they were not designed for the greater good. Nor do these ingredients reliably promote our own happiness. Our happiness was never high among natural selection's priorities, and even if it had been, happiness wouldn't naturally arise in an environment so different from the context of our evolution.

DARWINISM AND IDEOLOGY

There is thus a sense in which the new paradigm lends itself to morally conservative use. By showing that the "moral sentiments" aren't naturally deployed morally, it suggests that a strong moral code may be needed if people are to respect the greater good. Marvelous though it is how often the mutual pursuit of self-interest leads two or more human beings to find common benefit, much common benefit will go unfound unless we take morality seriously.

Does this sort of moral conservatism have a deep connection with political conservatism? Not really. True, political conservatives spend more time than their opposites championing moral austerity. But they also tend to think that the strong moral code we should all obey is the one they espouse ex cathedra — or, at least, the one that has the blessing of "tradition." A Darwinian, by contrast, looks at time-honored moral codes with deep ambivalence.

On the one hand, codes that have long endured must have a kind of compatibility with human nature, and probably do serve the interests of at least someone. But of whom? The molding of a moral code is a power struggle, and power in human societies is usually distributed complexly and unequally. Figuring out which agendas are served can be tricky.

The dissection of moral codes — determining who pays for them and who benefits, and the costs and benefits of alternative codes — is best done with the tools of the new paradigm. And it is best done with care. We should, in the end, dispense with those norms that don't make practical sense, but in the meanwhile we should recognize that norms often do make practical sense; they have grown out of an informal give and take that, though never purely democratic, is sometimes roughly pluralistic. What's more, this implicit negotiation probably took into account some (perhaps harsh) truths about human nature that may not at first be apparent. We should look at moral axioms the way a prospector looks at shiny rocks — with great respect and great suspicion, a healthy ambivalence pending further, and urgent, inspection.

The result of such appraisal will be too diverse to characterize with a simple label. It may be called conservative, so long as that refers to a tentative respect for tradition and not an undying love for it. Then again, the result of the analysis may be called liberal, so long as liberalism isn't equated with hedonism or with moral laissez-faire. If liberalism's moral philosophy is what the (in his day) "radical" John Stuart Mill laid out in On Liberty, then it includes a healthy appreciation of the dark side of human nature and the need for self-restraint, even for moral censure.

As for the effects of creeping biological determinism — which is to say, creeping determinism — they also defy ideological pigeonholing. On the one hand, by stressing that incarceration is always a moral tragedy, if a practical necessity, determinism accents the urgency of erasing the social conditions, such as poverty, that lead to punishable behavior. Darwin saw this. In his notes, after professing his determinism and recognizing the philosophical vacuousness of retribution, he wrote: "Believer in these views will pay great attention to Education." Animals, he noted, "do attack the weak & sickly as we do the wicked. — we ought to pity & assist & educate by putting contingencies in the way to aid motive power."³¹

Yet, Darwin wrote, if a wicked man is "incorrigably bad nothing will cure him. "Indeed. Though the new paradigm stresses the mental plasticity that liberals have long stressed, it also suggests — as does casual observation — that this plasticity is not infinite, and certainly not eternal; many mechanisms of mental development seem to have their essential effects during the first two or three decades of life. It's not yet clear how concrete various aspects of the character then become. (Can a man become a nearly incorrigible rapist, or at least incorrigible until his testosterone level drops, near middle age?) But the answers may at times be favored on the political right, by those who argue for locking 'em up and throwing away the key.

Progress in evolutionary psychology will plainly affect — legitimately affect — moral and political discourse for decades to come. But no simple ideological label will summarize the effects. Once everyone understands this, there will be no horde of critics on the left, or on the right, for Darwinians to fend off. Enlightenment can then proceed.

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Chapter 18: DARWIN GETS RELIGION

In my journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, "it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind." I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than
 the mere breath of his body. But now the grandest scenes would
not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind.
It may be truly said that I am like a man
who has become colour-blind... .

— Autobiography (1876)

When the HMS Beagle left England, Darwin was an orthodox and earnest Christian. He would later recall "being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality." But he was beginning to harbor quiet doubts. He was troubled by the Old Testament's "manifestly false history of the world" and its depiction of God as "a revengeful tyrant." He wondered about the New Testament too; though he found the moral teachings of Jesus beautiful, he saw that their "perfection depends in part on the inter-pretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories."

Darwin longed to regain certainty. He daydreamed about the unearthing of ancient manuscripts that would corroborate the Gospels. It didn't help. "Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate."

Having lost his Christian faith, Darwin held for many years to a vague theism. He believed in a "First Cause," a divine intelligence that had set natural selection in motion with some end in mind. But then he began to wonder: "[C]an the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?" Darwin finally settled into a more or less stable agnosticism, He might in upbeat moments entertain theistic scenarios; but for long periods of his life, upbeat moments weren't common.

In one sense, however, Darwin always remained a Christian. Like others of his time and place, he was steeped in the moral austerity of Evangelicism. He lived by the tenets that echoed in English churches and found secular expression in Samuel Smiles's Self-Help: that a man, by exercising his "powers of action and self-denial" could stay "armed against the temptation of low indulgences." This, as we've seen, was for Darwin the "highest stage in moral culture" — recognizing "that we ought to control our thoughts, and 'not even in inmost thought to think again the sins that made the past so pleasant to us.' "

But if Darwin was in this sense an Evangelical Christian, he could, with almost equal accuracy, be called a Hindu or Buddhist or Muslim. The theme of strict self-governance, the control of animal appetites, appears again and again in the world's great religions. Also wide-spread, if a bit less so, is the doctrine of brotherly love that Darwin found so beautiful. Six centuries before Jesus, Lao-tzu had said, "It is the way of the Tao ... to recompense injury with kindness."⁵ Buddhist scriptures call for "an all embracing love for all the universe ... unmarred by hate within, not rousing enmity. "⁶ Hinduism has the doctrine of "ahimsa," the absence of all harmful intent.

What does a Darwinian make of this striking recurrence of themes? That various men at various times have been privy to the divine revelation of several universal truths? Not exactly.

The Darwinian line on spiritual discourse is much like the Darwinian line on moral discourse. People tend to say and believe things that are in their evolutionary ingrained interests. This doesn't mean that harboring these ideas always gets their genes spread. Some religious doctrines — celibacy, for example — may dramatically fail to do that. The expectation, rather, is simply that the doctrines people latch on to will have a kind of harmony with the mental organs natural selection has designed. "Harmony," admittedly, is a pretty broad term. These doctrines may, on the one hand, slake some deep psy chological thirst (belief in an afterlife gratifies the will to survive); or they may, on the other hand, suppress some thirst so unslakable as to be a burden (lust, for example). But in one sense or another, the beliefs people subscribe to should be explicable in terms of the evolved human mind. Thus when diverse sages manage to sell the same themes, the themes may say something about the contours of that mind, about human nature.

Does this mean common religious teachings have some sort of timeless value as rules to live by Donald T. Campbell, one of the first psychologists to get enthusiastic about modern Darwinism, has suggested as much. In an address to the American Psychological Association, he spoke of "the possible sources of validity in recipes for living that have been evolved, tested, and winnowed through hundreds of generations of human social history. On purely scientific grounds, these recipes for living might be regarded as better tested than the best of psychology's and psychiatry's speculations on how lives should be lived."⁷

Campbell said this in 1975, just after the publication of Wilson's Sociobiology and before Darwinian cynicism had fully crystallized. Today many Darwinians would be less sanguine. Some have noted that, while ideas must by definition have a kind of harmony with the brains they settle into, that doesn't mean they're good for those brains in the long run. Some ideas, indeed, seem to parasitize brains — they are "viruses," as Richard Dawkins puts it.⁸ The idea that injecting heroin is fun keeps infecting people by appealing to myopic cravings, rarely to the ultimate advantage of those people.

Besides, even if an idea does spread by serving people's long-term interests, the interests may be those of its sellers, not its buyers. Religious leaders tend to have high status, and it is not beyond the pale to see their preachings as a form of exploitation, a subtle bending of the listener's will to the speaker's goals. Certainly Jesus' teachings, and the Buddha's teachings, and Lao-tzu's teachings had the effect of amplifying the power of Jesus and Buddha and Lao-tzu, raising their stature within a growing group of people.

Still, it's not as though religious doctrines were always forced on people. Granted, the Ten Commandments had a certain totalitarian authority, conveyed by the political leadership and carrying God's own signature. Jesus too, though lacking political office, regularly invoked God's endorsement. But the Buddha, for one, didn't stress supernatural authority. And, though born to a noble station, he is said to have abandoned the trappings of status to roam the world and teach; his movement started, apparently, from scratch.

The fact is that many people at various times have bought various religious doctrines under no great external coercion. Presumably, there was some psychological payoff. The great religions are at some level ideologies of self-help. It would indeed be wasteful, as Campbell suggests, to throw out eons of religious tradition without inspecting it first. The sages may have been self-serving, like the rest of us, but that doesn't mean they weren't sages.

DEMONS

One great theme of the great religions is demonic temptation. Time and again we see an evil being that tries, in the guise of innocence, to entice people into seemingly minor but ultimately momentous wrongdoing. In the Bible and the Koran there is Satan. In Buddhist scripture there is the arch-tempter Mara, who insidiously deploys his daughters, Rati (Desire) and Raga (Pleasure).

Demonic temptation may not sound like an especially scientific doctrine, but it captures nicely the dynamics by which habits are acquired: slowly but surely. For example, natural selection "wants" men to have sex with an endless series of women. And it realizes this goal with a subtle series of lures that can begin, say, with the mere contemplation of extramarital sex and then grow steadily more powerful and ultimately inexorable. Donald Symons has observed, "Jesus said, 'Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart' because he understood that the function of the mind is to cause behavior."

It is no coincidence that demons and drug dealers often use the same opening line ("Just try a little; it will feel good"), or that religious people often see demons in drugs. For habituation to any goal — sex or power, say — is literally an addictive process, a growing dependence on the biological chemicals that make these things gratifying. The more power you have, the more you need. And any slippage will make you feel bad, even if it leaves you at a level that once brought ecstasy. (One habit that natural selection never "meant" to encourage was drug addiction itself. This miracle of technology is an unanticipated biochemical intervention, a subversion of the reward system. We were meant to get our thrills the old-fashioned way, from a hard day's work: eating, copulating, undermining rivals, and so on.)

Demonic temptation connects almost seamlessly with the more basic notion of evil. Both ideas — a malign being, and a malign force-lend emotional power to spiritual counsel. When the Buddha tells us to "dig up the root of thirst" so that "Mara, the tempter, may not crush you again and again," we are supposed to steel ourselves for the battle to come; those are fightin' words.¹⁰ Warnings that drugs or sex or a belligerent dictator are "evil" bring much the same effect.

The concept of "evil," though less metaphysically primitive than, say, "demons," doesn't fit easily into a modern scientific worldview. Still, people seem to find it useful, and the reason is that it is meta phorically apt. There is indeed a force devoted to enticing us into various pleasures that are (or once were) in our genetic interests bin do not bring long-term happiness to us and may bring great suffering to others. You could call that force the ghost of natural selection More concretely, you could call it our genes (some of our genes, at least). If it will help to actually use the word evil, there's no reason not to.

When the Buddha urges digging up the "root of thirst," he isn't necessarily counseling abstinence. Certainly there is talk in many religions of abstinence from various things, and certainly abstinence is one way to short-circuit the addictiveness of vice. But the Buddha put his emphasis not so much on a laundry list of proscriptions as on a generally austere attitude, a cultivated indifference to material rewards and sensory pleasure: "Cut down the whole forest of desires, not .1 tree only!"¹¹

This fundamental defiance of human nature is encouraged in some measure by other religions. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth"; and "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on."¹² The Hindu scriptures, like the Buddhist, dwell at more length, and more explicitly, on withdrawal from the realm of pleasure. The spiritually mature man is one who "abandons desires," who "has lost desire for joys," who "withdraws, as a tortoise his limbs from all sides, his senses from the objects of sense."¹³ Hence the ideal man as depicted in the Bhagavad Gita: a man of discipline, who acts without worrying about the fruits of his action, a man who is unmoved by acclaim and by criticism. this was the image that inspired Gandhi to persevere without "hope of success or fear of failure."

That Hinduism and Buddhism sound so much alike is not shocking. The Buddha was born a Hindu. But he carried the theme of sensory indifference further, boiling it down to a severe maxim — life is sillering — and placing it at the very center of his philosophy. If you accept the inherent misery of life, and follow the teachings of the liuddha, then you can, oddly enough, find happiness.

In all these assaults on the senses there is a great wisdom — not only about the addictiveness of pleasures but about their ephemerality. The essence of addiction, after all, is that pleasure tends to desperate and leave the mind agitated, hungry for more. The idea that just one more dollar, one more dalliance, one more rung on the ladder will leave us feeling sated reflects a misunderstanding about human nature — a misunderstanding, moreover, that is built into human nature; we are designed to feel that the next great goal will bring bliss, and the bliss is designed to evaporate shortly after we get there. Natural selection has a malicious sense of humor; it leads us along with a series of promises and then keeps saying "Just kidding." As the Bible puts it, "All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled."¹⁴ Remarkably, we go our whole lives without over really catching on.

The advice of the sages — that we refuse to play this game — is nothing less than an incitement to mutiny, to rebel against our creator Sensual pleasures are the whip natural selection uses to control us to keep us in the thrall of its warped values system. To cultivate some indifference to them is one plausible route to liberation. While few of us can claim to have traveled far on this route, the proliferation of this scriptural advice suggests it has been followed some distance with some success.

There is also a more cynical explanation for that proliferation One way to reconcile poor people to their plight is to convince them that material pleasures aren't fun anyway. Exhortations to forswear indulgence could be simply an instrument of social control, of oppression. So too with Jesus' assurance that in the afterlife the "first shall be last and the last shall be first"¹⁵ — it sounds a bit like a way of recruiting low-status people to his growing army, a recruitment that may come at their own expense, as they cease to struggle for worldly success. Religion, in this view, has always been the opiate of the masses.

Maybe so. But it remains true that pleasure is ephemeral; that its constant pursuit is not a reliable source of happiness (as not only Samuel Smiles but also John Stuart Mill noted); that we are built not to easily grasp this fact; and that the reasons for all this are clearer in light of the new Darwinian paradigm.

There are scattered hints in the ancient scriptures of an understanding that human striving — after pleasure, after wealth, after status — is yoked to self-deception. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that men "devoted to enjoyment and power" are "robbed of insight." To pursue the fruits of action is to live in a "jungle of delusion."¹⁶ The Buddha said that "the best of virtues [is] passionlessness; the best of men he who has eyes to see."¹⁷ In Ecclesiastes it is written: "Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire."¹⁸

Some of these utterances are, in context, ambiguous, but there is no doubt about the clarity with which sages have seen one particular human delusion: the basic moral bias toward self. The idea recurs in Jesus' teaching — "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone"; "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."¹⁹ The Buddha put it in plainer language: "The fault of others is easily perceived, but that of one's self is difficult to perceive."²⁰

The Buddha saw, in particular, that much delusion grows out of the human penchant for one-upmanship. In warning his followers against dogmatic squabbling, he said:

The senses' evidence,

and works, inspire such scorn

for others, and such smug

conviction he is right,

that all his rivals rank

as "sorry, brainless fools."²¹

This grasp of our naturally skewed perspective is bound up with exhortations toward brotherly love. For a premise of these exhortations is that we are deeply inclined not to view everyone with the charity we extend to our kin and ourselves. Indeed, if we weren't so deeply inclined, if we didn't buttress this inclination with all the moral and intellectual conviction at our disposal, you wouldn't have to start a whole religion to correct the imbalance.

The renunciation of sensory pleasure is also tied to brotherly love. Acting with generosity and consideration is tricky unless you somehow escape the human preoccupation with feeding the ego. Taken as a whole, some bodies of religious thought are a fairly coherent program for maximizing non-zero-sumness.

THEORIES OF BROTHERLY LOVE

The question remains: How did these bodies get started? Why has the doctrine of brotherly love so thrived? Leave aside for the moment that it is honored mainly in the breach, that even those who most diligently pursue it may manage to dilute their self-love only slightly, that organized religions have often been vehicles for violating the doctorine on a spectacular scale. The mere fact that the idea lives on in this species is curious. In light of Darwinian theory, everything about the idea of brotherly love seems paradoxical except for the rhetorical power of the term brotherly. And this alone, surely, hasn't been enough to sell the idea.

Proposed solutions to this mystery range from the highly cynical to the mildly inspiring. At the more inspiring end of the spectrum is a theory by the philosopher Peter Singer. His book The Expanding Circle asks how the range of human compassion grew beyond it primitive bounds — the family, or perhaps the band. Singer notes that human nature, and the structure of human social life, long ago got people in the habit of publicly justifying their actions in objective terms. When we urge respect for our interests, we talk as if we are asking for no more than we would give anyone else in our shoes Singer believes that once this habit is established (by the evolution of reciprocal altruism, among other things), the "autonomy of rea soning" takes over. "The idea of a disinterested defense of one's conduct" grew out of self-interest, "but in the thought of reasoning beings, it takes on a logic of its own which leads to its extension beyond the bounds of group."

This extension has grown impressively. Singer recounts how Plato urged his fellow Athenians to adopt what at the time was a major moral advance: "He argued that Greeks should not, in war, enslave other Greeks, lay waste their lands or raze their houses; they should do these things only to non-Greeks."²² The growth of moral concern to the bounds of the nation-state has long since become the norm. Eventually, Singer believes, it may reach global proportions: star vation in Africa will seem as scandalous to Americans as starvation in America. Pure logic will have brought us truly in touch with the great religious teachings of the ages — the fundamental moral equality of everyone. Our compassion will, as it should, spread evenly across humanity. Darwin shared this hope. He wrote in The Descent of Man: "As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individ ual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and

In a sense, Singer is saying that our genes have been too clever by half. They long ago began cloaking raw selfishness in the lofty language of morality, using it to exploit the various moral impulses natural selection created. Now this language, as harnessed to pure logic, impels the brains they built to behave with selflessness. Natural selection designed two things for narrow self-interest — cold reason and warm moral impulses — and somehow, when combined, they take on a life of their own.

Enough inspiration. The most cynical explanation of why so many sages have urged an expanded moral compass is the one set out near the beginning of this chapter: a large compass expands the power of the sages doing the urging. The Ten Commandments, with their bans on lying, stealing, and murder, made Moses' flock more manageable. And the Buddha's warnings about dogmatic squabbling kept his power base from splintering.

Supporting this cynicism is the fact that the universal love espoused in many scriptures doesn't emerge from scrutiny looking truly universal. The odes to selflessness in the Bhagavad Gita come in a somewhat ironic context: Lord Krishna is spurring the warrior Arjuna toward self-discipline so that he will more effectively slaughter an enemy army — an army, no less, that contains some of his own kin.²⁴ Ami in Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, after singing the praises of love, peace, gentleness, and goodness, he says, "[L]et us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith. These are wise words indeed, coming from the head of the household. The case has been made that even Jesus didn't really preach universal love, that his injunctions to love your "enemies," when appraised carefully, are seen to apply only to Jewish enemies".²⁶

In this light, Singer's "expanding circle" seems an extension less of moral logic than of political reach. As social organization goes beyond the level of the hunter-gatherer band — to the tribe, the city-state, the nation-state — religious organization on an ever larger scale is feasible. So sages take the opportunity to expand their power — which means preaching a commensurately broad tolerance. Thus, appeals for brotherly love are comparable to a politician's self-serving appeals to patriotism. In fact, appeals to patriotism are, in a way, appeals for brotherly love on a national scale.²⁷

There is a third theory that stands near the middle of the cynicism spectrum. Yes, it holds, the Ten Commandments may have made Moses' flock more manageable. But presumably many of the sheep benefited too, since mutual restraint and consideration bring non zero-sum benefits. In other words, religious leaders, however self-interested, haven't been simply foisting their interests on the masses. They've been finding overlap between their interests and the masses' interests, and the overlap has gotten larger; as the scope of social and economic organization has grown, and with it the zone of non-zero sumness, the, self-interest of people has lain in behaving with at least minimal decency toward larger and larger numbers of people. Religious leaders are more than happy to have their stature rise commensurately.

There has been a change not just in the scope of social organi zation, but in its nature. The moral sentiments were designed for a particular environment — or, more precisely, for a particular series of environments, including hunter-gatherer villages and other, earlier, societies that are lost in the mists of prehistory. It is safe to say that these societies didn't have an elaborate judicial system and a large police force. Indeed, the strength of the retributive impulse is tes tament to a time when, if you didn't stand up for your interests, no one else would.

At some point, things began to change, and the value of these impulses began to wane. Today, most of us waste great quantities ol time and energy indulging our indignation. We rail ineffectually at careless drivers; we spend a day working with police to find a purse snatcher, even though the purse contained what we earn in three hours' work and catching the thief won't change the odds of being victimized in the future; we smolder at the fortune of professional rivals, even though we are powerless to bring them misfortune and would profit from treating them with greater civility.

When exactly in human history some of the moral sentiments began to obsolesce is hard to say. But it is worth pondering Donald Campbell's insight that it is the religions of the ancient urban civilizations — "independently developed in China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mexico, and Peru" — that reliably produced the familiar ele ments of modern religions: the curbing of "many aspects of human nature," including "selfishness, pride, greed, ... covetousness, ... lust, wrath."

Campbell believes this curbing was needed for "optimal social coordination."²⁸ Whether he means optimal for the ruler or optimal for the ruled he doesn't say. But we can take heart in the fact that, though the two are sometimes at odds, they aren't mutually exclusive. What's more, the "social coordination" in question may extend beyond the scope of any single nation. It is by now trite to say that the peoples of the world are more interdependent than ever. Trite but true. Material progress has greatly deepened economic integration, and various technologies have brought threats that humanity can lorestall only in concert, such as environmental degradation and nuclear proliferation. There may have been a time when it was commonly in the interests of political leaders to stoke their people's intolerance and bigotry to the point of international strife. This time is passing.

The Hindu scriptures teach that a single universal soul resides in everyone; the wise man "sees himself in all and all in him."²⁹ As a metaphor for a great philosophical truth — the equal sacredness (read: utilitarian worth) of every human sphere of consciousness — this leaching is profound. And as the basis for a practical rule of living — that the wise man refrains from harming others so that "he harms not himself"³⁰ — this teaching is prescient. The ancient sages pointed — however ambiguously, however selfishly — to a truth that was not just valid, and not just valuable, but destined to grow in value as history advanced.

TODAY'S SERMONETTE

In illustrating the "puritan conscience" of Victorian England, Walter Houghton described a man who wrote down all his "sins and errors" and habitually detected "selfishness ... in every effort and resolve. The idea goes back at least as far as Martin Luther, who said a saint is someone who understands that everything he does is egotistical."

This definition of sainthood reflects favorably on Darwin. Here is a characteristic utterance: "But what a horridly egotistical letter, I am writing; I am so tired, that nothing short of the pleasant stimulus of vanity & writing about one's own dear self would have sufficed." (Needless to say, this sentence followed a passage that would strike few people today as egotistical. He had been voicing anxiety, not confidence, about how his work aboard the Beagle would be received.)

Whether or not Darwin, by Luther's measure, fully qualifies as a saint, it is certainly true that Darwinism, by this measure, can help make a person saintly. No doctrine heightens one's consciousness of hidden selfishness more acutely than the new Darwinian paradigm. If you understand the doctrine, buy the doctrine, and apply the doctrine, you will spend your life in deep suspicion of your motives.

Congratulations! That is the first step toward correcting the moral biases built into us by natural selection. The second step is to keep this newly learned cynicism from poisoning your view of everyone else: to pair harshness toward self with leniency toward others; to somewhat relax the ruthless judgment that often renders us conve niently indifferent to, if not hostile to, their welfare; to apply liberally the sympathy that evolution has meted out so stingily. If this operation is inordinately successful, it might result in a person who takes the welfare of others markedly, but at least not massively, less seri ously than his own.

Darwin did a reasonable job of this. Though fairly attuned to, and disdainful of, other people's vanity, his general attitude toward others was one of great moral seriousness; he reserved most of his mockery for himself. Even when he couldn't help but hate people, he tried to keep his hate in perspective. Regarding archenemy Richard Owen, he wrote to his friend Hooker, "I am become quite demoniacal about Owen" and "I mean to try to get more angelic in my feelings." The point isn't whether he succeeded. (He didn't.) The point is that to half-jokingly apply the word "demoniacal" to one's hatreds is to show more moral self-doubt, and less self-importance, than most of us usually manage. (This is all the more impressive as Darwin's feelings were hardly eccentric; Owen, though a particular threat to Darwin's status by virtue of his disbelief in natural selection, was also a spiteful and widely disliked man.)³⁴ Darwin came fairly close to the nearly impossible and highly commendable: a detached, thorough!) modern (if not postmodern) cynicism toward self, paired with Victorian earnestness toward others.

Another thing Martin Luther said is that chronic moral torment is a sign of God's grace. If so, Darwin was a walking grace repository. Here was a man who could lie guiltily awake at night because he hadn't yet answered some bothersome piece of fan mail.³⁵

We might ask what is so gracious about filling someone with anguish. One answer is that other people can benefit from it. Perhaps what Luther should have said is that a morally tormented person is a medium for God's grace. And this (metaphorically speaking, at least) Darwin sometimes was: he was a utilitarian magnifier. Through the magic of non-zero-sumness, he turned his minor sacrifices into other people's major gains. By spending a few minutes writing a letter, he could markedly brighten the day, and perhaps the week, of some unknown soul. This is not what the conscience was designed for, since these people were usually in no position to reciprocate, and were often too remote to help Darwin's moral reputation. As we've seen, a good conscience, in the most demanding, most moral sense of the term, is one that doesn't work only as natural selection "intended."

Some people worry that the new Darwinian paradigm will strip their lives of all nobility. If love of children is just defense of our DNA, if helping a friend is just payment for services rendered, if compassion for the downtrodden is just bargain-hunting — then what is there to be proud of? One answer is: Darwin-like behavior. Go above and beyond the call of a smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren't likely to help you in return, and do so when nobody's watching. This is one way to be a truly moral animal. Now, in the light of the new paradigm, we can see how hard this is, how right Samuel Smiles was to say that the good life is a battle against "moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice"; these are indeed the enemies, and they are tenacious by design.

Another antidote to despair over the ultimate baseness of human motivation is, oddly enough, gratitude. If you don't feel thankful for the somewhat twisted moral infrastructure of our species, then consider the alternative. Given the way natural selection works, there were only two possibilities at the dawn of evolution: (a) that eventually there would be a species with conscience and sympathy and even love, all grounded ultimately in genetic self-interest; (b) that no species possessing these things would ever exist. Well, a happened. We do have a foundation of decency to build on. An animal likr Darwin can spend lots of time worrying about other animals — not just his wife, children, and high-status friends, but distant slaves, unknown fans, even horses and sheep. Given that self-interest was the overriding criterion of our design, we are a reasonably considerate group of organisms. Indeed, if you ponder the utter ruthlessness of evolutionary logic long enough, you may start to find our morality such as it is, nearly miraculous.

DARWIN'S END

Darwin himself would have been among the last to see God's grace in his anguish, or in anything else. He reported, near the end of his life, that his typical frame of mind was agnostic. When he declared, the day before he died, "I am not the least afraid of death," it was almost surely in anticipation of relief from his earthly suffering, not in hope of anything better to come.³⁶

Darwin had pondered the meaning of life for "a man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward." He believed such a man would find "in accordance with the verdict of all the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts. If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth." Still, "his reason may occa sionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost guide of conscience."³⁷

Maybe this last sentence was a loophole, designed for a man who had spent his life building a theory that lacked the universal "appro bation of his fellow men," a theory that, though true, might not tend toward "the good of others." Certainly it is a theory with which our species has yet to make its peace.

Having crafted a moral measuring stick, Darwin gave his life a passing grade. "I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science." Still, while feeling "no remorse from having committed any great sin," he had "often regretted that I have not done more direct good to my fellow creatures. My sole and poor excuse is much ill-health and my mental constitution, which makes it extremely difficult for me to turn from one subject or occupation to another. I can imagine with high satisfaction giving up my whole time to philanthropy, but not a portion of it; though this should have been a far better line of conduct."³⁸

It's true that Darwin didn't live the optimally utilitarian life. No one ever has. Still, as he prepared to die, he could rightly have reflected on a life decently and compassionately lived, a string of duties faithfully discharged, a painful, if only partial, struggle against the currents of selfishness whose source he was the first man to see. It wasn't a perfect life; but human beings are capable of worse.

The End

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Acknowledgments

A number of people were nice enough to read and comment on drafts of parts of this book: Leda Cosmides, Martin Daly, Marianne Eismann, William Hamilton, John Hartung, Philip Hefner, Ann Hulbert, Karen Lehrman, Peter Singer, Donald Symons, John Tooby, Frans de Waal, and Glenn Weisfeld. I know all of them had better things to do, and I'm grateful.

A few people actually summoned enough grim self-discipline to read a draft of the whole book: Laura Betzig, Jane Epstein, John Pearce, Mickey Kaus (who has also improved many of my other writings over the years), Mike Kinsley (who, while editor of The New Republic and since, has improved even more of them), and Frank Sulloway (who was also kind enough to lend various other aid, including the use of his photo archives). Gary Krist gave me trustworthy feedback on an even earlier, messier version of the whole book, and also provided sound advice and vital moral support later in the game. Each of these people deserves a medal.

Marty Peretz gave me an extended leave of absence from The New Republic, in keeping with his general, and rare, policy of letting people explore things that interest them. I am lucky to work for someone who genuinely respects ideas. During that leave, Henry and Eleanor O'Neill provided a winter's free lodging in Nantucket, allowing me to write a part of this book under some of the most beautiful conditions imaginable. Edward O. Wilson, by writing Sociobiology and On Human Nature, got me interested in this stuff, and has been helpful since then. John Tyler Bonner, James Beniger, and Henry Horn, who cotaught a seminar on sociobiology while I was in college, sustained my interest. While an editor at The Sciences magazine in the mid-1980s, I had the privilege of editing Mel Konner's column, "On Human Nature." I learned a lot from the column, and from my conversations with Mel, about this view of life.

Thanks to Bill Strobridge (for encouraging me to become a writer), Ric Aylor (for steering me toward B. F. Skinner's writings while I was still in high school), Bill Newlin (for early advice), Jon Weiner, Steve Lagerfeld, and Jay Tolson (for later advice), Sarah O'Neill (for timely babysitting and other acts of altruism), and my brother, Mike Wright (for fueling my fascination with this book's subject in ways he doesn't know, including being such a moral animal himself). Several colleagues at The New Republic whom I've already mentioned — Ann Hulbert, Mickey Kaus, and Mike Kinsley — deserve a curtain call for providing advice and commiseration on a day-to-day basis. I feel privileged to have known and worked with them over the past few years. John McPhee, who as my college tr.uher did much to shape the direction of my life, also gave me valued advice during this project. This isn't a very McPheeesque book, but it is guided by some of his values (e.g., it's all true, so far as I know, and I didn't choose the subject with income maximization in mind).

Various scholars (including many of those mentioned above, especially in the first paragraph) have let me interrogate them, formally or informally: Michael Bailey, Jack Beckstrom, David Buss, Mildred Dickemann, Bruce Ellis, William Irons, Elizabeth Lloyd, Kevin Mac Donald, Michael McGuire, Randolph Nesse, Craig Palmer, Matt Radley, Peter Strahlendorf, Lionel Tiger, Robert Trivers, PaulTurke, George Williams, David Sloan Wilson, and Margo Wilson. A number of people provided me with reprints of their papers, the answers to nagging questions, etcetera: Kim Buehlman, Elizabeth Cashdan, Sieve Gangestad, Mart Gross, Elizabeth Hill, Kim Hill, Gary Johnson, Debra Judge, Bobbi Low, Richard Marius, and Michael Raleigh. I'm sure I'm forgetting people, including a lot of members of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society whom I've buttonholed at their meetings.

My editor, Dan Frank, is rare among contemporary editors in the amount and quality of attention he gives to manuscripts. A number of other people at Pantheon, including Marge Anderson, Altie Karper, Jeanne Morton, and Claudine O'Hearn, have also been helpful. My agent, Rafe Sagalyn, has been genetous with his time and sound in his advice.

Finally, to my wife, Lisa, I owe the largest debt. I still remember when she first read the first draft of the first part of this book and explained to me — yet without using this word — that it was bad. She has read the manuscript in various forms since then and often presented similarly penetrating judgments in similarly diplomatic fashion. Often, when I was faced with conflicting advice, or otherwise befuddled, her reaction served as my guiding light. In addition, she has done all kinds of other things that allowed me to write this book without going totally crazy. I could not have asked for more (although, as I recall, I did on a few occasions).

Lisa disagrees with parts of this book. I'm sure that everyone else I've mentioned does too. That's the way things are in a young science that is morally and politically charged.

Appendix: Frequently Asked Questions

In 1859, after Darwin sent his brother Erasmus a copy of The Origin of Species, Erasmus replied with a letter of praise. The theory of natural selection was so logically compelling, he said, that the fossil record's failure to document incremental evolutionary change didn't much bother him. "In fact the a priori reasoning is so entirely satisfactory to me that if the facts won't fit in, why so much the worse for the facts is my feeling."

This sentiment is more widely shared by evolutionists than some of them would admit. The theory of natural selection is so elegant and powerful as to inspire a kind of faith in it — not blind faith, really, since the faith rests on the theory's demonstrated ability to explain so much about life. But faith nonetheless; there is a point after which one no longer entertains the possibility of encountering some fact that would call the whole theory into question.

I must admit to having reached this point. Natural selection has now been shown to plausibly account for so much about life in general and the human mind in particular that I have little doubt that it can account for the rest. Still, "the rest" is no trivial chunk of terrain. There is much about human thought, feeling, and behavior that still puzzles and challenges a Darwinian — and much else that may not strike a confirmed Darwinian as so puzzling but does strike the layperson that way. It would be quite un-Darwinesque of me not to mention a few prominent examples. Darwin was nearly preoccupied with his theory's real and apparent shortcomings, and his insistence on confronting them is one thing that makes the Origin so persuasive. The shortcoming that Erasmus alluded to came from the chapter Darwin called "Difficulties on Theory." In later editions, Darwin added another chapter called "Miscellaneous Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection."

What follows is hardly an exhaustive list of the puzzles and apparent puzzles that surround the new Darwinian paradigm as applied to the human mind. But it conveys their nature and suggests some prospects for solving them. It also addresses some of the most commonly asked questions about evolutionary psychology and, I hope, helps dispel some common misconceptions.

1. What about homosexuals? One wouldn't expect natural selection to create people who are disinclined to do the things (for example, heterosexual intercourse) that get their genes transported into the next generation. At the dawn of sociobiology, some evolutionists thought that the theory of kin selection might solve this paradox. Homosexuals, perhaps, were like sterile ants: rather than spend their energy trying to get their genes sent directly to the next generation, they use oblique conduits; rather than invest in children of their own, they invest in siblings, nieces, nephews.

In principle this explanation could work, but reality doesn't seem to favor it. First of all, how many homosexuals spend an inordinate amount of time helping siblings, nephews, and nieces? Second, look at what many of them do spend their time doing: pursuing homosexual union about as ardently as heterosexuals seek heterosexual union. What's the evolutionary logic in that? Sterile ants don't spend lots of time caressing other sterile ants, and if they did it would constitute a puzzle.

It is notable that bonobos, our near kin, exhibit bisexuality (though apparently not exclusive homosexuality). They engage in genital rubbing, for example, as a sign of friendliness, a way to defuse tension. This points to a general principle: once natural selection has created a form of gratification — genital stimulation, in this case — that form can come to serve other functions; it can either be adapted to these other functions via genetic evolution or can come to serve them via sheerly cultural change. Thus, ancient Greece developed a cultural tradition whereby boys sometimes pleased men with sexual stimulation. (And, in sheerly Darwinian terms, it's quite debatable who was exploiting whom; boys who used this technique to cultivate mentors were at least getting their status raised in the process; the men — again, in sheerly Darwinian terms — seem to have been wasting their time.)

In this view, the fact that some people's sexual impulses get diverted from typical channels is just another tribute to the malleability of the human mind. Given a particular set of environmental influences, it may do any number of things. (Prison is an extreme example of such an environmental influence; when heterosexual gratification is impossible, the sexual urge — especially the relatively strong and indiscriminate male sexual urge — may seek the closest substitute.)

Is there a "gene" for homosexuality? There is evidence suggesting that some genes are more likely to lead to homosexuality than others. But that doesn't mean there's a "gay gene" — a gene that drives one inexorably to homosexuality, regardless of environment; and it certainly doesn't mean that the genes in question were selected by natural selection by virtue of their contribution to homosexuality. (Some genes no doubt make a person more likely to enter, say, banking, or professional football, than other genes; but there's no "banker gene" or "pro football gene" — no gene that was selected by virtue of its contribution to one's banking or football playing. Just genes conducive to, say, facility with numbers, or to physical strength.) Indeed, once you rule out the kin-selection theory of homosexual inclination, it is very hard to imagine a gene being selected by virtue of its leading to exclusive homosexuality. If there is a "gay gene" that has spread to a sizable part of the population, it probably was having some effect other than homosexual inclination in the environment in which it spread.

One reason some people are so concerned about the "gay gene" question is that they want to know if homosexuality is "natural," a question that — to them, at least — seems to have moral consequence. They think it matters greatly whether (a) there is a gene (or combination of genes) conducive to homosexuality that indeed was selected by virtue of that effect; or (b) there is a gene (or combination of genes) conducive to homosexuality that was selected for some other reason but, in some environments, has the effect of encouraging homosexuality; or (c) there is a gene (or combination of genes) con ducive to homosexuality that is a fairly recent arrival on the human scene and hasn't yet gotten a strong endorsement from natural selection for any particular property; or (d) there is no "gay gene."

But who cares? Why should the "naturalness" of homosexuality in any way affect our moral judgment of it? It is "natural," in the sense of being "approved" by natural selection, for a man to kill someone he finds sleeping with his wife. Rape may, in the same sense, be "natural." And seeing that your children are fed and clothed is surely "natural." But most people rightly judge these things by their consequences, not their origins. What is plainly true about homo sexuality is the following: (1) some people are born with a combi nation of genetic and environmental circumstance that impels them strongly toward a homosexual lifestyle; (2) there is no inherent con tradiction between homosexuality among consenting adults and the welfare of other people. For moral purposes (I believe) that should be the end of the discussion.

2. Why are siblings so different from one another? If genes are so important, why do people who have so many genes in common so often turn out so unlike one another? In a certain sense, this question isn't a logical one to ask an evolutionary psychologist. After all, mainstream evolutionary psychology doesn't study how different genes lead to different behaviors, but how the genes common to tin-human species can lead to various behaviors — sometimes different, sometimes similar. In other words, evolutionary psychologists typically analyze behavior without regard to an individual's peculiar genetic constitution. Still, the answer to this question about siblings sheds much light on a puzzle that is central to evolutionary psychology: If the main genetic influences on human behavior come from genes that all people share, why do people in general behave so differently from one another? We've addressed this question from various angles in this book, but the matter of siblings sheds a new kind of light on it.

Consider Darwin. He was the second youngest of six children. As such, he conforms to a striking pattern that has only recently come to light: people who initiate or support scientific revolutions are exceedingly unlikely to be firstborn children. Frank Sulloway (see Sulloway [in press]), who has documented this pattern with voluminous data, has also found that people who lead or support political revolutions are very unlikely to be firstborn children.

How to explain this pattern? Presumably, Sulloway notes, it has something to do with the fact that younger children often find themselves in competition with older siblings — authority figures — for resources. Indeed, they may find themselves in conflict not just with these particular authorities, but with a whole establishment. After all, firstborn children, having higher reproductive value than their younger siblings (see chapter seven), should, in theory, tend to be favored by parents, all other things being equal. So there may often be a natural commonality of interest, an alliance, between parents and older siblings that younger siblings find themselves combatting. the establishment lays down the law, the younger sibling challenges it. It could be adaptive for children who find themselves thus situated to become good at questioning received rules. That is: a species-typical developmental program may tend to steer children with older siblings toward radical thought.

The larger point here is about "nonshared environment," whose importance geneticists have grasped only over the last decade (see Plomin in and Daniels [1987]). People who doubt environmental determinism like to point to two brothers, raised side-by-side, and ask why one of them became, say, a criminal and the other a district attorney. If environment is so important, they ask, why did these people turn out so differently? Such questions misconstrue the meaning of "environment." Though two brothers do share some aspects of their environment (the same parents, same school) a large part of their environment is "nonshared" (who their first-grade teacher was, who their friends are, and so on).

Paradoxically, as Sulloway (see Sulloway [in preparation]) points out, siblings may, by virtue of being siblings, have particularly disparate "nonshared" environments. For example, while you and your next-door neighbor may both be firstborn children — and thus "share" this environmental influence — the same can't possibly be true of both you and your sibling. What's more: Sulloway believes that one sibling, by virtue of occupying a certain strategic "niche" within the family ecology, may push other siblings toward other niches in their struggle to compete for resources. Thus, a younger sibling may find that another sibling has already won great favor through, say, conscientious sacrifice for the parents; in response, he or she may seek another "niche" — excellence in school, say — rather than try to compete in the already crowded sacrifice market.

3. Why do people choose to have few or no kids? This is sometimes cited as a great evolutionary "mystery." Academics have puzzled over the "demographic transition" that lowered birthrates in indus trialized societies, trying to explain it in Darwinian terms. Some theorize, for example, that in a modern environment, having what was once considered an average-sized family can be bad for your genetic legacy. Maybe you will wind up with more grandchildren if you have two children, both of whom you can afford to educate at expensive private schools, than if you have five children who get educated at cheaper schools and find themselves unable to support children themselves. Thus, in having fewer children, people are be having adaptively.

There is a simpler solution: natural selection's primary means of getting us to reproduce hasn't been to instill in us an overwhelming, conscious desire to have children. We are designed to love sex and then to love the consequences that materialize nine months later — not necessarily to anticipate loving the consequences. (Witness the Trobriand Islanders, who according to Malinowski hadn't grasped the connection between sex and childbirth but, nonetheless, had man aged to keep reproducing.) Only in the wake of contraceptive tech nology has this design faltered.

The choice of family size is one of many cases where we have outsmarted natural selection; through conscious reflection — seeing, for example, that children, however lovable, can be quite burdensome in certain quantities — we can choose to short-circuit the ultimate goals that natural selection "intended" us to pursue.

4. Why do people commit suicide? Again, one can try to construct scenarios in which this sort of behavior might be adaptive. Maybe a person in the ancestral environment who had become a burden on his family would actually maximize inclusive fitness by taking himself out of the picture. Maybe, for example, food is so scarce that by continuing to eat he would deprive more reproductively valuable relatives of nutrients to the point of endangering their lives.

This explanation is not entirely implausible, but there are some problems with it. One is that, in the modern environment at least, people who commit suicide seldom belong to families near starvation.

And, really, being near starvation is just about the only circumstance in which suicide could make much Darwinian sense. Given fairly abundant available food, almost anyone — except the seriously handicapped, or the extremely old and infirm — could, by staying alive, contribute substantially to their reproductively valuable relatives: gather berries, tend children, teach children, etcetera. (And, anyway, even if you have become an unjustifiable burden on your family, would out-and-out suicide be the genetically optimal path? Wouldn't it be better for, say, a depressed man's genes if he just wandered away from the village, hoping to find better luck elsewhere — hoping, perhaps, to encounter some strange woman he can try to seduce, if not rape?)

A likely resolution of the suicide paradox lies in remembering that the behavioral "adaptations" designed by natural selection aren't the behaviors per se but the underlying mental organs. And mental organs that were adaptive enough, in one environment, to become part of human nature may, in another environment, lead to behaviors that are maladaptive. We've seen, for example, why feeling bad about yourself may sometimes be adaptive (chapter thirteen). But, alas, the mental organ designed to make you feel bad about yourself can misfire; feeling bad about yourself for too long, without relief, may lead to suicide.

Modern environments seem more likely than some previous environments to lead to this sort of malfunctioning. They permit, for example, a degree of social isolation that was unknown to our ancestors.

5. Why do people kill their own children? Infanticide is no mere product of a modern environment. It has happened abundantly in hunter-gatherer cultures and agrarian cultures. Is it, then, the result of an adaptation — a mental organ that implicitly calculates when killing a newborn will maximize genetic fitness? Quite possibly. Not only are unhealthy and handicapped babies more likely to be killed; so are babies born under various other kinds of inauspicious circumstances — when, say, the mother already has young children and has no husband.

Of course, in the modern environment, it is harder to explain thr killing of offspring as a sound genetic stratagem. But as we've seen (chapter four), many cases of supposed offspring murder are in fact the murder of a stepoffspring. Many of the rest, I suspect, are committed by husbands who may in fact be the natural father but have begun to doubt — consciously or unconsciously — that they are. And in those relatively few cases where a mother kills her own newborn baby, it is often amid the sort of environmental cues that, in the ancestral environment, might have meant that infanticide would be genetically profitable: relative poverty, no reliable source of male parental investment, etcetera.

6. Why do soldiers die for their country? Jumping on a hand grenade — or, in the ancestral environment, suicidally leading a defense against club-wielding invaders — may make Darwinian sense if you're in the presence of close relatives. But why die for a bunch of people who are just friends? That's one favor you'll never have the pleasure of seeing repaid.

First, it is worth remembering that in the ancestral environment, in a small hunter-gatherer village, the average degree of kinship to a comrade in arms was not negligibly low — and, indeed, depending on patterns of marriage, could be fairly high (see Chagnon [1988]). In discussing the theory of kin selection in chapter seven, we focused on mental organs that identify close kin and treat them with special generosity; and, we suggested, genes conducive to such discrimination will tend to flourish at the expense of genes that bestow altruism more diffusely. But there may be a few circumstances that don't permit such fine discernment. One such circumstance is a collective threat. If, say, a whole hunter-gatherer band, including your immediate family and many near relatives, is under dire attack, inordinate bravery could make straightforward genetic sense by virtue of kin selection. Men in modern war may sometimes act under the influence of a tendency to bestow just such indiscriminate altruism in warlike situations. A nother difference between modern war and ancestral war is that the genetic payoff of victory is now lower. It is reasonable to suspect — based on observation of preliterate societies — that the rape or abduction of women was once a common feature of war. Thus the rewards were large enough, in Darwinian terms, to justify substantial risk (though not plainly suicidal behavior). And it is likely that the men who demonstrated the most valor during war were rewarded most richly. In sum, the best guess about valor in wartime is that it is the product of mental organs that once served to maximize inclusive fitness and may no longer do so. But the organs persist, ready to be exploited by, among others, political leaders who profit from war (see Johnson [1987]).

Human behavior poses many other Darwinian mysteries. What are the unctions of humor and laughter? Why do people make deathbed confessions? Why do people take vows of poverty and chastity — and even, occasionally, keep them? What is the exact function of grief? (Surely it signifies, as we assumed in chapter seven, the degree of emotional investment in the deceased, and surely the emotional investment itself made genetic sense while the person was alive. But now that the person is gone, how does grieving serve the genes?)

The solution to such mysteries is one of the great challenges in contemporary science. Often the route to solution will involve these themes: (1) distinguishing between the behavior and the mental organ governing it; (2) remembering that the mental organ, not the behavior, is what was actually designed by natural selection; (3) remembering further that, though these organs must have led to adaptive behavior in the environment of their design (since that's the only reason natural selection ever designs a mental organ), they may no longer do so; (4) remembering that the human mind is incredibly complex, that it was designed to yield a large array of behavior, depending on all kinds of subtleties of circumstance, and that the array of behaviors it yields is tremendously expanded by the unprecedented diversity of circunv stance in the modern social environment.

* Actually, Darwin divided the "survival" and "reproductive" aspects of the process. Traits leading to successful mating he attributed to "sexual selection," as distinct from natural selection. But these days, natural selection is often denned broadly, to encompass both aspects: the preservation of traits that are in any way conducive to getting an organism's genes into the next generation.

* In this book I will sometimes talk about what natural selection "wants" or "intends," or about what "values" are implicit in its workings. I'll always use quotation marks, since these are just metaphors. But the metaphors are worth using, I believe, because they help us come to moral terms with Darwinism.

* Actually, a ground squirrel (or a person) shares much more than half of his genes with a sibling — and, indeed, with other members of his species. But fairly novel genes, genes that have just appeared within a population, will, on average, reside in half of an organism's full siblings. And novel genes are the ones that matter when we're talking about the evolution of new traits.

* The argument here is crucially different from other arguments about morality that have been made in this book. Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence — legitimately — our choice of basis values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature — by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse — we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature — natural selection — gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy.

* Actually, one premise of the new Darwinian paradigm is that natural selection's guiding light is a bit more complex than "survival and reproduction." But that nuance won't matter until chapter seven.

(In two long pages; return to  The Beginning)

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