"Every culture has its story of the roots of good and evil. For the
three great Abrahamic religions, it all began with a tree, whose fruit
was forbidden by God. With one bite of the illicit apple, Eve condemned
us to a world of wickedness and shame. Since then, the whisperings of
the devil have continued to seduce us away from the edicts of the
angels.
Evolution has now all but replaced the book of Genesis as
an explanation of our origins. But science seems to confirm that
mankind is irredeemably fallen. Darwin argued that we were driven only
by the instinct to survive and spread our selfish seed. For many, his
theory of evolution proved that deep down we dance to the devil’s tune.
In the brutal struggle for survival, there is no room for being nice....
...But Axelrod’s models showed just the opposite: that in a society where
individuals interact with each other more often, it pays to be nice...
...[however] The more altruistic the members of a group are towards each other, the
more aggressive towards outsiders. Close-knit communities are the least
tolerant of others...
1) The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness
by Lee Alan Dugatkin
Princeton University Press £15.95, 188 pages
FT bookshop price: £12.75
2) Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
by Frans de Waal
Princeton University Press £13.50, 230 pages
FT bookshop price: £10.80
3 The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War
by David Livingstone Smith
St. Martin*s Press £17.99, 288 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39
Every culture has its story of the roots of good and evil. For the
three great Abrahamic religions, it all began with a tree, whose fruit
was forbidden by God. With one bite of the illicit apple, Eve condemned
us to a world of wickedness and shame. Since then, the whisperings of
the devil have continued to seduce us away from the edicts of the
angels.
Evolution has now all but replaced the book of Genesis as
an explanation of our origins. But science seems to confirm that
mankind is irredeemably fallen. Darwin argued that we were driven only
by the instinct to survive and spread our selfish seed. For many, his
theory of evolution proved that deep down we dance to the devil’s tune.
In the brutal struggle for survival, there is no room for being nice.
But
Darwin himself recognised that humans also seem to have an instinct to
help our neighbours in times of need. He worried that this nobler side
contradicted his thesis that we evolved through millennia of looking
out for number one. Darwin died with this riddle unsolved, and the
debate over whether nature made us bad to the bone has split his
followers ever since. As the theologians know, it is a battle for the
human soul.
Three new books have entered the field. On the side of the angels, Lee Alan Dugatkin’s The Altruism Equation tells the story of those who set out to reconcile benevolence with natural selection. In Primates and Philosophers,
the legendary zoologist Frans de Waal argues that the origins of human
goodness can be seen in our fellow apes. On the other side, David
Livingstone Smith’s The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War sees in us the devil’s work, arguing that the history of humanity is the history of atrocity and bloodshed.
As
Dugatkin explains, there are two sides to the story of human goodness.
The first is the tendency in humans and animals to do one’s own
relations a good turn; the second is the instinct of the good Samaritan
to be nice even to those who are not part of the family.
The
easier half of the riddle was cracked in 1955 by the polymath J.B.S.
Haldane, once described as “the last man who might know all there was
to be known”. His answer begins with a mother’s love. If a
self-sacrificing mother jumps into a river to save her children, she
may herself drown, but her altruistic genes will be passed on in the
brood she rescues. On the other hand, a mother who does not sacrifice
herself for her children may survive longer, but her genes would die
with her.
But whereas your children will on average inherit half
of your genes, your grandchildren are likely to carry only a quarter;
and your first cousins will share about one eighth. Haldane claimed,
only half-joking, that he would risk his life jumping into a river to
save two of his own children, but only to save four grandchildren, or
at least eight cousins. His conclusion: we are altruistic towards
others in direct proportion to how related we are to them.
Of
course, we do not actually work out the percentage of shared genes
before deciding whether to help a family member. But that is because we
do not need to: our instincts do it for us. The tendency to help family
above others, and close family above all, is universal in human
societies. All the totalitarian utopias that tried to collectivise away
this instinct collapsed. In contrast, the strongest communities, where
people are most likely to rally round in times of need, are those that
are small and ethnically homogenous – in other words, those which are
in effective extended families.
However, people who are entirely
unrelated are also capable of showing kindness and generosity to each
other. Explaining this is the real test for the selfish gene theorists.
That
test was passed by a political scientist called Robert Axelrod and his
computer. Axelrod spent the 1980s and 1990s modelling the success of
different behaviours in virtual societies. Each interaction in these
societies was based on the “prisoner’s dilemma”, a scenario in which
two players can either co-operate or defect. If both co-operate, both
get a middling reward. But if one defects while the other does not, the
defector wins all and the nice guy is left with nothing.
Theorists
assumed that in these scenarios it made sense always to defect. But
Axelrod’s models showed just the opposite: that in a society where
individuals interact with each other more often, it pays to be nice.
The most successful strategy was one called Generous-Tit-for-Tat.
Players with this strategy would do as they had been done by – so
co-operate with those who were co-operative, but retaliate against
those who defected (the tit-for-tat element). But there were two
refinements that made it generous: these players always started out by
co-operating, and they occasionally spontaneously forgave someone.
These refinements encouraged virtuous circles to develop and put a halt
to feuds.
The success of this strategy proved that good behaviour
– being nice to strangers and forgiving one’s enemies – really does
pay. And if it pays, then it should be selected by the evolutionary
process. When we look around, we see that Generous-Tit-for-Tat is in
fact a pretty good description of what we consider decent human
behaviour.
Of course, it is not a perfect description of all
human behaviour – after all, there are saints and sinners in the world.
But Axelrod’s model also accounts for this. If most people play
Generous-Tit-for-Tat, then really nice people will also flourish, as
the Tit-for-Tatters will be happy to co-operate with them. But equally,
as the Generous-Tit-for-Tatters start out playing nicely, they can also
be taken for a ride – even if only once. So in a large society, we
would expect to find sinners too.
Darwin’s critics believed the
existence of goodness refuted his theory of natural selection. Dugatkin
tells in his clear, if functional, prose the stories of those who
proved these critics wrong: communities of upstanding folk, with a few
extremes of saintliness and wickedness either side, are exactly what
evolutionary theory would predict.
And not only in our own species. In his new book, Primates and Philosophers,
Frans de Waal argues that the origins of human goodness can be seen in
apes and monkeys. He claims that we have evolved from a long line of
social animals for whom close co-operation is “not an option but a
survival strategy”. Not only are we nice by nature, but our ancestors
were too, ever since they came down from the proverbial trees.
De
Waal’s evidence is that we see goodness in the behaviour of those
animals with whom we share these long-lost relations. He shows that our
closest cousins, the chimpanzees, have all the building blocks of moral
sensibility. First, they have a highly developed capacity for empathy –
the ability to identify with another that is a precondition for doing
them a good turn. One researcher describes how the only way she could
persuade a young chimp to come down from the roof of her house was by
pretending to cry, in response to which the chimp would immediately
rush over to console her.
Second, reciprocity is at the heart of
chimpanzee society. When a junior male spends the morning grooming a
senior male, he will expect a larger share of the kill in return.
Similarly, reciprocity is central to all the main human religions and
belief systems, whether in the form of the Golden Rule – do as you
would be done by – or Axelrod’s Generous Tit-for-Tat. But philosophers
are uncomfortable with the claim that the noblest aspects of human
nature are part of our bestial heritage. As four essays from leading
ethicists in de Waal’s book show, they consider there to be a great
gulf between a few anecdotes about soft-hearted apes and the heights of
moral theorising.
However, philosophers have failed to give their
moral theorising either logical foundation or real world application.
No one who takes an ethics course at university comes out any wiser
about how to behave; whereas Axelrod’s equations and de Waal’s chimps
show us the origin of human morality as it is actually lived. People do
not make complex theoretical calculations to weigh up the rights and
wrongs of every decision. Their responses to murder or injustice are
instinctive – and remarkably similar the world over. That moral compass
is part of our evolutionary inheritance.
Those who still consider themselves morally superior to our hairier relatives should read David Livingstone Smith’s The Most Dangerous Animal.
Smith’s book focuses on our darker side. Pasting over the cracks in his
argument with a thick layer of polemic, he argues that bloodthirsty
deeds are not exceptions to the rules of human behaviour, but are
dispositions we all possess just waiting to be triggered.
The men
of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, responsible for the
shooting of at least 38,000 mainly Jewish unarmed civilians were, Smith
reports, “middle-aged family men without either military training or
ideological indoctrination”. The same could be said of the perpetrators
of any of the mass killings committed in the last century by people of
all continents, cultures and religions. Given the right conditions,
these murderers “could be your neighbours, parents, or children,”
writes Smith. “They could be you.”
What are those conditions
written into our genes that unleash genocidal tendencies? Primarily,
the opportunity to take resources – including fertile females – from
foreigners. Smith notes how war – ancient and modern – is invariably
accompanied by slaughter, rape and pillage. According to the Bible,
after defeating the Midianites, Moses instructed his troops to “kill
all the boys, and kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save
for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man”.
So
which is it: has nature made us Jekyll or Hyde? The answer, of course,
is both. As Aristotle wrote, we are social animals. And like all social
animals, from ants to chimpanzees, we are highly xenophobic. The more
altruistic the members of a group are towards each other, the more
aggressive towards outsiders. Close-knit communities are the least
tolerant of others. The world over, humans band together into
co-operative groups – whether tribes, nations or religions – then set
upon those who are different.
These three books argue that it is
not random impulses that make us one moment Jekyll and the next Hyde.
Nor is it the voices of angels and demons. What the young science of
evolutionary biology shows is that the roots of good and evil lie in
instincts that are universal and predictable; instincts that have
helped the genes that encode them to replicate from one generation to
the next. We might hope that understanding the biological basis of
these instincts better will help us to master them, not least in seeing
through the flimsy pretexts on which we often rush to war.
Henrik sez, "I've started the first Lego animation festival in Northern
Europe, and it takes place for the first time tomorrow (Saturday that
is) in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden. There will be three blocks of short
brickfilms and the venue is a 300 seat theater. Hopefully, it will
eventually go mobile and tour the country and perhaps the Nordic
countries. The festival will feature not only 20+ independent
brickfilms but there will also be stands with computers and cams where
people can try out Lego animation themselves if they want."
Link
(Thanks, Henrik!)
I remember receiving the US text of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct
from Penguin in the early 1990s and being asked for an opinion about UK
publication. I said that it was one of the best books about language I
had ever read. Each time a Pinker books comes out, I say that to
myself. But this one beats them all.
The
term “summit” was coined by Winston Churchill in an election speech in
1950, where he advocated a meeting with Stalin. “It is not easy to
see,” he declared, “how matters could be worsened by a parley at the
summit.” A few years later, in 1953, the conquest of Everest led the
cartoonist Vicky to show “a four-power expedition – preparing the long
delayed attempt to climb the highest mountain of all”, which is of
course peace. 
The
book cover originated in the 19th century as a simple paper wrapper
whose job was to protect the binding of the book. It has since become
an essential marketing tool, and the designer’s task has been to
transform the cover – and by extension the book – into an irresistible
object. In his book Front Cover, Alan Powers put it bluntly:
the best covers possess a “hidden eroticism”. You want to take them
home, make them yours. But once the book finds its place on your
bookshelf, it’s the spine, and not that seductive cover, that you’ll be
staring at for the next 30 years.
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