Human Nature

 

When humans first domesticated plants and animals they overrode natural selection in order to favour certain physical and behavioural features over others. Most domesticates don’t do well in the absence of humans, because the characteristics that were selected by humans, such as tameness and docility, are not advantageous in the natural world. It’s fair to say that at least a part of their nature is determined by human choice and not natural selection.  Analogously, most humans wouldn’t survive in a natural environment without other humans to cooperate with.  A mountain lion or a bear doesn’t need to be around others of their species to survive, and they are not socializers, except when it comes to mating time.  Humans are a social species but a social species that is unlike any other.  Just as we’ve prospered by selecting and maintaining certain advantageous features in domesticated plants and animals,  we prospered even more by collectively selecting certain human moral characteristics, analogous, but not identical to tameness.

The basic premise of evolutionary psychology is that human nature is just animal nature, determined by blind natural selection. This is the thesis I wish to dispute. I will argue that the development of  human morality was deliberate - it was collectively purposive rather than a purposeless consequence of natural selection, in the same way that  the development of agriculture was derived from a series of deliberate human decisions.

Although all animals can adapt to changes in their environment, only humans have moral systems that purposefully select behaviours because of their collective survival value. What we consider good behaviour, roughly amounts to the deliberate selection of certain human behaviours, for instance, empathy, cooperation, and mutual support; and the rejection of other human behaviours, such as boasting,aggression, and bullying.

Against my thesis you could argue that if that is what morality is, my theory is plainly inaccurate, since boasting and aggression are fairly common in our society. But, my point, and here I agree with the evolutionary psychologists, is that conditions in the Pleistocene and Paleocene were significantly different than today.  Imagine then, the lengthy period in prehistory before the development of agriculture, when humans lived in fairly small groups of hunter-gatherers.  It seems that of the few hunter gatherer societies left on earth, two, as disparate as the Inuit of the Arctic, and the San, of the Kalahari desert,  both display public intolerance of  aggressive and boastful behaviour, and people in these societies express their intolerance by public ridicule and shunning. 

It is as if:  Moral judgements target the types of behaviour that puts the group at risk when the need for extended cooperation is vital for the group’s survival.

Here is the way two anthropologists describe the moral systems of North American Indians:

No crime against the community was worse than selfishness, no attitude

was worse than arrogance, no behaviour was more loathsome than

argumentativeness. The individual who behaved thus, in the small,

tightly knit world of native communities, quickly found himself, shunned,

shamed and isolated.

 If we consider our modern society, where the vast majority of us are not so threatened by starvation, there's no shortage of these “prohibited” behaviours around, but, all the same, we still generally disapprove of them.  We, of course, no longer live as hunter-gatherers, so why not permit  a wider spectrum of behaviour? Besides, boasting and aggression can safely be channelled into behaviour surrounding competitive sports, entertainment, and  trading in the stock and money markets, and therefore, they don’t need to be prohibited; whereas in stone age societies suppressing these kinds of anti-social behaviours could have been essential for survival.

Suppose we see the human development of morality as the distinctly human way of trying to make things better for everybody, instead of leaving things to nature.  I put it to you, dear reader, that we humans were not happy with nature taking its course, so we got together and decided to do a big part of this job ourselves. I would argue that morality is a system of behaviour regulation whose collective aim amounts to improving on nature - better ensuring  the survival of succeeding generations - and one that worked better than we could ever  have hoped for.  It therefore, could have taken the place of natural selection in the same way that domestication developed as a distinctly human initiated form of selection.

 Human males have evolved to become less sexually dimorphic than their ape ancestors: Humans lack the tremendous size differential that exists between male and female gorillas, and  the huge canines and massive shoulders of male chimps and gorillas.  Humans have purposefully adopted technologies to help themselves survive.  These technologies have effectively replaced the biological weapons and armour of animal kind with the artificial tools and weapons created by the human mind. And what is more, these stone age technologies could well have led to significant changes in social hierarchies, just as modern technologies such as the printing press, the radio, and the internet have been shown to alter social systems.

The fact that human brains are a lot larger than ape brains, which necessitates the birth of infants that have developmentally delayed nervous systems, so that their heads are small enough to fit through the human birth canal,  means that human  infants are more helpless and dependent for longer time periods than ape infants; and this wouldn’t be at all possible without a sexual division of labour; and this sexual division of labour is mostly absent from other animals;  most animals have much shorter periods of immaturity, and therefore there is little need for a sexual division of labour; immature herd animals quickly gain a footing and are weaned by the late spring; a father is not much help in this fleeting situation. 

 It seems to me pretty significant that humans have the longest period of helpless infancy and childhood of any other animal. Not only is this long period of immaturity (and we are talking at least a decade, if not more)  the perfect environment for learning complex behaviour like speaking; what’s even more significant for evolutionary theory is that it comes at a large cost:  the longer childhood necessitates longer and much more cooperative types of  parenting. 

So, how did this come about?  Evolution in brain size over the last two million years was rapid, even though many factors seem to militate against it, such as: the requirement for a diet higher in animal fat and the requirement for more complex levels of cooperation. Apes, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, are mostly vegetarian, whereas humans, with their bigger, energy-hogging brains, and extended terms of nursing, tend to eat a lot more meat and animal fat.   Nursing female humans needed extra dietary fat, but their physically close ties to their young, meant that for long periods of time, while they are raising their infants, they were not as mobile as males, who could better access the animal fat from fresh predator kills in often dangerous and precarious conditions.  So, the practice of monogamy would fit well with human parenting, affording better protection for the children, and a better diet for the pregnant and nursing females, as the mother and father can divide their labour.

Our closest primate relatives, the great apes, tend towards the majority of offspring being the consequence of a dominant alpha male and fertile females. Humans tend much more towards monogamy, but unlike any other animal, human monogamy is not instinctual.   In human societies monogamy is a chosen type of living arrangement, not a form dictated by nature, the way birds are forced into monogamy by the logic of taking care of a nest.  By contrast, monogamy is not at all common in mammals; many herd animals, for instance, are made up of unattached adult males as well as harems of females protected by a single alpha male.

Given a certain minimum amount of cooperation between hominins,  as well as the ready availability of lethal stone weapons, the prospect of a more egalitarian distribution of females could have motivated the agreement between non-dominants to pair up and prevent polygyny by collectively eliminating the alpha male.  Monogamy could have been collectively enforced in order to prevent the regeneration of replacement alphas. In fact, moral systems could have originated from these agreements and enforcements.  This could explain the common bias against polygamy and  “open marriages” as well as  our propensity to readily engage in the judgemental  art of gossip with others, the main goal of which is to display and to share moral disapproval of bad behaviour.

Cooperation is like a reservoir, it is a potential resource that is constantly threatened by  depletion.  And we know it is vulnerable because we can often feel the necessity to get together with others to defend and support it when we feel that it is under threat. This fact is fundamental.  The fact that cooperation is vulnerable and it can best be protected by collective effort, I believe, is exactly the pivot point for differentiating humans from all other animals. Human nature was always an uphill battle. Our childhoods require extensive cooperation amongst parents, family, and community.   Maintaining monogamous relationships, moral systems, and an economy all take a lot of extra effort; these systems  do not run themselves, they have a collective cost, because violations must be detected and punished, otherwise what we have in common  is lost. If a large enough minority let things go and act any way they feel  with no thought for others, they will end up destroying cooperative ventures. Cooperation is therefore vulnerable to depletion, like a reservoir. 

 

Theories of moral origins that are based on evolutionary biology are all faced with the difficulty of explaining how greater cooperation could have worked by natural selection if natural selection works through each individual passing on his or her genes to their offspring.  In nature, brute strength, cheating, and deception are often winning strategies.  Even if everyone benefits from cooperation, individuals can benefit even more by cheating and free-loading, without contributing to collective efforts. 

 Why then do human groups manage to survive and prosper?  The answer has to be the effective enforcement of collective decisions.  In moral systems, those who cheat and don’t contribute to the effort are punished and progressively isolated for successive transgressions.  This enforcement is done collectively by group adherence to moral rules.  It was never delegated to a single authority, thus, it’s the exact opposite of the Hobbsian, sword-wielding absolute monarch.  It is, in fact, an agreement that every individual learns to make, of their own adherence to and enforcement of the moral rules, mediated by the moral sentiments:   resentment, empathy, etc.  In humans, whenever possible, the alpha male is replaced with collective participation in cooperation and in enforcement.

This, I believe, is the basis for the real difference between humans and other animals.  It is the social equivalent of Elinor Ostrom’s institutional principle of the common pool resource - the case where a resource that is vulnerable to overuse is protected by collective agreements around usage. The common pool is, in effect, created by deliberate agreement among all the people who claim the  resource in common. 

 When people enjoy the continued benefits of a common resource there is more general trust in the workings of the cooperative system, and a concomitant desire to maintain it. But cooperation can be depleted and destroyed by allowing individuals to take without consequences.  Once it is gone, it is much harder to recreate than it would have been to maintain.

Our overwhelming  success in multiplying and dominating the planet is primarily due to our fantastic ability to cooperate on multiple scales at once, and this is only possible through  our internalization of morality.   By constantly observing and judging others behaviour we are, all the time, collectively discouraging and weeding out selfish and destructive behaviour.  This is what we learn to do as we grow up, and once internalized we take it for granted as adults.

Unlike hunter-gatherers we now live in huge complex societies that require multiple institutional systems to deal with the interminable issues and problems that come up - police, legal systems, primary, secondary, and post-secondary educational systems, civic, state, and national governments -  on top of, and somehow enmeshed with our internalized moral systems.

Obviously this superstructure of social institutions did not evolve by natural selection.  Each institution was  deliberately created in order to deal with the growing problems that surfaced, as  human populations and resource use grew exponentially. 

  Deliberate collective agreements and decisions are a hallmark of humans.  Religions, governments, educational systems, legal systems, and economic systems are all set up and work by deliberate agreements about rules. As Bernard Gert argues:  Morality works through universal public awareness of, and commitment to a short list of  rules, emphasizing publicly known prohibitions; and does not rely on generating elaborate instructions on what to do. 

 The most basic form all human systems is the common pool resource.  Human cooperation functions as a potential pool of benefits.  Just like all pool resources, it is vulnerable to exploitation and exhaustion.  If cheats and free riders are able to exploit the cooperation of others and suffer no sanctions, they can derive personal benefit, while at the same time they end up  destroying the fruits of cooperation for the rest of us.  Then people are discouraged from further cooperation, and trust declines precipitously, leading to further social breakdown.

 Why does this not happen all the time?  And how  did humans escape the fate of other primates? Humans, by and large, adhere to moral standards, and when we do this we all actively look for moral transgressions and sometimes recruit others to enforce against them.  We don’t hire a gunman to do this, we do it through our own actions, sometimes dealing directly with the transgressors, sometimes collectively bringing down the institutions of police and government on their heads.  

 

Male chimpanzees  are able to collectively defend their group against external threats, but only humans, and, surprisingly, bonobos, are able to collectively defend against threats from within the group.  This is what moral systems are for. 

The mark of being human is the ability to make collective decisions that maintain cooperation in the face of threats to that cooperation from inside the extended group.

 Another mark of being human is the ability to cooperate and assist strangers, that is, people who are outside the extended group.

Believe it or not, we know more about ourselves and our origins than we did three thousand years ago!  The Biblical book of Genesis correctly associates the acquisition of morality with our exit from nature. What it gets wrong is the all-important moral of the story - inventing right and wrong is what allowed us to go forth and multiply from the very beginning.   The toil and trouble of existing outside of "Eden" is not because the first humans disobeyed God's commands, it’s because moral systems don’t run themselves - they require the life-long active participation of every one of us. Deep down, morality forms the basis for all human social systems. Adopting a moral system is what made human nature possible, and what differentiates us from all other animals.

                                      Bibliography

Boehm, Christopher,  Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and

Shame, Basic Books, 2012.

Boehm, Christopher,  Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of 

Egalitarian Behavior, Harvard University Press, 2001

Chapais, Bernard,  Primeval Kinship:  How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human

Society, Harvard University Press, 2008.

Gert, Bernard, Morality: It's Nature and Justification, Oxford University Press, 2005.

2005.

Ostrom, Elinor,  Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Perdue, Theda, and Green, Michael, North American Indians:  A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2010.