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Charles Wohlforth: Your work shows howhuman pro-social tendencies could haveevolved as a consequence of people living ingroups with cultural traditions forcooperation. A tribe that works togethereffectively has a better chance of survival.Cultural norms enforcing cooperation keepthe tribe on track. Sanctions affect the abilityof defectors, or non-cooperators, to

reproduce—for example, a man who won'tfight in battle for the tribe is shunned andcannot find a mate. Over time, biologicaladaptation follows those cultural norms, andwe come out of the womb programmed forshame and loyalty, and other emotions thatmake us good group members.

The debate rages in evolutionary biologybetween kin selection and group, or multi-

Scaling human nature upA conversation about community, globalgovernance, and climate change

PETER J. RICHERSON AND CHARLES WOHLFORTH

Peter Richerson is... [Bio TK]

Charles Wohlforth is... [Bio TK]The question is... [TK]

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level, selection, allowing wags to point outthat a war is going on among scientists whostudy cooperation and altruism. But yourtheory sidesteps much of that technicaldebate by taking it out of biology, at least inthe critical step of how cooperation starts inthe first place. Even the most self-centeredegoists in their ancient tribes, would, withsufficient brain power, realize they couldaccomplish more together than alone. Andthey could devise sanctions for keeping thegroup working together. It makes sense thatthose rules would ultimately be bred into us.

As you've noted, we all ended up withboth pro-social and self-interested tendencies,which can play out in many ways in manysettings. I'm interested in how they play out inthe setting of the globe as a whole. We areagain faced with an adaptation challenge, thatof fitting our species within an ecologicalniche which encompasses all life. We aren'tdoing well at it. Individual and groupcompetition are driving economic growththat is changing the climate, acidifying theoceans, and dismantling ecosystems. Researchsuggests that groups, or communities, canmanage common resources sustainably, butwe've seen little evidence that nations can,and even less evidence that internationalorganizations can get humankind, as a whole,to overcome the acquisitive, consumptive andcompetitive side of our nature. Is the pro-social side of ourselves ineffective on theselarger scales? Is that a stage in culturalevolution we haven't reached yet—and maynot reach in time to solve the problems thatface us?

I have given a lot of thought to the ideathat we do create pro-social norms for theenvironment, and we have made progress inimposing on environmental wasters the kindof social sanctions that work on smallerscales. For example, in our country, the lastfew decades have created a norm of strongdisapproval for those who throw litter on theside of the road. The point I've tried todevelop in my book, The Fate of Nature, isthat we need political and social institutions

that will allow communities to establish thesenorms, which can then propagate, inter-group, through personal contact and perhapsthrough the media, to change theenvironmental ethos of society as a whole.Even the richest oil company president or hishirelings in government can't ignore the basicmoral presuppositions of the culture.

But your idea about how this worked inprimitive times suggests that parochialism isalso a fundamental part of developing pro-social cultural norms. Feelings of us-against-them build group affiliation and a strongbasis for punishing defectors. Lab researchon communities that successfully manage thecommons point to in-group prejudice as animportant component of making thosesystems work. Can we really expand pro-social affiliation to the entire world? If not,can our good acts with our local communitiesand common resources create norms ofbroader effect, beyond the direct reach or ourown groups?

Enough to chew on?Peter Richerson: Plenty to chew on!

You are right to worry about the problemof parochialism.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin spoke ofselection at the level of tribes favoring twosorts of moral impulses, sympathy on theone hand and loyalty and patriotism on theother.  He argued that sympathy was anengine for moral progress. Sympathy isinclusive and helps people imagine how theirmoral community can be enlarged beyondtheir natal tribe or nation. Laws, religion, andthe example of good men (sic) were amongthe cultural means by which the “instinct” ofsympathy could act as a force for enlargingcooperative communities. Loyalty andpatriotism are more dubious virtues. In manysituations, as we know all too well from thenews, if not from personal experience, loyaltyto tribe or religion helps bring order withingroups, but also leads to distrust and evenhatred of outgroups, intergroup anarchy, andspasms of dreadful violence. Rob Boyd’s and

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my “tribal social instincts hypothesis,”outlined in our book Not By Genes Alone:How Culture Transformed HumanEvolution is a modernization of Darwin’sidea.

The contemporary world faces a numberof global-scale challenges, including climatechange, biodiversity loss, emerging diseases,and economic instability. The first primitivestab at globalization, symbolized byMagellan’s circumnavigation, has evolved intoa tight web of links that bind the world up.The growth of the human population, and ofaffluence per capita, has made our species theearth’s first dominant organism since perhapssome pioneering photosynthetic bacteriumthree billion years ago. The evolution of ourdominance has been exceedingly swift, bornof the capacity of huge, sophisticatedpopulations to fuel explosive technologicaland social change. Simple back-of-the-envelope arithmetic argues that life on earthcould easily become quite unpleasant unless

we are prepared to manage our dominance.You don’t need an ocean-atmosphere-coupled General Circulation Model to tellwhich way the wind blows!

On the positive side, the trend of culturalevolution over the last ten millennia isfavorable as regards the balance of sympathyover patriotism. As human populations andhuman sophistication have grown, we havedeveloped ever more sophisticated tools todeal with the problems generated by our ownsuccess. The growth of multiethnic empires2,500 years ago led to the development of“Axial Age” philosophies and religions with abroadly humanistic rather than parochial coreideology. In the twentieth century, two awfulworld wars and the invention of cheapnuclear weapons led to new internationalinstitutions to protect human rights and tocontain the nuclear genie. The EuropeanUnion has gotten some handle on conflicts inthe twentieth century’s most dangerousregion.

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On the negative side, the main ideologicalenergy that has organized the onrushingmodernization and globalization of the lasttwo centuries has been nationalism, with itstypically rather extreme demands for loyaltyand patriotic fervor. Attempts in Europe topromote multiculturalism under the EUbanner have provoked the formation ofinfluential reactionary nationalist parties innations that we formerly considered some ofthe most enlightened. More generally, thecomplex societies of the last 5,000 years haveproven susceptible to boom and bustdynamics, the causes of which we do not yetunderstand very well.

Nationalism and tribalism are not the onlygame in the global village. The great religionshave produce unifying thinkers and doers likethe Dali Lama, Desmond Tutu, and MartinLuther King. Unfortunately, these samereligions have spawned fundamentalisttendencies, sometimes with nationalistconnections as in the Balkans. Secularhumanists have a cool, well-reasonedinternationalist policy agenda, but don’t excitemass enthusiasm. I don’t see any immediateprospect for a successful globalist ideologywith mass appeal that will decisivelystrengthen our capacity to sympathize withour fellow humans, regardless of tribe,nation, or confession.

The globe’s work for the immediate futureseems destined to remain largely dependenton the efforts of internationalist elites:diplomats, businessmen, leaders of non-governmental organizations, ecumenical andproselytizing religious leaders, scientists, andenvironmentalists. This is an awkward stateof affairs in a democratic age. Jingoisticpoliticians can whip up national and sectarianloyalties that greatly handicap themanagement of global problems, as our mostrecent election in the United States showed.You and your colleagues who write so wellfor the general public are certainly creating anenvironmental ethos. The generational shiftin attitudes is palpable and, we can hope,durable. However, the drive to achieve

changes in attitudes that allow sympathy totrump national and sectarian loyalties to thedegree necessary to tackle global scaleproblems, looks to me as if it is going to be anear-run thing.

Consider the power of consumerism. Therate of human population increase is slowingand is expected to stabilize or even beginshrinking in the next few decades. But in themeantime, affluence per capita continues torise, especially in the big and formerly poorBRIC nations. Exploding affluence needssomehow to be contained, but despite muchexcellent academic work and finger-waggingby many, including Pope John Paul II, littleimpact on popular thought is evident.Wohlforth: It seems we're trying to solve allthe world's problems at once. I suppose thatis a hazard posed by the perspective of yourwork, in which you take on big ideas and findpatterns and drivers in the mix of biologicaland cultural roots of behavior. There is adefinite challenge in moving from thatframework to making normative orprescriptive statements for individuals. In mywriting, trying to create the environmentalethos you allude to, I seek to make thatlink—to help people to see themselves withinthe world system, and take individualresponsibility. Small as we are as organisms incomparison to these problems, nonethelessthat is the level at which change must occur.Only individuals are able to form values ormake decisions; tribes, corporations, andnations are groups of individuals.

The last paragraph of your responseseems key to me. Materialism andconsumerism, as we live them in thedominant culture, have two characteristicscritical for this discussion. First, they matterdirectly: it is hard to see how we can preserve

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,consectetuer adipiscing elit. Ut asapien.

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a finite biosphere while pursuing infinitelyexpanding needs and wants. Second, thedesire for increasing wealth is fundamentallyan individual one. Here is a level at which wecan make decisions that connect our ethics toconsequences in the material world.

Is the desire for ever-increasing wealthand power programmed into human beingsby evolution? Or can cultural evolutionprogress through the creation of a newnorm, or ethical value, for sufficiency? Forexample, imagine a world in whichaccumulation of unnecessary materialpossessions has become an embarrassmentrather than a status symbol. Maybe socialstatus could be gained instead through non-material achievements or acquisitions, orthrough contributions to social goods. Suchgoods and acquisitions need not exist in thephysical world and therefore would carry noresource price.

Your discussion of nationalism is well-taken. The impulse toward parochialismmakes me pessimistic not only aboutinternational agreements and organizations,but even about the ability of individualnations to make meaningful progress onthese issues. However, addressingconsumerism as an ethical and social issuesidesteps those issues. As norms againstmaterialism take hold (and they are alreadydoing so), they could be transmitted cross-culturally and beyond national boundaries byHollywood and other cultural exportmechanisms. Can the internationalentertainment industry, which was built toadvance and power consumerism and the saleof products, also function to communicatenorms for sufficiency? Maybe this is a way wecan express our sympathetic impulses as asociety.

Richerson: Darwin’s rather neglectedDescent of Man proposes a theory ofprogress, the nut of which is captured in thisquote:

With highly civilized nations, continuedprogress depends in a subordinatedegree on natural selection. . . Themore efficient causes of progress seemto consist of a good education duringyouth while the brain is impressible,and of a high standard of excellence,inculcated by the ablest and best men,embodied in the laws, customs, andtraditions of the nation, and enforcedby public opinion.

Darwin’s “more efficient causes” are anexcellent and rather complete list of the toolswe have for making human evolution go indesirable directions. You and your colleaguesare doing excellent work informing thepublic; those of us in universities try toeducate and influence the ablest and best.This is all in pursuit of progress, I believe.

You raise an important point about therole of the individual in creating progress.Forming laws, customs, traditions, and publicopinion are matters of collective decision-making. We attempt to persuade each otherof the right course for public policy. Insimpler societies, and in smaller segments ofmore complex societies, we talk out the issuesthat face us and try to reach decisions basedon consensus. The legislative process ofmany modern states is merely aconstitutionally-formalized collectivedecision-making system. Customs andtraditions evolve through the contributionsof myriad individuals over an extendedperiod of time.

None of the above is meant tounderestimate the importance of individualstaken one at a time. Persuasion is like a retailbusiness. We try to get individuals to read ourbooks, attend our classes, and think aboutwho to vote for. A great deal of creativeheavy lifting is done by individuals. Howevermuch ideas are propagated, refined, andrecombined by wholesale collective decision-making, I can’t see how we can operate any

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human social system without retail attentionto the individual.

Our own radically individualist politicaltradition gives outsized weight to a citizen’sdecisions in the formation of public policy. Ithink we need to push back to some degreeagainst excessive individualism. Materialwants, especially excessive ones, arecomparative: I don’t mind living in a modesthouse, but if all my friends and neighbors livein much grander ones, I may feel the pain ofenvy in my one hundred square meters whilethey count their three hundred square metersas a happy sign of virtue, not greed or luck.The economist Robert H. Frank in his booksChoosing the Right Pond and The Winner-Take-All Society dissects the operation ofthis dynamic. Unrestrained economic changedriven by comparative wants can easilydestroy value. He shows how cooperation isnecessary to evade being victimized bycomparative wants. Pride and envy are amongChristianity's seven deadly sins. They don’t

get any better treatment in the otheruniversalistic religions.

Since biological fitness has a stronglycomparative component, you are likelycorrect that comparative wants have deepbiological roots. On the other hand, thehunting and gathering societies that seemmost like our late Pleistocene ancestors areusually rather egalitarian. Power differentialsare modest, and foods that require the mostenergy and skill to collect are generally widelyshared within the community. According toChristopher Boehm in his book Hierarchy inthe Forest, among human hunter-gatherersthose who would have been subordinates inancestral ape societies cooperated to suppresswould-be dominants in order to produceegalitarian human societies. AnthropologistsJoe Henrich and Francisco Gil-White arguein an important paper that humans haveerected a new system of prestige on top ofthe more ancient primate system ofdominance. Dominants depend upon raw

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coercive power for their status while theprestigious are granted status as the ablestand best by public opinion. Aung San SuuKyi has prestige; the Burmese junta thatprevents her party from taking power hasdominance. Ancestral hunter-gatherersocieties were substantially organized byprestige, not dominance. Dominants rightlyfear the power of prestige; the Chinesegovernment reacted quite strongly to theprestige accorded by Liu Xiaobo by theNobel Peace Prize Committee.

Modern democracy is an attempt tointroduce the spirit of egalitarianism and ruleby prestige (rather than power) into theoperation of complex societies. This attemptruns in the face of history, as complexsocieties seem to have regularly led to thereturn of dominance in the human socialequation. Yet as Peter Turchin argues in hisbook Historical Dynamics, elite societies arethemselves unstable: authoritarians oftenpromise stability when democracy seemsshaky, but it is by no means obvious thatauthoritarians can in fact deliver.

I certainly hope that you are right that byusing humanistic and universalist argumentswe can draw the sting of nationalism andsimilar parochial ideologies. This seemsessential for moral progress in a world withcritical global problems to solve.

I sometimes think of human life as anadventure. In an adventure, you take risks inhope of ultimate gain. Against the risks, youpit your skill and judgment. Modernity has

launched our whole species, willy nilly, upona great adventure full of risk and uncertainty.Foolish adventurers neglect skill andjudgment and trust to luck; either wesuccessfully use Darwin’s tools to progress orwe face the luck of natural selection—and wedon’t want to evolve by natural selection ifwe can avoid it!

Perhaps we need to remind people aboutthe adventure's fundamentally social nature.As Adam Smith said in The Theory of MoralSentiments:

What are the advantages which wepropose by that great purpose ofhuman life which we call bettering ourcondition? To be observed, to beattended to, to be taken notice of withsympathy, complacency andapprobation all are the advantages wecan propose to derive from it.

Wohlforth: We're wonderfully near toconsensus. Your message reads like a veryerudite precis of my book, The Fate ofNature, including the attention paid toindigenous cultures and Joe Henrich's work,the issues surrounding the psychology ofmaterialism, and the emphasis on culturalrather than biological evolution. I think I'veexpressed myself poorly, however, in thatyou've taken some of what I said to be thecontrary of what I meant: I strongly agreewith most of your message.

But I think there is an area where I wouldamend your comments. You say, “Modern

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democracy is an attempt to introduce thespirit of egalitarianism and rule by prestige(rather than power) into the operation ofcomplex societies.” The word “democracy” isas slippery as any in the language. It impliesconsent of the governed, but in practicemore often effects only a wider distributionof power, into the hands of numerous peopleand across time. On the surface, your pointthat democracy is more egalitarian follows bydefinition, since the broader distribution ofpower is necessarily more egalitarian thandictatorship. However, it does not necessarilyfollow that a democratic system embodies“the spirit of egalitarianism and rule byprestige.” Splitting dominance (or purepower) into parts doesn’t transform it intothe “spirit” of egalitarianism. Moreimportantly, if that “spirit” means, as Ibelieve you intend, the capacity forexpression of pro-social values into policy, Iwould suggest the contrary may be true. It isnot at all clear that a democratic arrangementof power would be better for theenvironment or would allow human beings tomore easily fit within our ecosystem, nor isthere necessarily a connection between votingand the transmission of pro-social values intopublic policy.

The Enlightenment form of democracymost perfectly manifested in the UnitedStates assumes that we are not co-operative;in Madison's classic words from TheFederalist Papers (No. 51):

Ambition must be made to counteractambition. The interest of the manmust be connected with theconstitutional rights of the place. Itmay be a reflection on human naturethat such devices should be necessaryto control the abuses of government.But what is government itself but thegreatest of all reflections on humannature? If men were angels, nogovernment would be necessary.

Experience teaches that this is, in fact,how our form of democracy functions. It is asystem for summing selfish private interestsinto public policy; a system for allocatingresources and for selecting policies that willyield maximum opportunities for privatebenefit. At best, it is utilitarian, in that thesum of the self interest of the largestnumber of people is maximized. To thelimited extent that the system is capable ofrecognizing group or community interests, itdoes so by privileging them within the systemof constitutional “places”. The original statesdemanded retention of power. Theprogressive loss of power by local and stategovernments reflects the growing emphasisof the U.S. constitutional system onindividual interests and economic growth tothe exclusion of almost all other values. Onecan't get elected without declaring supportfor national power and competitiveness andpromising to deliver maximum economicbenefit to individual voters.

It is not a coincidence that concentratedfederal power and corporate power go hand

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in hand, and that community connectionsthat exist in the spirit of egalitarianism areever weaker. We naturally want to connectwith others and the natural world, but theability to influence the world is increasingly inthe hands of distant corporations andgovernments. Democracy is not helping bringour sympathetic impulses to the fore; on thecontrary, it is narrowing the span ofautonomy in which these impulses can act,making them irrelevant.

I've heard some environmentalists speaklongingly of China's system, where thegovernment can simply imposeenvironmental protection by fiat. Capitalists,too, who envy the rapid economic growthand efficient exercise of government powerthere. Those feelings scare me. I'm scaredthat authoritarian postmodern capitalism maybe the most efficient and powerful economicsystem yet invented. I think our constitutionalsystem is seriously flawed, but any student ofhistory should prefer it to one-party ordictatorial power. Madison was right, at least,that our system is well-suited to prevent thefree rein of the worst part of our nature.

Returning to our original question aboutour capacity to address global environmentalproblems, I'm forced to rely upon socialforces: specifically, the creation of norms forenvironmental ethics in a rapidly developingglobal culture. The science-and-statemechanism now being used to addressclimate change would never have broughtabout last century's changes in race relations.Academic study followed by democraticlegislation did not defeat slavery, colonialism,and overt racism. Instead, the really effectivetools were moral discussion, communityrelations, and the spread of new normsthrough writings and action. Governmentsonly moved when the moral ground hadalready shifted under them, makingcontinuation of the old system untenable.

As you say, we don't know what willhappen. I don’t know if the process of social

change will be quick enough. But I think it isthe solution, and that it is only achievablethrough those sympathies that we normallyexpress on the small scale.Richerson: Yes, I imagine that we are nearagreement on most issues. I certainly wouldnot defend a panglossian view ofcontemporary democracies. I share many ofyour critical opinions. Aside from all theirother imperfections, it is not clear that theyare up to managing global problems. Butpostmodern authoritarianisms, as exemplifiedby China, Russia, or Saudi Arabia, are notobviously any better. In Copenhagen lastyear, the responsibility for failure was widelydistributed and didn’t depend much on typeof political system.

We also don’t want to romanticize hunter-gatherers. In simple societies men dominatewomen. Feuds and intertribal warfare areoften serious problems. Hunter-gatherershave been blamed for megafaunal extinctions.

I think that reasoning from “humannature” is an error. Results from recentexperimental games suggest that individuals’propensities to cooperate are highly variable.A large minority of people are stronglycooperative, a majority are conditionalcooperators who will cooperate if others do,and a minority cheat as much as they can getaway with. In groups composed of the firsttwo types, cooperation emerges rapidly. Theproblems come from the ten percent ofcheaters: for example, those who usecommunication deceptively, encouragingothers to cooperate while they defect.Different cultures vary in the tools they givethe minority of strong cooperators toencourage the majority and control thedeviously selfish. People also vary in thekinds of moral arguments they subscribe to.We have barely begun to think about politicsand policy using population thinking in placeof the dubious essentialist concept of humannature.