the impact of evolutionary thought

7/28/2019 The Impact of Evolutionary Thought

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Chapter 1. Introduction [00:00:00]

Professor Stephen Stearns: Now, today I am giving a lecture, on which you're not going to

be tested. Okay? So I'm being an idealistic, academic intellectual today, and I'm talking about

stuff which is of general interest and is not going to be on the final exam. So I want you to kick

back and enjoy this final lecture before Spring Break, and perhaps it will stimulate some things

for you to think about.

If you want to read further about this, you can go to the Resources page and look up Major

Transitions, right here, and you'll pick up a commentary written in Evolution to which this talk

is relevant; it's structured a little bit differently.

Now I want to give you a little bit of background on my current thinking about this area, because

I'm likely to run out of time towards the end; so I better tell it to you at the beginning, otherwise

you won't hear it. [Laughs]

I began worrying about this issue of whether we're stuck in the middle of a major transition,

between individual and group, about now fifteen to eighteen years ago. And in 2005/2006, after

I finished being chair of the department, Yale very kindly gave me a full-year sabbatical, and I

spent the year reading widely in how evolutionary thought had impacted psychology,

anthropology, political science, economics; all of these cognate fields that have something to do

with human behavior, and that bear on the issue of whether or not we have been selected to

behave in certain ways in social contexts.

And I'm going to give you today a talk that describes my motivation to do that, and the

preliminary conclusions that I came to. And you can read about that in more detail in that

commentary in Evolution, if you wish. You just download the PDF from the website.

When I finished all that process, and I thought about sitting down to write a book, which I did

last summer, what I discovered is that there were certain key elements in the logic of the

argument that simply were not well scientifically established at this point. And I therefore had to

make a decision: Do I remain agnostic, or do I go for a colorful and publication worthy thrill? I

decided to remain agnostic.

I could have published a book that made claims that probably would've gotten into the New

York Times fairly easily. And I decided not to. And basically the reason for that is that I'm a

natural scientist, and I don't want to make claims, to the broadly educated public, about the

nature of the human condition, without having all the links in the chain of logic pinned down by

experiments.

I think it's perfectly valid to do what I'm doing today. I'm going to advance some hypotheses. I'm

going to tell you where they are or where they are not well established; and I think that by doing

that I can show you that there are some really fascinating issues here. But I don't think it would

be responsible for me to go out and publish a book, in the general trade industry, that made the

central claim.


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This is the central claim: That we're stuck in a major evolutionary transition. We're feeling the

pain. The pain is caused by the fact that there is a conflict between individual interest and group

interest, and that conflict has not been resolved, and the selection mechanisms that have been

pushing us in that direction are starting to break down.

So it's an interesting idea. And, in fact, the feedback I've had from that commentary is that

people were absolutely amazed that Evolution allowed me to publish it, and it was deeply

interesting and troubling, but that clearly it's still an open issue. So I think that the colleagues I

have in the evolutionary biology community agree that it's interesting and unresolved. So all of

that upfront. Okay, let's go.

This has to do with the impact of evolutionary thought on the social sciences, and its

implications for understanding what we are. I begin with some of the remarkable observations

that led me to these ideas. I was an early Vietnam War protestor. I was deeply concerned with

the issue of why I should die for my country; back in 1966/1967.

Well here are some, to me, really incredible observations about human behavior. The first day of

the Battle of the Somme, July 1st, 1916. One day. The British Expeditionary Force lost 58,000

men, in 24 hours. That's as many as were killed- American were killed in the entire Vietnam

War, over about eight years.

The British continued to attack until winter. They lost another 420,000 men. During that time

the French lost 200,000; the Germans lost half a million. So, over six months more than a

million people, led by idiots, died in useless slaughter. And here's the point: throughout the next

two years, young males continued to volunteer for service and to obey their leaders. That's one

hell of an observation. It tells you something very deep about humans.

Now, we are susceptible to lots of other social emotions besides patriotism. We express love,

empathy, compassion, guilt, shame, embarrassment, duty and honor; and we do it by the age of

three. Paul Bloom, in the Psych Department, has watched the development of the moral

emotions in humans, in his own children, and says that by age three they had already committed

all of the Seven Deadly Sins, except lust. Okay?

So it looks like the susceptibility to moral emotions is innate. People who lack moral emotions

we call psychopaths, or sociopaths. They commit crimes and end up in prison. We will trust

strangers enough to engage in economic transactions; we'll even do it on the web, with our

credit cards. That's pretty amazing too.

There's a great story in Paul Seabright's book about this, where about 1500 years ago traders

show up on the banks of the Volga River, to trade with the Khazars; and the Khazars are a

bloodthirsty people, but they've got money. Right? So the goods are put down on the bank of the

river. The traders go away. The Khazars come back, look at the goods. They place a pile of money

over there. The people never see each other. They go back and forth for two or three days, kind

of bargaining, by just putting stuff down on the ground, until finally a stake is pounded in, and

it's a deal, and one side takes the money and the other side takes the goods.

It is not clear under what circumstances people can trust each other enough to engage in aneconomic transaction; especially not since Bernie Madoff. We are willing to pay taxes to the


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government, in return for services that benefit the entire country; not just ourselves, not just our

relatives.

And if you look at the major religions of the world, you'll find that their central moral messages

are mostly about stabilizing social behavior. Okay? So in Christianity we've got the Sermon on

the Mount. So you should be gentle. You should be merciful; that means you should be

forgiving. You should make peace; so you should stabilize social conflict. If you got angry with

your brother, you're going to be guilty before the court, and the central Sermon on the Mount

statement is do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

If we look at Islam--this is in the Koran--so do good to your parents and kinsfolk and orphans

and needy, and to the neighbor of your kin and the neighbor not of your kin, and to the fellow

neighbor, and to the wayfarer. Look at how that sentence neatly expands the moral circle that

Peter Singer talks about, of how far, how distantly related does something have to be to us, for

us to feel like we should behave morally towards them? And the Koran lays that out very

explicitly.Forgive people who offend you. Give to those who refuse you. Stretch a hand of peace

to the one who quarrels with you; very much like turn the other cheek. Okay?

Another great tradition, Confucianism. Love others; be benevolent, charitable and kind. Okay?

We're now in sixth century BC China.Do your duty to honor your family and neighbors; social

relationships. And what you don't want for yourself, don't do to others. So a neat little

inversion of the Golden Rule in the Sermon on the Mount, in Confucius 500 years earlier.

Well the idea behind this is that things like nationalism and religion are culturally transmitted

value systems, and biology is providing handles on which those value systems can pull. And the

way it does it is very probably by genetic influence on hormones and their receptors. There areprobably other mechanisms as well, but that's at least one of them, and some of this stuff is now

under experimental investigation.

So, for example, oxytocin. If I want to stabilize trust, I can give people lots of oxytocin, and

they'll cooperate and trust each other a lot more than they will if I give them an overdose of

something like testosterone. Okay? So testosterone is more or less more aggression, and

oxytocin is more trust and cooperation. In other words, we contain within ourselves

physiological mechanisms that if genes want to, they can dial up and down like rheostats, and

that will have some kind of indirect influence on the general level of either aggression or trust, in

a group.

Chapter 2. Transitions in Hierarchal Selection [00:10:27]

So my questions about these kinds of problems are, are we in fact stuck in a major transition

between individual and group? Has it gotten stuck because the selection mechanisms have

broken down? Has the breakdown left us in a state of tension, caused by conflicts between

individual and group? And do these individual group conflicts define a significant part of the

human condition?

You know, once you've seen that list, it's easy to start telling just-so stories, and throwing up lists

of things: unions in conflict with management; Democrats in conflict with Republicans over the


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role of the individual and the role of society in constructing government policy; Communism

versus Capitalism; the way I feel about whether or not I should donate to a charity or keep the

money for my wine cellar. You know? There's lots of different contexts in which that can

happen.

You can ask yourself, well what would happen if we really went right through the major

transition? Well, some things have. Eusocial insect colonies have gone through this transition;

and they are defined by reproductive suppression. So if you were living in a state in which the

opportunity to reproduce was in fact determined by the group and not by the individual, that

would probably be a pretty strong signal that you had completed the transition. We're nowhere

near that at the moment.

However, we are certainly in a circumstance in which some of that happens. The Chinese One-

Child Policy is an indication of that. The sort of political correctness of the environmental

movement that encourages people towards zero-population growth and only having two

children is that kind of thing. So we haven't made the transition, but certainly there are signals

that we're partway into it.

So here are the hallmarks of major transitions. And I want to remind you of this; this is from the

lecture on genetic conflict, and it's also from the lecture on major events in evolution.

In a major transition, things that were previously independent fuse into a larger whole and lose

their independence. Then units in that larger whole specialize on different functions; they

achieve a division of labor. That division of labor has to be stabilized, and it then integrates the

new unit and improves performance, in competition with like units. And the cohesive

integration, that's needed within the group, requires suppression of intra-group conflict, amongpreviously independent units, so that you can be effective at competing with other similar

groups. Often during this process a new system of information transmission will emerge.

So this is something that's happened four or five times in evolution: prokaryotes to eukaryotes;

single-celled eukaryotes to multi-cellular organisms; multi-cellular organisms into family

groups; family groups into insect societies; and in mammals into naked African mole rats and

dwarf mongooses, things like that.

And in humans the new system of information transmission is cultural transmission, with

language. So we now have a parallel genetic and language transmission of information, and they

can be in conflict with each other.

So to see if these ideas make any sense, we need to evaluate hierarchical selection. That sets up

conflict between individual and group. We need to see what kind of cultural group selection

might be going on, to select for cohesion, promoting group performance. We need to see how

conflicts are generated and resolved, in a selective hierarchy; so the origins of group cohesion.

That brings us to the contentious subject of whether there are tribal social instincts and how

they might originate. I would claim that if I were to take you guys and put you on a desert island,

and call half of you greens and half of you blues, and divide the territory of the island in two,

that you would develop green identity and blue identity, within about six hours, and start


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organizing for competition. I think humans self-organize to do that real quick. There have been

experiments done on that.

Then, as part of the claim of the overall hypothesis that we're stuck in the transition and we're

probably not going to complete it, is group selection, biological and cultural, breaking down, in

our current civilization? So let's run through that.

Here are the basic issues in hierarchical selection. The thing you need to focus on is the

distribution of variation within and among units. So if most of the variation in the population is

within each group, and the groups don't differ too much from each other--they're all kind of

motley, but they're all similarly motley--then you won't really have very much opportunity for

group selection. But if the variation in the population is homogenous within groups, and

different between groups, you have a much bigger opportunity for group selection.

The strength of selection, in part, is going to be determined by the rate at which units are born

and die. So if the little units, inside the groups, do things very rapidly, and the big units, thegroups, do things very slowly, then that's going to prejudice things towards the individual and

away from the group; and vice-versa. Okay? Then you need to look at the correlation of

reproductive success, with trait variation at each level. That just takes us back to the first lecture

in the course. Right? Conditions, four conditions, for natural selection.

And when we think about how cultural selection might work, when biological group selection is

usually ineffective--and, by the way, there've been a lot of publications on this recently, and

they've been in high-end journals, likeNature andScience--we can see that one of the things that

happens is that social norms spread rapidly through imitation.

So if, within a group, a new social norm arises, it can spread through that group and homogenize

that group pretty rapidly, simply because we are creatures that learn rapidly, and we imitate

others, and we respond to social pressure, and to things like political correctness. This is

essentially a description of the spread of political correctness.

You can accelerate that spread with moralistic punishment, and that will--that's a very, very

powerful force. Moralistic or altruistic punishment is the following: I notice that Blake is doing

something that is violating a group norm, and I punish her for it. Blake doesn't like that, and she

elicits a- imposes a cost on me, for having the effrontery to having punished her for doing that.

However, my punishment continues, and is strong enough finally to force Blake to obey the

group norm.

In the process I have--she's really elicited quite a bit of cost from me. Okay? Perhaps I'm

battered and miserable, but she's behaving now. Well that's benefited everybody in the group, at

my cost. If there is any selection for people who behave that way, who go around going, "Nah,

nah, nah, nah, nah," that will actually accelerate the spread of social norms, and rapidly make

them uniform, within groups.

Now part of the process of cultural group selection would be the extinction of a group, or the

reproduction of a group. And the extinction of a group culturally doesn't require biological

group extinction. The Gauls did not die when they were conquered by the Roman Empire, andstopped speaking Celtic, and started speaking in Latin.


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There was a horizontal transmission of a language that Latinized France and made it no longer a

Celtic, quasi-Germanic society. The people didn't die, but the culture died. Or think of Tibet, if

you want a current day example. And cultural group reproduction doesn't require biological

group reproduction. So the Romans basically reproduced their culture in France, 2000 years

ago.

Chapter 3. Cooperation and Aggression [00:19:18]

A horrible statement, isn't it? Very true. I would challenge you to find any individual who has

ever lived on this planet, who has lived at a time in which no war was going on anywhere on the

planet. Their own particular local group might not have been in warfare, but it's almost

impossible to find a time in which war is not going on.

I could put up a slide like this, by the way, for China, and I'd have to redefine the Y-axis, because

the number of deaths is so much greater. It's difficult to reconstruct the demography of Central

Asia, or of Africa, but one can be pretty sure that similar graphs would be put up. And the take-

home message, when you look at this history, is that humans--we think about how nice we are

and how aggressive those chimpanzees are, and stuff like that.

But if you were another species, looking at the human race, you would say, "Oh, they are B-A-M-

Fs; they are bad-assed mother-fuckers. [Laughter] And I use that--I thought, should I use that

term in an introductory biology lecture or not? Should I drop that particular linguistic bomb

into the mix? And I decided yes, because I want you to remember it. Okay? That's why I did it.

Now we have some other evidence. Troy and Jericho. You go back in Jericho and you go through

forty-two layers of Jericho getting burned down. I've been to the museum in Istanbul and I have

looked at the excavation layers of Troy. The Trojan War was sack number nine; or no, sack

number six I think. And so Troy was burned down a total of about fifteen times.

You look into our great mythologies, and they are all structured around warfare: Iliad,

Mahabharata, Niebelungenlied. You look into the histories of any of the civilizations that we

have at hand, you'll find that there's war. Okay? So there's a lot of opportunity for group

performance to be tested by lethal competition. That's the take-home message of the prevalence

of warfare.

Now the genetic differences between early human groups probably were long enough- large

enough for lethal inter-group competition to account for the evolution of altruism and

cooperation within the groups. In other words, we all have to band together, because if we don't

cooperate with each other, those guys next door are going to wipe us out.

And the necessary condition for that, in the theoretical models, is reproductive leveling within

groups, that's generated by food sharing beyond the immediate family, that's generated by

monogamy and generated by other cooperative means.

So this is--I told you, this stuff is getting published in Science andNature. This is Sam Bowles.

Sam's a Yale College graduate. His dad was Ambassador to India, under John Kennedy, and

Sam's an economist. And he's actually a fairly committed group selectionist--so mainstream

evolutionary biologists look on his work with some skepticism, because of that--but he's very


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much concerned about whether or not there were conditions that would tend to take the selfish

Darwinian model of short-term selfishness--homo economicus; strictly short-term, selfish,

rational--and tend to convert that into a person who is more socially empathetic and more

cooperative, at least within the immediate group. So he's concerned with that kind of process.

Well we would very much like to know, if this is going on, how a social norm, like food sharing

or monogamy, gets fixed in a group. Culture is very real. Cultural transmission is there, and it's

important, and it's different from biological genetic transmission, and it's a fact on the ground.

Okay? And you will find that, if you look across the face of the earth, tremendous cultural

variation. And a group of people, who are centered around Sam Bowles and Pete Richardson

and Rob Boyd and Joe Henrich and some others, are arguing that cultural group selection will

explain the spread of social norms, that promote group cohesion and group performance.

So that one of the things that happened is--language and cultural transmission emerged in the

human lineage, and became important probably between about 100 and 50,000 years ago--is

that this process could start. And it's been commented on.

There's a great Muslim historiographer named Ibn Khaldun. He was kind of the Henry Kissinger

of his day. He was born in Andalucia, in Southern Spain, and he was active politically in

kingdoms there, and in North Africa, and he became the leading professor on the Law Faculty in

Cairo.

And when Tamerlane, Timur the Lame, invaded Syria--Timur the Lame was one of Genghis

Khan's descendants--Ibn Khaldun went up, with the army from Egypt, the Muslim army from

Egypt, to defend Damascus, and he was in Damascus when it was besieged, and Tamerlane

asked to meet him, because he was such a famous guy.

So he got lowered over the walls of Damascus, in a basket, and was taken to Tamerlane's camp,

and gave us the only written description of Tamerlane. Tamerlane himself was illiterate. Okay?

So this guy had an interesting life. He also had the tragedy of standing on the breakwater at

Alexandria, watching the ship, that was bringing his wife and children in from Spain, sink in

front of his eyes, and they all drowned, in front of his eyes. So he was a guy who was marked by

intense political and human experience.

And what he said was this: It's religious propaganda that gives a dynasty its power. And he

claims that that's how the Arabs managed to achieve these great victories, at the beginning of

their conquests in 632, when they radiated, after the death--well it started with Muhammad, but

shortly after his death there was a real breakout and they conquered the Middle East and spread

across North Africa very rapidly.

And in one case they were fighting at Yarmouk, with 30,000, against 120,000, and against

Heracleus, who was in the Eastern Roman Empire, against 400,000 and neither of those big

armies could withstand the 30,000 Muslims who were fighting them, and he claims it was

religious propaganda that gave that cultural force to that army.

I recommend theMuqaddimah. It's a very interesting piece of work, a brilliant piece of work, by

a guy who was writing generally about problems of politics and aggression and stabilization, roleof culture, in human life, long before the Social Sciences really emerged as a field in the West.


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Chapter 4. Group Norms [00:27:09]

How does a norm spread through a group? How does something like that propaganda spread

through a group? Well we have--and this is one of the places where perhaps biology is providing

a handle for culture--we have a number of learning mechanisms. One of them is to copy the

successful, the dominant, the frequent.

You may not have thought explicitly about it, but the whole point of education is to try to keep

you from having to learn everything by trial and error, so that you don't have to repeat all the

mistakes of all of the previous generations of all the humans who ever lived, in order to get to a

certain state of enlightenment, by the time you're twenty-one-years-old. Well how do you do it?

One of the ways is this. But that won't explain the spread of an individually costly norm, like me

trying to punish somebody for violating a social norm.

One can punish defectors from group norms, even if it costs you. That's a very powerful force,

and it's powerful enough to overcome inherited biological tendencies. So it's powerful enough toexplain why we get celibate nuns and priests, why we get to declining birthrates, why we get

other things that reduce lifetime reproductive success.

How do we get it? Well it's not clear. By the way, there are now--if you ever wanted to write a

paper on this, there are three or four models in the literature about how altruistic punishment

might evolve, and under what conditions it would be stable. You need to have pretty strong

inter-group conflict for it to work. And why would that happen? Why would we get altruism?

Okay, here's Nathan Hale, and his individual fitness was strikingly in conflict with the social

cohesion that was needed for the revolutionary American army to resist the British. Okay? So

this guy graduates from Yale, and he's a school teacher down in New York, and he's spying for

the American Army, and gets caught and hanged. And he was executed at age twenty-one. He

left no children. He said famously, "I only regret that I have one life to give for my country." And

he's a social hero and a Darwinian madman. [Laughter] Okay? That's the tension.

So how can you resolve that kind of conflict? Well there are actually a lot of ways to do it. I've

mentioned some of them already, in the course. You can convert individual stakes into common

stakes, so that whatever an individual is going to get, out of living its life, is going to be identified

with whatever a group can get out of performing better.

Ecological constraint can be imposed on the group; the threat of outside risk will stabilizeinteractions within a group. One can cooperate with and sacrifice for kin; that's just

straightforward kin selection. You all now know how that works. You can punish defectors;

that's the punishment of violators of social norms, altruistic punishment.

You can stabilize the division of labor; that will certainly reduce conflict, by making sure that say

all the people who are making shoes are not in conflict with all of the people who are making

shirts. They're actually cooperating with each other; they're each making something that the

other one needs. It's win-win, for them. You can promote reciprocity. There could be cultural

norms to promote reciprocity, and that is the basis of trust; and trust is the basis of cooperation.

I'll step through these.


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How do you convert separate stakes into common stakes? Well you know one of them already.

That's how you randomize success. That's meiosis in the parliament of the genes. Once you set

up a mechanism that means that every single gene in the genome has the same probability of

getting into the next generation, then that is a structure that imposes homogeneity of success,

on all of those genes. Meiotic drivers violate it, meiosis stabilizes it.

At the cultural level you can homogenize success with monogamy. So we have the Chinese One-

Child Law. You can share food with non-kin. And if competition within a group is not an option,

then the only path to better performance is the performance of the whole group. So that's the

rising tide lifts all boats part of it.

An example of imposing ecological constraint: We can see in the meerkats, they have sentinels,

that altruistically look out for predators and give alarm calls, and larger groups of meerkats have

better defense and offense. And if you leave the group--this is a Cape Cobra; here are six

meerkats confronting a Cape Cobra. The six of them together have a much better chance of

dealing with it, than would one of them alone. And there are Batteleur Eagles and things like

that, that are cruising the landscape and that pick off meerkats cats pretty quickly, if they're on

their own.

So if you- if it's very risky not to be in a group, that will increase your willingness to bear a cost

imposed by group membership. In this particular species, the cost imposed by group

membership is that you can't reproduce, if you're a female, so long as the dominant female's in

charge. She won't let you in the group. She'll kick you out if you try to have a baby. That's a

pretty strong cost. Nevertheless, meerkats go into groups--okay?--because the alternative is

death, within about twenty-four hours.

You can cooperate with and sacrifice for kin. So multi-cellular organisms integrate very easily,

because they are clones that originate in a single cell. So they're all 100% related to each other.

And you can see the division of labor here, between the chlorophyll producing cell, cells that are

producing carbohydrates and cells that are going to be actually reproducing that group. This is

in a multi-cellular alga. This is a model for the origin of multi-cellularity.

It's well known, from anthropological work, that many hunter-gatherer groups consist mostly of

close kin. There are interesting analyses of asymmetries in that, and there's big controversy over

some of it. But it is nevertheless, I think, a pretty safe broad generalization that many human

groups consist of close kin, and therefore we can expect that kin selection has been operative,and that it has been promoting cooperation, altruism and sacrifice.

You can punish defectors, and in a multi-cellular body one can, for example, eliminate the

defecting cancer cells through apoptosis. So there certainly are ways that the immune system

does attack, and partially succeeds in controlling cancer cells. And in social groups one can

punish those who break social norms. So I'm going through a series now of analogies between

multi-cellular organisms and potentially emerging cultural-level group integration in humans.

You can stabilize the division of labor. In biology that's done with epigenetic mechanisms;

epigenetic information is what stabilizes development and makes sure that brain cells stay brain

cells, and liver cells stay liver cells. And in culture we've got things over history, like guilds,


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classes, castes, professions, job descriptions. There are all kinds of ways that the division of

labor gets stabilized culturally.

You can promote reciprocity. In evolutionary biology it's much easier to promote reciprocity in a

two-dimensional surface where people are playing against their neighbors, than in a very well

mixed kind of liquid. That's the basic take-home message of Martin Nowak's work on the

evolution of cooperation. And a way to stabilize reciprocity culturally is through win-win

economic exchange. So transactions in which both sides profit; that's the basis of business.

So lots of ways to resolve or suppress conflict, but there are some problems. If you're going to

stabilize conflict within a group, you very probably need a leader. You need the leader both to

direct the collective within the group, and you need the leader to basically take over foreign

policy [laughs], to deal with extra group relationships. And in the multi-cellular body, that's

been done by the central nervous system, and in the emerging social group, that's done by

something like a president.

Chapter 5. Patterns and Differences in Cultures' Selfishness [00:35:51]

Well this guy wasn't selected at random, and there are some issues. Groups need leaders. A

psychological predisposition to defer to authority is what would permit a strong, unrelated

leader to emerge. You might trust your dad or your uncle, but the issue here is why is it that in

groups humans actually will trust somebody unrelated to lead them? That's, in other words,

going beyond the kin selection model.

Most of us, around the world, really just want to be left alone to do our own thing, and we would

like to delegate to leaders this business, this complicated business, of interacting with other

groups, particularly if it's aggressive. But that's a double-edged sword. Okay?

Deference, which may have evolved--this may be one of the human social instincts that's kind of

a handle on which culture can pull--deference to leadership will let a selfish leader exploit the

public. And selfish leaders invade. They've got to be controlled, while they're leading. And this is

what the U.S. Constitution is all about.

A group that constrains its leaders to pursue public interest will have a competitive advantage,

because they will be internally cohesive. If you have a long series of defecting leaders who are

corrupt and who subvert the public interest, you will have the breakdown in social reciprocity

and trust, and you will end up with situations which are similar today to Zimbabwe, to the

Congo, to Sudan, and other failed states. So this defection is a recipe for the creation of a failed

state. Nevertheless, leaders are motivated to defect, if they're selfish.

Well let's take a quick look at some very idealistic people in history who have tried to say we

should work for the group good. Christ; the invasion of the Christian Church by the Borgia

family, and the remarkable situation of corruption in fourteenth and fifteenth century Italy,

where the Borgia's essentially managed to make a personal fiefdom out of about a third of

Northern Italy.

Karl Marx, who said a lot of things that were quite similar to Christ, and who tried to describe a

very idealistic world in which people were sharing property and were really cooperative and


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were helping each other, getting subverted by the nomenklatura; and again and again, you find

that selfish mutants are invading.

The French Revolution, in 1789; Libert, Equalit, Fraternit, was a very idealistic attempt to

overthrow a selfish aristocracy and establish--kind of wipe the slate clean--and establish a new

sort of society that was much more egalitarian. And it rapidly got invaded by this guy, who

probably was responsible for more deaths of young Frenchman than any other person in history.

I think that Napoleon's armies lost somewhere between 20, 25 million people; a lot. A very

dramatic and very effective piece of data presentation showing the width of Napoleon's army, as

it went to Moscow and came back. And it goes in as a river and it comes back as a little line on

the page.

So there's a problem with defecting leadership. And when you think about that, you think about

deference, patriotism, empathy, trust; where do those emotions come from? Where did guilt

come from? Why do we get embarrassed? Do you think that it's conceivable that an adult malegrizzly bear is capable of embarrassment? No way in hell. He's going to eat all those babies

wherever he can get them. Ditto male lion. Okay? I will forbear commentary on provosts.

Now outrage at defection, where does that come from? Why do we want to punish defectors?

We're very sensitive to defectors. We're very, very sensitive to people who deceive us. Why do we

have a desire for revenge? Often that is a spiteful, self-defeating kind of a thing. Why do we have

an impulse to conform? There's been lots of good psychological studies on this one; we have a

frightening impulse to conform.

Well the tribal social instincts hypothesis, that Richardson and Boyd have advanced, attempts to

explain this kind of thing. They claim basically that gene culture co-evolution built social

imperatives into our genes; that genes use hormones that create emotions, that manipulate our

phenotypes; and that those emotions then are the biological handles on which culture pulls.

Okay?

So that would be an assertion that our minds are not blank slates, and that we entered the world

partially pre-programmed, and that some of the programming is for social interactions. That's a

big claim. There's some evidence.

Joe Henrich was one of Rob Boyd's Ph.D. students, and Joe and Rob and Pete Richardson and

Sam Bowles and others got money from the MacArthur Foundation to fund fifteenanthropologists to go out and play the Ultimatum Game in fifteen different cultures.

So the Ultimatum Game basically works like this. I walk into a room with you guys, and I've got

in my hand enough money to make you interested--let's say I've got $1000.00--and I give the

$1000.00 to Blake, and I say, "Blake, here's how it works. You make him an offer, and if he

accepts it, that's the deal, you get to keep it. If he turns it down, neither of you gets anything."

If Blake is homo-economicus, a selfish Darwinian model, Blake will keep $999.00, and offer him

one, on the hypothesis that one is better than zero. Okay? So that's the Ultimatum Game. And if

he says, "That's totally unfair. I'm not accepting it. Go to hell." Then neither of them gets

anything. Okay? That's why it's called the Ultimatum Game.


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Well all cultures tested rejected complete selfishness. Everybody demanded some degree of

fairness. The worst that anybody was able to accept was 200 bucks; so 800/200, that was the

worst. They varied in how much selfishness they tolerated, and the amount of selfishness was

actually related to the cohesion of the culture.

So the ones that demanded the most--so, for example, the one that would say--say Blake offers

you $500.00, and you say no, but she offers you 600 and you say yes, and she only gets 400--

that would be the Lamalera whale hunters of Malaysia. They get into small boats, unrelated

people get into a small boat and go out to hunt whales, and their lives depend upon each other;

it's dangerous business. So unrelated people are cooperating, and they're literally in the same

boat. Okay? They're the ones that demand the most fairness.

The ones that demand the least, the twenty-percenters, are scattered, wandering, single-family

groups of Native American Indians in the Peruvian jungle. They have very little social

interchange and very little economic life, and they are willing to accept 20%; but that's the

minimum. Okay?

So it seems that for social emotions, biology is important, culture does make a difference.

Biology is providing a principle; culture's setting the parameters. That's kind of like language,

the way that Chomsky thought of it.

And it looks like we display a lot of symptoms of group adaptations. The mechanisms that might

have selected them are plausible; they're not yet strongly supported. So are we going to fuse into

a group identity, or are we going to remain torn between private interests and those of the group

to which we belong, which is our current state?

Chapter 6. Redefinition of Social Boundaries [00:43:57]

Well, when we went from transition- when we transitioned from hunger-gatherers into

agricultural settlements, the relationships among group members decreased, group size

increased, and the average encounter was no longer with a relative but with a non-relative.

That's a big city. Okay? There weren't any cities before agriculture.

Now we then started getting engaged in large-scale economic exchange, and it both reinforces

and erodes cultural group selection. So exchange within groups promotes group cohesion;

exchange among groups erodes group boundaries. This is a diagram of global trade a few years

ago; the width of the arrows is how much is flowing. It shows, as the current economic crisis just

shows so clearly, that we are now globally integrated by economics. So group boundaries are

being strongly eroded by globalization.

Our group identity is now multi-dimensional. So it used to be, if you were in a hunter-gatherer

band, or even if you were in a medieval guild, that your ethnicity, your religion and your politics

pretty much overlap. But it's now possible for people to belong to different dimensions of

identity, all at the same time. So you can be a Black Catholic Democrat, or you can be a Black

Muslim Republican. Right?


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And that didn't used to be possible. Those things are now breaking apart. So the power of

cultural group selection is decreasing, because these things are not adding up to push all in the

same direction; they're pushing in different directions.

In the evolutionary social sciences, by which I mean basically economic psychology and political

science, we're stuck in the major transition between individual and group. There's quite a bit of

support for that. The transition stalled, and the breakdown has left us in a state of tension.

But, these conclusions are supported by plausibility arguments, and these plausibility

arguments basically only achieve the level of consistency with the evidence. Consistency is a

weak logical criterion. There's a lot of stuff that's consistent, but not necessarily true. It is much

more difficult to demonstrate necessity and sufficiency. Basically to do that, you have to take the

Social Sciences and transform them into the Natural Sciences, with the same standards of

experimental demonstration and admission of evidence.

Well that is a long-term, big project. That's not easy. So I say that, at the end, because I don'twant to leave you with the impression that this idea, that we're stuck in a major transition, is

well established.

I think that it is consistent with the evidence that I know of, but I don't think the evidence is

strong. And of course, down in my gut, when I take off my scientist hat, and my teacher hat, and

I am sitting there alone quietly at 2:00 in the morning, in my house, thinking about this, I think

it's probably true. [Laughs] Okay.

[end of transcript]

the impact of evolutionary thought

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