Is the progressive ethos of the political left compatible with modern Darwinian views of human nature? I think it is. I discuss some of the main arguments on this question and describe the conceptual stumbling blocks to creating a coherent Darwinian left. Finally, I make a few recommendations for the scholarly left based on behavioral ecology.

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Notes Toward A Darwinian Left

“Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our noble traits as well?”

Stephen Jay Gould[1]

To what extent is the Darwinian vision of human nature compatible with progressive philosophies of social change, or more generally, with contemporary “left-of-center” ideals of social equality and justice? Is it possible to acknowledge our animal qualities while simultaneously advocating the ideals of a progressive and secular humanism? Darwinism seems to ask that we consider our nature from an inhuman perspective, to look without flinching at evolved, genetically encoded dispositions for violence, domination, and cruelty. Can we accept that demand and still own our humanity? I think we can. But unless we take a hard look at the more disturbing parts of our nature, we will never be able to make good on the promise of those parts we approve: evolved, genetically encoded dispositions for cooperation, kindness, mercy, compassion, and fairness. If we want to make our benevolent dispositions the master elements in our social policies, we cannot simply ignore the characteristics that lead us to harm others. We will have to understand how all our dispositions interact within the total system of human nature.

Peter Singer, who authored a monograph on the subject of Darwin and progressive politics, makes these recommendations: A Darwinian left must “accept that there is such a thing as human nature, and seek to find out more about it, so that policies can be grounded on the best available evidence of what human beings are like”; and it must “reject any inference from what is ‘natural’ to what is ‘right’.”[2] These recommendations top a longer list—but let me stop there, because quite frankly, we are still a long way from rising to these challenges.

Even today, thirty years after Gould penned the lines quoted at the outset of this piece, a caricature of evolution dominates the humanities and some quarters of the social sciences. It is the specter of Social Darwinism, an ideology associated with the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Darwin used the phrase but did not exemplify it. He adopted it, inadvisedly, on the recommendation of Herbert Spencer, a laissez-faire ideologue. Darwin himself was for the most part a progressive and liberal thinker, kind in his personal relations and hostile to all forms of social cruelty and exploitation. He hated slavery, which he had witnessed firsthand in Brazil. Whatever Darwin’s own views, modern academics react with fear to Darwinian views of human nature because they are afraid that any juxtaposition of evolution and human society will lead, willy-nilly, to pseudo-biological rationalizations for bad behavior: brute force, competition without compassion, sexual oppression, eugenics, and Machiavellian territoriality. In reality, the overwhelming majority of modern researchers into evolved human characteristics are themselves decent human beings, enlightened and progressive in their social views.  Are they just kidding themselves?  Is there some radical incompatibility between their scientific beliefs and their ethical stance?  The more one becomes immersed in this research, and the more familiar one is with the people who conduct it, the less plausible any such suspicion seems.

“Selfish genes” are not the same thing as selfish people. Richard Dawkins, who coined the phrase, is himself clear that selfish genes can be responsible for some very unselfish behaviors: altruism and cooperation.[3] And indeed, for decades now, evolutionists have debated the origins of our nobler sentiments—the feelings that motivate us to help each other and to care for one another, even at great cost to ourselves. If survival and reproduction are the ultimate criteria, why do we find altruists— individuals that risk their own survival (or in some cases, sacrifice it) for the sake of a group? That question has been at the heart of the debate over “group selection” or “multi-level selection.” Most prominently advanced by the biologist David Sloan Wilson, “multi-level selection” is the idea that natural selection operates not only at the level of genes and individual organisms but also at the level of groups. Wilson’s arguments, once marginal, have now persuaded many thinkers at the leading edge of research into sociality.[4] Whatever the ultimate verdict on this theoretical issue might be, we should be aware that the existence of self-sacrificing behavior was never in question; rather, what was and remains in question is how that behavior evolved, and under what conditions it holds.

In A Darwinian Left, Peter Singer focuses on cooperation as the panhuman instinct that provides the most promising foundation for a progressive politics: we must “promote structures that foster cooperation rather than competition, and attempt to channel cooperation into socially desirable ends.”[5] This focus converges with the broader attempt, in certain quarters of anthropology and primatology, to explain the evolutionary basis of pro-sociality. The primatologist Frans de Waal, who has been a champion of this endeavor, presents his own work as helping to correct “the one-sided portrayal by biologists of the natural world as a place of combat rather than social connectedness.”[6] That one-sided portrayal is not unique to biology. And indeed, it has been a recurring theme in Western thought. Herbert Spencer’s main ideological work predates Darwin’s theory of natural selection and has stronger ties to economics than to biology. Hobbes, of course, famously identified the natural state as one of war—each against all—long before anyone had given much thought to the mechanism through which species evolve, or had even recognized that they do evolve. Theories like those of Hobbes and Spencer are instances of what de Waal has called the “Veneer Theory”—the idea that our higher, “civilized” sentiments and behaviors comprise a thin outer layer, beneath which lies our brutish and vicious animal nature. In part as a response to this strand of Western philosophy, primatologists are now gathering evidence of the animal precedents of empathy, compassion, cooperation, reciprocity, and fairness.[7] De Waal explains, “There exists ample evidence of one primate coming to another’s aid in a fight, putting an arm around a previous victim of an attack, or other emotional responses to the distress of others.[8]

Sheer anthropomorphism? Consider: Primatology requires us to see that complex human emotions—including the moral sentiments that we take to be uniquely human—must have arisen from simpler precedents in the animal world. This insistence on continuity is not arbitrary. It is consistent with what we know about evolution. Natural selection can only tinker with what already exists; it cannot create something entirely unprecedented. Evolutionary change, therefore, does not proceed in leaps and bounds, but rather in the slow accumulation of gradual changes. Put another way, we do not expect to find large gaps or chasms separating us from our primate and mammalian ancestors. To posit some Great Leap Forward with respect to language, morality, or any human trait, is tantamount to saying that that feature did not evolve.[9]

Peter Singer identifies—correctly, I think—the heart of the issue that keeps many thinkers on the left (but particularly in academe) from embracing the Darwinian framework. In the “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx argues that, “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” Singer comments: “It follows from this belief that if you can totally change the ‘ensemble of the social relations,’ you can totally change human nature.” This claim goes to the heart of Marxism and of more broadly marxist (with a small ‘m’) thinking. As a result, it affects much of the thought of the entire left.” The great dream of the perfectibility of human nature has been the cornerstone of much leftist thought, because it leaves open the possibility of a different kind of society.[10] Though most scholars and teachers today are not avowed Marxists, the focus on cultural or social “constructs” is the modern descendent of Marx’s “ensemble of social relations.”[11]

Again, the question is not whether such constructs exist; we know that they do. But modern evolutionists worry that an over-emphasis on cultural constructs and historical specificity implies the nearly infinite malleability of human nature—a possibility that is biologically implausible. The academic left, in contrast, worries that naturalistic notions of a “fixed,” innate, or universal human nature can serve as a source of normative social values. Used in this context, the word “normative” expresses suspicion about belief systems that coerce people to conform to a norm or marginalize those who do not. The fear is that “Nature,” writ large, will be another Church, another source of absolute authority that hands down unquestionable laws from on high. Such laws have historically served the interests of ruling classes—hereditary elites, whites, colonial powers, males, heterosexuals, propertied interests, etc.

Modern progressive thought acquired a strong liberationist strand in no small part as a response to the historical catastrophes of the twentieth century. Scholars and thinkers on the left express its ideals, including tolerance for differences and advocacy for the rights of the oppressed, by foregrounding the uniqueness of other cultures and the singularity of specific historical situations. Whether a work is overtly political or not, this ethos has become part of the methodological fabric of scholarly work on the left, both inside and outside of academe. For several generations, we have spurned philosophical and scientific attempts to discover human universals, fearing that such universals could be applied normatively, in the sense described above. But relying on cultural or social “constructs” to explain human behavior implies that human nature is more malleable than it is. While there is room for a great deal of flexibility, the evidence is constantly mounting that human tendencies operate within certain bounds that are found across cultures. Moreover, the variations we observe are not random, and are likely “cued” by environmental factors.

So, where do we stand? What is the current state of the discussion among informed people? It might go something like this:

Evolutionist: We have empirical data that in most cultures, men are more violent, aggressive, and more sexually promiscuous than women, and that women are choosier with respect to mate selection and expend more energy and time on childcare. These findings may not be surprising in themselves, but we cannot ignore the fact that they are consistent with what we have learned about quantifiable trends that span the animal kingdom, and with the behaviors of our primate ancestors in particular.

Social Constructivist: I believe in evolution in general, but am uncomfortable with the ease with which you collapse the complexities of human behavior into the animal world. At best, you have simply provided a biological underpinning for old-fashioned folk intuitions; at worst, you have given a biological justification or rationalization for oppressive practices that are worthy of censure.

EV: Nothing of the sort. We evolutionists have been quite careful to distinguish between is and ought. A fact of nature tells us nothing about what we ought to do. I am no more a Social Darwinist than you are!

SC: Your intentions may be good, but no matter how often you invoke the naturalistic fallacy, biological “facts” often get misused and appropriated to questionable ends. They become part of the discourse of popular culture—a discourse that serves to propagate existing inequities.

EV: Any true fact can be misused by bad people. Such misuse should be censured, but we cannot stop seeking true facts about the world . . .

I have purposefully omitted the vitriol and rancor that often accompanies discussions of this sort. But many of us have witnessed, or been party to this debate, and we can easily imagine our own variation of this conversation. In distinguishing “is” from “ought,” the evolutionist is rejecting the so-called naturalistic fallacy, which has become a commonplace in academic debates over evolution. We cannot unconditionally derive a moral imperative from a fact of nature. But there’s more to it than that. I say “unconditionally,” because it is not difficult to come up with examples in which our knowledge about a fact of nature seems to inform a moral decision.

Marc Hauser presents the following scenario: imagine a situation in which a doctor administers anesthesia to a child. The anesthesia will cause no permanent damage, but without it, the patient will be in agony. We therefore conclude that the doctor should administer the drug. We appear to have made a conclusion about what ought to be done from a simple fact of nature (about the chemistry of the drug and how it interacts with the human body). [12] But the real issue here is whether we “ought” to prevent pain, and on that issue, only our own values, prompted by feeling, can give us an answer. Is feeling a safe foundation? One can understand the suspicion that it is not: while feeling prompts most of us to avoid causing pain to children, it also causes a few to take pleasure in that suffering. Or to take a less lurid, but more revealing, example: the consensus among progressive liberals is that we should unconditionally seek peace and equality; but among militaristic nationalists—no small minority among historical populations—the feeling is very different.

It is not enough simply to invoke the naturalistic fallacy. The conservative scholar Larry Arnhart forces us to confront this inadequacy when he derives several “oughts” from “ises.” In direct opposition to the fact-value distinction, Arnhart argues for the ultimate compatibility of Darwinian evolution and Aristotelian natural right.[13] The context of this endeavor is clear: Darwin has few advocates on the political right these days, due in large part to the coalition, forged in the Reagan era, between fiscal and social conservatives on the one hand, and Christian conservatives on the other. Arnhart therefore finds himself in a minority when he claims that “conservatives need Charles Darwin.”[14] To make this claim, he must argue that our evolved human nature is a source of moral—and specifically conservative—values.

Like almost all modern evolutionists, Arnhart posits a panhuman, species-typical nature. On the basis of this human nature, he takes a moral stand on the issues of slavery and female circumcision. Both practices, he argues, violate the basic, evolved needs of human nature. Theoretically, this move puts us in the same place as Hauser puts us: it takes evolutionary biology as the source of factual knowledge, and then leaves us to decide about how to deploy that knowledge. But unlike most evolutionists, Arnhart goes on to invest “human nature” with a kind of sacral authority that he feels is self-evidently wicked to contravene. But therein lies the false step: by choosing loaded examples, Arnhart makes the derivation seemingly self-evident. But one could also point to other historical examples in which what comes naturally is not self-evidently “good.” Puritanism (and other belief systems that value chasteness) exhorts its followers to contravene our nature, and then identifies that contravention—that abstention or forbearance—as the Good.

“Human nature” itself cannot stand in as a proxy for God. We’re back to feeling, but not without having made some progress. Yes, it is possible for some to feel pleasure at the suffering of children, and for others to find our highest good in frustrating the natural impulses of human nature. Nonetheless, if we recognize the limits and potential in our common humanity, we shall at least know where we stand. We can put the norms implicit in the feelings of psychopaths and the ethos of Puritans—and the norms implicit in our judgment of them—into their appropriate biological context. (It is probable that the brains of psychopaths exhibit irregularities in regions of the frontal lobe that mediate pro-social emotions, like empathy and compassion. Belief systems that place a premium on chasteness, by contrast, may represent social constructs that tap into and amplify an evolved, but highly variable, instinct for “purity.”[15])

So where does that leave us—particularly those of us on the scholarly left? I began by highlighting the evolutionary study of pro-social behaviors and emotions, because so many of us are simply unaware of, or indifferent to, this recent development in the evolutionary sciences. Given the fact that we possess both the instinct for violence and the instinct for compassion, a proclivity for selfishness and an impulse toward cooperation, it should be clear that the existence of those evolved traits does not help us decide which tendency is right or better for a given situation. What we can do as scholars is to map, describe, and explain the contexts that promote one over the other, while holding to our core system of values.

But to get to that point, we must begin by letting go of the folk intuition that “genes” or “hard-wiring” are equivalent to rigid determinism.[16] The existence of evolved psychological traits in no way fixes the outcome of social, historical, or political events; it doesn’t even determine the outcome of individual interactions. It merely equips us with instincts and feelings that motivate us to act in a certain way. Once we acclimate ourselves to this idea, we can begin to take note of the basic tenets of behavioral ecology: many organisms are endowed with a range of behaviors and instincts that are cued by local conditions.[17] These conditions may include things like access or limits to natural resources, access to mates, frequency of predation, parasite load in the local environment, and so forth. While this approach suggests flexibility of behavior, especially in primates, such flexibility is neither random nor unconstrained. It is probable that what was “fixed” in our phylogeny was a range of predispositions for many domains—predispositions that can be called forth to varying degrees by local ecologies.

Despite the internal debates within evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and biology, I believe that this “ecological” approach is the most promising avenue for scholars and writers on the left who must navigate between the human and the inhuman. It opens the door to what David Sloan Wilson has called “evolutionary social constructivism”—a synthesis of the more refined aspects of evolutionary thought and the more plausible versions of social constructivism.[18] The point is to unpack, in detail, the complex intertwining of evolved human traits and culturally or socially constructed practices, belief systems, and ideologies. Since much of the effort to reveal social constructs is an attempt to debunk them as authoritarian, patriarchal, or “hegemonic,” should we not also consider the degree to which such constructs either amplify or contravene our evolved predispositions? Here, then, are a few suggestions—questions and projects that I hope will begin to engage the scholarly left:

1. How do social constructs amplify, or take advantage of, certain evolved predispositions—even in a pernicious way that oppresses marginalized groups?
2. Conversely, to what extent do those constructs run counter to certain evolved, species-typical predispositions? And what is the social or ethical cost of a cultural practice that contravenes our instincts? (Nothing prevents us from advancing a progressive version of Arnhart’s argument, so long as we do not invest human nature with sacral authority!)
3. To what extent are certain social constructs “called forth” or “cued” by ecological conditions, such as the severe limitation of resources, or a change in the availability of potential mates?

Even cursory reflection reveals the overwhelming prevalence of kinship metaphors in most historical solidarity movements. The scholarly (constructivist) literature on nationalism, race, ethnicity and culture is certainly replete with studies of kinship as a recurring trope. But we can now begin to take into account the evolutionary reasons why metaphors of kinship are so powerful, and perhaps we can even begin to hypothesize about the conditions (ecological or otherwise) in which they are most prevalent. The evolutionary studies of altruism would seem to suggest that socially constructed kinship tropes would come into play when unusual degrees of self-sacrifice are required. Does this prediction match the data, and if not, why?

Finally, we can begin to examine the behavioral and affective tendencies that emerge as our access to resources grows limited. Some studies suggest that sensitivity to the availability of resources can subtly and unconsciously affect even our mate preferences.[19] Since scarcity is a condition that most species have repeatedly encountered in their phylogeny, we would expect a range of possible responses (though not an infinite range!). We can even imagine extreme conditions in which evolved proclivities run amok, to the detriment of all. This is the gist of Jonathan Gottschall’s reading of Homer: it is essentially an ecological argument, that the extreme violence depicted in the Homeric epics was a response to a shortage of fertile women.[20]

The filmmaker Akira Kurosawa said that, “To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.” That is equally true for us—evolutionists and Darwinian humanists on the left. In the long run, facing up to the realities of our evolved, biological inheritance will prove a more solid foundation than our denials of human nature. Recognizing the biological context, both of our brutish and our nobler aspects, will give us a firmer ground to stand on when we ask “What can and should we do?”

Notes

[2] Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) 61.

[3] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, 1999) 2-3.

[4] David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) esp. 6-8, 12-20.

[5] Singer, 61. For more on Singer’s view of competition, cooperation, and altruism, see also Singer, 44-59.

[6] Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 25.

[7] See for example Joan B. Silk, “The Evolution of Cooperation in Primate Groups,” in Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life, edited by Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005) 43-74. See also Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

[8] De Waal, 25-26.

[9] Both Pinker and Deacon’s works are attempts to correct this shortcoming in Chomsky’s earliest views of language. See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Harper Collins, 1994); and Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997).

[10] Singer, 5, 24-25.

[11] In his chapter on “Politics,” in The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker provides a useful survey that situates Singer in relation, not to constructivist thinkers, but to other “innatist” thinkers on the left such as Chomsky, biologists like Robin Trivers, and Marxists-turned-Darwinians like Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. See Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002) 299-304.

[12] Marc Hauser, Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong (New York: Harper, 2006) 3-4.

[13] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998) 1-13.

[14] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism (Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2005).

[15] I refer here to the work of the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has argued that moral or religious views of purity may be an extension of our capacity for disgust, an adaptation to our exposure to common pathogens. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006) 181-211. See also P. Rozin, J. Haidt, and C. McCauley, “Disgust,” in Handbook of Emotions, M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland-Jones, eds. (New York: Guilford Press, 2000) 637-653.

[16] Jiro Tanaka, “What is Copernican? A Few Common Barriers to Darwinian Thinking about the Mind,” in The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture, vol. 1, Alice Andrews and Joseph Carroll, eds. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010) 6-12.

[17] One classic text on the fundamentals of behavioral ecology is: J. R. Krebs and N. B. Davies, Introduction to Behavioural Ecology (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 1981, 1987, 1993).

[18] David Sloan Wilson, “Evolutionary Social Constructivism,” in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, Jonathan Gottschall and D. S. Wilson, eds. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005) 20-37.

[19] Daniel Nettle, “Beyond Nature versus Culture: Cultural Variation as an Evolved Characteristic,” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (15) 2009: 223-240. See also my essay, “What is Copernican,” 10.

[20] Jonathan Gottschall, The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Civil Rights leader Vernon Jordan’s autobiography is an excellent example of African American self-writing, a genre explored by Roland Williams in African American Autobiography and the Quest for Freedom. An adaptationist approach yields fresh insights into Jordan’s work and the genre it represents.

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Ancestral Footprints: An Adaptationist Approach to Vernon Jordan’s Life-Story

Vernon Jordan’s autobiography Vernon Can Read! is the life story of one of the modern Civil Rights movement’s most under-appreciated but distinguished leaders. As such, it is a major footnote to American history, but it is also much more. First, it is a classic American autobiography in the Benjamin Franklin mode—commonsensical, career-focused, self-knowledgeable but not self-preoccupied, studded with genial humor and personal philosophy, and imbued with the can-do spirit that fueled his achievements. Second, it is the kind of autobiography—including, as a matter of fact, Frederick Douglass’s—that Abraham Maslow frequently cited to flesh out his theory of the self-actualized person. Third, it is a landmark addition to the genre of African American self-writing, a component of our national literary heritage that deserves more attention than it has received, save for a handful of activist scholars.

And like all literature, it can be illuminated by adaptationist thinking. Several evolutionists have argued that literature (actually, all the arts) are adaptive. Exactly how is still warmly debated, but there is substantial agreement that the arts nourish human cognitive development and orient us to our environment in beneficial ways. One theory is that over the course of evolutionary time the arts helped bridge the gap between nature and nurture, that is, between Pleistocene hunter-gatherer cultures and the much more highly evolved and adapted agricultural communities of the Holocene epoch.¹

To frame my discussion of Jordan’s memoir, I’ll devote a good deal of this paper to the genre which it exemplifies. Or, lapsing into Darwinese—and why not?— the genotype which this phenotype expresses so well.

In 1849, Unitarian minister Ephraim Peabody published, in the Boston Christian Examiner, a review of five slave narratives which by then had become weapons in the arsenal of abolitionism—Frederick Douglass’s 1845 narrative, and narratives by. Henry Watson, the brothers Milton and Lewis Clarke, William Wells Brown, and Josiah Henson. For Peabody, these books represented “a new department in the literature of civilization” far superior to the conventional fiction of the time. In fact, he saw them as an archetype of what we now call the American Dream, declaring that “one cannot find a better model for an American epic than the adventures of a fugitive slave.”²

Peabody was, of course, a visionary—that is, if we expand his field of vision to include the hundreds of postliberation narratives written during the next 150 years. And that is exactly what Temple University scholar-poet Roland Williams does in his provocatively patriotic study of the genre, African-American Autobiography and the Quest for Freedom. Williams, the great- grandson of a former slave, sees this body of writing as not only a corporate racial epic, but a truly and deeply national epic as well. In much the same way that state-sponsored oppression groomed Alexander Solzhenitsyn to write The Gulag Archipelago, Williams argues that slavery “groomed black people for the role of a priestly caste, reminding the congregation to keep the faith.” Neatly side-stepping the standard oppositional narratives such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Williams concludes that “rather than a spot planted on the cultural mainstream,” African American self-writing flows well within the main channel, “sanctioning the social ethos in a manner that renders it epic in nature”. Moreover, as Williams sees it, the authors who inscribed this national epic are themselves epic heroes “who seek to be remembered by posterity for clearing barriers to the enjoyment of liberty through the employment of learning.”³

Does this sound, somehow, as comfortable as an old sweater (at least, to evolutionary-minded folk)? It should, since from the adaptationist perspective, Williams is claiming no less than the genre has had adaptive value for over 150 years in a way that leads back, as we shall see in a moment, to the origins of narrative. As for what those origins might be, Katherine Coe’s ethological research provides an important clue—an ancestral footprint. Adaptationist scholars like Coe research oral cultures for data that would link modern literature with known or suspected primordial human behaviors, and among the folktales of traditional peoples, she has discovered many such footprints—for example, among the Aborigine, where “stories are told about the ancestral heroes that lived in the Dreamtime and how they are correct models of social behavior”; or the western Apache, where such stories “promote compliance with acceptable standards of social behavior and the moral values that support them”; or the Dogon, where “every narrative is a pretext in social ethics.”⁴

At a somewhat higher level of generalization, virtually the same utilitarian motives would explain the origins and purposes of Gilgamesh, the Torah, Sundiata, the Odyssey, the Ramayana, or the corporate epic of Black America. In fact, for adaptationists, precisely such motives would account for a great deal of literature, and they account especially well for Jordan’s life-story. Of course, like all autobiographies, it expresses the author’s emotional need to be remembered, and therefore might be regarded as a literary analogue of the “selfish gene” which seeks merely to copy and perpetuate itself.⁵ Like many of the best, it combines the literary pleasures of the picaresque novel and the Bildungsroman. But like the storytellers of conservative traditional cultures, Jordan’s main purpose, is, as Coe would say, “unabashedly didactic.” The introduction makes this very clear, and with simple, modest, dignity: “I hope what follows will be instructive to readers today, and to anyone in the future who wants to know what those times were like.”⁶ As a personal record of the Civil Rights movement, his life-story is as deeply embedded in social ethics as a Dogon folktale. And one of the ancestral heroes of that great movement, which is already fading into the American Dream Time, he wants to preserve his achievements, and those of the other civil rights leaders who people the book, as “correct models of social behavior” and “the moral values that support them,” especially for the young African Americans who might be called his most privileged readers.

Even better, his Epilogue concludes with an envoi that not only embraces Roland Williams’s thesis, but the ancestral purpose that, according to Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, explains the origins of narrative: to preserve and transmit valuable survival information, both for the sake of present needs and for the benefit of posterity: ⁷

“What I most wanted to say out loud, though, is that we are a great people. Black people have done great things for this country; saved its soul, in fact, and we have been an example to the world in this process. That should never be forgotten, even as we press ahead, in our many and varied ways, toward our future. If we did so much when we had so little, think of what we can do now that we have so much more. That was the message I most wanted to convey.”⁸

That’s a powerful message, and not just because it states a political truth that should never be forgotten. Given the Social Darwinist prediction that the Negro race in America would be extinct well before he was born, Jordan’s statement could not be more ironically fitting. In fact, it brings to mind what an evolutionary psychologist would call those highly evolved and adapted, species-typical behavioral motives and dispositions that have, through the average effects of differential gene-transmission throughout eons of prehistoric time, promoted the evolutionary success, or “fitness” of our species. However, since folk psychology is the vernacular equivalent of Evolutionary Psychology, let’s simply call them, as would any warm-blooded human being, those qualities of mind and heart that have animated and informed the human race since its emergence as a distinct, fully-formed species.

Some of their most important psychological correlates are traits such as courage, sympathy, ambition, conscientiousness, and openness to experience, which are well-represented in universal criteria for selecting mates.⁹ A recent study by Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall indicates that such traits largely define the typical reader’s expectations of a fictional protagonist. ¹⁰ Although he would have been appalled by the comparison, Peabody was thinking like an evolutionary psychologist (as well as a warm-blooded human being) when he proclaimed that “Beside those who have sufficient force or mind and heart to struggle up from hopeless bondage, the ordinary characters of fiction seem dull and tame.”¹¹

A century later, Jordan’s upward struggle from segregation would still require the same force of mind and heart, and if his life-story compels our admiration, it’s because, as David and Nanelle Barash might say, our genes are whispering to us.¹² Such whisperings, amplified by cognition into coherent inner voices and then cohesive ideas, provide the Darwinian rationale for the ultimate value of the book, as well as genre it represents. In other words, by providing a cognitive map of highly adaptive behavioral dispositions and their fitness-enhancing outputs, it enhances (through the powerful magic of vicarious experience) our sense of fitness for the challenges that lurk within our own adaptive landscapes. Stephen Pinker has acknowledged the value of such cognitive maps, but as Joseph Carroll has argued, Pinker has failed to go the distance.¹³ Evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have understood this fundamental, commonsense principle much better, and certainly much better than the current crop of “literary theorists,” for whom literature has lost most, if not all, of its magic: “By unleashing our reactions to potential lives and realities [in this case, substitute actual lives and realities in narrative form] fiction enables us to feel more richly and adaptively about what we have not actually experienced. This allows us not only to understand others’ choices and inner lives better, but to feel our way more foresightfully to adaptively better choices ourselves.”¹⁴ (See? It’s not that difficult, really. Dulce et utile for the 21^st century. Horace would have loved it).

A Darwinian rationale for the study of this book seems well-justified, but there is more to be done. Adaptationist literary scholars look for the specific ways in which literature inscribes themes linking modern human behaviors with their presumed ancestral origins and with analogous lower-species behaviors—themes such as mating and kinship, resource acquisition, predator avoidance, competition and cooperation, status hierarchies, and detection of cheaters. That such themes ought to animate Jordan’s deeply introspective narrative is, from the adaptationist viewpoint, all but inevitable. And why? Because, as Joseph Carroll has observed, “Beneath and apart from their structure of conscious beliefs, authors, like people in general, are instinctively attuned to evolutionary psychology. It is the psychology by which they actually operate.”¹⁵

For evidence that such themes are the cornerstones of Jordan’s memoirs, one need go no further than several of the chapter titles—My Mother’s Son, At Home in the World, Building Blocks, Building Bridges, Family Matters, Endurance, At the Helm, and A World Opened Wide— where the survival and reproductive themes have bubbled up to the surface. To explore each chapter in detail would be tiresome; however, as an example of how such an exploration would proceed, and because the first two chapters (“My Mother’s Son” and “At Home in the World”) lay the groundwork for all that follows, I’ll address their adaptationist implications from the standpoint of Attachment Theory.

Attachment Theory, based on the landmark research of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, draws many of its insights from Darwinism as well as human and animal ethology, and in turn, informs Evolutionary Psychology with its insights into human personality development.¹⁶ And like a good deal of Evolutionary Psychology, Attachment Theory begins and ends with a deeply intuitional premise: we humans need a secure emotional base to explore our environment with increasing confidence, a base provided by our parents— especially our mothers. As field observation of animal behavior has abundantly demonstrated— who, for example, can forget “The March of the Penguins”?— this need is broadly homologous with most avian and mammalian species, and as Mary Ainsworth’s research also demonstrated, is just as common in rural Uganda as in Baltimore, Maryland.¹⁷

By the logic of “reverse engineering” common to adaptationist thinking, this kind of universality can only have arisen from both natural selection and sexual selection for desirable traits. In his magisterial meditation on morality, The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson observes that “what nature was selecting for was not simply skill at reproduction, but skill at parenting,” and thus over evolutionary time, the mutual attachment needs of mothers and children morphed from an adaptation geared to the child’s basic survival into the foundation of the child’s psychosocial development. It is thus that Kathryn Coe can claim, with only the merest whiff of feminist advocacy, that “dedicated mothers were the driving force behind the evolution of modern humans and their culture.” ¹⁸ For Wilson, virtually the same hypothesis explains of the origins of those prosocial dispositions and behaviors which we call “morality, ” and without which there would be no culture:

“It is the argument of this book that people have a natural moral sense, a sense that is formed out of the interaction of their innate dispositions with their earliest familial experiences . . . The affection that a parent, especially a mother [emphasis added] bears for its child and the desire to please that a child brings to this encounter are fundamental human dispositions. Our moral senses are forged in the crucible of this loving relationship and expanded by the enlarged relationships of families and peers.” ¹⁹

I strongly suspect that Vernon Jordan couldn’t agree more.²⁰ Moreover, Wilson’s main argument- -that the mutualism learned in the loving encounter between mother and child has driven cultural evolution as well, through widening circles of reciprocity from the endogamous marriages and kinship alliances of our ancestors to the exogamous marriages and coalitions of the modern world—might even provide a clue to Jordan’s career as a builder of interracial alliances and thus go even further to explain his mother’s recurrent appearances throughout the book as confidante, mentor, source of emotional support and voice of conscience. However, the way Attachment Theory explains her formative influence is quite enough:

“I know for certain that the world my parents created for me has made all the difference in my life, and the principal architect, general contractor, and bricklayer for the whole enterprise was my mother. Although my father was a constant and steady presence, there was no question who was in charge of my brothers and me. It was my mother’s plan that mattered, [and] with my mother at the helm, my direction in life was set early on.. . So, from the very beginning, I felt the tug of my mother’s hope. I moved forward, propelled by her deep ambition and love for me—two things I never had a moment’s doubt about and that moved me to accept her guidance and want to vindicate her faith in me.” ²¹

Such statements go straight to the heart of “secure base” doctrine, but so does the very next chapter, “At Home in the World.” Here, we see how Vernon is emboldened to set his sights on greatness guided by not only his mother’s precept and example, but his father’s loving encouragement, a succession of other attachment figures (teachers, coaches, family friends, church and civic leaders), and a number of interesting, age-appropriate part -time jobs. (Some are much more than age-appropriate too, indicating a high level of precocity). This is just the kind of optimal development from an uncommonly secure base that Attachment Theory would predict, but for the sake not only of convenience but substantive point, let’s stay with the titles, including their striking enjambment: My Mother’s Son—At Home in the World. Once again, My Mother’s Son—At Home In the World. Besides the choice of titles, their stark and unapologetic proximity suggests an absent premise that connects them in the reader’s mind. And the absent premise, which we might symbolize by a dash, or even better, a colon, is none other than the major premise of Attachment Theory.²²

With his own formative experiences as a secure base, and using the folk psychology which we all use most of the time, Jordan has intuited the vital role of the mother in the child’s psychosocial development, thereby manifesting the adaptive mindset which, as Adaptationists, we ascribe to most people—that is, people whose phenotypic habits of mind are well-attuned to their species-typical behavioral dispositions. Or as our Victorian forebears liked to say, whose instincts are sound. Or as David and Nanelle Barash might say, who listen keenly for the whispering of their genes. Not the ones that incline us to bad behavior, but the ones that represent the better angels of our nature.

The ancestral footprint revealed by the first two chapters is probably the oldest and deepest, but the title reveals a bigger, more recent footprint. And this one is forensic evidence of a major evolutionary crime.

Yes, I have saved the best for the last, and no, Jordan’s success does not grow out of a victory over childhood dyslexia. No; the title (like much of the book) simply reflects the “original and philosophical sense of humor” that Abraham Maslow regarded as a hallmark of the self-actualizer. It comes from a dramatic vignette in the Introduction, where young Vernon, working as a chauffeur for Atlanta multimillionaire Robert Maddox during his summer vacation from DePauw University, is discovered by his employer in the library of the family mansion, calmly engrossed in a book selected from the shelves. In the ensuing conversation, Maddox works his way through cognitive dissonance and lèse majesté to reluctant and comically grumpy permission for him to use the library. For Jordan, ever the pragmatic optimist, Maddox is simply an idiot, and the matter seems closed. But shortly later, at one of the formal dinners where Vernon also serves as a waiter, he becomes the subject of a painfully embarrassed silence when Maddox grandly announces, with the royal unconcern so typical of the old-style Southern grandee, “Vernon can read!”

Although Jordan treats this incident as pure comedy of the absurd, there is a tragic subtext and some very deep scar-tissue here. Chapter by chapter and victory by victory, the book might even be regarded as a long-deferred retort to Maddox and his embarrassed guests, “You’re damned right he can, and he can also do a whole bunch of things you never dreamed of!” Sweet justice indeed, but in view of his mother’s deep imprint, Jordan might well have titled not just the first chapter but the entire book My Mother’s Son, with even deeper evolutionary logic than Clarence Thomas’s My Grandfather’s Son or Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father. Or, he might have chosen from various other kinds of eye-catching titles common to autobiographies. Why then, did he choose a title that captures the in media res opening, and why did he choose that opening in the first place?

From Virgil to the present, in medias res can be a very powerful strategic device—a turning point which looks backward as well as forward, capturing both the narrative past and narrative future in a dynamic, pivotal moment. But here, the device cuts much deeper than conventional literary theory would suggest, because this particular moment has deep psychic roots. First, it so closely recalls the scene in Douglass’s narrative where Hugh Auld commands his wife to stop teaching young Frederick to read, it’s as if a century later, in a palatial Atlanta mansion, Auld’s worst nightmare—the slave fully empowered by literacy—has finally come true. Or, for that matter, as if Richard Wright’s semi-literate, tragic antihero Bigger Thomas has morphed into a budding intellectual.²³ Second, since within our cultural ecosystem literacy and its offshoots have conferred adaptive advantages and resource benefits even greater than the paleolithic technology of stone tools, its suppression during slavery and severe curtailment in the segregated South amounted to the denial of a reproductively relevant resource. Since no one would appreciate the importance of literacy better than those to whom it was historically denied, we can easily see, and especially from the evolutionary viewpoint, why reading is foregrounded in so many African American autobiographies (a point that Roland Williams shrewdly emphasizes), and thus why it is foregrounded here.

But because it is foregrounded so dramatically, Jordan may well have dug yet deeper to expose a taproot which reaches down, through layers of prehistoric time, to the evolution of “exploitative resource acquisition strategies”—the ancient strategies of intimidation, deception, expropriation, coercion, and violence which formed the psychic bedrock of slavery—and their coevolved counter-exploitive adaptations, which for blacks, besides overt reprisals such as Nat Turner’s rebellion, included various covert strategies as well. Among these, which generally fall under the rubric of deceiving “old massa,” the acquisition of literacy was one of the most dangerous, and by far the most important. Exploratory research on the evolution and adaptive value of both exploitative and counter-exploitive strategies indicates that there is indeed such a taproot waiting to be dug up and dissected ²⁴. And if, as I strongly suspect, Vernon Jordan has intuitively discovered it in the analogous morphology of a live nerve still throbbing painfully (even after nearly 50 years) beneath the layers of healthy, protective scar-tissue, then it’s little wonder that he chose such a bold and unconventional title. As Joseph Carroll would say, he was thinking like an evolutionary psychologist. Or (as, once again, David and Nanelle Barash might say), his genes were whispering to him.

A coda: I think our genes are also whispering to us when, as literary scholars, we decide to take up the arduous but immensely rewarding study of adaptationism.

Of course, we find the contrast with postmodernist sophistry and identity politics a refreshing change. Even more to the point, the prospect of contributing to E.O. Wilson’s program for “consilience” (i.e., the vertical integration of knowledge from the physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities) is exciting, and more than sufficient payback for our efforts.²⁵ But beneath and apart from that, I think it’s the sense of having discovered and connected with our roots as human beings that we find so exhilarating. In fact, it recalls Jack London’s wonderful paean to Buck, the domesticated half-dog, half-wolf who must relearn the lessons of his puppyhood in order to answer “the call of the wild.” The passage is found in The Call of the Wild at the end of the third chapter:

And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. . . . They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks. They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always. And when, on the still and cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, and thus the ancient song surged through him, and he came into his own again.

Notes

1.  E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 1998),  Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); Joseph Carroll,  “The Human Revolution and the Adaptive Function of Literature,” Philosophy and Literature 30 (2006), 33-49;  Carroll, “Literature and Evolutionary Psychology” in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. David M. Buss (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), 931-52; Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

2. Quoted by William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 98.

3. Roland L. Williams Jr., African American Autobiography and the Quest for Freedom (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), xiii, 117.

4. Kathryn Coe , “The Role of Traditional Children’s Stories in Human Evolution,” Entelechy Journal No. 6, at http://entelechyjournal.com/coe.

5.  Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: University Press, 1976).

6.  Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Vernon Can Read! A Memoir (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 120.

7.  Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, “Food, Foragers, and Folklore: The Role of Narrative in Human Subsistence,” Evolution and Human Behavior 22 (2001). Sugiyama’s argument  assumes natural selection as the underlying cause of behavioral as well as biological adaptations,  including a “narrative instinct.” Overlapping data from infant behavioral psychology, human ethology, cognitive science, and narrative theory have proved  that the mind most easily processes, stores and transmits information in narrative form. The most parsimonious explanation is that story-telling conferred major fitness benefits, and therefore probably coevolved with language.

8. Jordan, 334.

9. Jerry S. Wiggins, ed., The Five Factor Model of Personality: Theoretical Perspectives (New York: Guilford Press, 1996). . The landmark study of universal mate criteria is David M. Buss,  “Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1989), 1-49, http://www.busslab.com.

10.  Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall, “Human Nature and Agonistic Structure in Canonical British Novels of the 19^th and Early 20^th Century: A Content Analysis,” in Heuristiken der Literaturwissenschaft: Disziplinexterne Perspectiven auf Literatur, ed. Uta Klein, Katja Mellman, and Steffanie Metzger (Paderborn:  Mentis Verlag, 2006), 473-87.

11. Andrews, 99.

12.. See David P. Barash, The Whisperings Within: Evolution and the Origin of Human Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), and  David P. and Nanelle R. Barash, Madam Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature (New York: Delacorte Press, 2005; Dell mass-market paperback edition, New York: 2008).

13. Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 542; Joseph Carroll, “Pinker, Dickens, and the Function of Literature,” in Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 63-68.

14.. Quoted by  Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, “Reverse-Engineering Narrative: Evidence of Special Design,” in Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2005), 187. See also Carroll, “Pinker, Dickens, and the Function of Literature,” and “The Deep Structure of Literary Representations” in Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 103-116.

15. Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 38.

16.  For a good overview of the careers of Bowlby and Ainsworth, see Inge Bretherton, “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth,” Developmental Psychology 28 (1992), 759-75. For an overview of contemporary  Attachment Theory, go to http://www.bowlby.com.

17. See Bretherton.

18.Kathryn Coe, “On the Origins of Compassion and Altruism,” paper presented at the Metanexus conference, “Works of Love: Scientific and Religious Perspectives on Altruism,” Villanova University, May 31-June 5, 2003.

19.  James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), 226.

20. Vernon Jordan has read this paper.  His enthusiastic response (besides an enjoyable telephone conversation) included a complementary copy of his new book Make It Plain: Standing Up and Speaking Out (New York: Public Affairs, 2008.) The inscription was this: “’May your own dreams be your own boundaries. . .’ Thanks to you for expanding my mind as to my own work.”

21.. Jordan, 13-15, 35.

22.  Everett Waters, a director of the NYU/Stony Brook Attachment Lab,  provided some very helpful clarifications of Attachment Theory, and also agreed with my hypothesis that the chapter titles (and the way they fuse together in the reader’s mind) capture the “secure base” premise of Attachment Theory.

23. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940).

24. . David M. Buss and Joshua D. Duntley, “Adaptations for Exploitation: Group Dynamics, Theory, Research, and Practice 12 (2008): 53-62, at http//:www.busslab.com.   Buss supports my application of the theory (personal email correspondence.)

25. E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1999).

The connection between imitation and literature has been discussed since Plato. Theories of literary evolution have existed almost as long as Darwin’s theory itself. Recent research in psychology and related fields have put the study of imitation on firm enough ground that we can now make a productive analysis of imitation’s role in cultural evolution. The conclusion I draw from this research is that imitation is fundamental to the existence of culture. I examine how a psychological mechanism active at the level of an individual author or text can have repercussions at the level of an entire tradition.

*********

Imitation and Literary Evolution

Ontogeny of Cultural Acquisition

Can we make use of evolutionary theory to understand the way literary traditions change? Some theorists have sketched out parallels at the macro level including descent with modification and some form of “survival of the fittest.”[1] I think we’d do better to start at the micro-level, with how literature is produced by human minds. Let us begin, then, with the ontogeny of the mind.

Each child must absorb the “rules” of his or her culture, a process usually referred to as “enculturation.” This process takes place amazingly quickly. By five years of age, children can recognize if chord progressions are ‘legal’ within their culture (often heptatonic in Classical Western music, or pentatonic in much Eastern and folk music, for instance; Levitin 114). 6-month-old infants show no preference for one cultural rhythm over another, while adults have great trouble learning foreign rhythms and 12-month-olds show a preference, but are still adaptable to new musical schemas (Hannon & Trehub). What is true for music is true to a lesser extent for other aspects of cultural acquisition. Just as children soak up language—both vocabulary and grammatical rules—at a dizzying rate, so culture is imbibed from the environment and codified in some way shape or form. Just as native speakers of English know instinctively that the ‘d’ at the end of “walked” is pronounced as a ‘t,’ whether they know the rules for the voicing and devoicing of consonants or not, the same adults have a sense for which chords are “correct.”

The child in the process of acquiring languages exemplifies the so-called “poverty of the stimulus”: information insufficient to piece together all of the rules of language correctly and swiftly. The inference commonly drawn is that children depend on some form of underlying, innate or “universal” grammar pre-encoded in some way shape or form. A similar logic applies to enculturation (Jackendoff, 147-48).[2]

The ability to generalize and internalize rules from a given set of stimuli is important, but it is not enough to drive a continually evolving system, which requires some force that fosters novelty. A primary source of this neophilia is habituation. We naturally attune to what is new and ignore what has not changed, a cognitive proclivity that appears from birth and is the foundation of many experiments on the infant mind. So while culture will be molded to better push our mental buttons, it will also be constantly altered to attract attention and gain new shine. These are two of the major forces in literary change: the constant drive for novelty, and the cognitive boundary beyond which things are nonsensical, grating, or unattractive.

Three Requirements for Literary Evolution

An evolutionary process requires three things: variation, propagation, and selection. First there must be variation among one or more traits within a population (of meerkats, tastes, or texts); individuals must be different from one another. Second, there must be a mechanism for passing traits from one generation onto a new generation. Finally, there must be a mechanism by which some individuals, or some traits, are either selected for or weeded out of the population (Darwin; Dennett 343).

In biology there is a physical substrate to all physical characteristics—DNA, which is transcribed into RNA, which is translated into proteins that assemble to form the body. Culture has no such concrete foundation.[3] There have been various attempts to theorize cultural equivalents to the gene, including the closely-modeled  “culturgen” of Lumsden and Wilson (7) and Dawkins’ far more popular “meme,” which he defines as “a unit of imitation” (Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 192, emphasis in original; see also Aunger; Blackmore; Brodie); and also Sperber’s looser, and hence possibly more productive, concept of “cultural representations” (Explaining Culture 32-55), whence arises his idea of an “epidemiology of representations.”

These approaches are limited by one basic difference between genetic and cultural inheritance: culture propagates by being picked up and transferred from one brain to another. Each of these processes—acquisition and transferal—entail psychological processes that transform information. Imitation is the most basic way in which information is acquired, transformed, and disseminated. It is, consequently, the primary means of propagation in literary evolution. Imitation also has the advantage of allowing for the conglomeration of multiple sources. Whereas animals are the result of the recombination of two distinct genomes, with the addition of any new mutations, cultural artifacts can combine any number of sources (what Moretti calls convergence; 78-81).

Here then is my core claim: The concept of “imitation” can help us bridge from the micro to the macro levels in evolutionary analysis, integrating our understanding of individual minds and whole traditions. Imitation is an innate faculty that is likely present at birth (Meltzoff) but certainly manifests itself shortly thereafter and begins to develop rapidly at about nine months of age through the next two to three years (Tomasello 52). It probably plays a fundamental role in such intrinsic aspects of human experience as self-recognition, language acquisition, and theory of mind (Kinsbourne; Nadel; Meltzoff & Decety; Rochat).

Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd describe three types of transmission biases, which can be viewed as three types of imitation. These are “frequency-based,” “content-based” and “model-based” biases. The first, “frequency-based bias,” usually involves imitating the people nearby or the most common examples. Indeed, this is the most common form of imitation, arguably even within the arts and can be seen as the source for coherent schools and movements that last for decades or even centuries.

“Content-based bias” has two aspects:  cognitive predispositions that make certain things easier to process or remember (a “sensory bias” in Geoffrey Miller’s terms [142]), and association with other cultural artifacts. Poetic lines under 3 seconds are easier because that is the size of our short-term memory buffer) (Turner and Pöppel); and line-end rhymes are easier because the repetition of sound makes rhymed verse easier to remember than unrhymed).  The new works that show a similarity to old and familiar works will be more easily processed, but works that are too similar or derivative will not be interesting. And so new works need to be original enough to overcome habituation, but not so original so as to be too difficult or strange.

The third bias is “model-based” and involves the imitation of select individuals instead of a general mass or statistical average. Models chosen for imitation usually display high success, prestige, and status. Attributing prestige and status to cultural figures, many of whom may be long deceased, is guided by the same psychological mechanisms as our everyday social interactions. Prestige is generated by reputation and skill. Reputation can take many forms: being anthologized or included in curricula, receiving critical acclaim, or winning awards. Evaluation of skill is more than simply a matter of execution or end product. Low-valued skills or unappreciated forms will not be appreciated no matter how good the execution is. When Tyutchev’s poetry went largely unappreciated in Russia during the period of Realism in the second half of nineteenth-century it was not due to any inherent fault, but resulted from prevailing tastes, especially the low value accorded the lyric. When verse returned to a position of esteem early in the twentieth century, his reputation rose in tandem.

Literary prestige should often be self-perpetuating: authors imitate prestigious authors, authors who are imitated become prestigious. But it is possible for an author to fall victim to his or her own success, through no inherent fault. Work that is imitated and adapted too frequently acquires a familiarity that breeds contempt, and so leads to less-frequent imitation—or to travesty and parody. One example would be Petrarch’s poems, imitation of which fueled the English poetic Renaissance at the hands of Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Walter Raleigh, but whom Shakespeare would travesty in sonnet CXXX with the line “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” After the passage of enough time, formerly hackneyed sources can return, cleansed of their overuse, a circularity observed by Martindale (The Clockwork Muse) in French and English poetry and Lieberson in children’s names. Certain names, for instance achieve immense popularity for an extended period, only to decline in popularity or almost disappear as they become “old people names” (for instance, Maud, or Ruth). After enough time has passed the association passes and the names lose their negative connotation and return to favor (for instance Madeline is among the top 60 names for girls during the opening decade of this century after being in the 400s during the 80s). Similarly, one can watch the ebb and flow of “formal” poetry in the American tradition, especially its denigration in the 60s and 70s followed by the “New Formalism” of the 80s and 90s.

Beginning with this observation about the pendulum-like swing of literary, we can identify polar forms of imitation: “copy the product” and “copy the instructions,” (Blackmore 213-15; Dawkins, Forward xi; Sperber, “Objection” 167). (These are terms I borrow from memetics, the field founded by Dawkins.) “Copy the instructions” is a faithful process and produces homogeneous results. Mistakes in one generation are not passed on to future generations unless a mistake occurs in the directions themselves. Note that the “instructions” need not be formally described, but can be elicited either by observing production, or by inferring them from the product itself. “Copy the product” leads to heterogeneous results and products mutate quickly. Imagine the different results of a game similar to “telephone” where participants copy pictures. Asked to copy a five-pointed star, the result will almost certainly be nearly identical with the original since most people have learned to draw such a star in their childhood. Each copier need only revert to this internal set of instructions. On the other hand, if participants are asked to copy something more complex, such as a picture of a bird, as in an experiment described by Sperber (“Objection” 166), the accumulation of small changes will produce a drastically different result.

Habituation leads from “follow the rules” to “achieve the same goal through different means” or “achieve a different goal with the same means.” For instance, the dissemination of the sonnet moves through periods of close attention to formal and thematic structure to steadily broader thematics and more formal variation as well as the use of wholly different forms.

Innovation and the Renewal of Tradition

There is no such thing as true innovation in the sense of something entirely original that bears no connection with the past. Innovation consists in the transformation, adaptation, conglomeration, or repurposing of old innovations. As Barnett puts it, “Innovation does not result from the addition or subtraction of parts. It takes place only when there is a recombination of them” (9). Modern written literary traditions owe their beginning to domestic oral and folk traditions and to the importation or translation of foreign materials into a domestic context: postcolonial nations from/against their colonial traditions; Russia from Western Europe; England from the continent; Spain and France from Italy; and all of these from Rome; Rome from Greece; etc..

Literary change within a given movement or period will occur by the steady tweaking of established norms (loosening the “classical unities” in Neoclassical drama, for instance). This tweaking can be accomplished by importing new forms, styles or themes through the translation of foreign works. In the Russian tradition we can point to Vasily Trediakovsky’s translations of Tallemant’s Le voyage à l’île d’amour [Voyage to the Island of Love], the first work in Russian to deal explicitly the theme of secular love, and Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque [Adventures of Telemachus]. Both these groundbreaking works paved the way for innovations by Mikhail Lomonosov and Nikolai Karamzin among others. We can point as well as to Vasily Zhukovsky’s translation of Gray’s “Elegy” and Bürger’s “Lenore” which he readapted into a russified version called “Svetlana.”

Literary evolution progresses by small, incremental changes begun through some form of imitation. Once a new element is imported, it can be changed, adapted, and melded with other domestic elements. But this reworking can only last for so long. Eventually novelty cannot be created within a given paradigm, and some form of renewal is required, a new round of innovation, importation, and imitation. What we most need now, for a theory of literary evolution, is a more adequate psychological framework. Imitation adds this additional level of detail to a previously established framework.

Works Cited

Aunger, Robert. The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think. New York: Free Press, 2002.

Barnett, H. G. Innovation: The Basis of Cultural Change. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953.

Blackmore, Susan J. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Brodie, Richard. Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme. Seattle, Wash: Integral Press, 1996.

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: The Modern library, 1936.

Dawkins, Richard. Forward to: S. Blackmore’ s The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

—. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Dennett, Daniel Clement. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Hannon, E. E., and S. E. Trehub. “Tuning in to musical rhythms: Infants learn more readily than adults.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102.35 (2005): 12639-12643.

Hauser, Marc D. Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. New York: Ecco, 2006.

Jackendoff, Ray. Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007.

Kinsbourne, M. “The role of imitation in body ownership and mental growth.” The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution and Brain Bases. Andrew N Meltzoff and Wolfgang Prinz Eds. Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002. 311–330.

Levitin, Daniel J. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York, N.Y: Dutton, 2006.

Lieberson, Stanley. A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Lumsden, Charles J, and Edward O Wilson. Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981.

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[2] For a similar approach to moral sentiment see Hauser.

[3] Attempts to search for a “neural correlate” of cultural representations have failed. Even basic mental representations such as a simple square, although housed in the same parts of the brain, cause a different constellation of neurons to fire in different individuals, and even the same individual at different times.

To address whether culture is biological, we document differences between the system of behavioral codes found in kinship-based societies, which resemble those of our distant ancestors, and the behavioral code found in the early state. One key difference is the “axiom of kinship amity” found in kinship-based societies: altruism was to be provided to all co-descendants; self-interest serving was limited. Evolutionary psychology may be unable to explain this system of behavioral codes; however, as this system is widespread, we should recognize that cultural traditions can have a powerful influence on behavior.

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From Morality to Law: The Role of Kinship, Tradition and Politics

Introduction

The root of the word politics is Greek, coming from the word polis, which refers to a town of some size with walls; Greek word polites refers to a townman. While this origin implies that politics has something to do with groups of individuals, beyond that, politics seems to often refer to methods, including the use of power, for influencing the behavior of those individuals (Grandz & Murray, 1980) and their participation in civic affairs (Bourque & Grossholtz, 1974). Thus, theories of political behavior are aimed at explicating the influences that define an individual’s behaviors, opinions, and participation in civic society. To better understand the function of early political systems, we use the cross-cultural record to examine the transition between the system of behavioral rules of conduct that is found in societies that seem to more closely resemble those of our very distant ancestors and the system found in the early state.

While both law and morals encourage certain behaviors that presumably would not occur without them, and discourage behaviors that, with some probability, would occur without them (see Jones & Goldsmith, 2005), the proposal tested here is that the behavioral rules of conduct and the systems that support them that are found in more traditional societies are aimed at promoting enduring, cooperative relationships among individuals who are identified as kin through common ancestry. While early anthropologists referred to this system as primitive law, we prefer the terms moral system when referring to kinship-based systems that promote enduring and cooperative relationships. Moral systems, so defined, are significantly different from the systems of behavioral codes found in a polis — that is, in societies in which the majority of interactions are with non-kin, interactions often center on the exchange of goods and services — and traditions have largely been broken down. We refer to this second system, which is based on concepts of justice and fairness, as a system of law (Jones, 1997).

We use the descriptions of moral and legal systems to build the hypothesis that the source or model for the earlier systems was the hierarchical relationship between a mother and child. It may be true that mothers themselves may or may not have created the first moral systems; however, as we explain, the system itself appears to have been modeled on maternal behavior. As Edel and Edel (1957: 34) argue in their cross cultural study, “Mother take care of your child” is a “universal imperative.” While anthropologists have reported some variation in mothering behaviors, mothering behaviors are held to be so important that they are seen cross-cultural to generate moral sentiments and to have an “absolute structuring effect on morality, serving as the foundation for restrictions and positive ideas and values” (ibid).

In contrast, the model for the later systems of behavioral codes that were found in nontraditional societies was the relationship between individuals who were unrelated, who shared no common ancestry or traditions, but who for some reason or another had to interact in a way that is of mutual benefit. A trade relationship that is a short-term relationship that has the potential to be mutually beneficial is an example of a legal relationship.

Traditional Societies and Nontraditional Societies

Nearly anywhere you look in the anthropological literature you will see references to “traditional” societies. The mere use of this term implies that in the midst of the seeming chaos of cultural diversity in the world, there exists a recognizable dichotomy between traditional societies and nontraditional societies. Although this dichotomy is obviously actually a continuum, we suggest that when terms are carefully defined it is a useful place from which to approach the cross-cultural study of rules of conduct.

We will define traditional societies as those in which cultural behaviors tend to have been copied from ancestors for many generations. These copied behaviors included not only the rituals that are recognized as being stereotyped and repeated from one generation to the next, but also the everyday behaviors related to subsistence, and most importantly, social interaction. As all humans lived in traditional societies until the last few thousand years, even long after the development of agriculture, societies still referred to as traditional resemble in fundamental ways those earlier societies (see discussion in Coe, 2003, Palmer, 2010). Such societies typically consist of individuals identified as being kin to one another by virtue of being perceived as descended from common ancestors. Although some traditional societies are small, the tradition of passing descent names from ancestors to descendants over many generations enables some traditional societies to become very large as large numbers of kin are identified explicitly. As van den Berghe and Barash explain, unilineal descent “can be seen as a cultural adaptation enabling up to millions of people to organize” (1977:404). Among the Tiv, for example, “the whole population of some 800,000 traces descent by traditional genealogical links from a single founding ancestor” (Keesing 1975: 32-33; see also Evans-Pritchard 1951:29).

Kinship was held as being so important in traditional societies that when interactions had to occur between unrelated individuals, rituals, such as the Calumet of the Plains tribes, were followed that converted those strangers into metaphorical kin (Wood 1980; Bruner 1961). The calumet involved a “father-son” adoption ceremony and made it possible for individuals who came from tribes that had formerly been at war to trade in peace. “Plains Indian trade,” Bruner (1961:201) writes, “was accomplished by barter between fictitious relatives. From a larger perspective, a vast network of ritual relationships extended throughout the entire plains.”

Once those former outsiders were recognized as kin, cooperative interactions could occur and they could all begin to engage in trading relationships, including the exchange of children in marriage, which made the kinship metaphor a reality.

While traditions that dictate the use of descent names do make it possible to identify large numbers of individuals as kin, the mere identification of kin is not sufficient to account for cooperation. Other traditions that encourage enduring cooperation with those kin are necessary to produce the cooperative social relationships that form these individual kin into a society (Palmer and Steadman 1997; Coe, 2003). By enduring cooperation, we mean cooperation between individual that lasts over the lifetime and that then is transmitted to the children of the respective parties (Coe, 2003). Santos Granero (1991: 226) reported that tribal people such as the Peruvian Amuesha, regularly claim that “’yi’ (morality), which promotes such kinship responsibilities as love and generosity,” is crucial to the existence and perpetuation of harmonious and enduring social relationships. “Immoral” behaviors, in contrast, are those that are “antisocial,” demonstrating selfishness or “greediness or meanness” (Santos Granero, 1991: 226) in their “disregard for kinship duties and failure in one’s duties towards other fellow Amuesha” (Santos Granero, 1991: 45).

Traditions encouraging kinship and kinship-like cooperation and aimed at forming and maintaining enduring relationships among kin stand in contrast to legal codes that developed in non traditional early states that were made up of individuals who were non-kin and who developed codes aimed at protecting the rights of individuals and establishing justice or fairness in a dispute (Jones and Goldsmith, 2005: 439). Laws, Jones (1997: 167) writes, “define and protect individual rights” and “dispense justice.” We argue that individual rights and justice are often at the expense of enduring, cooperative relationships.

Nontraditional societies are those in which traditions have been replaced with cultural behaviors copied from people other than ancestors. Such societies typically consist of individuals who do not recognize each other as kin, either biologically or metaphorically. The earliest forms of nontraditional societies are often referred to as early nation states. Such early states typically included multiple kinship-defined traditional societies (e.g., a number of distinct tribes), and thus are vulnerable to splitting along these kinship divisions (van den Berghe 1979; Salter 2002). This required a fundamental change in the rules of conduct and the system supporting those codes, which we refer to as a transformation from moral codes to legal codes.

Definitions of Moral and Legal

In cross cultural studies the difficulty of defining the terms “laws” and “morals” (Radin 1953:114) has led to them frequently being used interchangeably. Irons (1991: 50), as one example, placed “morals, laws, and other types of rules” into one broad category he referred to as “morality” (see also Schwarz and Rosenbaum 1983: 24; Wines 1853: 396; Hoebel 1949:370). The terms, however, have quite distinct origins and may have quite different functions. Moral, according to most sources (Ayto, 1990), is derived from the Latin mõs (o/s mõr), which means “a way of carrying oneself, hence especially of behaving; a custom as determined by usage not law” (Partridge 1966: 212), and is a cognate of Old English mõd, which means spirit or courage (Bernhardt, 1988). The derived adjective, morality (moralis), was coined by Cicero as a translation of Greek ethikos, which meant proper behavior in a society. Law, on the other hand, came originally from the Germanic word lag (Ayto, 1990), which was changed to Old Islandic log (Old Norse lag, plural lagh), which meant decree, good order, or fate (Barnhardt, 1988). The English borrowed this term about 1200 AD to form the Late Old English lagu and the Middle English lawe, meaning stratum, share, or partnership (Ayto, 1990, Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, 1966). The word legal comes from Latin lex, which stems from the Latin verb legere, meaning to bind or tie together that which was not previously joined (Ayto, 1990).

Although it is difficult to interpret these roots, moral seems to be the older term. Thus, we follow many historians of law who claim that morals may be the older form. Morals, wrote Coulanges (1864) and Gruter and Bohannan (1983: xvi) may be the more “ancient codes” out of which law has developed. Morals, Diamond (1951) claimed may represent the infancy of law. Further support for the claim that moral systems may be older is the distinction made that laws are “ethics written down” (Alexander, 1987: 184) and that the moral judgments of a population shape legal standards (Gruter & Bohannan, 1983: xv). As morals appear to be the more ancient system of behavioral codes, they would have been the system of codes existed during the long period when all humans lived in traditional societies of kin. We suggest it is for this reason that the oldest codes are said to involve more “benevolent principles” (Ghoshal, 1889: 25) and to facilitate more enduring relationships, while more punitive systems tend to disrupt enduring social relationships (Coe, 2003).

Although early anthropologists referred to the systems of behavioral codes in traditional societies as primitive law, there are, as this paper discusses, a number of reasons why law may be an inappropriate term to use. Laws and the legal systems that surround them are associated with social systems in which kinship ties are disrupted (Hoebel, 1949). Laws appear to be related to the formation of partnerships, or new social relationships, between individuals who are “associated in some action or endeavor” (Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary, 1989: 1052). The function of law, as explained by Maccauley (1963), may be primarily to build and keep, for a period of time, negotiations, or business relationships, which tend to be neither close nor enduring. As was discussed earlier, Legere, the root word of legal, means to bind together something that was not already connected.

While, “the meaning of ‘law’ is frustratingly protean, shifting by usage and user” (Jones, 1997: 167), the earliest codes referred to as laws (e.g., the laws of Moses) were formulated to guide relationships in a group of individuals having distinct cultural origins (Wines, 1853). Although family social relationships (and the often unspoken behavioral codes that encourage those relationships) can be mandated or made into law, the social relationships themselves are not legal relationships. As Grotein (1928:128) pointed out, “Whatever the relationship was that existed between one member of a family and another, it certainly was not a legal relationship.”

Although there are distinct differences between morals and law, both are characterized by having a body of precedents, some process for teaching the system to others, a process for encouraging or discouraging legislative enactment, a collection of norms, and a process by which those norms are enforced and punishment occurs (see Jones, 1997). Using these characteristics, we will now describe the normative system of kinship-based societies, which we will, for the purposes of this paper refer to as moral systems, and compare it with the system of laws found in the emerging state.

Moral and Legal Systems

Source and Scope of Moral and Legal Codes

Source of the codes in kinship-based societies. Most scholars would agree that practice of having and enforcing behavioral codes is ancient and that the origin of these codes and the system that enforces them was our ancestors, who “from time immemorial,” were the “primitive custodians of the unwritten, uncodified, unclassified rules of conduct” (Rattray 1929:3). Primitive law was ancestral: “All of it [primitive law],” Culwick and Culwick (1935:8) write, “is neither more nor less than the rules of behaviour ordained by the ancestors and practiced by them (Edel & Edel, 1957: 87; Sumner, 1907: 232). As Sumner (1907:232).poetically worded this, these systems “contain in themselves the authority of the ancestral ghosts.”

Moral systems often have no justification other than “we do it this way because the old men say it is wiser” (Sun Chief, 1942: 268), or “it was the custom of their ancestors” (Tyler, 1891: 252), and it is now our “duty” to our ancestors to behave the way they specified (Edel & Edel, 1957; Johnson, 1984; Westermarck, 1912). It is often claimed that the ancestors who gave the rules still participate in social life, rewarding those who obey and punishing those who violate their rules (Santos Granero, 1991), a claim that may be universal in all traditional societies (Steadman et al. 1996). Among the Ndembu, the “moral man” is one who “honours his kinship obligations” and “respects and remembers his ancestors” (Turner 1979:374). Middleton states that among the Lugbara, “the rules of social behaviour are the ‘words of our ancestors’” (1960:27). To act morally is one’s duty to the ancestors; morals are not justified by a claim that they are just or fair.

Source of the codes in the early state. Although often appealing to earlier aspects of traditional moral codes for legitimacy, the earliest laws associated with the emergence of the commonwealth (e.g., Mosaic law, Hammurabi’s codes) were not themselves traditional. Instead their source was a new supernatural revelation. The laws of Moses were said to have come to him through divine revelation from the ancestor, Yahweh, who created him; those of Hammurabi of Babylon were said to have been revealed from the Sun-God Samas, the judge of Heaven and Earth (Johns, 1903). Mosaic laws were said to have been revealed to the prophet Moses in order to regulate the behavior of a group of individuals who were “not community of blood, or of land, or of government…but a crowd of mixed ancestry which fled Egypt (Suelzer, 1964: 90). Laws also are said to be “enhanced by the belief that they are fair and just” (Schwartz and Rosenbaum 1983: 241). However, this may be mere rhetoric. It seems clear that “equity is not a necessary condition for the constitution of law; even a shockingly unjust decision…can be law” (van Baal, 1981: 111).

The Scope of the System: To Whom do They Apply

The scope of the system in kinship-based societies. Given the claim that moral codes come from ancestors, it is not surprising that the scope of moral codes in traditional society is defined by kinship, not geography (King, 1972: 37; Edel & Edel, 1957: 16). Specific codes often correspond to specific categories of kin (Coe, 1995; Palmer and Steadman 1997). Birth and descent alone indicate “those who count in it reckoning and take part in its proceedings” (Edel & Edel, 1957: 16). Although descent groups can be associated with ancestral lands, birth is what appears to be important as clans and tribes, members of which are identified by descent names, are not confined to one geographic area, but are spread widely (Palmer et al. 1997; Edel & Edel 1957).

Rules encouraged co-descendants to treat one another as if they were close kin. As Briffault (1931: 57) observed, there are rules of “kindness, love, help, and peace applicable to members of our own clan, tribe, or community, the other of robbery, hatred, enmity, and murder to all the rest of the world.” Unlike Mosaic laws, which made their appearance when interactions among individuals in different tribes was beginning to occur, outsiders in traditional “static” (or unchanging) societies are considered to be less than human (Santos Granero, 1991; Hoebel, 1949). The Amalekites, thus, were not human and were to be exterminated (Wines, 1853: 383).

The scope of the system in the early state. In early nation states the scope of laws is geographic, including the entire nation state, and it thus includes non-kin. Schapera (1956: 25) explained that a state or commonwealth . . . is not a closed group with membership determined solely and permanently by descent. It is rather an association into which people may be born, absorbed by conquest, or admitted as immigrants and from which they may depart voluntarily or be driven by the fortunes of war.

Hammurabi’s code brought together in one geographic area two unrelated groups, Sumerians and Semitics (Diamond 1951). The foundation of Israel, according to Suelzer, was not community of blood or land, or of government,” it was “alliance with the lord [which] united the crowd of mixed ancestry which fled Egypt (1964: 90). In other words, early law created metaphorical kinship ties among non-kin, united by a prophet, Moses, who spoke for an ancestor, Yahweh, who was the father of all men. The boundaries of the Promised Land were said to have been established by God: “From the wilderness and coast be” (Deut iv 6). Tribes living outside the geographical area and not sharing the Hebrew God were neither protected by nor subject to Mosaic law (Wines, 1853: 383).

Transmission of the Codes: Teaching others about the system and its codes

Teaching about the system in kinship-based societies. It often is said that while laws tend to be formal and written, morals are rarely formulated clearly (van Baal 1981) and often are unwritten, transmitted orally, as are behavioral codes in traditional, kinship based societies (King 1972). In kinship-based societies many, perhaps most rules may be unspoken, transmitted by copying or modeling, or through verbal behaviors (van Baal 1981; King 1972). Even if unspoken, individuals are quite conscious of a high valuation placed on certain behaviors. For this reason, Pospisil (1956) argued that we must base our studies of systems of behavior code on what actually goes on in the case of conflict rather than on the presence or absence of abstract rules or a formal process for teaching the rules. Children in all societies are educated about behavioral codes and “the specific consequences that will follow if a rule is not obeyed” this teaching most often was done in the family (Hoebel 1949:363).

Teaching about the system and its codes in the early state. In the early state, education about the legal system and its codes was a civil responsibility—the “state controls education (Coulanges 1955:213). Children learned about the legal system through some sort of a formal system run by the state.

Legislative Enactment: Changes in Moral and Legal Codes

Legislative enactment in kinship-based societies. The persistent transmission of unwritten moral codes unchanged from one generation to the next requires considerable effort, including guided practice and ritualized memorization. Writing makes it easier to maintain codes unchanged. However, it was the written legal codes of early states that often underwent rapid change due to legislative enactments (Wines, 1858: 79; Diamond, 1951), while the unwritten moral codes of traditional kinship societies were passed through both verbal and nonverbal behaviors with little change (van Baal, 1981; King, 1972).

“Numerous writers,” Hoebel (1949) explained, “have commented upon the relative absence of legislative enactment by primitive government.” Often there was no authority competent to make a new rule: “It is seldom in the heads of a people to alter those customs which have been held sacred from time immemorial” (Westermarck, 1912: 162). This is because, as Lowie points out, the aim was “rather to exact obedience to traditional usage than to create new precedents” (1919: 358). Indeed, as Sumner (1907: 355) explained, “The ghosts of the ancestors would be angry if the living should change the ancient folkways.” Furer-Haimendorf (1967: 148) claimed that Gond philosophy “leaves no doubt that the rules of behavior laid down in the ancestor’s time remain binding for present generations.”

Legislative enactment in the early state. Change, such as legislative enactments are more common in legal codes of the early state, although precedent was still cited as justification for change. Regularity,according to Hoebel, refers to the fact that “laws build on precedents, for new decisions rest on old rules or law or norms of custom and new decisions tend to supply the foundation for future action” (1949: 364). While the apodictic codes of Mosaic law are “of perpetual obligation” (Wines, 1853: 43), “forever, throughout your generations” (exodus xxvii 21), the “purely civil law could be repealed or changed” (Wines, 1953: 123). The first law against usury, as one example, prohibited the taking of interest from poor Israelites only (Exodus xxii 25). The second law against usury extended this prohibition to the entire nation (Deut xxii 19; Wines, 1853: 123). Statutes could be modified through reason, logic, the judgments of respected authority, and the will of the people due to “circumstances of climate, soil, situation, political relations, character, and power of the neighboring nations, customs mode of life, prevalent notions as to honor and disgrace, and the nature of severity of punishments, species and sources of crime, etc.” (Wines 1853: 121).

The Presence of Authority and Use of Force

Authority and force in kinship-based societies. Moral codes in kinship-based society are based on the largely informal authority of the ancestors. The manipulation of power to one’s own personal advantage may not be characteristic of leadership in small-scale kinship-based societies and even in some larger societies such as the Nuer. The power of a headman “is extremely limited and ephemeral; it is . . . purely functional and no authority attaches to the office apart from utility to the community” (Briffault 1931: 181; see also Ghoshal 1886; Radin 1953: 245; Hoebel 1949; Westermarck 1912; Schapera 1956; van Baal, 1981).

While this point currently is being debated, for Radin (1953:245), “authority [kinship-based societies] is diffused and non-centralized and coercion is limited in its application.” “The headman in the primitive world,” wrote Hoebel (1949:393), “rarely has explicit authority; his functions are so subtle that they defy easy description.” Westermarck (1912:183-184) claimed that “among many savages, the chief is said to have nothing whatever to do with jurisdiction. He, like other men, “acts merely as an advisor, or is applied to as an arbiter…the judicial power with which the chief is invested is stated to be more nominal than real.” Bushmen chiefs, according to Schapera (1956:87), had “no legislative or judicial functions, nor are there official tribunals of any kind.” If people are unable to reach a decision, they “sometimes ask elderly men to arbitrate their disputes, but such requests are not obligatory, nor are the decisions necessarily accepted.”

The small amount of authority that does exist in kinship-based societies may be described as paternal in that it carries with it heavy obligations of generosity and the duty of protection (King, 1972).  The Bushman leader is commonly said to be the ‘father or ‘herdsmen’ of his people” (Schapera (1956: 68; see also Santos Granero 1991). Generosity is an important characteristic of a good leader. Santos Granero (1991: 162) writes that

the holders of power are represented as generous providers and power relations are characterized by a kind of love with only the powerful may feel for the less powerful. It is this kind of asymmetrical love, with its life-giving qualities, which makes power, whether political or not, legitimate in the eyes of the actors.

Heimendorf (1967: 88-89) reported that headmen who were stingy and grudged expenditure on ceremonial gifts lost the respect of their kinsmen and neighbor; the greater the sacrifices a leader is willing to make, the more respect he receives. Bandalier (1972: 99) wrote that the primary role of the lineage of clan chief is that he is the representative of the ancestors: “who transmits the words of the ancestors to the living, and those of the living to the ancestors.”

Authority and force in the early state. In contrast to informal ancestral authority in traditional societies, force and the legitimate use of physical coercion is the “the sine qua non of law” (Hoebel (1949: 364). That is, “the law has teeth, and teeth that can bite” (ibid). According to Hoebel (1949: 364) three primary elements are important to law: “we may say that force, authority, and regularity are the elements that modem jurisprudence teaches us we must seek when we wish to differentiate law from mere custom or morals in whatever society we may consider,’ “the sine qua non of law” in any society is the legitimate use of physical coercion.”  Legal coercion, he (1949: 363) explained “is the application of physical power, in threat or in fact, by a privileged party, for a legitimate cause in a legitimate way, and at a legitimate time, also see discussion in Meek, 1985; Holmes 1917: 343; Baxter 1953; Pospisil 1956: 257). While leaders in the early state had more power than did leaders in kinship-based societies, they also were expected – or encouraged — to behave in paternal ways, that is to be generous, to “master the civil wisdom of the age,” to perform their duties without complaint (“patient endurance of toil”), and to be “free of selfish ambition” (Wines, 1853: 126, 292).

Guilt and Punishment

Identification of guilt and punishment in kinship-based societies. Hoebel (1949) reported that in small communities of kin, questions regarding guilt or innocence are rarely raised as not much behavior is kept secret and the usual argument is only about the extent of the damages (see also Diamond 1951; Schapera 1956; Malinowski 1934). Punishment was primarily in the form of some degree of social embarrassment or ostracism. The most feared and dreaded punishment was banishment: “Banishment and the loss of rights as a member of the kindred group formed a most effective penalty in a community where the support of the group was so frequently necessary” (Lowie, 1919, 135; see also Hoebel, 1949; Rasmussen 1929; Edel & Edel, 1957; Spencer & Gillen, 1939; Schapera 1956).

Identification of guilt and punishment in the early state. The presence of an impartial judge and judicum parum, or the impartial judgment of peers, are said to distinguish legal from moral systems and kinship-based systems from modem systems (Grotein, 1923; van Baal, 1981). For the Hebrews, judges (who were governors or supreme authorities) were, in connection with the high priest, arbiters of civil controversies (Wines, 1953). The responsibility of judges was to serve as “ministers of justice, protectors of law, defenders of religion, and avengers of crime; particularly the crime of idolatry” (Wines, 1853: 546). Judges, who served for life, were appointed. They received no salary, revenue, or tribute and laws limited their power and the ability of others to influence their impartiality (Wines, 1853: 545).

In the early nations, punishment, depending on the crime, ranged from fines to flogging, to cutting off the ear of an adulterer, to death or banishment from the community (Bamouw, 1963). The principle punishments, “known to the Mosaic code, were the sword, stoning, stripes, compensations, restitutions, reparation of losses and fines” (Wines, 1858: 263). A number of crimes (“of deep moral malignity or aimed against the very being of the state” — Wines, 1853: 263) were punishable by death. Further, there were “posthumous disgraces” which included such things as burning or burying beneath a pile of stones (Wines, 1858: 263), and there were supernatural punishments. Those committing serious crimes were threatened with the loss of their soul, universal deluge, ghastly famine, fiery tempest, the blasting thunderbolt, and sickness (Wines, 1953: 279).

The Codes Themselves

Moral codes in kinship-based societies. The codes regulating interactions in traditional, kinship-based societies are said to focus on the roles of and interactions between kin. Four codes, which were said to be of fundamental importance, promoted motherhood (Edel and Edel 1959; governed mate choice and marriage (Briffault, 1931; Lowie, 1919; Tylor, 1897; Malinowski 1932; Coulanges 1864; Rivers 1917; Kroeber 1923; Westermarck 1912), encouraged cooperation between siblings and other kin (Edel and Edel 1957; Tylor 1891; Westermarck 1912), and encouraged respect for the elderly and the ancestors (Westermarck 1912; Diamond 1951; Tyler 1881; Santos Granero 1991). Without these codes men would be “held down by low animal appetites and passions” (Morgan, 1877: 41), return to a state of savagery, and live in misery (Tyler, 1881).

Legal codes in the early state. The laws of early states had “traces of the influence of a more ancient system of laws, a lex non scripta, or jus consuetudinarium” (Wines, 1853: 122), but they differed in their scope and formality. The aim of Hebrew government was to form a “union” of these unrelated people who were ruled by the 31 kings of Palestine (Wines, 1853: 445). Moses accomplished this by forming a metaphorical kinship group, a brotherhood, of the “children” of God (“Did not He that made me in the womb, make him?”), joining together men and women from different tribes (Job xxxi. 13; Wines, 1853: 446) and encouraging kinship-like behavior among them. When the laws were given to Moses, he read them to the assembly of headmen (“elders of the people”) who provided “formal assurance of their willingness . . . to meet his proposal…to unite together and form a civil community to be governed by common laws” (Wines 1853: 48-49). This is referred to as the first “true social compact” (Wines, 1853: 48).

Resolution of Conflict: Maintaining or Destroying Social Ties

Resolution of conflict in kinship-based societies. The type of relationship in which individuals are involved (kinship or non-kinship) affects the manner in which conflict is resolved. Breaches in enduring relationships, or social relationships that had a “time dimension…are not amenable to handling through law” (Yrgvesson, 1978: 83). Collier (1973) found that in her work with the Zinacantecan of southern Mexico that if individuals wished to preserve a valued relationship they would avoid legal procedures and seek procedures that make reconciliation possible. This is because strong punishment and “revenge denies the presence of social ties” (van Baal, 1981: 106). To resolve problems and allow social relationships to continue, settlements will typically “restore the victim of the crime to his status and give the criminal the opportunity to be reaccepted as a member of the group by his atonement” (van Baal, 1981: 106).

Resolution of conflict in the early state. Laws and the procedures that are designed to identify guilt and seek justice through fines and punishment that matches the judged severity of the crime may damage, irreparably, enduring social relationships (van Baal, 1981). Justice may prevail, but conflicts, in an important sense, are not resolved, as social relationships between individuals, families, and extended families, end.

Conclusion

Summary of the characteristics of moral and legal systems

To summarize this discussion of the transition from kinship based systems, which are more egalitarian and aimed at influencing enduring social relationships to political systems, in which the distribution of power changes and self-interest acquires a greater role, in kinship-based moral system, the codes come from the ancestors and obeying them is a duty owed to one’s ancestors. The codes specify good kinship behavior and the most serious offenses against the ancestors, and his/her descendants, is exile, or the loss of all kinship ties. The source of the codes in a legal system is also said to be an ancestor, actual or metaphorical. The ability to influence behavior, in both systems, whether of an elder or a leader, depends upon ancestral endorsement and leadership in both systems, is defined more by obligations than privileges. Leadership is legitimate when it has both an ancestral endorsement and shows evidence of responsiveness to followers (co-descendants) and fulfillment of obligations to them.

In a moral system, there is no system for the creation of new codes, as the codes themselves are largely immutable. Legal systems, however, have methods and mechanisms in place for legislative enactment. Although legal systems also have immutable codes (which are said to be ancestral and which focus especially on such things as honoring the elders), a new type of code has emerged. These codes, which are mutable, focus on temporary relationships between buyer and seller.

The system found in the early state differs from the one found in kinship-based, traditional societies primarily in the degree of formality as, for example, the laws themselves have been written down. There is also a difference in the power of authority. To some extent, the education of children, or transmission of knowledge about the system and its rules, rather than being accomplished by modeling, storytelling, or other informal methods, has been taken out of the hands of parents and placed in the hands of the state. In order to finance the system, tributes are specified and must be paid on a regular basis. Tributes are no longer made, as sacrifices, to the ancestors, but are given to the ancestor’s living representative. In a moral system, attention is paid to the particular punishments are specified for particular offenses (e.g., the punishment for treason is death) and less credence is given to considering contingencies that may have influenced why one committed an offense.

Theory: How can we explain these systems of behavioral codes?

Thomas Hobbes (1651) exemplifies the common view that before there were legal social contracts there was “war of all against all.” The cross-cultural study of traditional pre-state societies leads to a very different conclusion. Before the legal systems of early states, there were moral systems based on kinship. While legal codes are aimed a regulating selfishly motivated interactions among nonkin, moral codes are aimed at promoting the well being of descendants.

Evolutionary psychology may currently have no theory that allows us to explain the “axiom of kinship amity” or the cooperative treatment of those identified by descent from a common ancestor. As the behavior is so widespread, however, it may be time that hypotheses, such as the one based on cultural traditions, are proposed and tested against the cross-cultural evidence.

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In a recent book, Aniruddh Patel argues that music behaviors are not adaptations; they are, like the control of fire, culturally propagated technologies. I critically examine both views. Patel unduly exaggerates differences he finds between music and language in arguing that only the latter is an adaptation. And there are significant differences between music behaviors and fire control, such that if the latter is a technology, it is not clear that the former is.

*********

Music, Fire, and Evolution

In Music, Language, and the Brain (2008), Aniruddh Patel denies that music behaviors are adaptations. In other words, he holds that music behaviors are not biologically transmissible characteristics that provided selective advantage in the reproductive success of our forebears. And he denies that music behaviors are spandrels. In other words, he holds that music behaviors are not biologically transmissible side-effects of human adaptations that lack adaptive significance in themselves. He maintains instead that music is a transformational technology.

In this paper, I will briefly review Patel’s argument that music behaviors are not adaptations and, if only for the sake of moving on, I will concede his negative conclusion, because my interest lies more with the second argument. It is not my brief to defend the idea that music behaviors are a spandrel.[1] Nevertheless, I aim to raise doubts about the argument he offers and to examine the distinction we should draw between spandrels and transformational technologies. Before I take on those tasks, I try to clarify what falls under the notion of “music behaviors.”

I

If we are to consider the connection with evolution, we must focus on human dispositions to act in certain ways, rather than on the artifacts or products – in this case, such things as melodies, songs, symphonies – to which those acts give rise. So if we were to speak of music as an adaptation or spandrel, by “music” we would mean music making or music responding. Music making comprises a range of different activities, such as composing, improvising, or performing. Each of these might take a variety of distinguishable forms. Performing, for example, might count as instancing a composition, creating an improvisation, rehearsing, musical doodling, singing along with someone else’s recording or performance, and so on, and could involve such actions as whistling, humming, singing, slapping one’s body, playing a musical instrument, or using some other item as if it were a musical instrument. Music responding behaviors include acts of listening to music with understanding, pleasure, and appreciation, and of dancing, of moving to music, of entrainment, and so on.

Are some of these music behaviors more central or common than others? Among our many linguistic behaviors, generating novel strings and understanding the novel strings produced by others seem central and there are musical equivalents to these in composition, improvisation, and first-time listening. But within music, as compared to language, repetition and redundancy are perhaps more common and significant. Much music making concerns the production or instancing of “works” – that is, pieces to be remembered and performed on potentially multiple occasions – with the result that most performance is re-performance. And within works and improvised music playings, repetition is almost always crucial to shaping the structure of the piece or performance (Huron 2006: 228-9). So, within music making, the most prominent behavior is probably that of repeatedly performing a pre-composed work, such as a song, or repeating one part of a work within another part of that work, though the existence of such works obviously depends on prior acts of composition.[2] As for music responding, this also depends on music making, because it takes the product of music making as its object and focus. Here attentional listening is probably the primary activity, because coordinating one’s bodily actions with the music typically depends on it.

In evaluating possible connections between evolution and music behaviors, it is necessary to consider issues of scope and of level. The question of scope asks how many kinds of music behaviors individuals must be capable of engaging in if they are to count as musically fluent. How we answer this question will be directly relevant to assessing claims such as that music behaviors are not only pan-cultural but universal among humans. In practice, it looks as if almost all adults (without hearing defects or relevant neural deficits) are music responders, whereas, at the other end of the spectrum, composers make up a small minority. But there could be many explanations for this, and the issue is about capacities rather than the frequency of their actualization. We can reasonably expect that the kind of musical fluency that would connect music behaviors to evolution requires that most people can produce novel musical strings, not only understand them when they encounter them. And it is probably true that they are capable of this, so long as we accept that the strings in question are, for example, simple 8-measure melodies without accompaniment or are structured rhythmic patterns.

With the suggestion that musically competent adults are likely to be capable of composing at least simple melodies, we invite the question about the level at which the relevant behaviors are exercised if the connection with evolution is to be minimally plausible. There are many music behaviors and each of them could be practiced at different levels, ranging from a stumbling, incomplete grasp of the relevant behavior, through full competence, to virtuosic mastery. I take full competence in listening behaviors to involve something like the following: the listener has appropriate expectations from moment to moment about what will come next in the music, recognizes most errors in either syntax or content as such (and sometimes knows what would have been correct instead), and experiences the flux of tension, release, and closure in the music’s progress, so that she knows, for instance, if a piece was completed or, instead, interrupted. (Though I do not specify them here, I assume it is also possible similarly to spell out criteria for what counts as full competence in composition and performance.) Plainly, an individual may engage at different levels in different music behaviors – she is a good dancer and listener but a poor singer and composer – and sometimes at least, this is likely to reflect different capacities on her part for enacting the various behaviors. Moreover, other individuals will display different ranges of competence in their various music behaviors.

If we are considering possible connections between music behaviors and evolutionary forces, which music behaviors and at what level should we have in mind? Are we considering the behaviors of musical tyros, those with competence, or virtuosos and connoisseurs, and do we expect individuals in the group of interest to meet specifiable minimum levels in all music behaviors? As will emerge in later discussion, the answer to such questions is very relevant to evaluating some of the connections hypothesized as holding between evolution and music behaviors.

II

Are music behaviors an evolutionary adaptation? A number of writers have suggested that they are. Charles Darwin (1874), Geoffrey Miller (2000), and Daniel Levitin (2006) claim that music behaviors are a product of sexual selection, like the peacock’s tail. Ian Cross (2005, 2007) asserts that music aids in the mind’s development by promoting cognitive cross-domain flexibility and social facility. Other theorists see music as adaptive via its promoting social cohesion. For example, Robin Dunbar (2003) suggests that group singing releases endorphins, just as physical grooming in primates does, and both Sandra Trehub (2000) and Ellen Dissanayake (2000) point to its importance in establishing a bond between mother and infant. Patel (pp. 367-71) discusses and criticizes these theories in turn, but he also develops a different, powerful form of argument.

The capacity of humans to acquire oral language is an adaptation in Patel’s view. He identifies (pp. 259-366) ten human capacities for language acquisition that provide strong evidence for its adaptive significance. He then considers if music behaviors display similar marks of evolutionary selection and his conclusion is negative.

Here are the signs that there has been natural selection for the transmission of oral language: (1) Spontaneous babbling (even by deaf babies), shows that infant speech is not simply an imitation of adult speech. (2) Compared to other primates, humans have a lowered larynx, which brings the risk of choking but was necessary for speech. (3) Humans are unique among primates in their capacity for vocal learning and imitation. (4) Infants come into the world with the capacity to learn any language but soon favor their native tongue. (5) There is a critical (early) period for language acquisition. (6) Deaf signing children acquire phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics in parallel with hearing children. That language can jump modalities testifies to the power of the drive for language. (7) The acquisition of language is robust in that, while some children get more input than others, all acquire it. (8) Successive generations of users increase grammatical complexity, for example, as in Creole. Deaf children signers in Nicaragua systematized their language with almost no access to adults who spoke a fully developed language. (9) A single gene has been identified as exercising strong influence on speech and language. Though it occurs in other animals, the human version differs from these and is almost without variation in humans. (10) It is highly likely that humans without language abilities would be at a severe disadvantage when it comes to survival and reproduction.

How do music behaviors compare (pp. 371-400)? Babbling, vocal learning, and the anatomy of the vocal tract could all reflect adaptations for an acoustic communication system that originally supported both language and vocal music, but in other respects music does not measure up well. Learning develops rather slowly; for example, at age five years sensitivity to key membership is not yet as strong as adults’ sensitivity. It is not clear there is a critical period for music acquisition; some good musicians first learned to play or compose in their teens. The development of musical skill is not nearly as robust as language. And there is no evidence that non-musical people are less successful reproducers.

Moreover, the case for music-specific innate biases is weak. Studies of neonates should be regarded as controversial both because babies are not as musically innocent as is sometimes supposed and because many of their “musical” responses can be accounted for by biases related to speech or general auditory processing. Meanwhile, there is no evidence for a “music” gene. Tone deafness runs in families but the deficit is not music-specific. Perfect pitch is heritable but is not necessary for musical ability and some non-human animals have it but lack the relative-pitch-pattern recognition that is necessary for music. Many so-called “musical” recognition abilities might be the result of separating sound sources for scene analysis, that is, they might be aspects of auditory processing evolved to help us negotiate the soundscape rather than being particular to music.

Patel’s overall conclusion is negative: based on current evidence, music does not seem to be a biological adaptation.

I find all this impressive. Unlike the usual approach to the topic of music and evolution, which is piecemeal, narrowly focused, and highly speculative, Patel offers a sustained argument that calls on a considerable spread of data that he subjects to a powerful test: if music behaviors are an evolutionary adaptation, this should be no less apparent than is the fact that oral linguistic behaviors are an adaptation, and the indicators of music’s adaptedness should parallel those for language.[3]

Later I will assume that Patel succeeds in making the case that music behaviors are not an adaptation. (It’s what he says next that I want to focus on.) But I will raise one issue – relating to the questions of level and scope I mentioned earlier – before moving on. With language, we are all speakers as well as listeners, and we are all able to generate novel utterances. It might be thought this is not the case for music. Many music lovers cannot even hum in tune and not all performers are also composers. So, if we are checking whether music is adaptive, we might need to distinguish between various musical behaviors as I did earlier. Perhaps composing is a marker of fitness while appreciative listening is not. Patel’s approach tends to run these various musical behaviors together. This might be appropriate for language, in which competent users are equally composers of and listeners to utterances, but not for music.

Here is the reply that I believe Patel needs: at a relevantly basic level, we are all vocalists and we can all invent new musical strings. At that level, music is not so different from spoken language. When it comes to highly sophisticated forms of art music, we may not all be able to participate equally, but highly sophisticated art music should not be our focus. After all, we are not all novelists or playwrights, but that does not show that ordinary linguistic behaviors are not an adaptation.

If this is indeed the response Patel needs to make if the comparison he draws between music and linguistic behaviors is to be convincing, it might be necessary to set the standard rather low for qualifying as having acquired music behaviors. (In that case, Patel’s observation that some good musicians first learned to play or compose in their teens is probably beside the point, because he is there discussing much higher levels of competence than those that are relevant.)

Notice, however, that neither Patel’s argument nor my response to it will impress those who favor the view that sexual selection has elevated virtuosic musical skills to honest, because costly, signs of biological fitness. Their claim is not that music behaviors have become universal because they were successful as adaptations for our ancestors. It is, rather, that music behaviors serve currently as adaptations only for those who have them at the highest level, because such behaviors at such levels are positively valued by those choosing reproductive partners. By their lights, one can see music behaviors functioning as adaptations only by considering abnormally high levels of performance in those behaviors. Rather than being impressed by Patel’s approach to the issue, they might regard it as beside the point.

III

When Patel rejects music’s claim to be the direct product of an adaptation, one might predict that he will identify it as a spandrel, that is, as an adventitious byproduct of adaptations, such as those involved in language audition and auditory scene analysis, that is not itself of adaptive value. In fact he does not do so. He argues (pp. 400-2) instead that music is a technology and as such is not best regarded as either an adaptation or a spandrel. The idea here is that biological adaptations and spandrels should be clearly distinguished from cultural inventions that have no evolutionarily specialized biological substrates. The sign that music is a technology is that it has to be taught to each generation afresh, rather than emerging spontaneously as part of normal human development. And Patel accounts for music’s universality not by identifying it as an aspect of the evolved human nature we share, but by characterizing its high value. He compares it with fire. The ability to control fire is very likely to be a trait that does not rely on evolutionarily specialized “fire making” cognitive mechanisms in the brain. Rather, the ability to control fire is almost certainly an invention, which spread culturally and became universal because of its utility for humans.

The notion of music as a transformational technology helps us to explain why music is universal in human culture. Music is universal because what it does for humans is universally valued. Music is like the making and control of fire in this respect. The control of fire is universal in human culture because it transforms our lives in ways we value deeply, for example, allowing us to cook food, keep warm, and see in dark places. Once a culture learns fire making, there is no going back, even though we might be able to live without this ability. Similarly, music is universal because it transforms our lives in ways we value deeply, for example, in terms of emotional and aesthetic experience and identity formation. (p. 401; italics in original)

On this view, the cognitive flexibility that leads us to invent, elaborate, and develop what comes our way ­– to make fire or music, for instance – is an adaptation, but the results of those acts of invention, development, and elaboration are not thereby merely byproducts or spandrels. They are designed applications, not adventitious byproducts. We put the relevant capacities to work with the intention of bringing about desired outcomes and when we are successful, those outcomes are achieved, not accidentally thrown up. Moreover, such technologies are transmitted via teaching, though once again, our evolved natures might contribute some of the raw material on which this process of teaching relies. So it is that reading and writing are passed to children.

If we now apply Patel’s view to art, we might speculate that art had its genesis in our inclination to create, design, and elaborate whatever comes to hand and that this also explains why it continues to renew and transform itself. It is an expression of our biological nature, certainly, but it is not thereby either an adaptation or a spandrel. It expresses the aspect of our nature that leads us to be inventors and users of technology and to be appreciators both of what technology does for us and of the achievement that goes into its creation.

IV

Patel has offered (in a personal communication) a further positive argument for the conclusion that music behaviors are not a spandrel. He notes that music not only uses existing brain systems but can also shape those systems through mechanisms of neural plasticity. Growing evidence from neuroscience indicates that systematic engagement with music changes neural structures and connectivities. This neural feedback loop between mental technology and brain structures is not well captured by the metaphor of a spandrel, which implies a static architectural form, he suggests.

I wonder whether spandrels are incompatible with neural plasticity, however. When London taxi drivers acquire “the knowledge” – that is, when they learn the map of London and how to navigate across the city – there is a measurable change in their brains.[4] But the capacity to remember and navigate one’s environment is surely an adaptation, and the capacity to acquire this knowledge through reading a symbolic representation is most likely a spandrel based on that adaptation.

V

Patel thinks that, because music behaviors are not genetically heritable, they are neither spandrels nor adaptations. Does his position stand up? In the following I question both the claim that music behaviors are not biological (on the grounds that proto-musical behaviors develop early and, in any case, the expression of some biological behaviors is time-delayed) and also the claim that if they were not biological they could not be spandrels or adaptations (on the grounds that they could be memes or that evolution can operate at the cultural level, as described by development systems theory or multilevel selection theory). I also consider an objection to this second claim along the lines that, even if they are not themselves biological, they must be dependent on biological mechanisms, and that might be enough for them to qualify as spandrels. I go on to reject this objection for being too profligate in implying that almost all human behaviors are spandrels. Finally, I critically discuss the comparison of music with fire. I suggest that, even if there is a basis for distinguishing transformational technologies from spandrels and for counting fire behaviors among the former, disanalogies between music behaviors and fire behaviors call into doubt Patel’s claim that music is also a transformational technology.

Here is the first argument: Patel claims as evidence that music behaviors are not genetically transmitted the observation that such behaviors do not emerge spontaneously as part of normal human development. This can and should be challenged, however. Of course, the appearance of music behaviors presupposes exposure to a musical environment, but the development of language similarly requires exposure to a linguistic environment. The fact that mastery of one’s culture’s tonal or modal system is not fully formed until, say, five to eight years of age is not sufficient to show that musical behaviors do not emerge spontaneously as part of normal human development. The onset of sexual maturity is an obvious example of a part of human development that emerges spontaneously only with age. And for that matter, full linguistic competence comes years after one’s first, rudimentary meaningful utterances and comprehensions. It could be that music is similar to the extent that it relies for its appearance on the realization of appropriate facilitating conditions. Perhaps it depends on the development of cognitive sophistication, the acquisition of emotional sensitivities, or the honing of auditory processing skills, for instance.

There is also the worry that Patel here sets the bar for music ability inappropriately high, since his example concerns how long it takes the individual to acquire full competence in his culture’s tonal/modal system. As I have already suggested, if Patel is to make good on his comparison between music and language, he is probably required to set the base level of musical behaviors much lower, indeed, at a level according to which it is appropriate to count us all as performers and composers as well as listeners. Given that, it seems plausible to count pitch-structured, metrically regular vocalizing as evidence of the acquisition of music behaviors, without also requiring that what is vocalized must have a complex structure exhibiting tonal closure. Pitch-structured, metrically regular vocalizing emerges earlier than five years of age in the child’s development. Such behaviors appear to be self-motivating and are often unprompted, which suggests the environmental triggering of genetic dispositions.

It is also relevant to observe that music develops much more spontaneously than reading and writing. According to Patel (personal communication), this is because music has many cognitive links to language and because music is emotionally rewarding from a very young age. But in that case, the acquisition of music behaviors is unspontaneous only as a matter of degree in the comparison with oral language acquisition, which is rather different from suggesting that such behaviors are purely cultural. In any case, the claim of music’s relative unspontaneity compared with language is surely contestable. I doubt that complete working familiarity and facility with one’s culture’s musical system takes longer than the same level of mastery of one’s native language. And as I have already suggested, if we look instead for the first appearance of behaviors that count as musical and as linguistic, where such behaviors are initially primitive compared to what comes later through normal development, it is not obvious that the linguistic behaviors are earlier or more spontaneous than the musical ones. Additionally, many would count the intrinsic appeal of music to babies and young children as highly suggestive of its connection with behaviors of evolutionary significance. One should not explain how quickly children take to music in terms of their preference for it unless one is prepared to take on the question of how that preference arises. Perhaps what is adaptive is motherese, with its quasi-musical character, and perhaps music behaviors derive from this as a spandrel that inherits the pleasure babies take in motherese.

This first argument challenges Patel’s view that it is evident in how and when they are acquired that music behaviors are not biologically transmitted. But even if Patel were right, and here we turn to the second argument, we could challenge the assumption he recruits from standard evolutionary theory, that what is not transmitted genetically could not qualify either as an adaptation or a spandrel. Those who advocate meme theory are liable to reject the division Patel draws between biological evolution and human technology.[5] Less controversially, at least some evolutionary theorists – advocates of what is called developmental systems theory – argue that what matters is whether the relevant resources are reliably available to each subsequent generation, not whether their transmission is biological rather than purely cultural.[6] And the case for “multilevel selection,” a version of group selection, has been strongly made.[7]

In fact, Patel now acknowledges (personal communication) the plausibility of multilevel selection theory. He accepts that there can be cultural group selection for traits that promote intra-group cooperation. He comments: ‘If music promoted social cohesion within ancestral human groups, and if more cooperative groups prevailed in competition with other groups for limited resources, then it is possible that music could have acted as a cultural adaptation, without having originated as a biological adaptation. Furthermore, it is possible that there was feedback between cultural group selection and biological natural selection, so that there was some degree of selection for individuals who were more biologically predisposed to be musical. This would be an example of “gene-culture co-evolution”.’ But he remains skeptical of the truth of the antecedents of this conditional.

This brings us to the third argument, which assumes that the previous discussion shows that music is heritable, either genetically or via guaranteed cultural transmission, from one generation to the next, and assumes also that such behaviors are not adaptations in their own right. Now, however low we set the bar for what counts as music, it is the case that music depends on auditory capacities that are pre-musical – for instance, on the recognition of octave equivalence – which we share with some other non-musical animals. And those pre-musical capacities are likely adaptations for fitness-enhancing forms of auditory processing. Given the dependence of musical behaviors on these pre-musical adaptive capacities, then musical behaviors must count as spandrels from the point of view of evolution. They are byproducts of adaptations and they are useless from the point of view of evolution, having nothing to do with the reproductive fitness of those who display them.

Most human behaviors (and the products they issue in) depend at some point on our evolved cognitive, perceptual, affective, and motor systems. For that reason, this third argument implies that most human behaviors should be viewed as spandrels. Some theorists would find that corollary congenial. Stephen Jay Gould (1997, 1997) suggests that, with only 10,000 years of history behind them, both writing and reading are spandrels. Indeed, he regards language, human culture, and technology generally as byproducts of the oversized human brain that evolved to address now unknown problems faced by our ancestors. But others might think this notion of a spandrel is too profligate, and I am inclined to agree. The connection between the behaviors in question and the evolved capacities on which they depend is too attenuated for spandrel-talk to have explanatory power. So, if this approach shows that music behaviors are spandrels only by showing that almost all modern cultural behaviors are the same, it wins the argument at too high a price. By contrast with this extreme view, it seems reasonable to regard some behaviors as not adaptations and as not in any direct way side-effects of selection for something else either. In other words, it seems reasonable to regard some behaviors as neither adaptations nor spandrels. In Patel’s terms, adaptations and spandrels are to be distinguished from transformational technologies and, so he maintains, transformational technologies include both fire and music.

This takes us back to the comparison of music with fire. Are there differences between fire and music such that we could concede that fire is a transformational technology that is neither an adaptation nor a spandrel, yet plausibly claim that music is different and may be a spandrel? In what follows I consider how we should determine the border between spandrels and transformational technologies and I suggest that music falls on the other side of this border than fire does.

In my earlier exposition of Patel’s view, I shifted from talk of music behaviors to talk of music. I did so because I think this follows Patel’s usage and that something like his usage is required to sustain the analogy with fire that he draws. Songs and fires certainly are neither adaptations nor spandrels – they are artifacts, not traits or features of humans – but they could be the products of behavioral dispositions that count as spandrels. So, we should be comparing music behaviors with fire behaviors with respect to their relation, or lack of it, to relevant adaptations.

That is not easy to do, however, because the idea of fire behaviors is so vague and slippery. Take fire making. There are many ways of doing it – for instance, by taking something already burning from another fire, using friction to generate sufficient heat to ignite something, focusing the rays of the sun on something flammable, striking sparks from flints, using controlled electrical discharges, and generating heat by means of certain chemical reactions (for example, by exposing phosphorous to oxygen, adding pure calcium to water, pouring sulfuric acid onto sugar, decomposing organic matter in confined places). The problem is that these various activities seemingly have in common only that they can produce sufficient heat to ignite flammable material, that is, to bring fire into existence. As actions or behaviors they do not form a coherent class. I suggest that is why our focus falls naturally on the product, fire, rather than its causes and the behaviors that activate them.

Music behaviors are importantly different from this, I think. They are unified with each other and with the product, music. We hear music as the bodying forth of sound – on hearing music, the brain’s motor as well as auditory centers are stimulated.[8] All the actions that go into its production and reception are directly relevant to the properties the product possesses. Even if we were inclined to agree that fire should be counted as a transformational technology, we could have reservations about characterizing music in such terms.[9]

There is a further reason for querying Patel’s parallel between music and fire. He claims that we perpetuate both because we find them valuable. That claim is certainly plausible for fire. The value of fire is not merely that it is pleasant. It promotes survival by allowing us to withstand cold and by drying clothes. With fire we can purify contaminated water. It allows access to caves and it brings the light of day to night, thereby extending the time for social intercourse, for instance. It can be used to drive way predators, to stampede game animals, to smoke out game, and to harden weapons. Above all, fire eliminates bacteria from food and makes edible foods that we would not otherwise be able to digest easily.

So profound were the effects of controlling fire on the lives of our ancestors that we should pause to consider the history of fire control. It was our hominid ancestors who first controlled fire at least 790,000 years ago, as evidenced by ancient hearths.[10] Because of its significance in the lives our forbearers, it changed their evolution.[11] In particular, cooking and thereby softening food significantly increased the nutrition that could be extracted and this led to reduction both in the digestive tract and in the energetic costs of digestion.[12] Indeed, Richard Wrangham (2009) speculates that fire control goes back to our hominid ancestor Homo erectus and that it was the extra spare energy that control of fire provided by way of cooked food that permitted the development of the energy-hungry larger brain that marked the line of descent to which we Homo sapiens are heir. In any case, fire is part of what is sometimes called the extended human phenotype (Sterelny 2001) – that is, an organism-defining product of our genes that falls beyond our bodies – not merely an interesting but biologically incidental artifact. Fire making may be a technology, but it is part of gene-culture co-evolution because our long-standing dependence on fire has fundamentally altered the human genome.

The claim that music is a source of similarly profound benefits is not so clear-cut. Patel identifies the value of music in the positive effect that it has on our emotions and sense of identity. I imagine he is correct about this, and it is worth noting that both music making and music responding can produce paybacks in these areas. We do not value music merely as a means to these desirable effects, however, and we rarely bear them in mind when we make or seek out music. Rather, we are inclined to regard the primary value of music as intrinsic to it, as inherent in the activities of making and responding to it. In part, this is the common thread that unifies the various music making and music responding behaviors. Music warms our world. But note that what we value in music and the consequential benefits that come from its engaging our emotions and providing models for us to identify with are only very indirectly, if at all, connected with survival and reproduction. As well, the benefits must be balanced against the costs. Music behaviors come with significant costs in terms of the time, concentration, and effort needed to raise them to the level of full competence. There is little doubt that we value music highly, but whereas the advantages for survival that controlling fire bring in its wake are patent and are sufficient to explain why the behavior is universal, the high value we attach to music is much harder to justify in similar terms.

Here is my suggestion: with fire, the behaviors that go into its production are merely causal means to the valued end. The means are various and they do not transmit to fire the qualities for which we value it. Fire behaviors have no underlying unity of structure and no common basis of derivation from any single cluster or cohort of adaptive behaviors. With music, on the other hand, there is an intimate connection between what we value in the product and the kinds of behaviors that generate it, such that music behaviors cannot be regarded merely as dispensable means to the end product. Music behaviors share a deep unity, all being concerned with the human generation of patterned sound or with following its patterns. And it is not difficult to trace moderately close connections between music behaviors and perceptual, cognitive, motor, and affective systems that are interdependently related in ways that are adaptive, even if we agree with Patel that music behaviors are not adaptive in themselves. These differences between fire and music (or, rather, fire behaviors and music behaviors) can reasonably be thought to ground the distinction we were looking for, that is, the distinction between transformational technologies that are product-oriented, not process-oriented, and behaviors that should better be classed as spandrels or adaptations. And when we add to this the observation that, though music is highly valued, it is far from obvious how music behaviors enhance the fitness of those who display them, then if we must choose between those behaviors being spandrels or adaptations, we should favor the former.

I have agreed with Patel that we should distinguish transformational technologies from adaptations and spandrels, and that fire behaviors should count as transformational technologies. I have argued, however, that music behaviors differ from fire behaviors in being mutually integrated and unified rather than being random but for the output they happen to produce, and in being self-motivating rather than end-driven. In addition, whereas the value of fire lies in the product rather than in its production, and whereas there is an obvious connection between fire’s promoting our survival and our valuing it, with music the value is as much in the process as the product and, if it promotes our fitness at all, this seems incidental to our valuing of it. These considerations cast doubt on the claim that music behaviors are transformational technologies. Meanwhile, if the alternative is that such behaviors must be either adaptations or spandrels, the fact that they are costly and not directly connected to survival and reproduction suggests that the latter is more likely.[13]

References

Blackmore, Susan. The meme machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Cross, Ian. “Music and cognitive evolution,” in The Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology, edited by R. I. M. Dunbar & L. Barrett, 649–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

—. “Music and meaning, ambiguity and evolution,” in Musical communication, edited by D. Miell, R. MacDonald, and D. Hargreaves, 27–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Darwin, Charles. The descent of man and selection in relation to sex. London: John Murray, 1871. Second edition 1874.

Davies, Stephen. “Why art is not a spandrel,” British journal of aesthetics, forthcoming 2010.

Dawkins, Richard. The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Second edition.

Dennett, Daniel C. “Memes and the exploitation of imagination,” Journal of aesthetics and art criticism 48 (1990): 127–35.

Dissanayake, Ellen. “Antecedents of the temporal arts in early mother-infant interaction,” in The origins of music, edited by N. L. Wallin, B. Merjker, and S. Brown, 389–410. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

Dunbar, Robin I. “The origin and subsequent evolution of language,” in Language evolution, edited by M. H. Christiansen and S. Kirby, 219–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Fessler, Daniel M. T. “A burning desire: Steps toward an evolutionary psychology of fire learning,” Journal of cognition and culture 6 (2006): 3–4.

Gamble, Clive. Origins and revolutions: Human identity in earliest prehistory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Gould, Stephen Jay. “Evolution: The pleasures of pluralism,” The New York review of books 44 (11) 26 June, 1997.

—. “The exaptive excellence of spandrels as a term and prototype,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (US) 94 (1997): 10750–5.

Griffiths, Paul, and Russell Gray. “Developmental systems and evolutionary explanation,” Journal of philosophy 91 (1994): 277–304.

—. “Discussion: Three ways to misunderstand developmental systems theory,” Biology and philosophy 20 (2005): 417–25.

Huron, David. Sweet anticipation: Music and the psychology of expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Janata, P., and S. T. Grafton. “Swinging in the brain: Shared neural substrates for behaviors related to sequencing and music,” Nature Neuroscience 6 (2003): 682–7.

Koelsch, S., T. Fritz, D. Yves, V. Cramon, K. Müller, and A. D. Friederici. “Investigating emotion with music: An fMRI study,” Human brain mapping 27 (2006): 239–50.

Levitin, Daniel J. This is your brain on music: The science of human obsession. New York: Dutton, 2006.

Mark, Thomas Carson. “Philosophy of piano playing: Reflections on the concept of performance,” Philosophy and phenomenological research 41 (1981): 299–324.

Miller, Geoffrey. The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. New York: Doubleday, 2000.

Patel, Aniruddh. Music, language, and the brain. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008.

Pfeiffer, John E. The creative explosion: An inquiry into the origins of art and religion. New York: Harper and Row, 1982.

—. The emergence of humankind. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Fourth edition.

Pruetz, Jill D. and LaDuke, Thomas C. “Brief communication: Reaction to fire by Savanna Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) at Fongoli, Senegal: Conceptualization of ‘fire behavior’ and the case for a chimpanzee model,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, forthcoming 2010.

Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Sterelny, Kim. “Niche construction, developmental systems, and the extended replicator,’ in Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, edited by S. Oyama, P. E. Griffiths, and R. D. Gray, 333–49. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Trehub, Sandra. “Human processing predispositions and musical universals,” in The origins of music, edited by N. L. Wallin, B. Merjker, and S. Brown, 427–48. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

Wilson, David Sloan. “Group-level evolutionary processes,” in The Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology, edited by R. I. M. Dunbar & L. Barrett, 49–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Wilson, David Sloan, Mark Van Vugt, and Rick O’Gorman. “Multilevel selection theory and major evolutionary transitions: Implications for psychological science,” Current directions in psychological science 17 (1) (2008): 6–9.

Wrangham, Richard. Catching fire: How cooking made us human. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

[2] In terms of the comparison with language, we might put this by saying that quotation is more dominant in music than novel assertion. See Mark 1981, where musical performance is modelled on quotation.

[3] This assumes that, as adaptations, music behaviors must be strongly heritable and universal. Patel is entitled to testing this unusually strong assumption because those who identify music as an adaptation usually subscribe to it.

[4] See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/677048.stm.

[5] See Dawkins 1989, Dennett 1990, and Blackmore 1999.

[6] See Griffiths and Gray 1994, 2005.

[7] See Wilson 2007, Wilson, David Sloan, Mark Van Vugt, and Rick O’Gorman 2008, and Richerson and Boyd 2005.

[8] See Janata and Grafton 2003 and Koelsch et al. 2006.

[9] If we consider fire not in terms of how it is caused but with respect to the motivation for having it, the gap between fire behaviors and music behaviors might be reduced, but this is because we then move fire nearer the border with spandrels, not because music moves nearer the border with transformational technologies.

[10] See Pfeiffer 1982, 1985 and Fessler 2006. Gamble (2007) gives the more conservative date of 400,000 years ago for hearths. While our nearest relative, the chimpanzee does not control fire, it is interesting that in some respects it shows a more sophisticated understanding of wild fire than modern humans attain; see Pruetz and LaDuke forthcoming 2010.

[11] See Sterelny 2001 and Fessler 2006.

[12] See Wrangham 2009. Earlier I quoted Patel on fire as saying “there is no going back, even though we might be able to live without this ability” (p. 401), but this fails to acknowledge how fire has changed us in irreversible ways.

[13] I am grateful for comments received from Joseph Carroll, Sherri Irvin, Justine Kingsbury, Jonathan McKeown-Green, and Kim Sterelny.

Conceptions of the human brain range from the blank slate to a strongly modular structure produced by adaptations to problems our ancestors encountered in African savannas. Metaphors and models can help us formulate hypotheses about the level of constraining structure built into the brain. Here I discuss David Sloan Wilson’s use of the immune system as a model for human cognitive flexibility. The immune system has evolved to cope with the challenges posed by disease-causing organisms that are highly diverse, short-lived, and rapidly evolving. I argue that this model is not a good guide to the kind of cognitive structure that has evolved in response to challenges from more stable features of the ancestral environment, for instance, coping with large predators and hostile conspecifics or finding and selecting food.

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Metaphors, Models, and Modularity

Few scientists doubt that evolved human traits are the result of the same processes that generated the great diversity of life on Earth. Most scientists agree that natural selection accounts for the characteristic features of human anatomy and physiology. Few doubt that the human brain and its interactions with the human body have evolved by the same processes. Nonetheless, as contradictory as this might sound, biologists and social scientists sometimes disagree strenuously about the degree to which evolutionary history constrains the structure and functioning of the brain. One might expect doubts about evolutionary constraints from the religious right and from post-modern philosophers and literary theorists. Similar doubts expressed by scientists are more puzzling and invite close attention. The debate over evolutionary constraints on the human brain now centers on one specific discipline: Evolutionary Psychology (EP). Within EP itself, as within any rapidly developing field, there is robust debate about specific features of mind and behavior. What defines EP as a discipline, though, is a set of shared assumptions: that the mind is the product of the brain and its interactions with the body; that the body-brain has evolved in an adaptive relation with its environment; and that “the adapted mind” produces human behavior. This set of assumptions has become the focus of intense debate. For example, in his lengthy book, On Human Natures (2000), Paul Ehrlich claims to debunk most of the claims of evolutionary psychologists. In their recent book, Making Sense of Evolution. The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology (2006), Massimo Pigliucci and Jonathan Kaplan devote most of a chapter to a critique of EP.

EP is not based on an assumption that genes directly and rigidly control behavior. Evolutionary psychologists agree that an organism’s neural organization develops as the result of a complex interplay between genes and the environment at intracellular, body, social, and cultural levels. Evolutionary psychologists, in agreement with most other psychologists, view the brain as composed of programs that process information using complex arrangements of neural circuitry. Evolutionary psychologists expect some of these programs to develop reliably in most people if they experience an evolutionarily normal range of environmental conditions.

Evolutionary psychologists differ from most other psychologists, however, in that much, but not all, of their research is motivated by the view that the neural programs of the human mind were designed by natural selection to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors, for instance, finding a mate, cooperating with others, hunting, gathering food and other resources, protecting children and friends, and avoiding predators. They expect that natural selection has produced neural programs that respond to such problems reliably and quickly.

The scientific controversy that surrounds EP focuses on the concept of modularity, that is, functional specialization of the brain. Evolutionary psychologists postulate this functional specialization because the problems our ancestors had to solve were strikingly varied. Selection of a habitat in which to carry out specific activities, discriminating among types of food, dealing with environmental hazards, and choosing hunting partners, to name just a few, are such dramatically different problems that a general problem solver would be unlikely to be well designed to respond appropriately and effectively to more than one of them (Tooby & Cosmides 1992). Several of the metaphors used to describe the proposed modularity of the brain – Swiss army knife, jukebox, and computer software – imply the existence of cognitive modules designed to function appropriately to particular challenges in specific environments. A corollary is that, given that the environment in which people live today differs dramatically from the one in which our ancestors lived, some of our behavioral responses are not currently adaptive. That is, our minds are inhabited by “ghosts,” circuits established during our long residence on African savannas.

We do know, of course, that the minds and bodies of all animals are replete with ghosts: ghosts of past habitats, predators, parasites, competitors, mutualists, and conspecifics; ghosts too of past meteors, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and droughts. All adaptations reflect selection in past environments; natural selection cannot anticipate future environments. But do we have reason to expect that contemporary human behavior could still reflect adaptations of our ancestors to conditions on African savannas? Some scientists think that too much time has elapsed for behavioral adaptations molded in African savannas to reside in the human mind.

Traits may persist either because the duration of relaxed selection is too short for genetic mutations and genetic drift to erode them or because they are enmeshed in multiple regulatory pathways that channel development and buffer them from disruptive mutations. Empirical evidence suggests that these processes have resulted in long persistence times of behavioral traits. Adaptations have persisted in some species for thousands of generations after selection on those traits weakened or ceased (Coss & Goldthwaite 1995). Assuming an average generation time of 20 years, no more than 350,000 individuals separate us from “Lucy.” In the absence of strong selection against a trait, its persistence under today’s radically altered conditions is at least plausible. To demonstrate the existence of particular Pleistocene ghosts, however, we must develop specific hypotheses and test them with potentially falsifiable predictions. The existence or nonexistence of ghosts cannot be demonstrated by theoretical arguments.

The controversies surrounding the modularity of the brain and the existence of ghosts are inter-related. If the human brain is indeed a “blank slate,” it can house no ghosts. Any lingering ghosts can reside only in genetically programmed neural circuits. Clearly, the existence of cognitive models also can be settled only empirically. Nevertheless, concepts and metaphors have an important role to play by helping us conceive of possible modules, the problems they are supposed to solve, and the properties of the neural circuits that might serve that purpose. Such research is, of course, being conducted and much evidence of modular components of the brain is emerging (Gazzaniga 2008). My concern here, however, is not with the products of this research. My goal is to explore how we can employ metaphors and models to accelerate progress in understanding the structure and functioning of the human brain.

The dominant metaphor of the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) is a blank slate on which almost anything can be written. According to this view, the human brain has few significant preprogrammed neural circuits other than some built-in psychological mechanisms that cause organisms to select among initially undirected responses. B. F. Skinner, a prominent early exponent of the blank slate view, encapsulated his position in his influential but controversial novel, Walden Two (1948), in which he describes a society in which human behavior does not reflect evolved predilections to seek status and compete for resources and mates–two universal human traits that evolutionary psychologists judge to be extremely difficult to over-ride. Skinner did not pay much attention to what structure underlying psychological mechanisms must have to take environmental inputs and translate them into the adaptive behavioral outputs that he thought emerged. Recently, David Sloan Wilson has suggested that the immune system might serve as a metaphor and model for the kinds of open-ended processes that Skinner thought could yield adaptive responses (Wilson 2010).

The immune system evolved to enable the body to respond to attacks by disease-causing organisms. It does this by enabling the body to distinguish self from non-self. Disease-causing organisms are remarkably diverse and geographically variable. Their very short life cycles enable them to evolve much more rapidly than the hosts they infect. The immune system functions by producing a vast array of antibodies that can detect and respond to a correspondingly vast array of potential pathogens, most of which are never encountered by a given individual. The central processes that generate the great diversity of the system are based on DNA rearrangements and clonal selection. The cells that form the major component of the immune system are manufactured by stem cells, mainly in the bone marrow. The 5000–10,000 white blood cells per mm³ of blood live only 5-9 days. About two and one-half million red blood cells are produced each second; each lives about 120 days.

Almost every gene that codes for major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins has multiple alleles, ranging from a handful to more than 100. Each person inherits and expresses a unique set of MHC alleles. There are millions of different combinations of MHC alleles; very few people are likely to have exactly the same set. The human immune system may be able to respond specifically to 10 million different antigens. The diversity of millions of different cells, each able to produce only one kind of antibody is not generated by millions of genes, each one coding for one antibody molecule. That would require a genome seven times the size of the entire human genome! Rather, the genome of a differentiating cell has a number of alleles for several regions of the protein. Combinations of these alleles generate the diversity.

This massive, expensive, and continuing lifetime production of antibodies has been favored both because disease-causing organisms have always been major sources of morbidity and mortality and because which pathogens are likely to be encountered and their genetic composition cannot be predicted. An expensive, open-ended system may be the only effective response to such threats. Moreover, until the twentieth century humans were unaware of their existence, much less that they caused diseases.

How suitable is the immune system as a model for thinking about flexibility and modularity of the brain? To what other problems and challenges might a similar open-ended system be adaptive? As a metaphor the immune system is useful because it shows that such open-ended systems are possible. They cannot be dismissed on theoretical grounds. Nonetheless, the system as a model has very limited applicability because the problem to which it is a response differs dramatically from the other challenges that evolutionary psychologists study. Its only function is to distinguish self from non-self.

In addition, as Wilson points out, sometimes the process breaks down and the immune system attacks self-cells, causing autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, lupus, and some forms of arthritis and diabetes. The immune system also may respond inappropriately to innocuous substances. The immune system possesses highly constrained flexibility and regularly misfires.

The immune system is probably not broadly applicable as a model for brain evolution because none of the other challenges are posed by massively diverse, mostly undetectable, and rapidly evolving entities. For example, only a few species of macro-predators attack humans. These animals were familiar to our ancestors. They all share readily identifiable features, such as eyes and possession of dangerous, pointed weapons. Attention to and detection of these features does not require mechanism having the open-ended complexity of the immune system. What have evolved are strong responses, both positive and negative, to sharp, pointed forms. Facemasks that enlarge canines evoke strong fearful emotions in most people. Aichmophobia, dread of sharp objects, such as scissors, knives, and needles, is a common human phobia. Snake phobias and rapid, selective responses to snake forms are common human traits, even among people who have never seen a snake.

Selection of food is a more complex challenge because the range of foods available to a dietary generalist varies considerably among environments. Ingesting new, unfamiliar foods is risky, yet a dietary generalist needs to sample and determine the value of potential new food sources. Failure to learn about new foods reduces food intake. A varied diet is likely to be more nutritionally balanced and to have lower levels of particular toxins than a diet composed of only a few species. Dietary generalists evolve to be both curious about, but suspicious of, new foods. “It’s part of the biology of being an omnivore to have to learn almost everything about what is edible (Rozin 1997, p. 27).” Yet, the underlying response mechanisms are relatively simple. Children learn what is edible mostly by observing adults and being instructed by them. We can immediately tell whether most types of objects are dangerously hot or cold, sharp or irritating, soft or hard, but if we ingest toxic food, we do not get sick until hours later. As do other omnivores, we automatically and unconsciously associate sickness with food we ingested hours earlier. We develop aversions to that food, and typically avoid it in the future. Even odor of a food that made us sick may evoke nausea. Disgust, a powerful human emotion, is directed almost exclusively to animal foods even though animal tissues are more nutritious than plant tissues. Several feeding experiences are generally required to develop flavor preferences, but aversions are learned more rapidly (Rozin 1990). In short, a small number of neural circuits and a propensity to imitate suffice to enable us to deal with the challenging problem of knowing what to eat.

Many of the challenges for which evolutionary psychologists have expected and looked for neural modules concern our relationships with other people. During recent human history we have not shared the planet with another species of Homo; it is easy for us to recognize other members of our species. What is important is determining other people’s intentions. We have evolved sophisticated mechanisms for doing so. All body parts may provide cues to likely future behavior of an individual, but the human face is especially information-rich. Ability to detect subtle facial clues offers advantages, as does an ability to regulate facial expressions to give false information about one’s motivational state and, hence, one’s likely future behavior. A simple but powerful neural circuit is based on the fact that the angles in the eyebrows, cheeks, chin, and jaw in an angry human face resemble a downward pointing V, whereas the curves in the cheeks, eyes, and mouth of a happy face are round. A very simple shape, a downward pointing V, conveys the essence of threat and triggers greater activation of the amygdala and other brain regions than do presentations of an identical V-shape pointing upward (Larson et al. 2009). People detect downward pointing V-shapes embedded in a field of other shapes more readily than they detect identical shapes pointing upward (Larson, Aronoff & Stearns 2007).

Over most of human history both males and females formed hierarchies, but the hierarchies of the larger, more powerful males dominated those of females. In experiments, men and women were aversively conditioned to equally intense angry faces expressed by a male or female. As predicted, males showed stronger skin conductance responses to angry males than to angry females, whereas females responded equally to both conditions (Mazurski et al. 1996). A complex open-ended system that continually updates its responses to threats does not seem necessary to deal with challenges of mate selection and assessing intentions of other people.

Human brains, and presumably the brains of all other species that have them, are Darwinian machines that evolved to enable their possessors to respond to a rich array of contingencies with rapid, efficient, and appropriate responses. We live in a world awash with patterns that signal regularities in the world; predicting what will happen next can be a life or death matter. Most of the modules that evolutionary psychologists expect to exist and for which they develop hypotheses and devise tests, are circuits designed to detect and respond preferentially to patterns to which we should pay particular attention. If the patterns in nature share common features, simple circuits should suffice to yield appropriate responses. If the patterns are complex, difficult to detect, and rapidly changing, either no adaptive response may be possible or the response system may be open-ended, massive, continually updated. The immune system is a response to such difficult and rapidly changing conditions. None of the other major challenges that faced our ancestors appear to have these characteristics.

D. S. Wilson has performed a valuable service by stressing the importance of thinking clearly about the neurological structures likely to have evolved in response to life’s challenges. We can make further progress by carefully describing the features of various challenges and the possible structure of adaptive neural responses to them. With this process we should develop better hypotheses about whether neural modules are to be expected and, if so, what features they should have.

References

Coss, R. G. & R. O. Goldthwaite. 1995. The persistence of old designs for perception. In: Thompson, N. S. (ed.) Perspectives in Ethology, Volume 11: Behavioral Design, pp. 83-148. New York, Plenum Press.

Ehrlich P. R. 2000. Human Natures. Covelo, CA, Island Press.

Gazzaniga, M. S. 2008. Human. The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. HarperCollins.

Larson, C. L., J. Aronoff, and J. J. Stearns. 2007. The shape of threat: Simple geometric forms evoke rapid and sustained capture of attention. Emotion 7:526-534.

Larson, C. L., J. Aronoff, I. C. Sarinopoulos, D. C. Zhu. 2009. Recognizing threat: A simple geometric shape activates neural circuitry for threat detection. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21:1523-1535.

Mazurski, E. J., N. W. Bond, D. A. T. Siddle & P. F. Lovibond. 1996. Conditioning with facial expressions of emotions. Effects of CS sex and age. Psychophysiology 33:416-425.

Pigliucci, Massimo and Jonathan Kaplan. 2006. Making Sense of Evolution. The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology. University of Chicago Press.

Rozin, P. 1990. Getting to like the burn of chili pepper: biological, psychological and cultural perspectives. In: Green, B. G., J. R. Mason, & M. R. Kare (Eds.) Chemical Senses. Irritation, Vol. 2, pp. 231-269. New York, Marcel Dekker.

Rozin, P. 1997. Why we eat what we eat, and why we worry about it. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences L (March 1997): 26-48.

Skinner, B. F. 1948. Walden Two. Indianapolis, Hackett.

Tooby J. Cosmides L. 1992.The psychological foundations of culture. Pages 19-136 in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, edited by J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Wilson, D. S. 2010. Learning from the immune system about evolutionary psychology.  The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture 1:13-17.

I probe the interface between our chimp-like ancestor and the modern human to discover what triggered the explosion in cultural diversity that so comprehensively exceeded the sophistication of the individual humans that created it.

Responses by Joseph Carroll, Diana Kornbrot, and Anja Müller-Wood & John Carter Wood

Rejoinder by Robert Karl Stonjek

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Robert Karl Stonjek

A Brief but Plausible History of Culture

Instinct—Problem Solving—Culture

Genetically mediated fixed behavioural patterns (instincts) are common in simple arthropods. The digger wasp, for instance, will starve to death even with food in its mouth if it is frustrated by a researcher (eg Tinbergen) who replaces the cover to the wasp’s burrow each time the wasp removes it. So fixed is its behaviour pattern that it can not break it even to save itself from starvation. [1,2]

The evolved adaptation that breaks this pattern is an ability to match behaviour to the current conditions and modify them if needs be. This flexibility, in its most evolved form, is the sophisticated contemplative consciousness known to humans.

To accommodate evolving neural based adaptability, the innate behavioural patterns become less and less prescriptive until, as in humans, only vague drives and reward feelings remain save for the basic form of the sneeze and similar simple reflexive behaviours. Humans must use their own cognitive abilities to develop the behavioural pattern that will connect innate predispositions, say the drive to reproduce, with the local environment.

But this gulf between the vestiges of instinct and successful behaviour in complex human societies is too vast for an individual human to bridge in a single lifetime—they need help from above, they need culture.

Long before humans switched on a television set, culture had been bubbling away in the human and protohuman lineage. Indeed, even chimps and other primates enjoy a cultural dimension to their lives and this dimension was most probably present in our last common ancestor.

An adolescent chimp approaching the problem of, say, extracting termites from a termite mound may try digging, or waiting for them to emerge and then plucking a single termite or two from the ground and eating it. That chimp may give up and pursue other food sources and, perhaps, return to the termite mound problem periodically to consider a new strategy for extracting the tasty treat from their home beneath the ground.

How much quicker this process becomes when, after discovering the trick of stripping a green stick of its leaves and then poking it into the termite mound, other chimps simply copy this behaviour and pass it on to their young. [3]

The first utility of culture, then, is the accelerated problem solving that is possible: not all individuals must personally solve a particular problem in order to be in possession of the solution.

Non-human primates are limited to immediate utility and concrete examples for each element of their culture—humans are not so constrained and can learn solutions remotely from their application, for example learning in schools. Thus we can draw a line from pre-human culture through to the modern day and see that this early form of utilitarian culture has greatly expanded in scope and complexity.

Culture and Human Uniqueness

Culture differs from species wide innate behavioural patterns in that isolated individuals are unlikely to have those behaviours without exposure to them and can develop similar but atypical alternatives. Regional variations are commonly found, for example chimps in East Africa have a different technique for harvesting termites to those in West Africa. [4]

The capacity to adopt behavioural patterns requires an ability to learn through observation and guidance by conspecifics. Culture needs the consumption and support of conspecifics that also contribute to it, primarily by passing it on to the following generations.

From the first hit-and-miss efforts in old world monkeys to the art and industry of modern humans, genetic predisposition supporting culture has played an increasingly prominent role. Language, for instance, greatly accelerates and enriches cultural adaptation.

Almost all, if not all, of the adaptations that made human culture possible may already exist in non-human primates. But those adaptations appear only sporadically in a few individuals and may appear only intermittently, skipping several generations between expression. It is not inconceivable that, occasionally, a chimp might appear with a human version of the FoxP2 gene, but that chimp has no advantage over conspecifics so there is no selection pressure to drive the frequency of that gene higher.

Thus the discovery of single examples of traits in non-humans that are species wide in humans does not extinguish theories of human uniqueness. It is the species wide distribution and the correct sequence of expression of various traits in the human lineage that has resulted in the greatest differences between humans and other primates.

There is some debate that the larger human brain is the sole difference between human and ape and that if a mechanism for the evolution of the larger brain were to be established then the source of the difference has been discovered. But some microencephalics, with brains smaller than the chimp’s, are capable of consuming and contributing to culture and have a language ability that includes grammar and syntax, vastly beyond that of any known non-human primate even after the most intense lifelong human assisted training. [5]

The Culture of the Abstract

The evolutionary change in human precursory forms that allowed for the explosion of culture and cognitive plasticity began with the ability to handle abstract content in a new way.

Non-human primates can utilise abstract content in a decision making process providing the result maps on to concrete objects or actions that can be executed or observed within the current behavioural episode. [6,7]

Thus a concrete problem may have an abstract step toward a concrete solution. The non-human primate algorithm, then, is [some concrete starting point] is processed to become [some concrete end point] via [abstract elements that can be manipulated]. It is the ‘abstract elements’ that can be utilised in the process of human assisted language acquisition in such famous cases as Kanzi, who was taught to use an abstract symbolic language called ‘lexigrams’. [8]

The major difference in human decision making processes is that the end point may also be abstract and that abstract endpoints can be used as the starting point of subsequent decision making processes. Thus the decision making process can enter endless recursive loops. For Kanzi, for instance, the old non-human primate algorithm remains and so concrete end points are still required despite the use of symbols in intermediate steps.

The next steps in the process are the epiphany and the concrete mapping of abstract results.

The epiphany represents a cognitive event where strong reward feelings are experienced when abstract results to a problem solving process are achieved. Reward feelings for non concrete results appear not to occur in primates, even those that have acquired some degree of human language ability and concrete rewards must accompany achievements that would otherwise only return abstract results eg in game play on a computer, monkeys must receive a food reward when they have played successfully and it is only for the food reward that they will play.

The epiphany indicates that abstract results of decision making processes are treated to some extent like concrete results and so are accompanied by reward feelings and episodic (declarative) memory storage such that that abstract result can be recalled and used as the starting point of a new decision making or problem solving process, immediately or at some later date—the abstract solution is treated as if it had some degree of material existence.

Symbolism

Even the abstract end point of a decision making process is really just an interim step on the way to concrete solutions, at least in principle. In the out-of-reach banana problem, chimps fail to learn the general rule (stack ‘things’ on top of other ‘things’ and then climb up ‘them’ to get the ‘reward’) and have to solve the problem afresh every time the problem solving conditions change.

When a similar problem occurs, humans can readily start at the abstract solution (stack ‘things’ etc) and apply it to the new context. Further, the abstract solution may be refined when no concrete start or end point is in evidence (abstract initial and final condition with ‘epiphany’ reward feelings encouraging the behaviour ie contemplation, meditation, discussion etc).

We know that even chimps can pass concrete problem solving techniques between generations, but how can abstract solutions enter a culture?

‘Symbols’ are concrete objects or actions that represent the abstract content of a partial decision making process. In this form, a decision making process can be shared between individuals who may all contribute to a solution or it can be passed between generations, particularly where the concrete portion of any solution is contextual.

Concrete mapping of abstract concepts is what art and symbolic language are. Consumers of abstract content also experience the reward feelings.

Spontaneous symbol handling is seen in non-humans but is very rare. In a private communication, Frans de Waal told me, in response to a question on fantasy play including symbolic representation in adolescent non-human primates: “I think it is indeed rare, perhaps largely absent except in human-reared chimpanzees. Sometimes chimps fashion a log into a doll (Wrangham), and they may perform a few other symbolic activities, but again, this behavior is rare.”

Symbols make no sense without a lucid conceptualisation of the ‘future’, which, cognitively, is the abstract element between two concrete points, the concrete present and a temporally remote concrete present (the future). Thus abstract problem solving and the general concept of the future require the same cognitive facilitation.

Clothes and tools are objects that are both concrete objects to be used in the present and symbolic representations of future utility (they become abstract solutions to future concrete problems.)

Speciation

The earliest hominoids, having the advance symbol handling ability, would have been at a disadvantage in the environment in which conspecifics not having those advanced abilities were already successful as any advancement of the type described above comes at some cost eg slower maturation, more time spent in contemplation where pre-existing innate behaviours are available and so on.

The advantage of a symbol handling ability is the rapid adaptation to new environments that tools, clothes and intellectual cooperation, even if extremely rudimentary, can offer. Thus those individuals having the advanced symbol handling ability would be strongly attracted to new environments where, in isolation from the main body of conspecifics, allopathic speciation could proceed.

If the retention of neotenic traits was the vector of evolutionary change then the new variety would have been at a sexual selection disadvantage among the older variety of conspecifics as they will prefer sexually mature individuals. For instance male chimps prefer older females over younger inexperienced ones as there is a greater chance that infants will be properly cared for and so reach maturity and perpetuate the genetic lineage. Neotenic traits would have been readily associated with immature individuals.

First Steps from Bonobo example

De Waal and Lanting on neoteny in Bonobos:

It has been speculated that bonobos evolved through retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood, a process known as neoteny. For example, the smaller skull of the adult bonobo reminded both Schwarz and Coolidge of a juvenile chimpanzee. Bonobos also keep their white tail-tufts, which chimpanzees lose after weaning age. The voices of adult bonobos are still as shrill as those of juvenile chimpanzees, and even the frontally orientated vulva is considered a neotenous characteristic, also present in our own species. Neoteny has been called the hallmark of human evolution: it is reflected in our hairlessness, large brains, and general playfulness. [9]

…and this observation by Savage-Rumbaugh regarding a pail in the Bonobo enclosure:

They used it for holding drinking water, inverted it as a seat, used it as a repository for urine, placed it over the head as a blind, carried it on the stomach as if it were an infant, played with it as a toy, and much more. The neighbouring common chimps had been able to observe all these activities, and we wondered whether they would imitate the bonobo’s antics if we gave them a pail. They didn’t. Instead, they used pails as props in aggressive displays, shaking them in the air, slamming them against the cage sides, and kicking them across the floor.[10]

That Bonobos, particularly Kanzi, have been more successful at learning language than chimps (eg Sherman and Austin—all three studied by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues at the Great Ape Trust) is instructive. The same kind of neotenous speciation most probably saw the human and ape lineage separate from the last common ancestor. But the exact selection of neotenous traits need not be the same, particularly if the environment was different to that inhabited by modern day Bonobos.

An experiment on the ability of non-human primates to understand the absent referent found that most (but not all) couldn’t do it but human babies had no problem. The absent referent is another example of using abstract concepts as the starting point of a decision making process. [11]

Playing and Symbolic Behaviour

Before language evolved there was a change in the brain, but the change was subtle. Adolescent mammals ‘play’. They gain reward feelings for the abstract representations of the solutions to immediate problems which are also abstract. They pretend to hunt and pretend to catch prey, for instance. At a certain age, around puberty, play is replaced with reality. Taming animals returns some of that play (abstract thinking, symbolic behaviour) to animals and they subsequently act more human-like and less ‘animal-like’ ie less like their native or wild form.

If, for some reason, this ‘play’ ability were to remain active into adulthood then we would have most of what we need to satisfy the above mentioned subtle change. In the playing animal, solutions to play problems enter procedural memory. If the same ability remains into adulthood, the symbolic solutions enter episodic memory. We use episodic memory, memory of past solutions to problems, in order to solve current and future problems. Chimps appear to only use this form of memory for social behaviour such as keeping track of who has groomed whom and only apply it to the present.

If the ability to play became internalised, then we have all of the required symbol handling that I have mentioned above. The change to adulthood only changes the emphasis of the new problem handling ability toward concrete results, even if those results remain in the future (and so are still in symbolic form) such as possible mating success, possible increase in status and so on.

Modern Culture and the Final Step

Freed from concrete, immediately utilisable culture and able to express interim (abstract via symbolic) solutions, the individual’s desire to share their epiphanies and enjoy the reward for doing so would have been enormous. That other people can share in a reward with no exchange of resources would have resulted in a ravenous selective pressure for the required behavioural ability and expanded neural capacity it required.

Any and all forms of expression, gestural, vocal, facial expression, scratching images in the sand, theatrical depictions of events and so on would have been utilised, understood and enjoyed. Only with the Homo sapiens and the emergence of the transcription factor FOXP2 (forkhead box P2) did spoken language overtake all other forms of expression and greatly accelerate human communication ability and the vastly richer culture that exploded from it. [12]

Other culture related genes, such as serotonin transporter functional polymorphism (5-HTTLPR), seem to have brought with it not only a richer emotional dimension to our culture but a range of anxiety and mood disorders that are prevalent among the modern individualistic human. [13]

It’s Genetics All the Way Down

Genetic mediation of behaviour has evolved all the way from prescriptive instinctual reflexes that mandate each and every muscle movement (eg some arthropod behaviour) through to heuristic problem solving (simple thought or learnt behaviour) through to the effective storage and sharing of heuristics or even methods of deriving heuristic solutions (complex human culture that requires a human-like consciousness as an interface).

Though it is from genetically mediated prescriptive behaviour that we have evolved, it is via genetically mediated behavioural heuristics that we achieve it.

References

[1] Matt Ridley (2003), Nature Via Nurture, Harper Collins, p.49.

[2] J. Henri Fabre (2004), The Hunting Wasps, chapter “The Wisdom of Insects,” as quoted in Clive D.L. Wynne, Do Animals Think? Princeton University Press.

[3] Frans de Waal (2002), Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution, Harvard University Press, p.163.

[4] George Page (1999), The Singing Gorilla: Understanding Animal Intelligence, Headline Book Publishing, p. 209.

[5] Ralph L Holloway (1967), “The Evolution of the Human Brain: some notes toward a synthesis between neural structure and the evolution of complex behaviour,” paper presented at the American Anthropological Association meetings, Denver, Colorado.

[6] Clive D.L. Wynne (2004), Do Animals Think? Princeton University Press.

[7] Donald R Griffin (2001), Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition of Consciousness, University of Chicago Press.

[8] Sue Savage-Rumbaugh & Roger Lewin (1994), Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind, John Wiley & Sons.

[9] Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting (1997), Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, University of California Press, p.27.

[10] Sue Savage-Rumbaugh & Roger Lewin (1994), Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind, John Wiley & Sons, p.107.

[11] Ulf Liszkowski, Marie Schäfer, Malinda Carpenter, and Michael Tomasello (2009), “Prelinguistic Infants, but Not Chimpanzees, Communicate About Absent Entities,” Psychological Science 20 (5), 654-660.

http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/

[12] Genevieve Konopka et al, (2009), Human-specific transcriptional regulation of CNS development genes by FOXP2,” Nature 462, 213-217.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7270/abs/nature08549.html?lang=en

[13] Joan Y. Chiao and Katherine D. Blizinsky (February 2010), “Culture–gene coevolution of individualism–collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene,” Proc. R. Soc. B 22 vol. 277 no. 1681 529-537.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1681/529.full

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RESPONSES

to Robert Karl Stonjek

1. Joseph Carroll’s Response to Robert Stonjek

Robert Stonjek lays out elements contributing to human cognitive flexibility.  The chief idea, it seems, is that humans do not have “prescriptive instinctual reflexes” but rather “genetically mediated behavioural heuristics.”  He is surely correct in arguing that displacement from concrete tasks in a “current behavioural episode” is at the heart of specifically human forms of cognition.  “Absent referents” include linking the temporal present to past events and projected future events in such a way that no present event is every, for humans, just itself. It is always part of a narrative structure extending over time. The “abstract” relationship of the current event to past and future events is part of the actual feeling of the event. Nothing is isolated. All perceptions and actions are felt as consequences, intentions, hopes, expectations, or fatalities. Absent referents also include other kinds of “abstractions.” They include, for instance, social networks, so that what we do or feel at any given moment has reference to corporate social entities extending outside our immediate range of perception. Santa knows when you are being naughty or nice. Our ancestors turn over in their graves when we violate the traditions of the tribe. Our as yet unborn descendants look back sorrowfully on the shame with which we have imbued their lineage; or bask in the still reflected glory of our accomplishments. We live in the light of ideas, and sometimes die for them—flags, religious icons, la liberté, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Thousand-Year Reich, Jihad, the American Way.

Robert formulates a strong version of human cognitive flexibility: “To accommodate evolving neural based adaptability, the innate behavioural patterns become less and less prescriptive until, as in humans, only vague drives and reward feelings remain save for the basic form of the sneeze and similar simple reflexive behaviours.”  The strong version of flexibility can be sharply contrasted with the strong version of genetically controlled behavior suggested in Lionel Tiger’s contribution to this symposium.  Both are matters of emphasis; so to answer the question, “which is right?” we’d have to move from rhetorical declarations to more particular, precise statements about just how aggressive or insistent certain “instinctual” behavioral impulses might be.

The problem posed in the contrast between the formulations by Lionel and Robert is another version of the problem posed in my response to John Price’s essay: how do we parse, precisely, the relations between the universal level of human nature and the level of cultural differences?  Do cultures only produce functionally insignificant variations on a substantially identical set of motives and feelings?  If so, Lionel’s formulation is closer to the truth. Or do cultures take “vague drives” and transform them into highly particular motives and feelings that differ dramatically from culture to culture?  If so, Robert’s formulation is closer to the truth.

Robert mentions “the drive to reproduce” as an instance in which cognitive flexibility connects “innate predispositions” with “the local environment.” That particular instance allows us to narrow the problem down more. Probably more than half the work done in evolutionary psychology has been devoted to mating behavior. On that basis of that research, we can confidently affirm that “the drive to reproduce” is not just a “vague” drive.  In humans, it is accompanied by a rich array of highly particular motives and preferences that are universal to all cultures. Males prefer young and physically attractive mates. Females prefer mates somewhat older, but not too much older, and they prefer mates with high status and abundant resources. Waist-hip ratios enter into male preferences, as well as the various signs of youth and health: glossy hair, clear skin, supple musculature, regular features, full lips, and good teeth, for instance. We know too that children raised together have genetically transmitted dispositions for incest avoidance. We know that males and females have differing reproductive strategies based on differences in parental investment, so that females strongly value commitment from males and pay close attention to indications of emotional infidelity. Males, in contrast, have roving eyes, delight in the prospect of short-term mating with no commitment, but are also geared not to invest heavily in the offspring of other males, and are thus prone to pay very close attention to indications of sexual infidelity in their long-term partners. We know that both males and females have developed dispositions for long-term and short-term mating and that their criteria for these kinds of mating track with the other dispositions derived from their differing parental investment. The “drive to reproduce” does not of course just involve sex; it also involves parenting, and we know that one of the deepest conserved mammalian traits is the disposition for mother-infant bonding. We know that the human family emerges as a set of compromises between male and female reproductive interests interacting with the constraining forces of a social economy in which large groups of males cooperate and in which individual family units organize around a hearth designed to produce cooked food, food cooked characteristically by females. We know that the whole human reproductive economy involves a uniquely intense period of altricial care of infants, a uniquely extended maturational period for juveniles, and a post-menopausal life expectancy for females.  We know that “reproduction” also involves favoring kin, since kin carry our genes.  Taking just this set of elements—pair-bonded males and females in social networks of cooperative males interlaced with kinship ties—and we can say that the human “biogrammar” isn’t really all that “vague.”  It exercises robust constraint on the symbolic forms produced in part by the “genetically mediated behavioural heuristics” Robert describes.

2. Diana Kornbrot’s Response to Robert Stonjek

The history is plausible and engagingly described. Indeed it is one elegant account of how the human species differs from its close relatives.

There are two strong claims. The first is that human cultural variation has a relatively minor role in simple learning. The second is that culture a prerequisite of complex learning. In my view there are challenges to both claims. Addressing these challenges should inform my key questions

Culture May Differentiate Even Simple Learning

In practice, much cultural variation is associated with group membership and societal role. Acknowledging a ruler with a salute, a curtsey, a bow or a gift is NOT rocket science. Such behaviours are easily learnt by non-human species, and activated in human chosen scenarios. My friends’ dogs offer me their paws with enthusiasm. In other species social life is complex, but gestures of submission and dominance are species wide and not culture determined. An alpha female hyena gets similar submissive reactions from all her group. By contrast, humans show cultural variation in these simple group and role behaviours.

The universal presence of such cultural variation in simple behaviours is surely biological.   It leads to research questions that build on Dunbar’s insights (Dunbar, 1993) relating group size to encephailization (brain size as related to body size) Stonjek makes no specific suggestions. Potential research includes identifying how many different roles occur in different kinds and sizes of groups, e.g. head (chair, president, leader), treasurer, secretary, committee member, foot soldier. Lots of societies get by with just these, but past a certain size, (paid) administrative implementers are always needed. Governments (and their oppositions) seem to need more roles/portfolios.

Culture May Not Be Necessary for Complex Learning

Hunting, navigating and nest building are extremely complex skills. The foraging routes of elephants, the nests of bowerbirds, and the solo and co-operative hunting of lions are extremely complex. They are learnt from con-specifics, but not culture determined. By contrast the biology of humans leads to the acquisition of social and material advantages from complex learning that can only be learnt from cultural groups, which may be age, sex, and dominance specific.

Again Stonjek does not identify a research programme that stems from this biology. Nevertheless, his work suggests research programmes that investigate the conditions that lead to innovation and stagnation in the knowledge and culture transmitted by different groups. As an example, at a micro-level, Smolin provides an hilarious account of the difference in culture (he uses term sociology) between academic research physics communities engaged respectively in string theory and quantum gravity (Smolin, 2006). Another example is current research on the effect of the internet and social networks on human learning (Krotoski, 2010).

References

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1993). Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4), 681-735.

Krotoski, A. (2010). Homo interneticus? The virtual revolution Retrieved 21/2/2010, 2010, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/

Smolin, L. (2006). The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. NY: Houghton Mifflin.

3. Anja Müller-Wood’s & John Carter Wood’s Response to Robert Stonjek

We think that Robert Karl Stonjek is right to raise the issue of the unique flexibility of human behaviour and thought patterns and to link them to culture. Stonjek highlights how the ability to culturally transmit learning provided an incredible adaptive advantage, one that explains why we have developed brains that are so large and costly (in terms of energy requirements). We also agree that, while there are precursors to many cultural abilities in non-human primates, they have been developed to a unique extent in Homo sapiens, leading to a distinctive ability for abstract thinking and problem solving.

Nonetheless, we would like to raise a couple of questions. Stonjek’s depiction of the relationship between culture and biology is somewhat ambiguous. Despite an emphasis on a ‘genetic mediation of behaviour’ and attention to specific culture-enabling psychological abilities—the ‘concrete mapping of abstract concepts’, a sense of the future and the presence of ‘reward feelings’ attuned to particular forms of input—he sometimes seems to suggest culture has become disconnected from biology, such as when he states that culture provides humans with ‘help from above’ or argues that culture has led to a diminution of ‘instincts’. These views sound close to a common (though misguided) assumptions in the humanities and social sciences that culture is divorced from the underlying psychology in individual minds that produces it and that humans are instinct-deprived.

Stonjek draws a sharp contrast between ‘fixed’ behavioural patterns and ‘flexibility’ (based upon ‘cognitive plasticity’) as a general psychological ability: ‘To accommodate evolving neural based adaptability’, he argues, ‘the innate behavioural patterns become less and less prescriptive until, as in humans, only vague drives and reward feelings remain save for the basic form of the sneeze and similar simple reflexive behaviours.’ This leaves human beings only with ‘vestiges of instinct’.

Rather than a decline in instincts, we find it more convincing that, as Cosmides and Tooby (1997) have suggested, the importance of culture (i.e., socially transmitted knowledge) to human life requires more rather than fewer instincts (or, more precisely, innate psychological mechanisms). Our evolutionary development led us to inhabit a ‘cognitive niche’, one ‘based on developing an unprecedented new subsistence economics of information and knowledge use, involving, for example, the greater use of lower quality information, the greater use of novel interrelationships among information, and breakthroughs in lowering the coast of acquiring and maintaining large bodies of information’ (Barrett, Cosmides and Tooby 2007, 242). This has depended both on forms of ‘dedicated intelligence’ (which solve particular, evolutionarily recurring problems in predictable, perhaps automatic, ways) as well as ‘improvisational intelligence’, an ability to solve novel problems that human beings seem to have ‘to an unparalleled degree’ (ibid., 243). However, even improvisational intelligence—which could be seen as the basis of the ‘flexibility’ that Stonjek emphasises—‘rests upon a foundation of dedicated intelligences’ such as, to name only a few, object mechanics, tool use, intuitive biology, social inference, and social exchange: ‘These supply improvisational intelligence with many forms of useful inference to link representations together usefully, guiding thought away from vast spaces of barren and useless concatenation’ (ibid., 245-46). We find that such an approach helpfully grounds human psychological flexibility and offers clues as to its inherent tendencies and limits. While the extent of cultural variation is indeed breathtaking, the prevalence of cultural and behavioural universals raises doubts about Stonjek’s suggestion that ‘only vague drives and reward feelings’ remain as the legacy of human psychological evolution. There is flexibility; but only within a framework of possibility. As anthropologist Roger. M. Keesing (1974) put it,

the structure of cultural systems is created, shaped and constrained by individual minds and brains. What forms cultures take depend on what individual humans can think, imagine, and learn, as well as on what collective behaviours shape and sustain viable patterns of life in ecosystems. Cultures must be thinkable and learnable as well as livable. (86)

We have no doubt that Stonjek is aware of this, and our comments may only reflect a debate about the respective degree of importance given to flexibility; nonetheless, we find that attention to the numerous specific innate mental tendencies we possess helps to prevent the otherwise rather vague use of terms such as ‘flexibility’ or ‘plasticity’.

References

Barrett, H. Clark, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. 2007. The hominid entry into the cognitive niche. In The Evolution of mind: Fundamental questions and controversies, ed. Steven W. Gangestad and Jeffry A. Simpson, 241-48. New York: The Guilford Press.

Cosmides, Leda and John Tooby. 1997. Evolutionary psychology: A primer. <http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html>, accessed 12 February 2010.

Keesing, Roger M. 1974. Theories of culture. Annual Review of Anthropology 3: 73-97.

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REJOINDER

By Robert Karl Stonjek

Rejoinder to Diana Kornbrot

Culture As a Cognitive Structure or a Collection of Memes

Diana appears to be concentrating on the contents of culture rather than its structural roots, as in my essay. The most basic form of cultural learning is by observation and emulation of behaviours, as in chimps transmission of particular techniques for harvesting termites or cracking nuts.

Behaviours that are learnt from conspecifics are considered to be cultural learning e.g., fishing for termites by chimps is considered cultural. Only when the behaviour is the same for every member of a species and is not learnt from others is it considered innate (instinctual) and not cultural. In other words there are only three sources of behavioural predisposition: innate (unlearned); developed through trial and error learning (by experience); learned from conspecifics. If the behaviour learnt from observing others spreads through a population and especially if it outlives the innovator then it is generally considered to be cultural (knowledge held by a population rather than exclusively by an individual).

Chimpanzees, for instance, can not learn grammar or, if they can, no amount of human effort has yet managed to teach them. Clearly an enabling biological change is required, perhaps via FOXP2 and other language linked genes (note that all other mammals have a version of the FOXP2 gene).

“Culture” can be thought of as having three distinct layers consisting of the “meme,” or specific instances of cultural transmission; the population level culture, such as the culture of a tribe, nation, profession and so on; and the enabling biology that allows a species to develop population level cultures. My essay concentrated on the enabling level of culture and not on specific instances (memes) or culturally derived stereotypical behaviour at the population level.

The Utility of Culture

As mentioned in the essay, if humans had to learn by trial and error or personal experience alone, no human could, in their entire lifetime, ever rise to the level of the competence even of a modern adolescent human. They need to acquire information via culture, which includes all information that is drawn from the general (learned and transmitted between generations) knowledge of a people e.g., mathematics, language itself, all forms of engineering, all forms of government and social organisation and so on.

The extent by which individuals can acquire knowledge on their own is very limited. Trial and error learning is slow, tedious and at times dangerous. Complex behaviour, such as nest building etc as mentioned by Diana is largely innate and not learned. Birds raised with their wings bound can, when released at the time conspecifics learn to fly, take to the air with almost the same competence as their unbound nestmates—this is not a learned behaviour (adaptation and learning is only done with regard to adapting the innate behaviour to each birds particular wings and requires no instruction from others).

It is the area of behavioural plasticity upon which culture can be imprinted that is most dependant on culture to fill the void between an innate drive and success. For humans, simple reflexive behaviour is not sufficient for goal success. Entire strategies, sometimes taking many years (e.g., education and career, marriage and family), requires a level of cultural sophistication well above the single meme a hand shaking dog is capable of learning.

The shared culture is necessary for ever larger groups size, but beyond a certain size it appears to involve the annihilation or absorption of smaller cultural traditions into a single larger one, especially with regard to language, law and religion. We see a common language forming across the entire globe today, for instance, with the use of English as the international language of the sea and air.

It is the ability a new born human and not a new born ape has, to acquire this cultural information and behaviour which was the subject of my essay. It is tempting to think that only brain size limits the chimp’s ability. But as my essay pointed out, it is the type of information, not its bulk, which stops the chimp from acquiring even small amounts of, for instance, grammar (some human microencephalics with chimp size brains can manage it).

Rejoinder to Joseph Carroll

Regarding the Absent Referent

The absent referent, as mentioned in my essay, is present in some but not all chimpanzees. When I privately asked Malinda Carpenter about the age of those who could do it, thinking that it may be a trait lost with maturity in chimps, she told me that one of the chimps that could do it (point to the absent referent) was 6 years old. [1]

Although the absent referent does correspond to many behaviours that appear unique to humans it is not, in and of itself, a behaviour which led to human uniqueness but, rather, was a behaviour that came under strong selection pressure as a result of earlier/other cognitive/genetic evolved changes in humans.

The examples that Carroll gives require advanced imagination and modelling of future events. It is the concern with remote events, whether temporally, spatially or abstractly remote, that makes ready use of the absent referent.

As with most of what we discover about human uniqueness, it is never as fundamental as we at first imagine. This has been the riddle that has never been adequately solved, hence my approach in the essay. There must be at least one unique cognitive ability that humans have evolved, and it most probably has some feature that enables all of the human cultural traits that we observe, i.e., art, religion, language and so on. Despite this, it may also be the case that it does not map onto any singular observable behaviour.

On the Number of Innate Predispositions (Instincts)

When genetically mediated behaviour breaks down to non-prescriptive drives and reward feelings, the behaviours previously under tight control break up into numerous shorter drive-reward routines. For instance in my example of the digger wasp, the entire behavioural episode starting with hunting of prey to the digging of the burrow etc is one behavioural episode which is why the wasp can not change the order in which the behaviours are executed.

Greater flexibility means that each behavioural step becomes a separate event, most probably broken up where innate flexibility occurs anyway. Further flexibility allows each behavioural step to be replaced by some other behaviour that achieves the same end.

Thus for the same behavioural episode in the digger wasp that achieves the preparing for and laying of eggs, a far more flexible creature may have literally hundreds of separate behavioural episodes to achieve the same thing, even if the resulting behaviour appears to be much the same to an observer.

The question is: if a single complex genetically mediated behavioural episode breaks up into numerous shorter episodes under genetic control and each one has some degree of flexibility, is this greater or lesser genetic determination through innate predispositions? I count it as lesser, but Lionel Tiger seems to count it as greater.

Consider, by analogy, my old Amstrad PCW computer (first introduced in 1979) that had just one program. The program had the following functions: Disc Operating System (CP/M) and Word Processor (Locoscript). When you put the disc in the drive, loading was a single event (no hard drive).

The IBM PC, introduced a few years later, required the user to purchase a Disc Operating System (e.g., Microsoft DOS) and a Word Processor (e.g., MSWordStar). After switching on the computer, you loaded the Disc Operating System and then loaded the Word Processor. With the IBM PC you could select the Disc Operating System you wanted to use and then separately select the Word Processor, but the two computers performed the same function and had the same two programs installed eventually, however the PCW didn’t offer any flexibility of choice.

Humans now have numerous shorter “programs” and, although we can choose which program to use, the programmatic categories are still much the same e.g., “Word Processor” for the computer, “Language” for humans.

Thus one of the main differences between the human and other primates is that our software no longer comes in fixed bundles—we can choose. For instance we can choose (or have cultural selection impressed upon us) mating selection techniques, protocols and expressions. But the category “mate selection” is still innate.

I used the expression “vague innate drives” as a kind of shorthand for what I’ve outlined in more detail above. But the difference between Lionel and myself is really the difference between counting the early IBM PC as having two programs and the Amstrad PCW as having one, even though functionally they were much the same.

Regarding the Mating Drive and Preference for Low WHR

The vagueness of the mating drive can be seen by the fact that up to 10% (by some estimates) of humans are sexually attracted to the same sex to some degree, that a significant proportion of couples never have children, that young males engage in sexual liaisons with “cougars” and sometimes marry them, and that farm animals are used as sexual partners more often than we would like to admit.

The vagueness of the drive does not indicate the strength or persistence of the drive but the vagueness of the prescription (which should result in stereotypical behaviour in remote communities if the drive is prescriptive rather than vague).

We know that innate drives can be strong and persistent, but the vagueness I mentioned should be contrasted with the stereotypical producing prescriptive behaviour of strong instinctual control typically found in non-human species. A prescriptive drive prescribes behaviours more tightly than a vague drive by my usage of the terms. A non-prescriptive drive can be strong to the point of overwhelming even though the drive gives no indication of how it can be satisfied. Human behaviour where individuals enter long searches for “love,” “spiritual fulfilment,” “to find themselves,” e.g., by travelling, adventuring and so on and numerous other compulsions that may overwhelm them are clear examples of the strong and persistent drive that manifests with only vague or entirely absent prescription (innate behavioural predispositions or drives that achieve the desired goal). When people search for the “truth,” for instance, they are most liable to search for it in human culture, especially religious, spiritual and philosophical beliefs (for the example given, i.e., the search for “truth”).

Where vestiges of prescription exist, its accumulated presence in many individuals acts like a lens that increases its resolution to a much greater clarity. Thus many culturally derived behaviours may be very close to ancestral species even though they are quite weak in individuals. They are amplified by centuries or millennia of cultural accumulation and may be quite prominent in human culture.

If specific drives, such as the drive to seek out low waist to hip ratios, for instance, is under genetic control in humans then we would expect to find this trait in all human communities across all time. But most tribal communities tested seem to prefer chubby females, as do Tongans and a good deal of the Renaissance art culture. We must be careful not to confound widely adopted modern culture with innate predisposition and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find populations unaffected by modern western culture. But away from mainstream modern western culture, WHR has been tested and failed to show consistency with the modern industrial societies e.g., Hunter-Gatherer tribes tend to prefer chubby females. [2][3][4]

References:

[1] Ulf Liszkowski, Marie Schäfer, Malinda Carpenter, and Michael Tomasello (2009) “Prelinguistic Infants, but Not Chimpanzees, Communicate About Absent Entities,” Psychological Science 20(5), 654-660.

[2] David J. Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature.

[3] Charles Jencks, “EP, Phone Home”  in Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Hilary Rose and Steven Rose

[4] Viren Swami and Martin J. Tovée. ^“Perceptions of female body weight and shape among indigenous and urban Europeans,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 48, 43-50.

Rejoinder to Müller-Wood and Wood

Innate Predispositions

With regard to fewer innate predispositions, humans have more only if you consider that the earlier prescriptive form, when broken down into many smaller behavioural episodes, can be interpreted as more (see my reply to Joseph Carroll for more details on this point).

Human Culture

It is a reasonable speculation that there must be more innate predispositions to support human level culture, and as a general view this makes sense. But I am not aware of any innate predispositions enabling the development of culture actually being proposed, let alone discovered and described in detail. Grammar is an innate predisposition proposed for human language ability as chimps do not appear to be able to acquire it. Yet specifying exactly what an innate grammar must be, given variations between languages, has proved to be allusive.

What chimps don’t have, and the reason it is so hard to teach them, say, language, is any desire to learn and to utilise these things—they simply aren’t interested, they rarely ask questions and never ask about the name of anything. Chimps do have a desire to play in adolescence, but this appears to all but dry up in adulthood unless specifically extended through intense human contact. Bonobos are more playful than chimps, but even so do not spontaneously take to language learning and never ask questions, especially where the acquisition of knowledge is concerned.

Humans have a rich cross-modal processing ability which does not appear in chimps. By way of example, consider the chimp predisposition to become excited and give a “food-found call” when a fruiting tree is discovered. This innate predisposition is so strong that when chimps wish to hide their discovery they hold their hand over their mouth to muffle the call.

This behaviour has the following parts: search for a goal (e.g., finding food); discovering the goal and becoming excited (reward feeling in the absence of actual reward, i.e., they haven’t actually eaten any of the food yet); compelling desire (overwhelming for most individuals) to share the discovery with others.

In humans, this same behavioural predisposition is called “an epiphany” and can occur in any domain, most notably with abstract solutions (“eureka!!!”) and to any degree (the grand religious epiphany down to the trivial solving of a crossword question) and in any domain. The same predisposition, that exists in chimps (food finding “epiphany”), appears as numerous separate innate predispositions in humans e.g., the desire to acquire knowledge, the desire to acquire language, the desire to view art, to hear/read poetry, to tell/hear jokes, desire to ask a question and so on. In each case the discovery of “knowledge” is rewarded with a reward feeling and a desire to share the discovery with others.

In infants the “tell someone” part expresses comically when they will tell back to you something which they have just learnt from you—it is the new connection as revealed by the epiphany that they are compelled to share. In adulthood, the anticipation of sharing the new knowledge at sometime in the future satisfies the urge. Chimps have the same predisposition, but it is fixed in just one domain, the food finding behaviour.

In humans, it occurs in all domains, but it is the same (singular) predisposition. The problem is that each discipline searching for its paleontological roots attributes a set of behaviours to their area of study (language, religion, art etc) and this causes considerable multiplication of what is a much smaller set of innate predispositions.

Thus a very large part of the observed multiplication of innate predispositions is actually the same set of predispositions observed manifesting independently in each domain (e.g., in language, in emotion, in problem solving, in art, in religion, in self image and so on). The algorithmic form of grammar most probably exists in chimps but serves some other purpose and can not be utilised for communication purposes – it can not cross the modal (or module) barrier. To find innate grammar, the indigenous form must be discovered and its transformation in cross-modal utilisation must be demonstrated.

Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace (1982) is a neo-Darwinian beast fable about morality in a thermonuclear age. It serves me as a starting point for a fresh look at the fundamental questions surrounding morality and altruism. I also look at thirty five thousands proverbs from around the world and at the patterns of individual and group behaviour they describe.

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Of Morality, Proverbial Wisdom, and Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace

God’s Grace paints a front-seat picture of the global Armageddon: tsunami floods, radiation everywhere, the implosion of the biosphere so catastrophic that even cockroaches perish, and the life in death of the last human on Earth, Calvin Cohn. A paleologist and former rabbinate student, Cohn eludes the Bomb and the wrath of the Almighty by virtue of working at the sea bottom. In the afterglow of the holocaust, he and Buz—a young chimp prodigy he finds on the surface vessel —drift for weeks before getting shipwrecked on a tropical island, their Ararat and purgatory.

Like other protagonists of post-apocalyptic narratives, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Day After, Cohn takes it as his duty to rekindle civilization from nuclear ashes. There is only one problem. As God rumbles from on high, piqued at finding him alive, he is the only human to survive the Second Flood. Unfazed, Cohn transfers his promethean designs onto Buz and others of his kind who begin to appear on the island. The Lord seems to approve for, equipped with an artificial larynx, Buz miraculously masters human speech. No less miraculously, he teaches it to others.[i]

A New World Adam, Cohn gives names to the newcomers and, displaying resourcefulness that would make Robinson Crusoe proud, proceeds to engineer a chimpanzee society. Not to replicate the errors of the past, in lieu of a political constitution he lays down seven Admonitions for the post-human age in the hope of steering his communards toward a better life. Daily he lectures to the grooming apes on history, sociobiology and altruism. Impatient at the pace of progress, he even monkeys with evolution by begetting a child with a “womantically” inclined female, Mary Madelene.

Yet the more he educates the apes under the Schooltree and presses them to obey the dictates of brotherly love, the more nature rears its head, dragging the community towards anarchy. Little by little, the quasi-Edenic garden—on which even insect-pollinated trees get pollinated in the absence of insects—devolves into a primeval jungle. Hostility, racism and eventually cannibalism write the closing chapters of the communal history. In the final scene, the prodigal son Buz leads captive Cohn up the mountain to slay him in a reversal of the story of Abraham and Isaac. At last, humanity is no more.

Crucially, the relation between God’s Grace and The Fate of the Earth is the opposite of that between God’s Grace and Walden Two. On the surface, the fictional communities conceived by Skinner and Malamud teem with similarities. Both are small and isolated farming groups founded and dominated by alpha-male scientists. Both human leaders are, at once, insiders and outsiders. Both engineer their societies from the bottom up, even as neither relinquishes top-down control. Both abjure violence, putting their faith in positive reinforcement instead. Both, in their separate ways, go back to nature to better human nature.[ii]

But apart from the knack for telling a good story, what separates a literary masterpiece from a behaviourist pamphlet is evolution. Where Skinner disregards the behavioural aspects of human adaptations, Malamud makes our genetic carry-on the centrepiece of his plot. Where Skinner’s social engineers cure everyone of such primal instincts as parental investment, status seeking, gossip, cheating, envy or jealousy, Malamud lets them run their course. Taking issue with the closing of the American mind, he even has his protagonist educate the apes on the Descent, Advent, Ascent of Man as Darwin and Wallace had propounded the theory of species and natural selection; adding a sketch on sociobiology, with a word about the nature-nurture controversy (152).

God’s Grace challenges our degree of autonomy from the ancestral Homo insofar as the latter is the progenitor of so many behaviours of the modern human. This anthropological—not to say sociobiological—perspective is no mere poetic licence. A lifelong teacher and professor of literature, in preparation for the novel Malamud became a student of evolution. Even as he steeped himself in Thoreau’s Walden, he steeped himself in primatology, paleoanthropology and evolutionary psychology, reading everything from Louis Leakey’s Unveiling Man’s Origins to Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man.

In a radical step for a writer of fiction, he even spent a year at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, absorbing the essentials of within-group and between-group selection. Having done his homework, he makes it clear that evolution is an ideal vantage point from which to contemplate human society and morality. All would-be social reformers who discount the bedrock of biology have only so much, or so little, chance of success. This is what I set out to prove below, armed with the latest in sociobiological research and the oldest of folk wisdom.

Human Morality, Primate Sociality

It seems entirely possible that chimpanzees, as they progress in their evolution may, if their unconscious minds insist, incite molecular changes that will sooner or later—sooner, I hope—cause them to develop into a species something like man.

Bernard Malamud, God’s Grace

Before violence and aggression scuttle the communal experiment, Cohn sets up seven Admonitions on the face of a mountain. These quasi-Mosaic edicts are to safeguard the principles that the social engineer sees as essential for a politically just and spiritually enlightened society. Like the Christian injunctions against the seven deadly sins, they are a distillate of the dual nature of his endeavour. On the one hand, they reflect the nobility of his eutopian aspirations. On the other, by the very fact of being posted, they testify to the need to redirect the truant onto the path of virtue.[iii]

1. We have survived the end of the world; therefore cherish life. Thou shalt not kill.
2. Note: God is not love, God is God. Remember Him.
3. Love thy neighbor. If you can’t love, serve—others, the community. Remember the willing obligation.
4. Lives as lives are equal in value but not in ideas. Attend the Schooltree.
5. Blessed are those who divide the fruit equally.
6. Altruism is possible, if not probable. Keep trying. See 3 above.
7. Aspiration may improve natural selection. Chimpanzees may someday be better living beings than men were. There’s no hurry but keep it in mind.[iv]

In interview after interview, Malamud cited his formative influences to be World War II and the Holocaust, the continuing racial strife in America, and the threat of nuclear war. Political and sociopolitical, all these concerns are reflected in the blueprint for the primate community. The spectre of nuclear winter, lit by the embers of atomic blasts, drives the First Admonition. The Second replaces the Christian mantra “God is love” with an elliptical reminder that God is the ultimate unknown. So much for invoking his will as an excuse for bigotry and war—or for arming American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan with rifle sights stencilled with biblical references.

With Russia and the U.S. separated only by 85 kilometres of Bering Strait, the Third Admonition is a reminder that ICBMs have shrunk the world to the size of a neighbourhood. Grafting the Schooltree onto the biblical Tree of Knowledge, the Fourth exhumes the ghosts of John Scopes and the 1925 Monkey Trial. The Fifth Admonition to distribute resources equitably rings with especial force in the United States where the wealth of the top 1 percent exceeds that of the bottom 95 percent.[v] The Sixth goes after the geopolitical divisions that often limit the right to peaceful coexistence only to those who share our patch of dirt.

The Seventh Admonition, however, seems different. Talking about natural selection, it veers away from politics and anything else we might term “culture”. Or does it? Malamud thinks not, leaving no doubt that the alleged divide between the alleged determinacy of genetic inheritance and the alleged indeterminacy of cultural expression is a red herring:

Cohn lectured on the development of the great apes and ascent of homo sapiens during the course of evolution. He had several times lectured on natural selection—the maximization of fitness, someone had defined it—a popular subject with his students. It promised possibilities if one made himself—or in some way became—selectable. (187)

If the apes wish to become more selectable, they can do something about it instead of waiting for adaptive behaviours to grind themselves out over eons. Put differently, social engineering can guide natural selection in a co-evolutionary pas de deux. Culture is, after all, an adaptation. For a very long time now, it has been changing the genetic character of human populations via multi-level selection. On second thoughts, Cohn’s lecture about the road to eutopia being paved by social engineering and evolution is far from an anomaly. All seven Admonitions make as much sense from a sociopolitical as from a sociobiological point of view.

The First Admonition reflects the core precept of moral codes worldwide: Thou shalt not kill. Naturally, from Yahweh commanding the Israelites to smite their enemies to modern nations butchering one another for democracy, killing has always been legitimized under some circumstances. In evolutionary terms, self-sacrifice is an established fact, but altruistic tendencies are on the whole less intense than the impulse for personal survival. When people get hungry enough, they will eat each other. When newly dominant males kill the displaced leader’s offspring, they have equally adaptive reasons for doing so.

Against this background Malamud’s beast fable is once again nuanced and true to life. The raid on Cohn and the butchery of his child are perfectly consistent with predation, signifying that deep down the chimps may regard the human as a different species. Conversely, if they see Cohn as a chimp, their behaviour makes equal adaptive sense. After all, by deposing the dominant male and by getting rid of his progeny they induce Mary Madelyn into estrus. Throughout all this, the apes are murderous but highly cooperative. Their behaviour is not prosocial but it is highly social.

The Second Admonition attempts to prise morality away from doctrinal religion. Historically religion has frequently been a flashpoint for antagonism and intolerance, fragmenting us into sects and factions, only to pit one against another. For results, look no further than Northern Ireland, or India and Pakistan. And yet, religion can also provide one of the most inclusive tribal identities. In this case, however, the marker is not genetic but cultural.

Religion acts like a centripetal force, herding disparate individuals toward the common centre. There is no one family on earth that is a billion strong, but there are more than a billion Catholics (roughly the same as atheists) united under the Fisher Ring. With God as the overarching tribal leader, religious systems paper over the genetic differences of the believers. Black and white Methodists, Ashkenazi and Coptic Jews, or Iranian and Saudi Shiites can kneel side by side because—even as they fence off non-believers—their religions promote cultural group identity.

The Third Admonition is the moral golden rule, vividly paraphrased by a Pashto proverb: Pinch yourself to find out how much it hurts others.[vi] It is there to counter the adaptive distinctions we always make between the in-group and out-group. From corals to shoaling fish, ants, termites, rodents, flocking herbivores, and primates, not to even mention species that aggregate in family groups, social and colonial animals dominate the world. To survive alongside one another, all must have evolved ways of determining friend from foe and of knowing what to do with either.

Morality evolved to harmonize in-group attitudes, and is therefore biased in favour of those who are with us. As David Berreby documents in Us and Them (2005), sharp distinctions between those who are insiders and outsiders is bred in our genome. Social animals are often xenophobic, hostile to strangers of the same species who live outside the territorial and social boundaries of the group. It is far from a matter of giving trespassers the evil eye. Individuals who stray into others’ territory open themselves to attacks that may be lethal. “Unprovoked” aggression of this sort has been reported for almost all social species.[vii]

The Fourth Admonition reflects the demands of intelligence, culture and social life. Human evolution selected for prolonged childhood, the longest in any animal that ever lived. The Fifth fosters prosocial behaviour through emphasis on egalitarianism and resource sharing. Individual fitness is one thing, but behaviours good for me are seldom good for the group. The thing is, groups also compete with one another, and the more cooperative they are, the better chance they stand of outcompeting the competition. This yin-yang of multilevel selection means that the “selfish gene” cannot be the whole story.

The conceptual apparatus of modern biology has long been thought to be synonymous with Dawkins’s famous meme. We are survival machines, wrote the biologist, programmed to replicate our twisted strands of genetic code. We may do so with the aid of the group or even by contributing to the welfare of the group, but with the ultimate goal of multiplying copies of our DNA. If acts of altruism and selflessness occur on the way, they occur only to the extent that they serve the continuation of the gene beyond the individual currently carrying it.

The Sixth Admonition does not merely encourage a reinterpretation of the selfish gene in more prosocial terms—it demands it. Prosocial behaviour is, after all, compatible with self-serving behaviour, even though they may frequently be only reluctant bedfellows. Far from being maladaptive, self-sacrifice has emerged from the same adaptive pressures that produced more self-oriented forms of social exchange, such as favouring kinfolk and reciprocal back-scratching. There is, in short, no need to look outside evolution to explain why “me first” is not always an enemy of “we first”.

Quite so, maintains a leading evolutionist, for “there is more to evolution than adaptation”.[viii] The Seventh Admonition reinforces this message by stressing the interplay between genetic and social factors. Biology has moved on from the days when Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, framed the nature-nurture dialectic. Today his thesis and antithesis look more like the 1948 Escher lithograph of one hand drawing another in a closed loop. This is because, in all likelihood, gene-culture coevolution was the twin Rolls-Royce engine that lifted hominids from the plains of Africa to the heights of scientific, artistic and material sophistication we enjoy today.

How did it happen? Even if the details are still subject to debate, some facts are beyond doubt. The most evident among them is that people are adapted for culture in ways that apes are not. The crucial difference here is our adaptation for understanding other agents as agents, i.e. intentional beings. This allows us to share a point of view—and thus information—by drawing attention to intention. Evidence suggests, in fact, that, in conjunction with theory of mind, this shared (“we”) intentionality is what drove human cognition. The result? The “ratcheting up” of learning skills and the explosion of culture.[ix]

The key factor in cultural evolution is its fantastic rate. Molecular genetics shows that Homo sapiens separated from apes some six million years ago. Fossil record suggests that for the next four million years we continued as very ape-like australopithecines. Our uniquely human ability to attribute beliefs and intentions is therefore likely less than two million years old. This is a very short time for any cognitive adaptation to emerge. On the other hand, something did manifestly alter primate cognitive selection in spectacular ways. You are the living proof of that. What was it?

Given the speed and the ratcheting effects of this cognitive evolution—perhaps we should say revolution—there is really only one agent of change to fit the job description: culture. Material and symbolic culture is, after all, influenced by biological imperatives and, in turn, biological traits are influenced by cultural selection. Without culture in the picture, write Richerson and Boyd in Not By Genes Alone (2005), “we can’t explain why our societies are so different from those of other primates, the emotional salience of tribal-scale human groups, or their importance in social organization and social conflict” (235).

Genetic variation among groups—especially mixed groups—can’t explain variation in group behaviour. The experience of partitioned nations, from (East) Germany to (North) Korea to (Northern) Ireland, is unequivocal in this respect. So is cross-cultural adoption, whereby children effortlessly adopt the new culture and not that of their genetic parents. Nor can ecological factors be the answer. First of all, all environments on Earth have by now been altered by culture, so that even if the hypothesis were right, it would be wrong. Secondly, the ecological hypothesis would predict similar behaviours in similar environments, which is emphatically not the case.[x]

Genetic and cultural selection have walked hand in hand since at least the early Pleistocene. The result is civilization as we know it: Fatman and Little Boy, the Big Mac, the Lindy hop. That still leaves the question of what evolutionary mechanism acted as the cognitive ratchet. The recently discovered mirror neurons —so-called in distinction to “canonical” neurons—look more and more like a link between natural selection and the evolution of culture. This is because, as we are learning, mirror neurons directly detect and simulate other people’s cognitive and emotional states.[xi]

That’s right: cognitive and emotional states. Take a triadic structure: you, me, and an object—or some relation between objects, or anything else—you want to draw my attention to. Intentional actions and indicated structures, as it turns out, speak directly to our evolved brains. The latter detect intentions even before “we” do, and process them with unerring alacrity. It is not, in other words, a case of “humankey see, humankey do”. Eerily, mirror neurons are attuned to intentions behind movements, the purpose of gestures. You could say that they understand their meaning in terms of goal-directed actions.[xii]

At the cortical level, the brain does not work by tracking motor activity. It does not work, in other words, in terms of extending a forelimb and closing digital protrusions around a tapered cylinder resting a couple of feet away. It works in terms of reaching for a banana in order to eat it. How do we know? Because when the exact same action is repeated in another context—for example, miming the original gesture without actually grasping anything or even without intending to—nothing in the brain fires and nothing activates. Somehow our evolutionary “wet” chips are able to grasp other intentional beings’ minds.

It is important to remember that all this happens without any reflective or inferential mediation. It is an automatic and immediate cortical understanding in the heat of the moment—a looking-glass reflex of my evolved brain. But there is even more. The discharge of these neurons is strikingly similar when an action is performed and when it is merely observed. Mirror neurons are voyeur neurons, primed to activate whether you burn yourself with scalding water or whether you only witness my own injury and distress. And it is not just cognition, either.

When I see you frown, look around and spread your hands while elevating your shoulders, I can reasonably surmise that you are puzzled or lost. But a long time before that I am ready to offer help, because my brain—to be precise, my motor or visceromotor system—understands and feels your disorientation before “I” do. It’s the ultimate case of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. When I watch your pantomime of helplessness, my brain not only knows that you are puzzled or lost, but feels it. This is crucial because morality hinges on empathy, on the capacity for putting yourself in other people’s shoes.[xiii]

Training is one conduit of moral virtue. Aristotle spent years pounding the precepts of goodness into Alexander, who then went to pillage most of the known world. Be that as it may, the rudiments of morality appear to be preloaded into humans. Empathy, the feeling of the feelings of others, is after all the foundation —to many philosophers a precondition—of altruism.[xiv] Altruism, in turn, is the foundation of groupish behaviour, and thus of society as we know it. Naturally, in everyday parlance altruism comes bundled up with goodness. Not so in biology, where it is defined operationally rather than in reference to any intrinsic features.

Regardless of the motives or intentions behind it, if an action that benefits others is costly to the performer, it is considered altruistic. This can include even paradigmatically hostile or aggressive behaviour. Bees that die after stinging, or army ants that get eaten before their numbers can overwhelm the prey, are highly altruistic but hardly benevolent. Both are out to kill. Just because actions benefit someone else’s survival, they must not, therefore, be regarded as good in some transcendent moral sense. By the same token, however, selflessness must not be excluded from the overall economy of social life.

Economists, political scientists and sociologists often reduce us to rational utility maximizers, conspicuously leaving out the human dimension, the capacity for disinterested self-sacrifice. To gauge what is wrong with this picture, we need look no further than Adam Smith. Commonly perceived as a prophet of wealth-maximizing laissez-faire, Smith was much more nuanced a thinker. Not only did he publish a whole book on altruism, but he maintained in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that Man has capacities “which interest him in the future of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it” (9).

Armed with these caveats, let us look at altruism again. Suddenly it seems to  be everywhere. Far from an esoteric trait of the likes of St. Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa, benefiting others at cost to self dominates the social landscape. Granted, just because we are all altruists does not mean that all instances of self-sacrifice are equal. But there is no denying that, sometimes at least, we act out of other-directed motives. Or is there? Cynics can always find alternative reasons for even the most altruistic acts. A soldier smothering an exploding grenade with his own body earns not only posthumous fame and decoration, but a hefty pension for his family.

On this interpretation, his apparent altruism is really a roundabout kind of kin selection.[xv] But what about families who report felonious kin to the police in the knowledge that the latter will be sent away for life, or to the chair? Theodore John Kaczynski, aka Unabomber, was not caught as a result of a years-long FBI investigation. His brother recognized the terrorist’s writing style and opinions in the latter’s manifesto and tipped the Feebs. What was in it for him, in the absence of financial reward? Heartlessness does not explain anything since, in many cases, people turn in kin whom they love and support during the trial and later in jail.

My counterevidence may be, however, missing the larger point. As Janet Radcliffe Richards points out, if you raise the bar too high no one will ever be able to jump over. A Doubting Thomas, who always suspects everyone’s motives, writes even the possibility of altruism out of the social equation. In contrast, Richards’s implicit and Donald Broom’s explicit position is that self-sacrifice is not incompatible with self-interest. Naturally, many moral philosophers may find much amiss with this thesis. Genuine morality, they will remonstrate, demands an extension of the willing obligation to the entire human race.

Wouldn’t it be nice? I put more stock, however, in Remarque’s (echoed by Stalin) remark that a single death is a tragedy, while a million deaths is a statistic. We would have to be a very different species to empathize with abstractions such as humanity with the same intensity as with personal acquaintances. This is not to mention the fact that, by these standards, a Martian anthropologist would have to conclude that almost all people are immoral, given that most of us ordinarily limit the radius of our good will to the inner circle of family, neighbours and associates. So do, for that matter, chimps and bonobos.[xvi]

Even more to the point, our Martian would see human and animal morality as continuous, however far removed from each other on the spectrum. Not the same, of course—not by a long shot. He would not conclude that moral judgments that apply to people (the Nuremberg trials leap to mind) should apply to animal predation or aggression. But neither would he waste his time dusting our frontal lobes for God’s latent fingerprints. Human morality, he would conclude, is as much a product of evolution as is our brain architecture, anatomy, propensity for counterfactual thinking, or even some of our proverbs.[xvii]

The Book of Proverbs

Cohn said he thought to be human was to be responsive to and protective of life and civilization.

Buz said he would rather be a chimp.

Bernard Malamud, God’s Grace

Morality is a trait emergent because of a basic fact of existence. Just like many other organisms, we have always needed others of our kind in the struggle for survival. The position that evolution made us moral could not, however, be more at variance with the Christian view that people alone possess moral sense by the grace of God. According to the church, even as it makes us human, morality separates us from the animals—even those closest to us, the great apes. Moral sense could never be mistaken for moral instinct. We may be our primate cousins’ cousins, but not when it comes to altruism.

Nonsense, counters Malamud, making the relation between evolution and morality the backbone of the Admonitions. Not for nothing does his hero urge the apes to “evolve into concerned, altruistic living beings” (146). Moral sense is not a veneer that somehow (how exactly?) emerged via non-evolutionary processes. We are altruistic as a consequence of the same selective pressures that have made us egocentric. Adaptively, it is not difficult to see why. Cooperative and altruistic units tend to outperform self-oriented individuals. As the Spanish proverb says, Three helping each other are as good as six.

And herein lies the rub. Egoism increases our fitness but altruism betters group fitness. Something does not add up, and this something has an analogue in Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.[xviii] The brilliant if highly eccentric mathematician proved that no system past a certain (low) threshold of complexity can be shown to be consistent. It could, in other words, be utter nonsense and you would never know—unless you climb to a hierarchically higher level. Therein, indeed, you can prove to your satisfaction that the first one is trustworthy. But if you think you just got out of paying for lunch, forget it.

The second level lets you verify the consistency of the first, but at a price. Now to determine that the second floor is soundly constructed, you need to climb to the third; for the third to the fourth; and so on, ad infinitum. It is a variant on the chicken-and-egg regression. To make your chicken hatch consistent eggs, you have to verify that the chicken itself is in working order, which means verifying the egg from which it came from, and so on, ad infinitum. Nature iterates this yin-yang architecture independent of scale because, at its most fundamental, mathematics is a fractal.

Why bother? Because multi-level selection is another fractal. Think of it as a recursive function of two evolutionary vectors: one pro-individual, the other prosocial. When competition between individuals gets suppressed, between-group selection emerges as the primary agent of change. But even as cooperation shifts the balance between vectors from “me first” to “we first”, competitive behaviour reappears at the next level up in the biological hierarchy. From eukaryotes all the way up to the earth’s biosphere, all the intermediate stages iterate this yin-yang architecture.

One factor that would seem to cast doubt on multi-level selection is inter-group migration in primates (and presumably in early humans). If groups are so fluid as to be practically nonexistent from the genetic standpoint, there is little for group selection to work on. Unlike apes, however, we cooperate with and within units that far transcend family groups or even the 100-150 strong forager-hunter band sizes. Instead of relying on genetic markers, cultural group identity relies on symbols—language, customs, ideology, religion, and so on. As such, it is largely independent of inter-group migration.

Groups with a higher coefficient of altruism will tend to outcompete rivals and spread the groupish genes. Self-serving behaviour has not, of course, ceased to exist. Far from it—if only because my interests are best served if all except me are altruistic. At every level “me first” behaviour is therefore kept in check by the local police. At the lower levels, for instance, the job is handled by the immune system. Most of the time our cellular organelles, their aggregates (cells), and their aggregates (internal organs) do work well as a team, which is good because their “heave ho” has to synchronize if we are to live.

Naturally, aggregates of organs that we call human beings also engage in competition against other aggregates. Still, even players on a pro-basketball team who vie for individual fame and contracts unite to compete against other teams. Guess what? The yin-yang vectors reappear at the next level up. Teams of players who competed against one another as the Knicks and the Sixers unite into Team USA to compete against other national teams. In principle, this process could go on forever because its architecture is so fundamental (as for Gödel’s theorem, in my opinion, it holds true everywhere in the universe).

Egoism twins with altruism within a group, which twins with competition against other groups, which twins with altruism within groups of groups, which twins with competition against other groups of groups, and so on, independent of scale. Multi-level selection permeates our lives because it is a fractal present at every level of existence. This includes, notably, the level at which we daily forge our destinies: the world of people and societies, of selfish prerogatives and social norms. And if our selfish prerogatives and social norms appear to be in constant tension, it is because they mirror the vectors that shape our lives.

Where would literature scholars look for evidence of these evolutionary vectors? Paleoanthropologists dig for fossils to ascertain who we were and how we lived. Perhaps we could do some excavating among literary fossils? Luckily, there is a body of verbal artifacts available for examination not in musty museums but in the living canons of folk lore. Like hemoglobin cells, these living fossils continually course through the arteries of our civilization, some evergreen, some falling into disuse, continually testing their fitness against the times. They are, as you must have guessed by now, proverbs.

Although no book of proverbs has ever won the Nobel Prize in literature, in itself that says nothing about their literary and social value. A better gauge to their wit and wisdom than the scandal-plagued and blatantly politicized votes of the Swedish Academy is the judgment of one of the fountainheads of our culture: the Hebrew Testament. The Book of Kings teaches that Solomon—the epitome of biblical wisdom—bequeathed no less than three thousand proverbs encapsulating the principles of a good life. No less tellingly, the Book of Proverbs refers to itself as a manual for living.[xix]

Proverbs, as John Russell aphoristically put it, are the wit of one, and the wisdom of many. The reason why we cite them almost daily is precisely because they compress so much élan and wisdom into such a compact delivery platform. It is not necessarily easy to separate proverbs from other miniature forms: adages, apothegms, aphorisms, epigrams, maxims, bon mots or dicta. Some distinctions, however, can be made on the basis of features associated with oral transmission. Having passed from generation to generation, many proverbs are cast in a form that lends itself to easy memorization.

Brevity and pith are high on the agenda (In the friendship of asses, look out for kicks: Behar). So is symmetry (What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is my own: Tamil). So are parallelism and parataxis (Where the power, there the law: Russian), or chiasmus (A stranger, being a benefactor, is a relative; a relative not conferring a benefit is a stranger: Burmese). Other features, not always preserved in translations, are rhyme (In time of test, family is best: Burmese) and alliteration, often augmented with a caesura (Be good with the good, bad with the bad: Latin). Finally, personification and metaphor (Relatives are scorpions: Tunisian).

If some proverbs appear anachronistic, it is because they reflect pre-urban environments. They express prosocial sentiments or interpersonal obligations in reference to farm life (If the cattle are scattered, the tiger seizes them: Burmese), produce (Nine measures of grain for relations, but ten for strangers: Tamil), or domestic animals (When the cat and mouse agree, the grocer is ruined: Iranian). But even if their vehicle is out of date, their tenor isn’t—because social dynamics has not changed that much. To retool Michael Ghiselin’s words, scratch today’s urbanite and watch a pre-urbanite bleed.[xx]

Proverbs are ultimate self-help manuals for dealing with social contexts. Handed down from generation to generation, they are time capsules buried in the minds of speakers of a language. Some are cast in the form of observations (Lying and gossiping go hand in hand: Spanish). Others as admonitions (Do not stretch your feet beyond your carpet: Lebanese) or commandments (Love thy neighbour: Greek). Others still incline toward paradox (A pair of women’s breasts has more pulling power than a pair of oxen: Mexican). All seek to engineer behaviour by retrofitting the social skills of individuals.

But there is a problem. Some proverbs directly contradict others. While the Italians caution that A short tail won’t keep off flies, the Koreans retort that If he tail is too long, it will be trampled on. More familiar advice to look before you leap flies in the face of a reminder that he who hesitates is lost. Clearly, proverbs can be cherry-picked to suit the need of the moment, and it is worth asking why it should be so. One answer is obvious. Proverbs are not logically consistent axioms for living in a group because different behaviours are useful in different contexts.

Just as there is no one adaptation that will work in all ecological systems, there is no one behaviour that will work for all individuals for all times. Instead of explaining these self-contradictions away, however, I think we ought to put them in the spotlight. Proverbs encapsulate the wisdom of societies, predating even the dim beginnings of recorded history. Their transmission over countless generations attests to their strategic value as behavioural recipes. As such, proverbs could be examined as evidence of evolutionary pressures acting on human agents living in a group.

Specifically, to the extent that proverbs reflect deep-seeded economies of human life, some of them ought to be self-contradictory. Since human behaviours are the sum of the selfish and groupish vectors, and since proverbs tap into deep and constant facets of human nature and social dynamics, human verbal artifacts ought to reflect this tension. Some of them, in other words, ought to reflect the interests of the individual, campaigning for “me first” and pointing out the risks that come from truck with others. Others should campaign for “we first”, extolling the benefits of cooperation and altruism and flailing the antisocialist.

Let me firm up these remarks into testable predictions. The first three are general and perhaps self-evident. In any statistically viable sample, we ought to find:

1)  a great degree of overlap and redundancy among proverbs from diverse cultures and geographical regions (detectable especially in advice aimed at adaptive behaviours)

2)  numerous proverbs dealing with kin (families, marriages, husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings, etc.); numerous proverbs dealing with communal life (neighbours, friends, social leaders, visitors, strangers, etc.); numerous proverbs dealing with social intercourse (exchange, debt, borrowing, fairness, reputation, etc.)

3)  a preponderance of men’s point of view (detectable in proverbs dealing with men-women relationships, such as in marital or love-related advice)

My database were proverbs from various cultures and regions of the world —some 35,000 entries in all.[xxi] In all three cases, the null hypothesis proved void: the findings were consistent with the predictions. There is a massive redundancy across cultures. We reinvent the wheel over and over again, so that all proverbs cited in this article have equivalents in numerous other cultures. All nations have their version of When in Rome, do as the Romans do or, in old Bihar version: Suit your appearance to the country. All, even Egyptians almost 4,000 years ago, have their version of the golden rule: Do for one who may do for you, that you may cause him thus to do.

These and countless other examples attest that human nature respects no national boundaries. Folk wisdom comes from insight repeated from one society to another, indexed by its transpersonal character. For historical reasons, classical and biblical sources have been disseminated more widely in our civilization. But they are animated by the same sentiments that animate proverbial wisdom from regions outside the sway of the western civilization, such as Persia and South-east Asia, and from peoples that have retained their nomadic or agrarian way of life.

Proverbs, moreover, are mirrors of our evolutionary priorities. In line with the predictions, communal life and social intercourse dominate the agenda. Many concern themselves with lineages, blood, hereditary characteristics, marriages, weddings, incests, quality of wives, resemblance of children to parents, and so on. At the same time, they also mirror the patriarchal hierarchy of social position and transmission of (oral) knowledge. One hilarious result of this preponderance of men’s point of view is, as I discovered, a venomous hatred of mothers-in-law in all cultures (and not a word anywhere about fathers-in-law)!

So much for the more obvious result of my research. My other predictions are considerably less obvious but, at the same time, more specific. Both attempt to tease out the adaptive tension between the egoistic “me first” and altruistic “we first” vectors:

4)  in the case of proverbs dealing specifically with social life, there should be direct contradictions between prosocial sentiments and self-serving ones (reflecting the selective pressures of within-group and between-group selection)

5)  at the same time, there should be a significant quantitative preponderance of prosocial proverbs over egoistic ones (reflecting the need to police self-serving and antisocial behaviour)

Once again, the data is consistent with the predictions. Proverbs dealing with social life display stark and direct contradictions. Limitations of space allow me to include only small sample below, but I have deliberately mixed in proverbs from around the world in order to exemplify the transcultural nature of the “me first” versus “we first” tug-of-war. None of these examples, I reiterate, are one-off exceptions. All without exception have equivalents in many—in some cases all—other cultures. In quite a few cases, in fact, polar opposites can be found within one and the same culture, as in the opening examples from Burma and France.

By association with whatever friend safety diminishes (Burmese), but By association with whatever friend safety increases (Burmese)

A sin that is hidden is half forgiven (French), but Clean conscience makes a good pillow (French)

Everyone lays a burden on the willing horse (Irish), but A voluntary burden is no burden (Italian)

Friendship is friendship, but money has to be counted (Russian), but Mutual confidence is the pillar of friendship (Chinese)

If you would be well served, serve yourself (English), but Nobody can rest in his own shadow (Hungarian)

If all men pulled in one direction, the world would topple over (Yiddish), but A boat doesn’t go forward is everyone is rowing his own way (Swahili)

Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others (French), but In a village divided against itself even a monkey will not abide (Tamil)

Old promises are left behind (Maori), but There is no virtue in a promise unless it be kept (Danish)

Love your neighbour, but don’t pull down the fence (German), but A near neighbour is better than a distant cousin (Italian)

A good bone never falls to a good dog (French), but Honest fame awaits the truly good (Latin)

Love thy neighbour, but don’t let him into your house (Maltese), but Love thy neighbour (Greek)

Better one true friend than a hundred relations (Italian), but An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship (Spanish)

A long continued loan usually confers ownership (Irish), but A loan, though old, is no gift (Hungarian)

Be particular about your conscience and you will have nothing to eat (Chinese), but Honest fame awaits the truly good (Latin)

Pardon one offence, and you invite many (Latin), but It is more noble to pardon that to punish (Arabic)

A patriot is a fool in every age (English), but He serves me most who serves his country (Greek)

Trust not the many minded populace (Greek), but The voice of the people is the voice of God (Latin)

Revenge is the pleasure of gods (French), but Revenge is a tree that bears no fruit (Dutch)

The troubles of a stranger aren’t worth an onion (Yiddish), but Do good regardless of consequences (Chinese)

If it’s not your worry, don’t hurry (Polish), but He who lives for himself is truly dead to others (Latin)

Your partner is your opponent (Egyptian), but A thing is bigger for being shared (Gaelic)

The malice of relatives is like a scorpion’s sting (Egyptian), but Your family may chew you but it will not swallow you (Arabic)

Proverbs are not transmitted by individuals but by groups. As such, they ought to reflect the needs of groups, i.e. extol prosociality and condemn egoism. I found this, indeed, to be the case. Moralistic advice against putting on airs, not repaying debts, forgetting obligations, breaking one’s word, oppressing the less fortunate, not sharing wealth, being lazy, gossipy, vindictive, deceitful, envious, jealous, hypocritical, materialistic, exploitative, godless, and so on, is the norm. From thousands upon thousands, I can only reproduce a handful. Most should be familiar in spirit, if not in word, again testifying to their transcultural character:

An ape’s an ape though he wears a gold ring (Dutch)

If one does not counsel one’s brother, one will share in the misfortune (Yoruba)

If the family lives in harmony, all affairs will prosper (Chinese)

They don’t unload the caravan for one lame donkey (Iranian)

The career of falsehood is short (Pashto)

A chief is known by his subjects (Hawaiian)

A bad coconut spoils the good ones (Swahili)

Cheerful company shortens the miles (German)

The confession of a fault removes half its guilt (Tamil)

Courtesy that is one side cannot last long (French)

A common danger produces unity (Slovakian)

A good deed bears interest (Estonian)

A single finger cannot catch fleas (Haitian)

Give a little and you gain a lot (Pashto)

Charity begins at home (English)

A good man protects three villages; a good dog, three houses (Chinese)

The staves of ten men make the load of one (Behar)

Though you go fifty miles for it, you must have society (Tamil)

Love thy neighbour as yourself (Bible)

Do not go to his house if he does not come to yours (Tunisian)

Society is ancient as the world (French)

Credit is invisible fortune (Japanese)

If a countryman of mine gets beaten I am thereby weakened (Chinese)

Given the equally deep-seeded predisposition to take care of number one, it should also be mirrored in behavioural advice that casts doubt on trucking with others. Oftentimes family, neighbours and social groups can, after all, be less than trustworthy or easy to live with. This ought to be reflected in advice against being prosocial. Again, in terms of propositional logic, this makes little sense. If I enjoin you to p, I should not enjoin you to ~p. But socially and evolutionarily it makes perfect sense. Evolution works on what it gets, and what it gets in this case is different levels of natural selection.

At different times, individualism and prosociality make adaptive sense, and both ought to be common enough to be noticed and warned against. To put it cynically, social norms are enforced for each individual’s benefit. You are always better off when all others are altruistic. The rational strategy is to trumpet social norms while evading them. You get the credit for being a good guy and benefit from the effect it has on others, but you also reap whatever benefit might accrue from cheating (so long as you are not caught).

The number of antisocial sentiments, however, ought to be significantly smaller than the number of injunctions against egoism. Although, for illustrative purposes, the sample below is exactly the same as the prosocial proverbs above, the numerical disparity between the two groups is enormous and unmistakable. My estimate is that the ratio of proverbial prosociality to egoism is between 10:1 and 100:1, and almost certainly closer to the upper value. Prosocial policing is, in other words, very much in evidence at the level of behavioural advice bequeathed by one generation to the next in order to counter egoistic sentiments, such as:

The best neighbours are vacant lots (French)

A man is a tiger in his own affairs (Tamil)

People seldom wish that others prosper (Yoruba)[xxii]

The camel carries the burden, the dog does the panting (Turkish)

If you do not ask their help, all men are good natured (Chinese)

Better to be alone than in bad company (Spanish)

To accept a favour is to lose your liberty (Polish)

Everybody collects coals under his own kettle (Finnish)

To live is either to beat or to be beaten (Russian)

A stolen orange is better tasting than your own (African Bemba)

If you want to please everybody, you’ll die before your time (Yiddish)

We all love justice in the house of others (French)

There are only two good men—one dead, the other unborn (Chinese)

Unguarded property teaches people to steal (Lebanese)

Relatives are friends from necessity (Russian)

Self-preservation is the first law of nature (English)

When you go out to buy, don’t show your silver (Chinese)

If everyone swept in front of his house, the whole town would be clean (Polish)

A good man is always made to toil (Tamil)

Kind hearts are soonest wronged (French)

Too much trust breeds disappointments (Philippines)

Fence your own vineyard, and keep your eyes from those of others (Greek)

The first time it’s a favour, the second, a rule (Chinese)

My preliminary study of the adaptive origins of social proverbs is merely a small token in the heap of evidence corroborating the neo-Darwinian account of human affairs. Naturally, proverbs reward study not only as evidence of human origins but as literary artifacts in their own write. Their authority and evocative resonance make themselves felt in any number of social contexts. One of them is  American politics as exemplified by the abolitionist oratory of the 1872 American Vice-Presidential candidate, Frederick Douglass.

Wolfgang Mieder, a scholar by whose standard the study of proverbs must be measured, leaves no doubt that Douglass relied heavily on biblical proverbs to strengthen the social and moral sentiments in his abolitionist polemics. Biblical sources boosted the authority of Douglass’s philippics while adding the cachet of employing folk wisdom in the fight against slavery. In general, as authoritative collective statements, proverbs are well suited to being used as moral and political weapons, a lesson not lost on generations of American presidents always in search of that folksy touch.[xxiii]

Works Cited

Berreby, David. Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind. New York: Little Brown, 2005.

Blakeslee, Sandra. “Cells That Read Minds.” New York Times 10 January (2006). http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10mirr.html

Brandt, R.B. Facts Values and Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Broom, Donald M. The Evolution of Morality and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Bulbulia, Joseph, Richard Sosis, Russell Genet, Cheryl Genet, Erica Harris, and Karen Wyman, eds. The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, and Critiques. Santa Margarita, CA: Collins Foundation Press, 2008.

Christian, John. Behar Proverbs. London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner &Co., 1891.

Cordry, Harold V. The Multicultural Dictionary of Proverbs. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1997.

de Waal, Frans, and Robert Wright, Christine M. Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher, Peter Singer. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton UP, 2006.

di Pellegrino, G., L.Fadiga, L. Fogassi, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti. “Uunderstanding motor events: a neurophysiological study.” Experimental Brain Research 91 (1992): 176-180.

Ghiselin, Michael. The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1974.

Gottschall, Jonathan, and David Sloan Wilson, eds. The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Forewords by E.O. Wilson and Frederick Crews. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2005.

Gray, James. Ancient Proverbs and Maxims from Burmese Sources. London: Trubner & Co, 1886.

Hart, Henry H. (translator). Seven Hundred Chinese Proverbs. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1947.

Hutton, Will. “Why America’s Richest Love Taxes.” Observer 25 Feb (2001). http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,442671,00.html

Jensen, Herman. A Classified Collection of Tamil Proverbs. London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner &Co., 1897.

Johnston, David Cay. “Corporate Wealth Share Rises for Top-Income Americans.” New York Times 29 Jan (2006): 1:22.

Lasher, Lawrence M., ed. Conversations with Bernard Malamud. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

Malamud, Bernard. God’s Grace. New York: Avon, 1982.

McCombs, Phil. “Century of Thanatos: Walker Percy and His Subversive Message.” In Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. More Conversations with Walker Percy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. 189-207.

Mertvago, Peter. Dictionary of 1000 French Proverbs with English Equivalents. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1996.

Mieder Wolfgang. Proverbs From Around the World. Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998.

Mieder, Wolfgang. “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You”: Frederick Douglass’s Proverbial Struggle for Civil Rights.” Journal of American Folklore 114:453 (2001): 331-357.

Owomoyela, Oyekan. Yoruba Proverbs. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Richards, Janet Radcliffe. Human Nature after Darwin: a Philosophical Introduction. London, New York: Routledge, 2000.

Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2005.

Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Corrado Sinigaglia. Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

Scarborough, W. A Collection of Chinese Proverbs. Changsha: China, 1926; New York: Paragon, 1964.

Skinner, B.F. Walden Two. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005. [1948]

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edinburgh: 1759.

Swirski, Peter. Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution (Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture Series). Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.

Swirski, Peter. “When Biological Evolution and Social Revolution Clash: Skinner’s Behaviorist Utopia.” In Andrews, Alice, and Joseph Carroll, eds. The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science and Culture. New York: SUNY Press, 2009. 46-58.

Swirski, Peter, ed. I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature. Montreal, London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.

Swirski, Peter. Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory. London, New York: Routledge, 2007.

Tomasello, Michael. “The Human Adaptation for Culture.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 509-29.

Tomasello, Michael, and H. Rakoczy. “What makes human cognition unique? From individual to shared to collective intentionality.” Mind and Language 18 (2003): 121-147.

Tomasello, Michael, et al. “Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 675-735.

Tomasello, Michael, et al. “Cultural learning.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1993): 495-552.

Wilson, David Sloan, and Edward O. Wilson. “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 82:4 (2007): 327-348.

Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf, 1998.

Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology: the New Synthesis. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Endnotes

[ii] For the analysis of Skinner’s behaviourist utopia from an evolutionary standpoint, see Swirski “When Biological Evolution and Social Revolution Clash” [2009].

[iii] See Malamud’s remarks on constitutional ideals in Talking Horse, 145-146.

[iv] Page 198. See Brandt [1996], 78-79, for a comparative discussion of the earliest versions of the moral code in ancient Attica.

[v] Hutton online; see also Johnston; Swirski, Ars Americana, Ars Politica.

[vi] Eastern Iranian ethno-linguistic group; today the language of Pashtuns is found mostly in Afghanistan and some provinces of Pakistan.

[vii] Wilson, [2000], 249.

[viii] David Sloan Wilson, in Gottschall and Wilson 23. Gene-culture coevolution is also known as Double Inheritance Theory (DIT).

[ix] For cultural “ratcheting”, see Tomasello; Tomasello et al.; Tomasello and Rakoczy.

[x] Richerson and Boyd [2005] provide a spectrum of examples among which the Dinka and Nuer tribal customs and domination, and Yankee vs Southern excitability and culture of honour may by now be regarded as canonical.

[xi] Research on mirror neurons in simians predates that on humans; see di Pelligrino et al.

[xii] Rizolati and Sinigaglia, 124; for “triadic” semiotics, see Percy [1975].

[xiii] Mirror neurons, reports Giacomo Rizzolatti, operate “by feeling not by thinking”; in Blakeslee online.

[xiv] See de Waal [2006].

[xv] The esprit de corps, frequently expressed as a “brotherhood in arms”—especially in small, tight-knit, frontline units—could also activate self-sacrifice as a sublimated form of “kin” selection.

[xvi] See de Waal [2006].

[xvii] Swirski [2007].

[xviii] In actuality there were two theorems.

[xix] Book of Proverbs, 1:3.

[xx] Ghiselin rejected what is known as Veneer Theory of human morality with an ironic: “Scratch an ‘altruist’ and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed” (247).

[xxi] See Christian, Cordry, Gray, Hart, Jensen, Mertvago, Mieder, Owomoyela, and Scarborough in the bibliography.

[xxii] Interpretation of the rather obscure and long original; see Owomoyela.

[xxiii] See Mieder [2001].

Our interest in the role played by social intelligence in politics suffices to generate much of the aesthetic attraction of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Not only is the opera a remarkably faithful reenactment of Russia’s dynastic struggle in 1598-1605, it is replete with cases of deceit and also passages of unprecedented psychological insight. The composer’s pursuit of “musical truth” anticipates much of the modern Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis.

*********

Musical Truth in Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov

Modest Musorgsky

“My music must be . . . truthful, accurate.”

The central work in the Russian operatic canon, Boris Godunov (1872), lends support to a hypothesis that art “serves to develop awareness of our own capabilities,” in this case, by providing insights “into interpersonal politics and personal subjectivity” (Cooke, 2008: 153). Not only does this opera present a remarkably accurate portrait of Russia’s dynastic struggle at the beginning of the 17^th century, its portrait of the guilt-ravaged tsar constituted a substantial advance on previous methods of depicting subjective states of mind and anticipates modern views regarding social intelligence. These agendas, whether or not part of the composer’s conscious design, can be seen as essential to the considerable appeal of Boris, its pursuit of musical truth. The opera, especially the rendering of the title role, constituted a watershed in musical history, one that set many subsequent composers on a quest for greater psychological verisimilitude, often at the cost of melody, symmetry, and, indeed, comprehensibility itself. We can also see it as turning a new page regarding the essentials of political relationships, for Boris is the most political opera in the core repertory.[1]

Boris’ popularity is all the more remarkable for the many ways in which it bucks common notions regarding the writing of accessible works for the stage. Its central issue, the presumed assassination of Dmitry, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, takes place seven years before the drama begins, and whether it even occurred remains a major point of doubt for many of the characters, inasmuch as Grishka Otrepev, who ran away from a Moscow monastery in 1602, is able to convince a growing number of supporters that he is the tsarevich, that he miraculously survived the attempt on his life. The events are not only unfamiliar to Western audiences but also unclear to Russians, amongst whom the opera has supreme prestige; the political entanglements are more than byzantine—no fewer than three of the characters depicted occupied the throne subsequent to Boris: Boris’ young son Feodor who ruled but for days, Grishka (identified as the Pretender), and Boris’ courtier, Vasily Shuisky. All and probably others have reason to covet the throne, with the result highly salient to our study that one almost never knows whom to believe. There is little onstage violence and what appears to some as a love interest is in fact a dark parody of love; as a means of gaining a Polish army to advance his aims, Grishka contracts a marriage to Marina Mniszek, who is interested in the Russian only because she hopes to become tsaritsa. Those few who know the subsequent history of the “Time of Troubles,” 1606-1613, will remember that the actual Marina later recognized yet another “Dmitry” as her husband in order to regain her place by the throne. Most seriously, the principals never encounter each other a la Macbeth and MacDuff in the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy and Verdi’s opera. Rather, as recounted in history, Boris suddenly died of natural causes in 1605. Musorgsky leads us to believe this is caused either by feelings of guilt for complicity in the boy’s murder or by stress resulting from the Pretender’s approach to Moscow.

The music is rarely excerpted for concert or recital performance; it is effective only as a setting to the drama.[2] Although Musorgsky inserted a polonaise and a few folk songs in his 1872 revision, there is little opportunity for vocal display; rather, grim, inflected speech declamation characterizes the bulk of the work. As several commentators have noted, the opera comprises not a “continuously developed action,” but rather “a series of episodes held together by an epic thread and the central figure of the Tsar” (Grout and Palisca, 1996: 71). Precisely what brings on Boris’ demise—historical accounts suggest some sort of stroke—becomes the major unifying theme; as a result, Boris is the first psychological opera, par excellence, indeed.[3] Internal evidence leads us to conclude that this is the key to its being “the essential Russian opera” (Layton, 1998: 18). Vladimir Stasov said it is “one of the greatest works not only of Russian but of all European art” (cited in Taruskin, 1993: 290). The question I pose in this essay is how evolutionary criticism can account for the extraordinary prestige of this opera.

Boris holds the stage and would be yet more frequent on our shores if it were not for its exotic language—few Western singers or choruses are trained to sing in Russian—immense production costs—generally lavish sets are required for this costume drama—and parts which require not only demanding singing but also acting of a quality unprecedented on the operatic stage. Konstantin Stanislavsky said that Feodor Chaliapin’s performance of the title role inspired his system of method acting (Elliott 2006: 259). And it is a work of literary merit. Not only did Musorgsky adapt Alexander Pushkin’s tragedy of the same name—a play increasingly recognized as the poet’s most important work—but Prince Dmitry Mirsky’s A History of Russian Literature praises the composer as a dramatic genius on the basis of how he set Pushkin’s unperformed tragedy (1958: 255). So, a secondary question for this essay: how is this kind of dramatic success accomplished in Mussorgsky’s pursuit of a specifically “musical truth.”

To be sure, heads of state and other political leaders figure large in the 100 most popular operas. The title characters of Aida, Salome, Turandot, Otello, Don Carlos, Lohengrin, Nabucco, Elektra, La clemenza di Tito, Simon Boccanegra, Macbeth, Idomeneo, Tristan und Isolde, L’incoronazione de Poppea, Guilio Cesare, Oberon, and Dido and Aeneas are all members of ruling families. As witnessed in much stage drama, the high social status of these characters appears to raise the ante of interest in the action; it follows that their fates should seem to have more sway on our own.[4] Political intrigues also are prominent in Tosca, Rigoletto, Fidelio, Andre Chenier, Dialogues of the Carmelites, Un ballo in maschera, and Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina. But with the exception of works like Macbeth and Dialogues, politics alone does not suffice to generate an evening-long entertainment; it usually serves as but a background to issues of romantic and/or filial love—themes that relate closely to inclusive fitness and that are thus easily scanned by evolutionary criticism. The Russian composer, Alexander Serov claimed that “music, by virtue of its open, candid nature, is but a poor elucidator of political and diplomatic intrigue” (cited in Taruskin 1993, 128). Almost uniquely, Boris is a successful opera that deploys almost exclusively political themes. Insofar as we surmise that much of the attraction of art lies in its resonance with “epigenetic rules” like mate selection, paternal uncertainty, incest, and reciprocal altruism, Boris poses a challenge to evolutionary criticism. Given that opera is an expensive art form, a greater load is placed on explaining how it comes to be performed. This is yet more the case in Boris which lacks several of the most popular elements of popular operas.

I am presupposing that successful works of art interest audiences by reference to the same issues that play a prominent role in determination of their inclusive fitness. Presumably, if something is crucial to our success or failure as reproducing organisms, we should tend to pay attention to it. Of course, there are many cases of misapplied attention, but, as Mark Schaller, Justin H. Park, and Douglas T. Kenrick argue, given that “attention is a limited resource,” “the human mind seems to be hypervigilant to cues connoting fitness-relevant perils and prospects.” As a result, “[p]eople are motivated to communicate about some kinds of information more than others, and these more highly communicable knowledge structures are more likely to become culturally popular” (Schaller, Park & Kenrick, 2007:494, 495, 501). We anticipate that the internal features of works of art will reflect our evolved tendencies in the allocation of attention.

Some well-identified epigenetic themes can be discerned in the opera. One of the basic themes of the tragedy is pedicide (killing children) and a corresponding affront to notions of justice and prosocial behavior. The end of the Rurikovich Dynasty began in 1581 when Ivan the Terrible killed his eldest son Ivan, his healthy successor, in a sudden moment of anger. This left the microcephalic Feodor to succeed him in 1584. With the tsar visibly incapable of ruling “all the Russias,” the country was run by his brother-in-law, Boris Godunov. The dynasty became even more fragile in 1591 when Ivan’s other surviving son, Dmitry, mysteriously died in Uglich. An official inquest led by Vasily Shuisky judged the nine-year-old boy’s death an accidental suicide—they concluded the boy suffered an epileptic fit while playing with a knife. Even so rumors persist as the opera begins that Boris ordered his assassination in order to clear his way to the throne seven years later. The curtain rises in 1598 when Feodor died without a surviving heir and his widow Irina refused the throne. A crowd comes to the monastery where Boris took refuge, pretending to refuse their plea that he accept the crown. This is followed, of course, by “The Coronation Scene,” where Boris claims to be overwhelmed by the prospect of assuming responsibilities he has already held for 14 years. If according to the historian Nikolai Karamzin, Pushkin’s principal source, Boris was guilty of the crime, this would have required a special degree of foresight on his part. Tsar Feodor was healthy in 1591 and capable of producing a healthy successor—his daughter subsequently died at only one year of age.[5] Indeed, few modern historians continue to maintain his guilt. Caryl Emerson also argues that it would hardly have been characteristic for a medieval tsar to feel pangs of conscience in such a case—the historical Boris certainly purged many of his other rivals—but he well might have feared supernatural retribution (Emerson & Oldani, 1994: 209). Obviously, it mattered to Pushkin, who wrote the first version of his play in 1825, and Musorgsky, who submitted the first version of Boris in 1869, that the tsar experienced guilt.[6] They evidently believed that considerations of justice required some recompense on Boris’ part for his crime. Musorgsky altered Pushkin’s text so that it is Pimen, the monastic chronicler who first charges Boris with murder, who relates a miracle to the tsar proving that his victim is now a saint in Heaven—and thus brings on Boris’ fatal stroke.

It should already be clear that Boris does not fit the typical pattern of an opera; rather, it largely follows an arguably accurate account of the actual events. The opera then skips to 1602, when Grishka Otrepiev, a novice in the Miracle Monastery, hears about these events from Pimen. Grishka echoes his mentor’s call for divine justice to be visited on Boris, but this impulse is immediately supplanted by one of regal ambition. Hearing that Dmitry, if the prince had lived, would be about his age, Grishka flees to Poland. Word reaches Boris that his Polish enemies have received and recognized this “Dmitry Ivanovich” as the rightful heir to the throne. Whether this was the actual son of Ivan the Terrible, who somehow escaped assassination, and/or Grishka Otrepiev, is a continuing matter of speculation; for our purposes it suffices to note that Karamzin, Pushkin, and Musorgsky treat him as an imposter. The tsar vainly orders the novice’s arrest and asks that Dmitry’s relics be transferred to Moscow as means of proving that the boy is dead. No doubt these developments caused Boris undue stress, but his death must be ascribed to medical or psychological causes, not military or political.

Both Pushkin and Musorgsky set Karamzin’s historical account as part of intentional challenge to write dramas without substantial love interest—a feature in more than eighty percent of the core opera repertory (Cooke, 2010: 79). Arriving in Poland Grishka asserted his claim to the crown and, as part of recruiting support of local Polish nobles, won the hand of Marina Mniszek. What follows in “The Fountain Scene” is a wicked parody of a romantic assignation, normally a staple of conventional opera—albeit directors often miss the irony in the text. While the genuinely smitten “Dmitry” would prefer to be loved for his own sake, Marina will only have him if he really expects to occupy the throne and bring her with him.[7] It is one of the remarkable features of Boris that so much aesthetic interest can be elicited by this unremitting series of selfish and duplicitous characters. With the presentation of romantic love so repellent in the opera, the question then becomes how the composers and their audience are attracted to this very motley tale. Evidence of prosocial behavior is scanty and it is difficult to identify a moral “hero.”

An argument can be made for filial love as a motivating theme in the opera. The “Terem Scene,” set in Boris’ Kremlin apartments, depicts the tsar’s doting attention to his daughter Ksenia and son Feodor. Like Macbeth, he is a criminal interloper concerned with starting a dynasty; he monitors Feodor’s study of the map of Russia. Boris elicits some sympathy as a loving parent. Later in the penultimate “Duma Scene,” the dying tsar instructs Feodor once again in the art of statesmanship and installs him on the throne. Whether or not cognizant of the actual history, the audience rightly surmises it will not be long before Grishka has the boy killed.[8] The work closes with a “holy fool” mourning the fate of the entire country,

Woe, woe to Russia, weep,

Weep, ye Russian people,

Ye starving people! (420)

Seven years of political chaos are clearly in view.

Given their limited development in the opera, it does not appear that the themes described above provide much more than a peripheral evolutionary account for the opera. Of course, it is not to be expected that one or any small group of evolutionary themes suffice to motivate either the composition and/or appreciation of a work of art, let alone one the size and complexity of Boris Godunov. Something more seems to be required.

I suggest that a major ingredient in the mix is the still insufficiently chartered nexus of Theory of Mind and social intelligence—a nexus highly relevant to almost all political relationships. Simon Baron-Cohen posits a Theory of Mind module to account for our ability to model the consciousness of other people by means of self-consciousness. “Human have evolved to be able to attribute mental states to interpret and predict action—that is, to ‘mindread’” (1997: 207) That ability allows us to anticipate other people’s actions and have some sense of whom to trust and whom to fear. Obviously, this ability is highly fallible. Social intelligence can be impeded by a co-evolved ability to obstruct penetration by others, to deceive others, and even to deceive one’s self..

The drive to gain insight into human nature constitutes one of the major themes of narrative arts, including opera.[9] That drive is rooted in a universal human disposition but can be cultivated and developed by cultural means. The development of “realism” as a narrative mode can be characterized as a cultural technology aimed at developing our innate powers of psychological penetration. Boris marks a major milestone in the development of greater psychological realism in opera, both in terms of increasingly detailed and incisive depictions of subjectivity in libretti and in the musical language used to set them.[10] It is as if composers, librettists, their producers, and their audiences, were conducting a progressive course of research into the experience of being human.[11]

My argument is prompted by observation of the unusual emphasis placed on truth in Musorgsky’s opera. Prosocial behavior depends on some degree of honesty in communication; otherwise, it is difficult to imagine how cooperation can be established and maintained. On the other hand, allies are coincidentally competitors, so alliance dictates a certain degree of dissimulation. To prevent exploitation by others, we are constantly on the lookout for deception; signals suggesting intended deception heighten interest and leave stronger traces in memory. Not surprising, then, that the Dmitry legend was dramatized by Lope de Vega, Alexander Sumarokov, and Friedrich Schiller, and set on the opera stage by Johann Mattheson.

As arguably the political opera, it seems symptomatic that Boris is replete with various cases of lying. In a fashion sadly characteristic of politicians, Boris begins the action by lying to the Russian people as a whole. He pretends to refuse popular demand that he assume the throne, now that the country’s first dynasty has come to an end. For their part, the crowd pretends to plea for him, prodded to do so by major boyars and the police. Whom this is meant to deceive is an unanswered question. This is followed by the “Coronation Scene” where Boris indeed accepts the crown, as the crowd—it would be the same chorus in a performance—and his known rivals call out, “Long life!” to him. Later, to dispel rumors that Dmitry is approaching Moscow to reclaim the throne, Boris has the boy’s relics transferred to Moscow and orders a requiem mass to be sung in his honor in St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square. Although he requests that Dmitry be recognized as a saint, he is so disturbed by Pimen’s account of miracles performed in the tsarevich’s name that he suffers his fatal stroke. Clearly there is a contradiction in this.

Meanwhile, Musorgsky makes it quite clear that Grishka Otrepev is not only a Pretenderl he is also not otherwise to be trusted. Grishka knows from Pimen that the monk saw the body, ergo that he is not the tsarevich.[12] In the “Inn Scene,” Grishka tells guards that he was leading the itinerant monks Varlaam and Missail, when it was they who guided him—and he does this quite brazenly in their presence. Grishka is travelling in disguise, nevertheless, he is unsettled to learn that the guards are carrying a warrant for his arrest and execution. He then misreads the warrant to implicate Varlaam. In the “Polish Act,” Grishka, of course, passes himself off as the proper heir to the Russian throne; given his distinct appearance—red hair, warts, and a deformed arm—this appears to be a brazen lie, one easily compared with memories of the tsarevich. In Pushkin’s play Grishka’s Polish hosts suspect him, but they are not that interested in the truth, nor is Marina. It is far more advantageous for them to believe his story and use him as a weapon against Moscow and a venue to the throne.

These leaders, of course, are not alone in their disregard for the truth. The border guards press the warrant on Varlaam and Missail as a means of shaking them down for money. One cannot be confident regarding Vaarlam’s plea of poverty. Interestingly, the monk expresses his suspicions at Grishka’s refusal to drink with them. (252) Though betrayed by Grishka in Act I, Varlaam and Missail fail to recognize him in “Dmitry” as the latter leads a Polish army, Jesuits, and a motley Russian crowd against Moscow in the concluding “Kromny Forest” revolution scene (Taruskin 1993: 273). For his part, Dmitry trusts neither Rangoni nor Marina’s protestations of her love, and with good reason, for she is only faking her passion for him. One rarely knows whom to believe, even in soliloquies.[13]

One would hardly expect that rivals would be candid with each other. Information is power, and so is misinformation. At different junctures Boris gives specific instructions that the truth be told to him—apparently they require reiteration, especially as the stakes rise. Note how Boris insults Vasily Shuisky to his face:

Ah, the most illustrious orator,

worthy ringleader

of the brainless herd;

the criminal leader

of the seditious boyars

the arch rival of the royal throne.

The impudent liar, who has

broken his oath three times,

the cunning hypocrite,

the sly flatterer,

the woman making communion bread,

while wearing the hat of a boyar,

the deceiver and the rogue!       (304-6)

Boris has just heard a spy’s report that Shuisky has held secret conversations regarding messages from Poland. How are Boris’ insults to motivate Shuisky to give him what he wants? It is at this point that Shuisky announces the appearance of the Pretender. When Shuisky describes how he led the investigation into Dmitry’s death more than a dozen years previously, the audience may wonder why he goes into such detail regarding the uncorrupted state of the body, including his observation that the boy was still smiling. Can we place confidence in his assertions? Could it be that this future tsar has his eye on the crown? Notably his report so unsettles Boris that the tsar asks strange questions such as

Have you ever heard…

of dead children

rising from their graves . . .

to interrogate tsars . . .

lawful tsars . . .

elected by the whole nation . . .

and crowned

by the great Patriarch . . . (312)

Only minutes later Boris suffers hallucinations of the bloody child approaching him in the “Clock Scene.” Is his mental breakdown Shuisky’s design? Of course, it is Shuisky who later ushers in Pimen to tell how shepherd regained his sight by praying to the now angelic Dmitry. Why is Pimen’s witness necessary? In any case, the shepherd’s tale is the blow that brings on the tsar’s fatal stroke. It should be kept in mind that neither Pimen nor Shuisky, who knows what the monk is going to say, has the best intentions for Boris. One regards the tsar as a regicide, the other has all but heard Boris’ confession and is well aware of the rumors surrounding the boy’s mysterious death. Other boyars accuse Shuisky of telling crowds the boy is alive. (372)

Lisa Zunshine warns that there is a limit to the number of liars a prose fiction can bear: “By creating a narrative framework in which everybody could be lying, such novels push to its furthest limits our ability to store information about our own and other people’s mental states under advisement” (2006: 133). Perhaps this is not as much a problem in dramatic narrative, where this is no possibly deceptive narrator intruding between the audience and the objective facts to be seen on the stage. Nevertheless, it is problematical that the central action of Boris, the murder of the tsarevich, not only is not staged but is not even related by eyewitnesses. Instead, the best accounts we are given are Pimen and Shuisky’s visits after the event. And this happened seven years before the curtain rises.

At the first mention of the Pretender in Act II, Boris orders Feodor to leave the room. There are limits to how much he will instruct his son in the art of statecraft. Later, while dying, he tells Feodor not to inquire how his father reached the throne. This very pregnant hint, of course, belies Boris’ vain effort to shield his family from the fateful knowledge. He doesn’t lie, but then he does not tell the truth. And the lack of candor is intended as a help—or at least, this is what the audience has to assume. Their task of interpreting the operas only becomes more vexed when we consider the problem of Boris concealing things not only from people who ought to be able to trust him, such as his heir, but also from himself.

Since the Pretender can only exert pressure on Boris, the deterioration of tsar’s state of mind becomes the principal action of this epic opera. His four monologues track the accumulating process by which he is forced to acknowledge a crime he has tried not to recall. Here the presumed virtues of self-deceit come to mind; if Boris were able to forget that he ordered the assassination, he likely would have been able to rule more effectively. But remorse is weighing on his mind from his first words in the opera as he accepts the crown, public words hardly appropriate for “The Coronation Scene”:

My soul is sad!

Some involuntary fear

has gripped my heart

with ominous foreboding. (224)

With “O, God of righteousness” his next breath, one can readily conceive that a medieval tsar might fear divine punishment, but it is also symptomatic that Boris speaks as if he does not know the source of his dread. In his second monologue, in the Terem Scene that makes up Act II, things clear up some, but not completely. As the focal center of the opera and the most important soliloquy in Russian opera, it is worth citing in full:[14]

I have achieved supreme power,

For six years already

My rule has been peaceful

but there is no happiness

in my tormented soul. |

It is in vain that the soothsayers

promise me a long life

and days of untroubled power. |

Neither life, nor power,

nor the delusion of fame,

nor the shouts of the crowd

can cheer me! |

In my family

I imagined I would find happiness,

I prepared a joyous wedding feast

for my daughter,

my own innocent darling

the tsarevna. |

Like a storm, death

carried off the bridegroom! |

(grows pensive)

How heavily weighs

the right hand of the awesome judge,

how terrible his sentence

on the criminal soul . . .

All around there is but darkness

And impenetrable gloom!

If there were only

a ray of happiness! |

My heart is full of sorrow,

and my weary spirit

pines and languishes.

(in a whisper) |

Some kind of secret trepidation…

and you forever expect . . . |

With a fervent prayer

to the Lord’s saints

I imagined that I could silence

the sufferings of my soul…

amid all the grandeur and the splendor

of limitless power,

the master of all Russia, I begged

for tears of consolation . . . |

but I get reports: the sedition of the boyars,

the machinations of Lithuania, and

secret schemes to undermine our power.

Hunger, pestilence, earthquakes

and destruction . . .

Like a wild beast,

our plague-ridden people roam about;

poor, starving

Russia is groaning… |

and in our dire sorrow

sent down by God

for our grievous sins

as a trial,

I am named

the cause of all these misfortunes,

and on the squares

people curse the name of Boris! |

Even sleep eludes me

and in the darkness of the night

the blood-stained child rises up before me . . .

His eyes blaze

and clenching his little hands

he begs for mercy . . .

But there was no mercy!

The terrible wound gapes wide!

The sound of his

mortal cry . . .

(jumps up and sinks heavily into the chair.) |

O, Lord, o, my God . . . (290-94)

Obviously, Boris is suffering from depression; he repeatedly describes internal sensations. He soon returns to the ominous tone of his coronation speech, but note how he will not enunciate to himself its cause. Rather he points to “Some kind of secret trepidation,” senses divine retribution at hand and speaks of a “criminal soul,” but without acknowledging that it is his, even though he then mentions the sufferings of his soul and “tears of consolation.” Clearly his conscience is shaping the course of his thoughts. Family woes are replaced by those of the whole nation. Boris acknowledges only “our grievous sins,” albeit he is the one singled out by others for blame. Finally, he begins to imagine the dying tsarevich; since the crime took place not in Moscow but in Uglich, this is the product of his imagination, not something he could have remembered.

Boris comes closer to acknowledging his complicity shortly after his conversation with Shuisky regarding the inquest. Left alone in what is termed “The Clock Scene,” Boris begins to admit to himself what he must have always known, indeed could not possibly forget, and cannot put out of his mind: he speaks even more about internal sensations and hallucinates the approach of the murdered boy. Keep in mind that all the while he is talking to himself—and the audience—in private.

Ah, how painful;

let me get my breath.

I felt all my blood

rushing to my face

and then it drained away suddenly.

O, cruel conscience,

what a terrible punishment you exact!

(The stage darkens. The clock with its chimes springs into action)

If there is a single stain on you . . .

just one chance stain . . .

your soul burns

and your heart if filled with poison.

It becomes painful, so painful . . .

It hammers in your ears

with its reproaches and it curses . . .

it somehow suffocates you . . .

It suffocates . . .

and your head reels . . .

(The clock strikes eight.)

The bloodstained child

is in your eyes.

There . . . over there . . . what is it?

There, in the corner . . .

it is hovering, it is getting larger . . .

it is coming closer . . .  it quivers and groans…

Keep away, keep away . . .

It is not I . . . Not I who did you wrong…

It was the people . . . not I . . .

The will of the people!

Keep away, child! . . .

(Horrified, he covers his face with his hands, and sinks to his knees exhausted near the armchair.)

O Lord,

Thou dost not wish

to claim the life of a sinner . . .

have mercy on the soul of the

criminal Tsar Boris! . . .  (316-18)

Echoing Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy and pleading for understanding—much as he would if convicted by an actual judge—Boris personifies his guilt as his sentences begin to fragment. Eventually he addresses the hallucination and denies guilt, but then in apparent contradiction vainly tries to shift the blame onto others—and to lie to himself. Although he refers to himself as a “sinner” and a “criminal,” he never quite confesses to the crime. The next time he appears, in the “Duma Scene” of the last act, Boris once again is hallucinating the blood child and denying his guilt. Indeed, he insists, “the infant is alive, alive,” against all the evidence. (378) As he dies, he complains, “I am unable to atone for my sin with prayer!” and pleads for forgiveness, but still there is no confession. (392)

Somehow, all this is subject material for an opera, a genre which heretofore focused on the most dramatic and simplified situations where characters would be motivated to emote—loudly—with simple, as if sincere, expression. Obviously, things were changing by the time Boris was written. These scenes probably convince few modern viewers as genuine representations of depression, self-deceit, and hallucination, but they constitute an enormous advance on previous achievements not only in opera but also on the dramatic stage. “Rage” arias were a common occasion for heightened emotions in Baroque opera seria. Mad scenes had been featured in Romantic works like Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet and Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, but these were still more pretexts for vocal fireworks by the lead sopranos than an occasion for psychological insights. Ophelia and Lucia’s sudden onsets of insanity releases these women from inhibitions, allowing them to express extreme states of mind in a very public manner. But no vocal gymnastics are on display in Boris, where the tsar simultaneously confesses and attempts to conceal things from himself. Rather the singer of the title role has to convey numerous transitions in both his singing and gesture to reflect the many different things passing through his mind. Not until Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925) or Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945) will opera approach, let alone exceed, this degree of psychological verisimilitude.[15]

The notion of a criminal tsar, let alone a deranged one, must have had greatresonance for Russians living under the monarchy. After all, it was illegal to depict members of the Romanov dynasty on stage until 1837. This is one reason why Russian artists took so much interest in the previous dynasty and the Time of Troubles—it was their closest point of access to discussion of their own politics.[16] This ban continued in opera until the late 1860s. The tsar (Mikhail Romanov) does not even appear in Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836). Pushkin’s tragedy was only cleared for production in 1866. Musorgsky started work on its adaptation before the play was first staged in 1870. In other words, however exotic to our eyes and ears, the play and opera conveyed the most up-to-date political commentary available to Russian stages.[17] Notably, at about this time other plays and operas were staged regarding the late sixteenth century. Boris and Rimsky-Korsakov’s two operas regarding Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584), Maid of Pskov and Tsar’s Bride, remind us of the special interest generated when the sanity of the criminal tsar is suspect, as in the case of Boris’ hallunications. Indeed, politics thus becomes synonymous with psychology. The monarch’s power to awe is enhanced by the “Mad Dog strategy” described by Geoffrey F. Miller: it befits a monarch to exhibit an unpredictable anger threshold, since “the definition of despotism is the power of arbitrary life and death over subordinates” (1997: 323). This, of course, attracts yet more attention.

Boris’ appeal to foreign and later Russian audiences might be by analogy to political regimes in general. Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera originally depicted the assassination of Sweden’s King Gustav III, but, being produced shortly after an attempt on Napoleon III’s life, censors in Italy feared the theme of regicide and forced the composer to relocate the action to colonial Boston. Perhaps Americans, to cite just one possible example, do not select their presidents according to the “divine right of kings,” but political relationships usually come down to the same interpersonal issue: whom do you trust or respect or fear? (We could add other verbs) Politics thus necessarily engage social intelligence; we continually scrutinize each other, paying special interest in those who might influence our lives. And the more information regarding how they really think, so it seems, the better. Such, at least, is the conclusion we derive from Boris.

With the exception noted above (guilt of the tsar), Boris is a remarkably accurate depiction of Russia between 1598 and 1605. Moreover, its historiography strikingly anticipates modern views; the “great man” view of history is undercut, crowds hold more sway over events—the chorus is relatively divided, able to carry on internal conversations, wherein individuals more discernibly look out for themselves—many more lines of causality are noted, the entire country seems to be involved, and, most importantly, the course of history is itself presented as an incredibly complex, virtually chaotic and uncontrollable process.

Boris was the first opera to reach the stage by the “Mighty Five,” a group of composers who were dedicated to Russian themes. The Five were also devoted to truth in the sense of their music representing the natural inflections of Russian speech. It is quite evident from their statements that their ultimate interest was psychological verisimilitude. As he worked on Boris, Musorgsky wrote, “my music must be the artistic reproduction of human speech, as the exterior manifestion of thought and feeling, must, without exaggeration of strain, become music—truthful, accurate, but… artistic, in the highest sense artistic (cited in Taruskin, 1993: 73-74). Note the virtues Stasov saw in Musorgsky’s experimental opera, The Marriage: “There is no convolution of thought, feeling, transient mood, mimetic movement, spiritual or even purely physicial expression that Musorgsky’s music has not here reproduced” (cited in Taruskin, 1993: 93). Clearly musical symmetry was to be subservient to representation of actual states of the mind. Musorgsky and his compatriots were much influenced in their movement by Georg Gottfried Gervinus, who called for “not only the understanding of speech but also empathy with that which is being said. It often happen that inner nervous stresses, which arise in the soul under the influence of external vivid impression, seek a keener outlet [than is provided by the verbal content of the utterance]” (cited and clarified by Taruskin, 1993: 77). Music was seen as having the ability, superior to spoken language, to quickly and more directly evoke diverse states of mind, often simultaneously, thus yielding a greater psychological complexity.

Boris’ monologues in Act II mark the apex of psychological verisimilitude in 19^th century dramatic music. Although Musorgsky was faithful to Pushkin’s text for the most part elsewhere in the opera, he altered the play notably in terms of making his portrait of the tsar more incisive, the states of his mind more extreme.[18] The “Clock Scene” is entirely his composition. Most importantly, musical form is sacrificed in favor of providing nuance to the words, to suggest the states of the mind that underlie them. Musical passages are not repeated in a symmetrical manner; Musorgsky, no doubt, observed that neither are our thoughts. He uses some recurring leitmotifs to suggest associations, but there is no development, which allows a greater degree of musical and psychological diversity. Generally the vocal line follows the text, usually cutting a new melodic line, while the orchestral accompaniment faithfully amplifies the semantic contents of each phrase. Cesar Cui, another member of the Five, observed how in this opera “The music fuses with the text to such a degree that having heard the phrases it is no longer possible to separate the text from the music” (cited in Emerson & Oldani, 1994: 137). Chaliapin attested to the “whole world of insights and emotions” in the music (cited in Emerson & Oldani 1994: 156). In effect, Musorgsky created a holistic impression of the tsar’s consciousness.[19] His “I have achieved supreme power” monologue is the most musically unstructured soliloquy written until its time; in the course of only five minutes of singing, there are at least a dozen loosely related passages of varying length, including some recurring leitmotifs, in what can no longer be termed an aria.[20] Tempi continually shift, as does orchestration. The music thus allows reference to several lines of thought occurring simultaneously.[21] This allows for an unprecedented degree of specificity in the rendering of Boris’ subjectivity. But there is yet less structure and more detail in the “Clock Scene” that concludes the act. Thoughts become yet more diverse, utterances are fragmented, as he loses his grip on sanity. Notably, many words refer to his internal sensations, culminating with his hallucination, as he increasingly resorts to shouts. Truly, no one bared his soul in opera for us heretofore more than did Musorgsky’s Tsar Boris. But his desperate assertion that “It was… the will of the people” is a blatant falsehood. He is still lying.

References

Baron-Cohen, Simon (1997) “How to build a baby that can read minds: Cognitive mechanisms in mindreading,” in Simon Baron-Cohen, ed., The Maladapted Mind: Classic Readings in Evolutionary Psychopathology. East Sussex: Psychology Press, pp. 207-240.

Bogdan, Radu J. (2000) Minding Minds: Evolving a Reflexive Mind by Interpreting Others. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cooke, Brett (2006) “Natural Psychology in the Evolution of Russian Prose,” unpublished paper presented to the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, Philadelphia.

Cooke, Brett (2008) “Compliments and Complements,” Style, 42: 150-54.

Cooke, Brett (2010) “Clichés Worth Singing: Narrative Commonplaces in Opera,” The Evolutionary Review, 1: 76-81.

Elliott, Martha (2006) Singing in Style: A Guide to Vocal Performance Practices. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Emerson, Caryl, & Robert William Oldani (1994) Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov: Myths, Realities, Reconsiderations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fiedler, Leslie A. (1960) Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion.

Layton, Robert (1998) “The Quintessential Russian Opera,” in Modest Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov. Philips Records, pp. 18-22.

Miller, Geoffrey F. (1997) “Protean primates: The evolution of adaptive unpredictability in competition and courtship,” in Andrew Whiten and Richard W. Byrne, eds., Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 312-340.

Mirsky, D. S. (1958), A History of Russian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1900, ed. by Francis J. Whitfield. New York: Vintage Books.

Musorgsky, Modest (1998) [1872], Boris Godunov, libretto translated by Philip Taylor, Philips Records.

Schaller, Mark, Justin H. Park, and Douglas T. Kenrick (2007) “Human Evolution and Social Cognition,” in R. I. M. Dunbar and Louise Barrett, eds., Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 491-504.

Taruskin, Richard (1993) Mussorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Zunshine, Lisa (2006) Why We Read Fiction; Theory of Mind and the Novel, Columbus; Ohio State University Press.

Notes

[1] See Cooke 2010 for how this repertory is determined.

[2] An elderly lady attending the premiere said, “What kind of opera is this? There is no music in it at all. But I have to say that I never took my eyes from the stage the whole time” (cited in Emerson & Oldani, 1994: 98).

[3] Robert Layton says “in its central character Mussorgsky has given us what one might call the most commanding and gripping musical portrayal in all Russian opera past and present, ” indeed, that “there is surely no more fully rounded psychological portrayal in opera than Mussorgsky’s tsar.” (18, 22)

[4] Sometimes this even includes gods and devils: Faust, Mefistofele, and Wagner’s Ring des Nibelung come to mind, the latter culminating in Gotterdammerung.

[5] It is also questionable whether Dmitry, as the son of Ivan’s seventh wife, would have been eligible to inherit the throne.

[6] The textology of Boris Godunov remains one of the most vexed in opera. Following Taruskin, Emerson, and Oldani’s careful studies of the relationship of the different versions, we are basing our study of the opera on the composer’s 1872 revision as the best representation of his wishes. It is largely the version that is performed today. For ease of reference, here is the 1872 order of scenes:

Prologue, Scene 1: Novodevichy Monastery gates

Scene 2: Coronation Scene

Act I,   Scene 1: Cell Scene

Scene 2: Inn Scene

Act II: Terem Scene (ends with “The Clock Scene”)

Act III, Scene 1: Marina’s Boudoir

Scene 2: Fountain Scene

Act IV, Scene 1: Duma Scene

Scene 2: Kromy Forest Scene

Citations of the opera are from Philip Taylor’s translation for the Gergiev/Philips recording.

[7] Presumably Marina is steered into her arrangement with “Dmitry,” by her family, who have ambitions of their own; they hope she and her children, their descendents, will establish a new Russian dynasty. It is an indication of the evil of the Polish side in Pushkin’s play that her family is willing to subject their daughter to the dangers of the Pretender’s campaign, even though they have heard rumors that he is in fact only a renegade novice. Perhaps they are operating on a cost/benefit analysis of the situation. If, as others say, “Dmitry” is only Grishka, then they risk only their daughter and part of their army. But if the Pretender’s claim, whether bonafide or not, suffices to gain the throne in Moscow, then Marina’s becoming tsaritsa stands to gain all of them incredible riches and advantages, easily sufficient to justify the risk undertaken. As we noted above, the historical Marina was an opportunist who subsequently launched the same campaign by recognizing as her husband a red bearded stranger who clearly was neither Dmitry nor Grishka, and thus enjoyed the rare status of being tsaritsa to two different tsars. The Mniszeks’ calculated strategy could be regarded as an extreme case of hypergamy, whereby women and their blood relatives maximize her relatively limited reproductive potential by selecting mates who either possess or show prospects for great social status, i. e., quality. Usually a woman’s family will tend to conservatively protect her sexual reputation, but with such a rare and lucrative pay-off in prospect, they may be persuaded to make a telling compromise. As happened at least twice with the actual Marina, it was her and their only chance of her becoming members of Russia’s ruling family. Musorgsky mutes this theme in the opera, but instead creates a similar one with a scene involving a Jesuit priest persuading Marina to marry the Pretender. Rangoni brazenly tells Marina it is her mission to force Roman Catholism on Orthodox Russia even at the “sacrifice” of her “honor.” (334) He then arranges a secret meeting for her with “Dmitry.”

[8] Russians also know that “Dmitry” did not rule for as much as a year before he met with a similar fate, but this information is not necessary for appreciation of the opera.

[9] According to Geoffrey F. Miller, “animals living in complex social groups should regularly evolve mental adaptations for social perception, prediction, manipulation and exploitation” (1997: 316). Furthermore, Miller argues, “Since the vast majority of runaway processes that result in fast elaborations of behavioral capacities probably occur within species, the Machiavellian hypothesis scored an easy win over other, much weaker theories of human mental evolution”—such as tool-making, etc. (1997: 333). Radu J. Bogdan suggests, “it is their politics, more than other social activities, which spawned strong pressures for interpretive skills” (2000: 62).

[10] I make a similar case has been made for the history of Russian prose (2006).

[11] Leslie A. Fiedler describes this kind of thinking as characterizing literary history: “a psychic revolution . . . a new kind of self, a new level of mind; for what has been happening since the eighteenth century seems more like the development of a new organ than a mere finding of a new way to describe old experience.” (1960: 32-33, cited thanks to personal communication from Tim Horvath)

[12] According to Musorgsky’s stage direction in the “Cell Scene,” Grishka deceives Pimen by sitting with “feigned humility” (238).

[13] The chronicler Pimen, for all of his economia regarding honesty, is himself not above suspicion. One wonders what this former courtier and warrior is doing in a monastery. Does he bear any relation to Filaret Romanov, a prominent boyar forcibly cloistered, not incidentally the father of Mikhail Romanov, the boy who founded the Romanov dynasty in 1613? There is reason to believe that he might have ambitions of his own, which raises questions whether we trust his charges—but, as we shall see in Act II, they are confirmed by Boris’ monologues.

[14] Markings indicate junctures in the melodic content of the monologue for our musical analysis later.

[15] Richard Strauss and Oscar Wilde’s Salome ends with the title character’s necrophiliac dance with John the Baptist’s head. At the end of Strauss’ Elektra, the title character dances herself to death in celebration when her brother Orest kills their murderous mother and stepfather. These could be argued to constitute mad scenes. The eponymous heroes of Tristan und Isolde hallucinate about each other in an extended manner comparable to that of Boris.

[16] Pushkin’s Boris may be read as an attack on the Emperor Alexander I, who came to the throne in 1800 by engineering the assassination of his father, Paul. Pushkin detested Alexander, who was reigning was the poet wrote his play, living under house arrest at the tsar’s command.

[17] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart similarly decided to set Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro, while the play—which deals with noble class sexual abuse of servants—was still banned in Austria.

[18] As exceptions to this statement, Marina’s Boudoir and the Kromny Forest scenes are entirely his own conception.

[19] Richard Taruskin claims that Boris marks how Musorgsky’s “realism had begun to ebb” (1993: 267). This is true in the sense that he abandoned the extreme word by word transcription of the rarely performed Marriage. But the arioso passages of the “I have achieved supreme power” monologue should be received as a more profound psychological citation of the moods that underlie Boris’ statements. Notably these are interwoven with others of less structured accompanied recitative. Taruskin himself acknowledges Feodor Chaliapin’s “musically unstructured rendition of the solo part” in his 1928 recording (1993: 278n.).

[20] These are marked in our citation of the monologue.

[21] Cf. Robert W. Oldani’s scansion of how Musorgsky uses harmony for similar thematic associations (Emerson & Oldani, 1994: 255-56).

A change in human culture occurred across Eurasia in the 6th century BCE.  A new form of non-sensory cognition is evident in laws, governmental institutions, moral philosophy, and art.  That change was due to an epigenetic modification in response to human-made environmental pressures.  Assortative mating assured the change was unequally distributed.  Human history records the consequences of that unequal distribution.  One strain of H. sapiens has fostered forms of thought and institutions that contribute to greater civility, while another, which has not benefitted from the adaption to non-sensory cognition, has favored more ancestral thinking modes and forms of life.

Are Liberals Mutants? Human History As Evolutionary History

“. . . endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Charles Darwin

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My thesis is that human cognition in the advanced civil area of the globe from Greece to China changed around the 6th century BCE, and this change in part accounts for the difference between human forms ever since.  The fact that the change is evident from Greece to China suggests that it was an adaptation in response to a shared environmental hazard.  That hazard, I contend, was human created, and it consisted of the danger posed by dependence on large-scale agriculture and the trade that distributed it to large, non-agricultural urban populations.  That environmental hazard made new kinds of cognition necessary, and humans adapted either genetically (hard-wiring) or epigenetically (a change in the operation of the existing genetic hardwiring).  High levels of social class stratification and assortative mating along professional lines meant that the adaptation swept through select populations and was prevented from sweeping through entire populations.  The result was an uneven distribution of the adaptation that endures to the present day.

The major cognitive adaptive ability that emerges in the 6th century BCE has to do with non-sensory cognition, or thinking conducted in the absence of sensory perception.  When we listen, see, touch, and smell, we engage in sensory perception.  When we close our eyes and shut out the world of sounds, sights, and sensations, we engage in non-sensory cognition.  We see things in our minds or we mull over ideas and thoughts; we imagine or we remember.  Those whose minds are trained in this kind of cognition can literally “see” things others cannot.  For example, they can convert complex mathematical symbols on a page into mental representations of forces in the world.  Or they can picture social structure with word tools and without actually “seeing” that invisible structure.  Some other words for this kind of thinking are speculation, imagination, meditation, conceptualization, and reflection.  The new mental ability must have had effects in multiple realms that demanded cognition.  It permitted the development of empathy for others, the ability to imagine their life state and their subjective condition.  The new ability also led to new forms of imaginative art and to new social institutions such as democracy, popular forms of justice, and legal principles such as rights.  New forms of mathematical calculation emerged that greatly enhanced trade and facilitated the evolution of currency.  All of these changes off-set the civilized hazard, the danger of dependence on non-proprietary agriculture and trade to sustain large non-agricultural urban communities that were in place from Greek to China by the 6th century BCE.

This change may have been genetic, but it need not have been.  Environmental pressure may have thrown a switch in some gene or combination of genes that triggered a latent human possibility.  Evolutionary biologists have yet to answer that question, and not being an evolutionary biologist, I will not try to do so.  Nevertheless, promising work is being done along these lines.  Coolidge and Wynn speculate that changes in the parietal lobes of the brain affected such components of non-sensory cognition as long term memory and concept formation (Coolidge and Wynn, 2009).  The second possibility, what is called epigensis, is fruitful because it reconciles cultural explanations of such changes (that they resulted from greater trade, for example) with physical explanations (that they resulted from some genetic modification).  Trade may have fostered an environmental hazard that triggered a genetic modification in humans that made a further advance in non-sensory cognition both possible and necessary.  As a result, institutional changes occurred in human civilization that reflect a need to develop less hazardous, less violent, and less costly modes of interaction.  Those largely have to do with the development of social norms of behavior and with rules and procedures for managing conflict when the norms did not work.  Public theatrical works, especially in Greece, developed as a way of spreading norms and educating group members regarding them.  The creation of norms, legal principles and institutions, and propagandistic art all required a non-sensory imaginative ability.  That ability also permitted members of the civil community to empathize with one another and to imagine others as fellow “citizens.”   Group members could now practice non-violent civility towards people who were neither kin nor clan but with whom one was nevertheless connected through citizenship in a “nation” or “empire,” both non-sensory entities that needed to be imagined in order to be.  These developments lessened the likelihood that a civilized hazard might be triggered by human action (withholding grain from market, for example, or ceasing to trade).  The new normative culture fostered a sense of responsibility towards others that off-set the natural proclivity toward individual organic survival.  Now, with norms and rules in place that fostered greater interactive civility, one’s individual survival could be imagined as a function of group survival.

Contemporary evolutionary theory holds that H. sapiens has not modified significantly since the Pleistocene age some 120,000 years ago (Cosmides and Tooby, 1992).  A universal human nature came into being then and has not modified since.  The Cosmides/Tooby argument makes sense from the perspective of human evolutionary history, but the advent of human civilization has created new post-natural environments and new human-made environmental pressures that seem to have speeded up epigenetic differentiation within the species.  A pacifist former law professor like Barack Obama who believes in universal principles and a rifle-toting, moose-skinning, believer in witches like Sarah Palin are noticeably different.  If culture is not determinant, as Cosmides and Tooby argue in their critique of “social constructionism,” then some physical explanation must be found for such differences.  Cosmides and Tooby convincingly argue that humans could not have changed much genetically in 120,000 years, given how many million it took to get to that point.  Epigenesis offers a compromise by suggesting that different locations (social, cultural, geographic, economic) may trigger changes that, while they leave the basic genome intact, nevertheless modify how it operates and make for genophenotypic variation (Boyd and Richerson, 2005; Fuentes,  2009; Cochran and Harpending, 2009).

The claim that H. sapiens was fixed in time in the Pleistocene as a unified and complete “universal human nature” seems less credible if cultural history is taken into account.  What one sees in that history is a species in the process of differentiation.  If sexual reproduction is not only preservative of a genotypic identity but also generative of departures from the existing genetic paradigm so that adaptation to environmental hazards can occur, then significant phenotypic differences merit closer attention. Paleoanthropologists use the term “forms” for the various hominoids that evolved after Africa in Eurasia, and a similar terminology might be needed to account for the significant differences within H. sapiens.  Differences of form, if they repeat over time in predictable ways, are usually evidence of structural differences.  They are not merely “surface” variations.

Theory is a way of picturing the world.  Some theory models are conceptual and use words.  Others are spatial and use graphic figures.  Others are temporal and distribute events and objects on a time-line. The Cosmides/Tooby model uses two quite common forms of theoretical modelling.  One is temporal, and it assigns a primary and determining role to “universal human nature” or Pleistocene Man that was established in the distant past.  Pleistocene Man is the origin, and all apparent modifications in that original nature are conceived as being derivative and secondary in relation to that primary historical creation moment. Because of the weight and value given the axiomatic origin, subsequent changes in humanity are considered to be of less importance, if they have any weight at all as “evolutionary events.”

The second theoretical model is spatial.  A center is posited that is axiomatic, and around it is drawn a globe whose surface is the assigned place for objects and events that are derivative and secondary.  In this version of evolutionary theory, a “universal human nature” is a center, a structure that transcends accidents such as repetitive differences in opinion between human groups.  They are merely surface events that are of less weight or value. That center transcends phenotypic differences, which are merely secondary and epiphenomenal.

These two theoretical models reduce the likelihood that significance might be found for the study of human evolution in either ongoing differentiation in H. sapiens or human built environmental influences (social construction) that might acts as epigenetic triggers.  Cosmides and Tooby’s critique of the “clean slate” model in the cultural sciences is accurate and welcome, but their theoretical model prevents them from seeing the importance of ongoing genetic differentiation in a human built environment that has come to play a more pronounced role, partly through the epigenetic process of social construction, in the maintenance of human life (Plotkin, 2007).

Different theoretical models assign different weights and values to different physical objects and events, and epigenetically-induced genophenotypic variation is less visible to the Cosmides/Tooby evolutionary theory because of the way that theory assigns value.  The spatial model assigns insufficient weight to “surface” phenomena such as the socially constructive imprinting process that inducts newly minted humans into human civilization by educating them regarding norms, tasks, and roles.  Stored cultural information is transmitted to new entrants through the media, through institutions such as schools, churches, and governments, and through a variety of discourses, from religion to everyday folklore.  If such socially constructive imprinting occurs, it must for a reason, and that reason probably is functional and adaptive.  Social construction aids human survival in a cooperative, human built environment by training inductees in the adaptive norms that have assured group survival by trumping the possibility of a civilized hazard.  It is an on-going epigenetic trigger.  But the Cosmides/Tooby theoretical model cannot picture that necessary relation because it assigns an axiomatic value to one term and a derivative and secondary value to all others.

Similarly, the temporal model, because it makes Pleistocene Man axiomatic in an historical sense, assigns insufficient weight to historical evidence of recent genetic differentiations in post-Pleistocene H. sapiens.  Because the realm of human culture is not taken seriously as a source of evidence because “social construction” has been dismissed as irrelevant, significant differentiations within the supposedly unitary “universal human nature” of Pleistocene Man are discounted.  They are mere fluctuations or historical accidents in a continuous identity that is undisturbed by them.  Genotypic structure is immune to merely phenotypic variation.  According to this model, differences of opinion in cultural history, however repetitive and seemingly structural, should be treated as adventitious disturbances that are secondary in relation to a foundational “nature” that transcends and is untouched by such events.  The proof is not in the pudding of on-going human differentiation but in the formal model.  But such differentiations are real nonetheless and must be accounted for, especially if their repetitive character over time suggests the action of structure.

Newer ways of conducting theoretical thinking have been invented, and it might be of value to evolutionary theory to ask how they might modify the current picture of human evolution.  The new models suggest much is to be gained from abandoning the centuries old distinction between foundation and manifestation, center and surface, structure and historical event, axiological ground and subordinate derivation (Derrida, 1967, 1975, 1976)). The new model of theory construction suggest that we consider each factor, be it “surface” or “center,” “origin” or “derivation,” “nature” or “construction” as being equally important. This level model of theory would allow us to study more closely aspects of the world that we were encouraged by the older spatial and temporal theoretical schemes to ignore.  Supposedly “surface” events such as social construction and supposedly secondary historical accidents such as phenotypic differentiation might be seen as having more significance.

At issue is human cultural history of the past 14,000 years, and the crucial question is whether the changes and differences evident there have any significance for human evolution and for the idea of a universal human nature.  A level theory model would encourage us to ask how the adaptive niche that is the human built civil environment is significant for human evolution even during this short period.

A noticeable cultural transformation, one that seems to due to physiological changes in human cognition, occurs from the seventh to the fifth centuries BCE across Eurasia.  The changes replicate an earlier cognitive change in the Upper Paleolithic along the glaciation line that stretches from Europe to upper Asia.  With large predators killed off by the harsh climate, humans were free to leave defensive groups and expand settlement, develop trade, and most remarkably invent symbolic currency.  This initial mutation probably paved the way for the second major change along the same geographic corridor. (Ofek, 2001)

The changes at that second moment are remarkable both for their quality and for their consistency.  It is as if a similar environmental pressure or hazard placed similar demands on the human population across a wide geographic range that provoked a general adaptive response in those areas where the hazard was most severe (where urban civilization especially was more advanced and where dependence on agricultural trade for survival was most acute).  Given the character of the adaptive response, which consisted of the development of a greater capacity for non-sensory cognition, the hazard was probably one that arose as a result of the interconnected, mutually dependent, and cooperative nature of human civilization.  The major new development in that civilization that might have created a hazard was the shift away from a culture in which everyone was responsible for supplying their own food to a culture in which people relied on others and on a network of trade to supply sustenance.  Individual survival suddenly became dependent on a more complex social system.  To be maintained, that system demanded higher order cognitive abilities in at least some of the population, those charged with system maintenance.  Because system maintenance required a consistent differentiation of tasks, the new kinds of cognition would have been associated with social marking and with the category-making and concept-formation ability that accompanies such marking, according to Coolidge and Wynn.  The new cognitive abilities allowed for greater social stratification through the development of a social semiotic system of class demarcation, and such stratification lessened the civilized hazard by assuring all tasks were assigned and performed.

The adaptive response to the hazard created by human civilization seems to have had to do with a change in human cognitive abilities pertaining to non-sensory cognition, or the ability to think in the absence of sense data. Non-sensory cognition is preferable for my purposes here to “general intelligence” or “fluid intelligence” for understanding cultural history because it links the various individual cognitive changes that make up the larger change of the first millennium (Mithen, 1994).  Such cognition has since Plato been a concern of philosophy; it consists of thinking about ideas that are not tangible things in the physical world.  Such cognition also allows humans to imagine fictions, to picture deities as well as a spirit world, to think recursively in categories, to imagine Euclidian space, and to make laws based on intangible principles such as justice.  Importantly, of course, it also allows them to make marks on wood, stone, or paper that signify “ideas.”  While humans clearly had a capacity for non-sensory cognition prior to the first millennium BCE, a major advance, probably with genetic roots fostered by the genetic mixing brought about by trade along the metal routes, occurs across Eurasia around 600 BCE.

At that point, one begins to see evidence of a significantly new form of non-sensory cognition.  In Greece, the laws of Solon in the 6th century BCE differentiate the Homeric culture that celebrated martial virtues from the Aristotelian culture that encouraged science and the building of an ideal civil political community.  For the first time, a philosopher, Plato, discusses a non-sensory realm of ideation and makes it the centerpiece of his thinking, while the first efforts at mathematics (especially in fields such as geometry that require non-sensory ideation) begin to appear in the works of Pythagoras and others.  Democratic forms of social organization for the first time supersede autocracy, and they demand oratory which is characterized by the ability to use long term memory to summon ideas easily in speeches made to a gathered population.  New forms of representational art emerge that evidence a new multi-dimensional ability in regard to perception and imagination (Brener, 2010).  In the other major areas of human population throughout Eurasia at the same time, similar transformations occurred.  In India, in the 6th century BCE, an era of regional imperial warfare coupled to a mythological literary tradition gives way to a new shramanic philosophy that emphasizes the cultivation of higher order cognitive abilities and the renunciation of the instinctive animal urge toward material goods.  Gautama Buddha’s call to renounce physical desire and the material world for the spiritual (or non-sensory) is a prescription for restraining animal urges and appetites for the sake of the cultivation of non-sensory cognition favorable to greater civility and cooperation.  The Upanishads, which were first attempts at philosophy, were written at this time as well.  In Persia, Cyrus (600 BCE-529 BCE) created one of the first governmental administrative systems that was meant to be beneficial to, rather than repressive of, its subjects, abolished forced labor, and advanced the idea of human rights as well as the ideal of religious tolerance.  At the same time, Confucius (551-479 BCE) gave China a new way of thinking that would seem to reflect adaptive non-sensory cognition at work.  Confucianism sought to infuse public institutions with universal moral principles such as justice, promoted the ideal of personal virtue attained through self-control, fostered a culture of laws, and infused government with the meritocratic ideal that replaced group affiliation as a standard of advancement with evidence of higher order cognitive abilities.

That Greek, Chinese, Persian, and Indian civilizations would all undergo the same kind of cultural change that required similar, if not the same, changes in cognitive ability suggests that the development of human civilization was making possible genetic responses across Eurasia to a similar environmental pressure–the civilized hazard brought about by greater density of population, greater urbanization, greater dependence on trade and purchased food, and a greater need for civil regulation if human civilizations were to survive.  With the replacement of agriculture by city dwelling, humans inadvertently created an environmental hazard of potentially genocidal proportions in the form of a possible failure of the surplus food supply for those not involved directly with agriculture.  Historian Joyce Appleby notes that “Traditional societies around the globe were built on the bedrock of scarcity, above all the scarcity of food. . . . And because farming often didn’t even succeed in [feeding the whole population], there were famines.  All but the very wealthy tightened their belts every year in the months before crops came in. . . . The effects of economic vulnerability radiated throughout old societies, encouraging suspicion and superstitions as well as justifying the conspicuous authority of monarchs, priests, landlords, and fathers.  Maintaining order . . . was paramount when the lives of so man people were at risk.” [i] The newer forms of civility made possible by what was apparently a new, more advanced form of non-sensory cognition were an adaptive way of addressing that danger.  With categories was born the allocation of tasks and roles along social class lines to assure the survival of the group.

The ability to think in the absence of sense data existed in a more rudimentary form before this moment in time. Religion antedates the new forms of law, philosophy, science, and literature that flower in the 6th and 5th centuries, but religion is all three rolled into one, the product of an early cognitive adaptation that had not yet acquired the ability to differentiate between the functions of non-sensory cognition such as conceptualization, empathy, self-regulation, and imagination.  Moreover, religion was probably a misinterpretation of this new cognitive ability.  Once humans became able to think in the absence of sense data, they had within themselves a new mental realm that was initially misinterpreted as “spirit” or “soul”.  And its products, before ideation could be trained into philosophy and science, were, I would suggest, mistaken for “Gods.”

Along with religion and early legal institutions, the strongest evidence of genetic change related to non-sensory cognition prior to the 6th century BCE is the emergence of writing and of legal institutions.  Writing requires a non-sensory cognitive ability.  One must be able to look at or sense marks on wax, paper, or some other material, and see instead non-sensory ideas.  Law operates in a similar way.  It consists of both non-sensory ideas such as fairness, equity, and justice as well as tangible institutions such as courts and written rules that one can sense with one’s eyes and ears.  Without the cognitive ability that permits sensory data to be “read” as non-sensory ideas or principles, early humans could not look at a man in court in a seat of authority and see the idea of justice at work.  Yet they had to if indeed justice–self-restraint based on ideas rather than physical coercion–was to work.

The genetic or epigenetic change that gave rise to non-sensory cognition thus served an important function in large communities of the kind made possible by surplus-generating agriculture.  It permitted legal institutions to come into being because it allowed physical things such as courts to embody non-sensory ideas such as justice.  And because ideas permitted thinking in broad formal categories such as “citizen,” it fostered the notion of universality, which meant that all were subject to impartial rules and principles that applied equally to everyone.  Social order needed no longer to be maintained through tribal alliances, clan loyalty, dominance behavior, the control of resources, physical coercion, and intimidating violence.  The ability to create laws that applied to an entire community diminished the importance of territory and of territorial defense between human groups.  The primitive tendency to side with one’s territorial allies against one’s territorial enemies could be overcome by training members of the group to adhere to norms and principles—ideas with universal applicability—that applied to friend and foe alike, regardless of where they lived.  One’s enemy was the same as one’s friend in the eyes of the principles undergirding the law.  Non-sensory cognition and the suppression of territorial and tribal violence thus would have evolved together.

Such non-sensory cognition also probably played a role in diminishing interpersonal violence.  It required that one give up immediate perception in favor of an internal mental process.  Such suspension allows affect to be regulated.  Contemporary psychology suggests an ability to construct non-sensory mental representations of varied complexity and nuance is essential to the formation of a separate self, to the development of an objective sense of the world, and to the regulation of affect (Fairbairn, 1954; Mahler, 1968; Blatt, 1997; Auerbach, 2005). Mental representations range from fruzzy to clear, fantasy filled to realistic, monolithic to highly differentiated.  On the one end of the range are images that are typological, lacking in detail, and simple, and on the other end are mental representations that are highly differentiated, realistically detailed, and complex.  Imagine the difference between a mythological story about Zeus and Poseidon and another about a French housewife stuck in a small town with a boorish husband who longs for the high life and has an affair with a local aristocrat.  One story–one mental representation, if you will–will be painted in simple brush strokes; characters will have usually one dominant trait; actions will be limited and lack nuance of motive and complexity of effect; the tone will be one of exaltation and fear.  In the other story, characters will be portrayed as having complex motives; their life situations will be described in rich realist detail; the characters will be portrayed with irony and empathetic analysis.  Depending on where they fall on this spectrum of cognitive abilities, humans vary in their ability to form separate identities that are not dependent on fusion with the object world or with the social group.  They vary in their ability to see the world objectively and clearly.  They also vary in their ability to regulate affect.  In human children, mental representations allow stresses such as separation from care-givers to be tolerated and accepted.  In the maturation process from child to adult, the God-like physical presence of the mother is replaced by a God-like mental representation of the mother that allows behavior to be inhibited and affect regulated.  Rage and fear, the bases of violence, can be muted and transformed into other, more temperate feelings.  It is likely that self-regulation became possible once mental representation, based in non-sensory cognition, was possible.  And once self-regulation was possible, efficient civilizations were possible.  One did not need to exert force to gain compliance with community norms.  Citizens did not need to be told what to do because they could tell themselves what to do.  Civility, living by shared rules that are internalized, was quite literally “imaginable.”

Advanced cognition in the form of complex realist mental representations would also favor the development of non-authoritarian civil societies of the kind that emerged in 6th and 5th century BCE Greece.  Such cognition encourages a sense of individuation and of objectivity in regard to the world.  The non-sensory cognitive ability aids the development of a separate self, one that has achieved a mature distance from its surrounding world and readily takes that world as its object of knowledge.  Such a cognitive ability is therefore conducive to science.  But not all mental representational abilities in modern humans are the same, and in all likelihood, the same was true of our ancestors.  Some live with mythological mental representations while others live with realist detail.  Realistic mental representation assumes a more successful separation from one’s object world.  One sees it better because it has become more of an object for the self through the separation of the self from the object world that mental representation brings about.  The presence of the mental representation means the absence of the literal thing, and it necessarily implies an ability to tolerate the thing or object’s absence; it implies self-regulation.  Individuals who live in a fused relationship with their object world and do not separate from it successfully also do not develop a capacity for complex, realist, detailed mental representations, and they are frequently associated with an inability to control affect.  They instead rely on mental representations that more resemble mythology and that contain exalted characters (great leaders), extreme emotions (fear of strangers, rage against perceived enemies), and ideals of fused communities in which individual difference is dissolved (the nation, the ethnicity, the patria or homeland).  If this kind of mental representing is more proximate in some ways to how early humans must have thought (mythology, territoriality, tribal identity), the kind of mental representing that is more complex, detailed, and realist would seem to lead eventually to science and to an ideal of human community as an embodiment of ideas that possess complexity, reach, nuance, and realistic applicability.  Not surprisingly, someone like Cyrus is associated both with advanced legal system building and tolerance for diversity.

Predictably, in ancestral human culture, mythological thinking accompanies undifferentiated tribal and clan social forms.  Non-sensory cognition that is more realistic and differentiated, in contrast, probably made possible the kind of internally differentiated and articulated democratic civility of 6th and 5th century BCE Greece, a culture characterized by significant advances in science, law, and philosophy of a kind reflective of more advanced cognitive abilities and a culture in which individual identity was a prominent feature of civil life.  We know who Demosthenes was, but we have no clue who the articulate spokesmen of earlier Greek clans were because there probably weren’t any.  If advanced non-sensory cognition fosters separation from one’s ambient object world and the assumption of a stance of greater objectivity towards it, the kind of cognition it supersedes, what might be called ancestral sensory cognition, is more likely to merge self and world, to treat objects animistically (as in religion) and to favor fused social forms in which the self’s identity is indistinguishable from group identity.

The advance in non-sensory cognition registers in the writing of the Greek Enlightenment from 800 to 400 BCE.  While Homer may speak of Gods, what distinguishes his writing is the near-scientific description of bodies and feelings and actions, a literary mode quite different from the simple broad strokes of the stories of Greek mythology.  Moreover, for the first time, a story has a clear pedagogical value of promoting norms.  Plato and Aristotle are constantly reaching for greater and greater detail in their philosophic analyses.  And Sophocles was a master of emotional and existential complexity that was proximate to actual human experience, and his plays are also inadvertent dramas of evolution in that they picture conflicts between ancestral sensory cognition and the new non-sensory cognition that begins to appear in full flower in the West for the first time in the Greek Enlightenment.  The idea of fate is a projection of lower order mental representational abilities premised on fusion with one’s object world rather than a separation from it.  In Sophocles’ plays, the tension is often between a sense of fate premised on simple mental representational abilities and a sense of individual responsibility that arises from a more realistic representation of the world.[ii]

Early human history suggests that the genetic change that gave rise to this more advanced form of non-sensory cognition was differentially distributed. The fact of the regular slaughter of adversarial populations during this time suggests that the quelling of violent urges by non-sensory cognition was not universal.  The gene flow initiated by it did not sweep through the human population.  In all probability, it was blocked and redirected by the strict social stratifications of societies of that period.  Class and caste barriers that promote assortative mating stood in the way of genetic sweeping.  Scribes in all early societies were an elite caste that was in certain instances deliberately self-reproductive.  They married amongst themselves, and fathers and sons succeeded each other in their posts.  Usually, they were distinguished from social strata assigned more practical tasks, such as engineering, law, agriculture, trade, and warfare. As with Ashkenazi Jews charged with doing complex calculations in the absence of zero, so also in the social classes charged with running such institutions as complex legal systems, assortative reproduction probably led to genetic strains that reproduced and preserved caste-specific genetic differentiations.  (Brahmins remain a separate genetic strain in India today, one that bears more noticeable European-originated genetic admixture. (Barnshad, 2001))  In Rome plebs and patricians would not have married, and throughout the Middle Ages, severe class differences persisted.  It is only in very recent experience that flux and flexibility have come to characterize human mating behavior.  And it is probably noteworthy that along with the scientific, industrial, capitalist, and philosophic revolutions of the 18th century came as well the domestic revolution so evident in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that brought flexibility and personal freedom to mating practices.

Another reason genetic sweeping may have been blocked is civility.  In the zone of civil protection that non-sensory cognition made possible, some could forsake predatory defensiveness, distrust, and violence for the sake of behavior guided by adaptive forms of non-sensory cognition without fearing extinction.  But equally, those lodged in an ancestral cognitive disposition would not have failed a fitness test and passed out of existence so long as they were willing to play by the new rules.  No replacement occurred.  Non-sensory cognition made possible a level of civility that prevented the natural culling of populations that usually occurred when a significant adaptation made greater fitness possible.  In this instance, the fitness made possible was protective of all.  It consisted of an ability to elaborate laws that made large pacified communities imaginable.  In the peaceful and non-violent communities adaptive humans designed, all survived, including those who had not benefitted from the adaptive change.  With the emergence of civil institutions, nature’s harshest harvesting laws ceased to function.  An agricultural surplus, made possible by organizational forms fostered by non-sensory cognition, protected everyone from nature’s random violence.  What this meant as well, however, was that human dispositions that were more ancestral continued to exist.[iii] And much of subsequent human history has been about that problem.

What might that ancestral human disposition have been like, one that did not benefit from fully developed non-sensory cognitive capacities?  And what kind of behavior might s/he have engaged in as a result?  A world without large protective human communities was in all likelihood a world driven by raw survival imperatives, characterized by inter-group violence, and populated by groups organized, like adjacent primate species such as chimpanzees, around opportunistic alliances, dominance behavior, the lop-sided control of resources, hierarchy, and subordination.  Cognition in such a context was probably limited by those imperatives and probably reflected their pressure.  It primarily addressed the self’s need for safety and security. Such cognition would be defensive, devious, expedient, and absolutist.  And it was predominantly sensory.

Defensiveness in a predatory context obliges one to monitor one’s immediate environment carefully for signs of danger, and it therefore favors highly sensory modes of perception over non-sensory ones that require one to relinquish one’s self-protective perceptual grasp on what is immediately before one’s eyes, ears, and nose.  As a result, such sensory cognition is less equipped to use the mind’s speculative capacities to develop formal or abstract non-sensory models of the world.  Such cognition is thus less capable of affect regulation.  Violence, rather than verbal negotiation, will be more likely as a way of dealing with adversaries.  Such intensely sensory cognition would also be less inclined to embrace a universal principle and to submit its urges to the control of formal regulation.  The possibility that one sacrifices one’s immediate survival chances for an idea that applies equally to all and that restrains one’s self-interest for the good of others would be both alien and dangerous. The consistent hostility in the history of the West to speculative cognition and to the constraints on pure freedom of action that it often mandates may result from the fact that it is associated with the possibility of letting go of the security and safety sensory perception affords.

What is at stake is the fear of death, a fear still felt by some human groups more so than others.  Jost, et al, found that self-described ideological conservatives in the U.S. fear death more than liberals (Jost, 2003).   There is a noticeable difference in cognitive style between the two groups.  Conservatives prefer ideas, actions, values, and institutions that assure survival and might be said to stave off a greater fear of death.  They prefer mythology and fusion over realism and science, and they tend toward highly regimented forms of social organization, expedient and opportunistic alliances, dominance behavior, social control through the accumulation of resources, and hierarchy-preserving behaviors designed to assure a greater rate of survival in a predatory context than liberal values such as tolerance, respect, empathy, and civility.  They prefer violent to peaceful solutions to conflict, and they abandon principles that impose restraint on defensive behavior (such as rules against torture) when self-defensive expediency and self-interest demand.  Liberals, in contrast, seem more capable of non-sensory thinking that posits formal or ideal entities such as “human rights” or “universal justice” that are not real sensory objects.  Allowing such non-sensory principles to dominate one’s mental life obliges one to sacrifice a sense of safety afforded by a well-monitored sensory world.  It requires a diminished fear of death.  If the palpable presence of the world in sensory perception confirms one’s safety, then the absence of it in non-sensory cognition requires one to accept the possibility of death when one engages in it.  This may account for the intense animus against abstract universal principles in conservative human groups.

The preference for sensory as opposed to non-sensory cognition that arises from a yearning for safety in a predatory context also leads to a need for cognitive absolutes and for cognitive control.  Absolutist forms of religion and absolutist state forms probably characterize early humanity for this reason.  Before the emergence of non-sensory cognition provided safety guarantees in the form of laws and civil institutions, absolute security and certain knowledge of the kind early state forms and early religion afforded was a way of controlling one’s environment, of assuring that one would not be vulnerable to violence because others were subject to harsh rules that made such violence too costly.

Purely sensory cognition would also be less capable of the empathy that life in civil communities would require.  Empathy means imagining others as subjects like oneself.  Empathy is a non-sensory cognitive capacity because it requires that one leave the security of one’s immediate sensory field of perception in order to imaginatively inhabit another’s perspective. Such empathy is a sign of weakness in a predatory context; it leaves one vulnerable and subtracts from the aggressive posture toward potential adversaries that one must always maintain in order to survive. To imagine someone else’s point of view, to empathetically inhabit their interests and needs, is to betray one’s own most powerful survival urges.

After the Greek Enlightenment of the 6th and 5th century BCE, those armed with more advanced non-sensory cognitive abilities seemed to dominate southern European life for several centuries, until the first century BCE.  Early Rome inherited the principles and practices of Greek democracy.  But the advances in civility did not take hold, an indicator, perhaps, of how difficult it is for a new trait to sweep through an entire class-stratified population in a short period of time, and eventually, violence triumphed over civility.  The Roman republic ends in civil war in the first century BCE and the rise to power of emperors who rule for nearly six centuries before succumbing to invasions by Germanic tribes.  The change from fifth century BCE Greece to fifth century CE Rome is a shift from democracy to authoritarianism and from civil legality to brutality and plunder.  It is as if evolution shifted into reverse.  If the positive developments in human civilization that seem attributable to a new kind of cognition were remarkable in the Greek Enlightenment, no less remarkable is their disappearance in a thousand year span of time.

In isolated Greek city states, assortative mating maintained genetic consistency of the sort that underwrote political democracy by making such non-sensory cognitive capacities as thinking in concepts and speaking from memory possible and culturally retainable.[iv] But once Greece gave way to Rome, a highly unstable empire with much migration and no consistent, isolated reproductive pattern, the Greek moment passes.  In early Rome an effort is made to preserve the democratic institutions created in Greece, but Rome was a magnet for wealth through conquest, and the high stakes fostered both lofty ambitions and low desires.  It must have been a tempting situation for anyone with an ancestral disposition.  There were few incentives to suspend urges and regulate affect for the sake of universal principles.  It was a case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma without any prisoners.  In the first century BCE, democracy was cast aside in favor of autocracy, and a several centuries long era of plunder and corruption began.  Simone Weil notes that what distinguishes Rome from Greece is the coming to dominance of a sensibility that might be called ancestral and sensory as opposed to adaptive and non-sensory (Weil, 2005).  Oriented toward violent defensiveness and the control of resources for the sake of domination, it eschewed non-sensory principles in favor of a brutal expediency whose goal was the subordination of others through the control of resources.  Authoritarianism superseded democracy, unempathetic violence replaced oratory in public spectacles, and propaganda replaced nuanced, realist forms of literary representation.  The difference between Demosthenes and Cicero is the difference between principle and expediency, and the difference between Homer and Vergil is the difference between a finely analytic mind devoted to the expounding of civil principles and a hack propagandist for a corrupt imperial regime who was willing to sell his skills to serve the interests of those in power.

In Rome, despite its fate, one nevertheless sees evidence of non-sensory cognition at work.  Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, two Roman Tribunes of the second century CE, were among the most intellectually gifted men of their era (Stockton, 1979). Their mother was a famous intellectual of Greek origin who oversaw their educational training by Greek teachers.  The brothers were noteworthy for their skills at diplomacy and legislation.  As political leaders, the brothers sought to reintroduce Greek principles of democracy to Roman life and proposed ways to make the distribution of property to army veterans more equitable.  Large property owners who stood to lose if the new principles of distribution were put into effect murdered each one of them before their reforms could be implemented.  We might interpret such events as a difference of opinion untouched by genetic variation, but when the difference is between those with a capacity for principled, non-sensory thinking on the one hand and those characterized by unregulated impulses normally held in check by such cognition on the other, one has reason to speculate that the clash has genetic or epigenetic roots.

With the collapse of Rome in the fifth century CE, western genetic history also seems to change. Economic historians use the term “simplification” to describe the socio-economic system that succeeds Rome in western Europe, one in which craft skills disappear and people forget how even to use money for trade (a sign of the absence of symbolic thinking abilities) (Ward-Perkins, 2005). The word “simplification,” given what did happen, has an unfortunate intellectual resonance as well.  It is as if the simple-minded and leaden-headed took over, and those with more advanced cognitive abilities are driven out of public life by the brutality and violence of their fellows.  Very little of any genetic evidence is available to sustain an hypothesis like that, but phenotypic behavior can be taken as an index, and by all accounts, the Germanic tribes that displaced the Romans were more given to physical activity than intellectual life, practiced antique forms of religion that included human sacrifice, cultivated martial violence in men as well as women in a manner that was more Homeric than Aristotelian, and had trouble adapting to basic civilized rules such as the one barring incest.  Even as late a figure as Charlemagne kept his daughters “close” throughout their lives. That the ability to use imagination to engage in detailed and realist artistic representation also disappears for eight centuries is a further indicator that a genetically based cognitive ability was either lost or shunted aside by people who did not possess such abilities but whose drive for dominance assured that their disposition would set the tone of the era and of their societies.

The ancestral sensibility that was displaced temporarily in Greece by those possessed of non-sensory cognition returned to dominance over public affairs, largely as a result of a population shift that drew in new human groups from northern and central Europe.  But where then did those benefitting from the genetic modification that gave rise to advanced non-sensory cognition in the Mediterranean basin go?  They did not disappear or get culled because the adaptation they bore shows up later in the Renaissance and bequeathes us modern, normative, rule-bound civilization.  In all likelihood, after the collapse of Rome and the beginning of the era of tribal rule, they entered religious life and became the great intellectuals of the Roman Church from Origen, Augustine, and Gregory to Copernicus, Occam, and Aquinas.  Religion was a realm where matters pertaining to non-sensory cognition could be explored and discussed, often with great analytic detail, as Aquinas proved. While in the contemporary era, belief and interest in spirituality has come to seem alien to the scientific sensibility, during the Middle Ages, spirituality was an intellectual realm that allowed those possessed of non-sensory cognitive abilities, even ones we might now consider scientific, to thrive.  It had a different meaning and social function then than it has now.  Abbeys and monasteries were the places where minds capable of science were preserved, and that may explain why the writings of Occam and Aquinas seem like early science, even though they are about religious matters.

Feudalism, the economic and social system that obtains from 500 to 1600 CE, was a system of dominance and subordination carried out by force and centering on the over-accumulation of resources as a means of maintaining control within the group.  It might also be characterized as a particular kind of cognitive reign. If the ability to develop highly differentiated and complex mental representations is linked to advanced forms of democratic civility in the Greek experience, a coming-to-dominance of ancestral sensory forms of mental representation in public life during the Middle Ages brought with it a diminishment of civility and a growth of the absolutist social forms that the ancestral disposition favors, forms that assured that society would be organized not around non-sensory principles such as justice or democracy but around dominance, hierarchy, defensiveness, violence, and resource control.  In art and literature, the Middle Ages witnesses a return to forms that are neo-mythological in their simplicity.  It is interesting that when Europe begins to “wake up” around 1300 CE, one of the first signs of awakening is new, more realist painting forms, such as those practiced by the Lorenzetti brothers in Siena and of literary works such as Cervantes Don Quijote that mock medieval mythology in a realist mode.

The case of the suppression of Catharism in southern France in the 13^th century is instructive regarding both the ancestral character of cognition prevalent in the dominant social group at the time and the persistence of the disposition evident in 5th century Greece.  With economic and social simplification after 500 CE, the Roman Catholic Church asserted its intellectual dominance in Europe.  Early discussions amongst Jews and Christians after the death of Jesus Christ reflect a rich mix of ideas, many of which, such as Gnosticism, clearly bear the mark of non-sensory cognition.  But those ideas were expunged from the New Testament of the Roman Church (Pagels, 1979). And Ireneus in the second century began the Church’s assault on the Gnostics, declaring their ideas heterodox and the ideas sanctioned by the authority of the Church orthodox.  With the Crusades from 1100 CE to 1300 CE, however, an opening eastward occurred that led to the rediscovery of Greek culture and of Greek books.  Gnostic ideas once again became popular in Western Europe, and were spread by Greek merchants.  Those ideas emphasize a distinction between a corrupt material world and a non-sensory spiritual one.  Gnostics divide humans into groups, with the lowest being those absorbed in material concerns and the highest or most spiritual being those who have absolved themselves of such concerns (by among other things renouncing material possessions and taking vows of chastity).  It is as if the Gnostics were observing humanity and noticing the division between those with an adaptive ability for advanced non-sensory cognition (misconstrued as spirituality) and those without that genetic benefit whose snouts were firmly in the trough and whose hands firmly grasped their swords.

The Cathars were an aristocratic caste in southern France in the 13th century who, like the Gnostics, believed the material world was a corrupt realm of power.  They were offended by the opulence of the Roman Catholic Church and saw it as an example of corruption.  The Cathars believed as well in a more pure spiritual realm of forms or principles such as love and peace.  In this, they resembled the philosophers of the Greek Enlightenment.  They developed a sophisticated culture characterized by sung poetry.  They opposed war because it was a manifestation of power rather than of love.  The Cathars believed in universal principles associated with restraint placed on animal urges, and such restraint is linked in their lives and their group philosophy to the ability to work with mental images or ideas that embody universal principles.

Catharism might be understood, therefore, not on its own terms as a spiritual or religious movement but rather as a manifestation of non-sensory cognition at work in human affairs, generating values, ideals, principles, and norms that restrained violence and furthered cooperative civility.  One could even hypothesize that its spread within Provence and Languedoc was due as much to cultural transmission as to genetic sweeping through a geographically isolated population over a period of centuries.  The Cathars represented a serious challenge both to those in power in the Roman Catholic Church and to the ancestral sensibility they embodied.  The Cathars’ opposition to wealth, power, and materiality was in fact a statement against the motives and practices of that ancestral sensibility as it was embodied in those with power generally in Western Europe at the time.  The Cathars, predictably perhaps, were violently suppressed by the Catholic Church in alliance with Frankish lords who were promised their lands and wealth in return for brutally eliminating the heresy and torturing and murdering many of its advocates. (de Rougemont, 1956).

Catharism is significant because it prefigures the Renaissance, the cultural, intellectual, scientific, and political revolutions set going in Europe (1300-1700) by the Crusades.  But the resurgence in learning also can be understood in terms of the resurgence and spread of advanced non-sensory cognitive abilities.  Once again, Greece plays a prominent role in the cultural transformation.  Genetically, Greek influence was probably significant since the Renaissance originates in an Italy saturated with Greek genetic mixing.  Aquinas, for example, comes from a region of Italy heavily populated by Greeks over the centuries.  But it was the rediscovery of ancient Greek texts, both religious and secular, that sparked the new emphasis on learning and science in Western Europe.  The rediscovery of the Greek Bible would lead eventually to the Protestant Reformation, which shifted emphasis in religious matters away from domination, subordination, and obedience of institutional authority towards a mode of cognition that emphasized separate individuality, private reflection, and spiritual purity (in contradistinction to the palpable material corruption of the Roman Church).

Francesco Petrarca, the person credited with initiating the Renaissance both in his writings and through his purchase of Greek texts for translation, is one of the first indicators of the reappearance in public life of people possessed of advanced forms of non-sensory cognition.  In his famous climb of Mont Ventoux, he turns from the world and focuses instead on his mental processes, which seem to give him access to a non-sensory kind of thinking associated with the regulation of affect:  “I was thus dividing my thoughts, now turning my attention to some terrestrial object that lay before me, now raising my soul, as I had done my body, to higher planes . . . How earnestly should we strive, not to stand on mountain-tops, but to trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthly impulses.”[v] If non-sensory cognition worked under the guise of religion to encourage self-control and the regulation of pre-civil affect in the religious writings of the Medieval Period, it began to operate as secular philosophy to encourage the elaboration of rational principles that function to further the building of more civil institutions during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

At this point in time, laws between nations began to be codified, a sign of a greater sense of international cooperation.  Republics such as Venice, which presupposed an educated populace, once again became popular modes of government as they had been in Greece and early Rome.  Feudal authoritarianism still persisted, but modern, more scientific divisions between administration, adjudication, and deliberation began to emerge as did universities such as Paris and Bologna devoted to the new divisions of knowledge known as the Trivium, and the first Parliaments appear, with the first coming in the British Isles, whose inhabitants, isolated like the 6th century BCE Greeks, would soon propel the scientific, industrial, and capitalist revolutions of the 18th century. From the Civil War in England in the mid-17th century to the revolutions in France and America in the late 18th, a different way of thinking began to promote universal principles such as equality, liberty, and democracy.  A major ideological and political division emerges at this point in time between those who favored simple sensory cognition, the supersession of custom over science, and an ideal of social hierarchy such as Irish conservative Edmund Burke on the one hand and those like liberal Thomas Paine on the other who evidenced non-sensory cognitive abilities, favored science over custom, and argued for universal principles that guaranteed the well-being of all.

It can perhaps be taken as a sign of the spread of advanced forms of non-sensory cognition in western Europe that more and more thinkers turn to the kind of philosophic and political thinking that emphasizes the separation of the individual from the fused feudal group and the need for objective knowledge, especially in the form of science.[vi] If contemporary psychology is right regarding the role of mental representations, we should not be surprised to see the simultaneous development of thinking about individual rights and of more realist and detailed thinking about the objective world considered as something separate from the self.  It was as if John Locke was born to confirm that particular hypothesis.  One of the first modern thinkers to propose a political theory founded on principles such as individual rights, Locke was also a scientist who argued for basing knowledge on empirical observation.  He astutely noticed that authoritarian thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes linked dogmatic forms of knowledge and absolutist political institutions.  One of the major discoveries of the period was that how we think about the world and how we organize institutions and social forms are crucially linked.  In a way that antedates modern evolutionary psychology, Locke and others, from Spinoza to Hegel, noticed that epistemology is ontology, how one thinks is materially connected to how one organizes human life.

The 18^th century is crucial because of the congruence in western Europe of significant advances in thinking ability and in human institutions.  Philosophers such as Kant and Hegel explored the implications of non-sensory cognition both in itself and for civil institution-building, while thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson actually undertook the work of interlacing the new cognitive advances with new political forms of life.  Cognition is physiological, and the important common ingredient in the great changes of the era is new thinking abilities and new ideas that infuse human physical reality, reshaping moral emotions, the psychology of expectation, institutions such as law and economics, practices such as scientific reasoning and industrial invention, and the like.  Modern human civilization is invented at this time, its basic forms and institutions established.  The era resembles in some respects the Eurasian Enlightenment of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE.  What is remarkable about the era is that non-sensory cognition itself becomes a topic of discussion and an object of philosophic reflection, and philosophers like Immanuel Kant link it to the need to develop better political and legal institutions. Kant’s distinction between Vernunft or empirical cognition and Verstand or reason exercised apart from sense perception could be interpreted as an acknowledgement of non-sensory cognition.  For Kant, Verstand is the basis for the universality that underwrites modern liberal notions of ethics and law that universalize rights.

It is in regard to the great changes wrought by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that one encounters for the first time widespread antipathy to speculative reasoning and non-sensory cognition.  It is as if those who had benefitted from social institutions organized around domination, subordination, and the control of resources finally recognized, after the success of the French Revolution, the danger of non-sensory cognition and the threat it posed to their interests.  In Burke’s writing one encounters an attack on speculation or theory, and in the conservative philosopher David Hume, one finds an attempt to undermine, using skeptical argumentation, Locke’s idea that one can construct universals from particulars and thereby secure a material and empirical basis for ideals of just government.  The era of conservative reaction and monarchial retrenchment that followed the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 was accompanied by a concurrent anti-speculative turn in discussions of cognition in western Europe.  Positivism sought to limit acceptable or legitimate knowledge to sense data arrived at only through prescribed methods.  The speculative methods that produced the ideal principles of the Enlightenment were rejected.  As a result, those who, on the basis of the ideal principles made accessible by non-sensory cognition, had in the past used speculative methods to make their points now turned to more practical forms of argumentation.  Utilitarianism, the philosophy that measured the success of ideas and institutions by their measurable gains for humanity, was a compromise solution that furthered the improvement of human institutions using the tools of non-sensory cognition while nevertheless hewing to the new emphasis on non-speculative positive knowledge.   In the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Mill, principles such as ethics and the common good were joined to scientific objectivity.  The two sides of non-sensory cognition–the elaboration of ideal principles apart from world objects and the emphasis on greater realism, objectivity, and differentiation in scientific representations of the object world–were beginning to work together more so than in the 17th and 18th centuries, when a divide still existed between “empiricists” such as Locke and “idealists” such as Hegel.  The two philosophers were using the same cognitive tool to explore the same issue but from different ends of the telescope.  The issue for both was how human cognition can improve the civil world, which is civil because it consists of the infusion of human cognition into environmental objects, a common language of norms, and educationally fostered cultural beliefs to create institutions.  Considered in this framework, there is much greater similarity between Locke’s exploration of the sensory basis of the non-sensory ideals that justify the social contract and Hegel’s only apparently quite different (even antithetical) exploration of the way non-sensory ideals infuse universal validity into particular, concrete human institutions, giving them a society-wide meaning and functionality.

I will cease my historical review here because as we approach the present and as time becomes more compressed, it becomes more difficult to see differences that suggest further development in non-sensory cognition.

If what I have suggested is the case, then we should be moved to ask:  have genetic or epigenetic differentiations occurred in humans that make us different from each other in ways that are more profound than we have so far imagined or would even like to imagine?  With the advent of human civilization, the harshest aspects of natural selection have been put on hold.  Nature no longer requires that physical adaptations be universal if each individual human organism is to survive.  But if human cultural history is any indicator, locally adaptive (epi)genetic differentiation along cognitive lines has not ceased.   My final point will be that such differentiation may account for why our societies are so conflictual.  There is no “universal human nature”; rather, there are several, perhaps many versions or forms of the same basic physiologically stable set of genes that have epigenetically varied according to local habitat (with habitat having the widest possible social, cultural, and historical meaning).  Pleistocene Man lives in body only, but not in mind.  Because evolution has shifted to cognition as civility has developed and post-natural human civilization become more complex, H. sapiens is no longer a single species bearing a single universal human nature from a cognitive point of view.

I began writing this essay in the midst of the reign of George W. Bush, thirty ninth President of the United States.  It was a reign marked by deceptive trickery, the promotion of the over-accumulation of social resources by Bush’s allies and buddies, violent attacks against adversaries for the sake of settling scores and eliminating threats to other buddies, dominance and intimidation behavior on the part of administration officials to get their way and to win elections, and other behavior that reminded me all too much of how chimpanzees behave.  I had just read Richard Wranghman and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males:  Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, and the congruity between what I read and what I saw in the world was too striking to ignore.  People are not chimps, I told myself, yet here were grown men behaving not altogether unlike chimps.  I had been struck too by how much the behavior of conservatives on TV and radio talk shows resembled primate dominance behavior.  They did not allow others to talk and spoke over them.  The sought do dominate rather than reason or discuss.  In contrast to such efforts at intimidation, liberals on such talk shows seemed to strive to be civil and polite, empathetic and respectful.  They seemed to value civility much more than conservatives.

Such differences might be merely ideological, I knew, but the fact that they manifested themselves in physical actions led me to wonder if they might also be the result of physical causes.  I had been studying the history of conservatism for years, and I recognized repetitive, apparently structural elements of the “ideology” that suggested something deeper at work than ideas.  That led me to ask:  what if the ideology is genetic?  What struck me especially was that while liberals seemed capable of seeing the importance of universal principles such as the Geneva Convention against torture, conservatives did not.  It was not that conservatives disagreed with such principles and offered reasonable arguments to justify ignoring them.  They simply seemed incapable of grasping them, as if they lacked the “principle grasping” cognitive module.  And that went along with a much more pronounced sense of expediency than one finds in liberals.  Conservatives like Bush were not just unprincipled; they lied for expedient ends, and did not seem to recognize that there might be something wrong with that if one wanted to preserve the community one lived in.  I began to wonder too if the fact that principles are non-sensory ideas with universal validity had something to do with this failure on the part of conservatives.  What if liberals benefitted from an adaptation in the realm of cognition that is associated with an ability to think in terms of universal principles that allows humans to build cooperative civil institutions that assure individual survival by assuring group survival?  And what if conservatives simply cannot think in the same way because they did not benefit from this adaptation?  That would explain what I saw in the conservatives I had been studying in cultural history:  a greater tendency towards violence as a means of solving conflicts, a drive to control resources as a way of controlling others, a tendency to engage in dominance behavior, an inability to restrain affect for the sake of ideal universal principles, a preference for the social hierarchies that subordinated others, a bent towards simple cognitive empiricism, a preference for fused authoritarian groups, an urge toward self-serving mythology and distrust of science, etc.

At about this moment in my work, I came across research that suggested that there are physiological differences between liberals and conservatives.  I was especially struck by the fact that conservatives fear death more so than liberals.  And that made sense to me because such a fear might be part of a genetic wiring that makes one more alert to the dangers predators pose, and conservatives fostered predatory societies in which “freedom” allows those with a resource advantage to prey on others.  Moreover, a fear of death would make one struggle all the more fiercely for one’s own survival.  That suddenly explained a number of features of conservative ideology such as opposition to taxes (why give resources to competitors?) and to government regulation (which interferes with survival-oriented activities in a mutually predatory capitalist setting).  It also explained the primary motive of most conservative ideology and action:  the quest to over-accumulate resources (a guarantee of survival in a resource-competitive context).  A fear of death would also motivate one to be more prone to be defensively violent towards perceived threats to survival (hence the conservative obsession with military defense).  U.S. conservatives in the 1980s had surprised me with their willingness to exercise brutality against adversaries in Latin America.  They seemed entirely lacking in a sense of empathy of a kind found in those, such as Jesuit priests and Maryknoll nuns, they murdered because they were too friendly to the poor and the subordinate.  Conservatives condoned death squad murders and accepted as routine the massacre of civilians by allies.  But that becomes understandable if one sees the quest by poor people for economic equality of the sort that motivated the social and political movements in Latin America as a threat to the survival of those with resources that would need to be shared more equitably if such movements were to succeed.  Lacking the kinds of non-sensory cognitive ability that allows liberals to embrace universal principles and to more successfully control negative affect, conservatives react violently to threats to their resources.  Murder in Latin America was justified to preserve the ability of conservatives to over-accumulate resources without interference from the community in the form of universally valid and universally binding restraints.

It would seem that the disposition we see in conservatives is reflective of an earlier adaptation, one attuned to a more predatory environment, while the cognitive ability evident in liberals that allows for reasoning in terms of regulative universal principles that put brakes on self-centered survival imperatives reflects a later adaptation, one geared more towards a later stage of human evolution that required cooperative living in large communities.  The conservative antipathy to speculative thinking becomes more understandable if this hypothesis is true.

Conservative cognition is limited by the survival imperative, and it bears the residues of that imperative. As a result, conservative cognition is limited to the self’s need for security, safety, and survival. Such cognition is defensive, empiricist, anti-speculative, and absolutist. Defensiveness in a predatory context obliges one to monitor one’s immediate environment carefully for signs of danger, and it therefore favors empirical modes of perception over speculative ones that require one to relinquish one’s perceptual grasp on what is immediately before one. Because it seeks safety by monitoring the practical empirical world around it for signs of danger, such cognition is less equipped to use the mind’s speculative capacities to develop purely formal or abstract models of the world. Conservative cognition, as a result, is incapable of submitting animal self-interest to the rigors of formal principle. The idea that one sacrifices one’s immediate survival urges for an idea that applies equally to all and that restrains one’s self-interest for the good of others is alien to it. Conservatives react with hostility to speculative cognition or “theory” because it is associated with the possibility of death, with a letting go of the security and safety empiricist perception and the cognitive security it affords provide. They feel most safe in a windowless empiricism that is intolerant regarding speculative modes of thought. Such speculative thinking posits formal or ideal entities such as “human rights” or “universal justice” that are not things before one’s eyes like empirical objects; one cannot sense them before one in empirical perception. If the palpable presence of the world in perception confirms one’s safety, then the absence of it in formal speculative thought requires one to accept the possibility of death when one engages in it. One leaves the safety of the well-monitored world. That liberals can engage in such cognition and that conservatives cannot is probably the most singular difference between them in regard to evolved cognitive capacity.

The windowless empiricism that arises from a yearning for safety in a predatory context also leads to a need for cognitive absolutes and for cognitive control. As they require empirical certainty, conservatives also require cognitive absolutes. Absolute and certain knowledge is a way of controlling one’s environment, of assuring that one will not be vulnerable to predation. Conservatives favor modes of cognitive authority that assure predictable results over modes that emphasize uncertainty. Their thinking therefore tends to be axiomatic and to preclude experimentation or the exploration of alternatives. They will always, in consequence, oppose reform. Their most natural cognitive mode is religious belief, especially the authoritarian varieties such as Catholicism, radical Islam, and fundamentalist Protestantism, and they are hostile to scientific knowledge and experimentation that contradicts the authoritative beliefs that sustain their self-interest. They are incapable of non-absolutist thinking that is tentative and hypothetical, that tests ideas for their possible truthfulness. Conservative thinking, to assure the survival of the self, cannot afford to be uncertain in a world in which all others are viewed as predators. Consequently, it rarely entertains the reality of other possible truths about the world that might threaten the self’s ability to control its environment. Conservative cognition can therefore never be pragmatic. It can never develop pictures of the world that are tentative and partial rather than authoritatively certain and absolute.

The intense self-interest that is the most important sign in conservatives of their greater proximity to the natural impulse to survive at all costs also accounts for their inability to empathize with others. Empathy is akin to the speculative cognitive capacity because it requires that one leave the security of one’s immediate empirical field of perception in order to imaginatively inhabit another’s perspective. Such empathy is a sign of weakness in a predatory context; it leaves one vulnerable and subtracts from the aggressive posture toward potential adversaries that one must always maintain in order to survive. To imagine someone else’s point of view, to empathetically inhabit their interests and needs, is to betray one’s own most powerful survival urges. Conservatives will always, as a result, appear “heartless” in social policy debates; they seem incapable of knowing other people’s pain or of taking it seriously. They cannot do so because to relinquish one’s guarded self-interest is to momentarily let go of the survivalist urge and of the mono-perspectivalism that accompanies it. Empathy entails a diminishment of the absolute certainty of the self’s perspective and of its beliefs. It requires that one grant validity and substance to another perspective, another reality, than one’s own. One must learn to shake hands with the predator.

That is an almost impossible task for conservatives because in a predatory context in which one’s own self-interest is primary, one’s cognition of others must be characterized by fear, distrust, and hostility. That fear makes one less capable of modes of cognition that require imagination, speculation, identification with others, and empathy. As a result, conservatives have not developed these abilities, and indeed, “lack of imagination” is a common descriptive term for conservatives steeped in the predatory culture of business and commerce. But lack of imagination is much more than an inability to fantasize. It means one lacks the cognitive ability to leave one’s own perspective, assumptions, and beliefs to travel on the freeways of the mind, to visit other places, to know other people, to be other oneself. The ability to engage in such travel means one doesn’t fear death. Indeed, the fear of death that is much stronger in conservatives than in liberals is probably linked to their comparatively diminished imaginative, speculative, and empathetic capacities.

Imagination is important in one other respect. It touches on aesthetics, on the philosophy of cultural creation. If human progress along an evolutionary pathway has consisted of moving away from the animal and toward the human, away from the simplistically empirical toward increasingly complex forms of mental activity and cognitive capacity, then the ability to live in the world of imagination and of imagined stories, characters, and meanings is a significant one. It means one is capable of living in a world of purely mental activity, of ideas not attached to things. It is a sign of more evolved cognitive capacities.

Moreover, the ability to think about ideas apart from things in culture is related to the ability to imagine better forms of social life that comport with speculative ideals and formal principles such as fairness and equality. Increasingly, the philosophy of culture has emphasized imaginative complexity that requires liberal cognitive capacities—the ability to inhabit multiple perspectives, the ability to empathize with quite different points of view, a distaste for social forms such as inequality that betray formal ideals such as symmetry and harmony, arguments in favor of rational universalism, and the like. The great liberal thinkers such as Immanuel Kant who have led the way in evolving new cognitive capacities have, in consequence, usually also been thinkers about aesthetics, about what constitutes a well-made mental or imaginary object. This is the case because their goal in the world has been the creation of a world that is itself well-made, that comports with ideal principles of rightness, justice, and symmetry.

Conservative self-interest is too particular and intensely empirical an impulse to be able to accommodate itself to the cognitive necessities of rational universalism or to the ideal standards of what might be called aesthetic justice—that the world should be like a perfect work of art in its complexity, its respect for multiple perspectives, its embodiment of principles of symmetry, harmony, and unity in the form of justice, fairness, and equality. The self and its survival imperatives prevent conservatives from seeing the transpersonal rules, procedures, and regulations of principled social existence as anything but nettlesome external constraints on a personal will that is more trustworthy because more true to one’s natural self and more direct an expression of one’s natural survival urges. The self’s intuitions provide a clearer and more reliable barometer of what the self needs to survive than liberal principles and procedures designed by others for others and that originate outside the self in the artificial contrivances of language and thought.

Submission to formal principles and procedures requires that one abstract from personal interest and one’s immediate empirical context.  It requires that one mould one’s will to formal ideational imperatives.  It requires an evolved, adaptive cognitive ability liberals possess but conservatives do not. Principles are formal and equalizing. One must be able to lift oneself out of one’s natural self-interested impulses and be able to recognize that others’ needs and interests are equal to one’s own. The equalizing impulse of principle is a threat to the natural survival impulse to prioritize one’s own needs. Such ideational equalization is a threat to one’s most basic sense of reality, and perhaps for this reason, the term used by conservatives to repel the call of principle is “realism.” Realism mandates a cynicism regarding human nature that makes behavior in accordance with formal principle seem a kind of weakness. To leave one’s self, one’s palpable empirical reality, for the sake of others through the medium of universalist reasoning is to risk death.

Because conservative cognition does not lend itself to formal and theoretical reasoning, it is prone to make self-interested errors of logic. Conservatives claim that force is necessary in foreign policy, for example, but such force is not so much a response to the actions of adversaries as the cause of those actions. Terrorist attacks against the United States appear in conservative eyes as unexplained and unexplainable aggressions that demand violent responses because they can only see empirical events and cannot speculatively picture invisible, non-empirical historical causes or contextual influences. But in fact those terrorist actions originate in the violent actions of American conservatives. Much of what is negative in others’ behavior toward the U.S. arises from events such as the CIA overthrow of a democratic government in Iran in 1953, a move conceived and executed by conservatives, or the decision by the first conservative Bush administration to station United States military forces in Saudi Arabia. Logical failure is, of course, also a failure of the ability to take ethical responsibility for one’s actions, since actions without historical causes are actions for which no one need assume responsibility. Such responsibility requires that one be able to tally causes and consequences in a complex diagram in which one’s own perspective is just one part of the larger structure of relations. This would explain why conservatives’ ethical lapses in responsibility often appear as cognitive lapses, a failure even to comprehend that a wrong has occurred for which responsibility need be taken.

Conservative cognition has a bearing on conservative social action. In conservative social action, the self is paramount as is the aggressive defense of its integrity. It is not so much that the self is aggrandized as it is that the self constitutes a lead ball around which all else relating to civil life and the obligations it imposes are so many loose, flimsy filaments of thread that lack the same weight, mass, and compelling value. To think and to act conservatively is therefore to look out from a bunker through thin slots that afford a useful and sufficiently instrumental field of vision to guarantee survival. All that one sees or thinks is oriented by and toward a single perspective, and all action that one engages in has the purpose of securing and preserving the integrity of that single point in the larger social field. All other points are pictured n the conservative worldview as being themselves opaque bunkers, targets rather than windows to selves as worthy of value or respect as one’s own.  In such a mode of being, others do not have sufficient value to prevent one from harming them for the sake of one’s own survival. If one is cynical regarding others’ motives (they must be as aggressive and defensive as one’s own motives), one provides oneself a license to be callous regarding others’ well-being. To make one’s own survival paramount is to diminish the right to survival of others. It is to make them potential targets of violence. This in part explains the conservative animus toward the doctrine of human rights. A doctrine that proclaims the dignity of all, the worthiness of all of respect of person, would impose an impossible limitation on the natural impulse to violate others for the sake of one’s own survival.

My description of conservative cognitive capacity up to this point should not be taken as a claim that conservatives are less “intelligent.” Cognitive capacity is different from what is called intelligence. Cognitive capacity means an ability to think in certain ways, to conduct certain forms of ideation. Conservatives can be quite skilled at practical, instrumental, self-interested thinking and still lack cognitive capacities having to do with complexity, relational thinking, speculation, reciprocity, formal universalism, and the like. Intelligence measures practical abilities—the ability to remember or to calculate or to read. It does not measure the ability to think complexly, speculatively, imaginatively, structurally, and relationally apart from practical tasks, an ability that engages cognitive powers that only become possible once one in fact sets aside attachment to raw empirical perception anchored in practical tasks. Those cognitive powers permit one to think in terms of forms and principles such as economic fairness or substantive justice or social equality that are detached from the immediacy of practical perception and are as a result universal in scope. They apply equally to all, and they restrain self-interested behavior and oblige it to conform to an idea that is not part of a practical task with a self-interested end or goal. The principle is an end in itself. As such, it permits us all to rise above the particularity of self-interest and to do things that are beneficial to all, including onseself. Because intelligence is a measure of practical tasks, it is possible for conservatives to be quite accomplished at such things as business, law, and medicine while failing at complex thinking. Because their cognitive capacities are determined and limited by the relatively greater presence of the survival imperative in them, they will always put gain before equity, winning before justice, and the exploitation of others’ needs before principles of reciprocal respect and universal rights.

If liberals have always led the way in human evolution, conservatives have always lagged behind, opposing liberal adaptations every step of the way. When liberals invented democracy in the early modern era, for example, they easily adapted to the dangerous new realities it made possible, while conservatives opposed the new invention tooth and nail. They did so because they feared losing control over social resources they perceived as necessary for their physical survival. Fear of democracy in the 18^th century was always associated with a fear of loss of property to democratic “mobs.” The conservative response to the danger of democracy took the form of an increased assertion of control over society in the form of revived monarchies, sedition laws, and outright state violence to suppress democratic dissent. From Waterloo on, control was reasserted violently by conservatives who could not adapt to the new liberal social invention by developing cognitive capacities appropriate to it, capacities that would allow one to tolerate the possibility of a change of government brought about by wills other than one’s own.

Almost by definition, conservatives are those who find invention disturbing and threatening. The impulse to survive retards their ability to adapt to liberal inventions that move humans further and further away from their original primitive animal state and toward every more civil ones. Those inventions replace the guarantee of survival that comes from certain animal traits such as aggressiveness, domineeringness, and defensiveness with traits such as civility, cooperativeness, and reciprocal respect that provide more indirect routes to survival. They do so by requiring that those who adapt give up the cognitive modes characteristic of the animal state and of the survival imperative—a windowless empiricism, a need for absolute certainty, a self-interest so intense that it prevents imaginative empathy, a self-seeking so powerful that it makes formal equality seem alien and dangerous, hostility to reciprocity, an inability to subordinate will to agreed-upon procedure, and the like. They require instead that one be able to mould one’s thinking and behavior to the demands of formal principle, to engage in empathetic identification, to be able to accept models of reciprocal equality, and to accept the complexity of multiple perspectives. Thinking complexly also requires that one extend the reach of thought beyond the bounds of immediate empirical perception and the limited instrumental range of practical self-interest. One is able to perceive structure behind empirical objects and events. Things that seem isolated connect with other things and come to be seen as embodying structural relations. Isolated things are in differential relations with other things. A sense of variability and contingency attends this way of thinking, and it frees one from the rigidity of pre-scientific convictions that prevent experimentation and invention. Things that exist in structural relations are usually changeable. They can be modified by changing the structure. This is why such thinking lends itself inevitably to science and to social reform.

In complex thinking, one adopts a neutral, objective perspective and treats knowledge as something outside the self that is not attached to self-interest. Such thinking also takes multiple perspectives into account. One shifts perspective away from the self and treats other perspectives as having equal value and weight as one’s own. To understand another perspective in this way requires an ability to imagine beyond the range of the self’s immediate survival needs and to place one’s mind outside the range of one’s survival-impelled range of empirical perceptions. That shift means giving up the self as the absolute point of value and giving up the empirical perceptual requirements of survival.

An ability to detach from the immediacy of perception and to engage in purely ideational cognition also is necessary to achieve other dimensions of civility such as cooperation and reciprocity. One can learn to trust others and to set aside an aggressive and hostile attitude in their regard by imagining their existence as something other than a threat. One can do that by imaginatively placing oneself in their perspective. Such imaginative speculation is the first step toward the kind of empathy for others that is essential to the ideal of liberal civility. To attain it, one must be able to move beyond one’s own boundaries and to direct positive affect toward something other than one’s own survival imperative. Defense of self at all costs can afford to give way to trust in others because those others have agreed to mould their behavior in accordance with the same formal universal ideals and principles of civility that one has oneself adopted.  Trust, respect, empathy, cooperation, equality, reciprocity—these goals of liberal civility require modes of cognition that are post-empirical and speculative, an ability to think apart from empirical perception and in terms of rational universals. That shift allows the invention of principles, procedures, and rules that are premised on reciprocity and equal applicability. Such ideal entities are crucial for the attainment of civility in human life because they permit a setting aside of the survival imperative.

Liberals have evolved differently in their cognitive capacities because evolution, I would argue, increasingly substitutes an ability to engage in formal reasoning, structural conceptualization, and differential and relational thinking for the empiricist, self-interested, and instrumental cognitive reflexes of the physical urge to survive. The ability to bend one’s will and one’s self-interest to the rigorous demands of principle are essential to the development and execution of these cognitive capacities. One accepts the limitations on one’s behavior that principles such as equal treatment or economic fairness impose not because they serve one’s self-interest but because they are a good in themselves as well as an end in themselves. They are like aesthetic objects, things one enjoys for their own sake. They are like scientific knowledge or the fruits of research that make the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself worthwhile for researchers, teachers, professors, scientists, intellectuals, inventors, and the like.

But self-interest is so powerful and so primary in conservatives that they cannot undertake this essential act of principled civility. They need the direct route of aggression and domination to help assure the continuity of life, while the indirect routes to survival of principled equality, reciprocity, cooperation, and the like that liberals have developed seem to conservatives to be weak and potentially dangerous to one’s chances of survival. The direct route consists of sticking one’s snout into the trough, whilst elbowing others aside. In place of this white-knuckled bundling of the necessities of survival to one’s chest, liberalism proposes alternative ways of proceeding that require a relinquishing of one’s claim to what one can grasp immediately. For conservatives, property is the gain one can claim simply by virtue of having a longer or a more aggressive reach. For liberals, the claim to property needs to be reconfigured within a larger structure of differentially related terms in a larger social whole that reciprocally sustain each other as in a complex algorithm. It is a matter of moving from arithmetic to algebra. Individual terms are modified by their relations to one another and cease to be assumed to stand simply on their own. They are subject to principles such as equity and equality because with the change of optic to algebra from arithmetic, the simple addition to one’s own sum comes to be seen as a subtraction from someone else’s in a differential equation. A change of thought mandates a change of reality. That has always been the case with liberal adaptation and invention.

Conservatives and liberals, therefore, do not so much hold different beliefs as give expression in their differing beliefs to different evolutionary locations and different, matching cognitive capacities. If liberals see a more complex world than conservatives, it is because they have more complex minds that have evolved in keeping with the evolution of more complex forms of social life that liberals themselves invented. Liberals inhabit a different evolutionary location the achievement of which demanded and in turn produced or made possible more evolved and complex cognitive capacities. As a result, they are able to “see” things conservatives cannot. Conservatives deny the reality of such things as global warming and the systematic production of inequality by unfettered capitalism because they cannot “see,” which is to say conceive, conceptualize, and imaginatively picture reciprocal, differential relations between parts of a structure that is not “there” for empirical perception to grasp. Instead, they see simple things detached from structure, field, and context, and they posit causes of those things that are equally simple. I have wealth; it must be because I am better than you, who do not have wealth. The cause is simple and in the self; it is not structural, relational, differential, and complex.

According to what might be called the law of cognitive recursiveness, those without an internal mechanism that allows them to perceive complexity will not see complexity in the world. Instead of differential relations between parts in a structure, they will see simple, isolated events, objects, and persons. Conservatives see a purely natural market universe of “free” survivalism, for example, where liberals see complex institutional relations that make possible and foster the impulses and actions such as self-interest that conservatives take as being spontaneous, unproduced, and natural. While conservatives see universal self-interest as the natural law of civil society, a liberal would look at the same social and economic situation and see that the unequal distribution of resources and the resulting unequal distribution of scarcity oblige people to urgently seek their own survival. But in a different social structure in which basic needs were supplied, the same people would be free to pursue other post-natural goals that would allow survival to be achieved through less violent and aggressively self-interested forms of social interaction. What for conservatives is the natural cause of everything is in fact an effect of a structure of relations, differences, and implicit rules that conservatives cannot grasp or see. And that structure can be changed to produce different effects, different human dispositions that, like liberal cognition itself, transcend the apparently “natural” and become the basis for creating second-order civil universes upon it.

What this line of reasoning should led to is a recognition that conservatism itself is probably both a genetic and an epigenetic phenomenon.  Contexts determine cognition to a certain degree, and while material ease allows upper class people to more easily embrace liberalism, material constraint means that lower class people are obliged to see the world differently.  A harsh environment breeds harsh and hard responses in human emotion and thought that are epigenetically triggered.  While some live in the mountains valleys of reason and benefit from well-stocked larders that enable non-empiricist cognition, others live still in metaphoric jungles.

The cognition of the jungle could not and cannot afford to be anything but concrete and empirical, firmly anchored in immediate sensory perception. Vigilance, the constant monitoring of one’s surroundings for signs of danger, demanded nothing less, and vigilance was necessary if one was to survive and to have one’s offspring survive. Cognitive biologists note that vigilance is linked to aversive relations with one’s “conspecifics.” In a world without rules, violence is unrestrained and competition for scarce resources is the only imperative worth respecting. Empiricism and survivalism for this reason are brothers, and their twin sisters are force and fear—an anxious defensive relation to one’s conspecifics and a willingness to harm them if need be in order to defend oneself.

That the cognitive disposition of conservatives may be more “ancestral” might explain some odd, almost humorous features of conservative life, such as their affection for hunting.  The fact that Sarah Palin can take down a moose as ably as she can skin a liberal is if nothing else an occasion for reflection on the persistence of the Pleistocene.  The seemingly phenotypic taste for guns and hunting just might be significant of a deeper difference. What I have found most interesting about conservatives, however, is their capacity for deceptive trickery.  They favor harsh regimentation in society, yet they call it “freedom.”  They mean, of course, that those who are in a superior position in terms of resource accumulation should be allowed to continue to accumulate.  They also should be free to exercise dominance behavior as a means of preserving control over others.  But because liberals from the 17th century on made “liberty” or freedom such an attractive ideal, conservatives have been obliged to borrow it and to bend it, quite opportunistically, to their own ends–which consist of assuring that society will be organized in such a way that their own survival interests are assured.  Interestingly, what conservative mean by “freedom” resembles feudalism.  And when things really get rough, conservatives explicitly embrace and implement neo-feudal social forms (in the Nazi experience).  This deceptive trickery is of a high order indeed, and it makes lying to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2002 or calling laws that allow pollution by one’s buddies in the energy industries “Clear Skies Initiatives” seem trivial.

If what I am suggesting is true, then we may need to stop using a term like “human nature” in the singular when we discuss the behavior of the various locally adapted, epigenetically differentiated forms of H. sapiens.  What we may be witnessing in modern societies such as the U.S. is not so much a culture war as an intra-species conflict.  More psychological and behavioral testing will need to be conducted on the difference between conservatives and liberals, but one advantage of human cultural history is that it affords ample evidence of the forms of cognition that characterize each social group.  Movies are cognitive products, and they are weighted with values that are near digital in their simplicity (think good guy versus bad guy) especially in popular fare.  If human values are shaped by epigenetic change and are preferences that are in a sense necessities, then a study of how acts of valuation or preference manifest themselves in different groups’ representations of the world, especially at times when physical survival is at issue because the civilized hazard has manifested itself, may have fruitful consequences.  The Great Depression of the 1930s was a time when human civilization’s hazard suddenly became evident.  In a cooperative civilization in which delivery of food supplants self-provision, the implicit hazard is that human-made institutions might fail, threatening the survival of all.  During the 1930s, conservatives and liberals in America debated in film what the proper response to the economic crisis should be, but what they were really debating goes much deeper and has to do with the evolutionary issues I have been discussing.  In the lexicon of popular political discussion, a key term was “liberty” (the freedom of conservatives to conduct economic activities without regulation by the community).  But at an evolutionary level, that term really means “dominance.”  Because political discussion is meant to sway a large audience with ideas that are attractive and likely to gain support for the group promoting them, such popular discussion is often characterized by representations that are never fully accurate.  A certain duplicity, especially on the part of conservatives, is needed to be effective.  In order to succeed, conservatives are obliged to call dominance liberty or freedom.

Cultural fantasies like film are a different matter, and while it may seem odd to say so, they are often if not always more true than popular political statements.  Fantasies have long been favored by cultural scholars as sources for evidence regarding underlying dispositions because fantasies, for precisely the reason they are not taken seriously by many–they lack seriousness–, are a mode of expression where internal cognitive censors and the sensing devices that might guide representational expression toward effective deception, are turned off or at a lower ebb.  One sees what people are really thinking.  If conservatives proclaim a love of “liberty” or “freedom” but in fact favor feudalism, one will be more likely to see that in conservative fantasies than in conservative political speeches.  In fantasy is an honesty lacking in censored and expedient public discourse.

The Gold Diggers of 1933 is a liberal film, while My Man Godfrey makes a conservative argument in 1937 against the liberal New Deal, a set of programs anchored in liberal ideals of universal governance for the common good.  In the midst of the worst period of suffering during the Great Depression, Gold Diggers promotes cooperation, mutual support, empathy for others, and the use of public instruments for private needs, especially that most basic need–hunger.  In contrast, Godfrey takes a much harder, even harsher approach.  The strong competent individual entrepreneur will save us, it argues, but he can do so only if everyone else submits to discipline, accepts their subordinate place in a hierarchy, and, to use an appropriate primatological metaphor, knuckles under.  Gold Diggers is noteworthy for its musical numbers, which move out of the limited space of theatrical representation and portrays a much larger space in which choreographed sequences can occur that exceed the bonds of the theater stage.  (The move is about the staging of a musical on Broadway.)  The shift from realist theater stage to non-realist and imagined stage is an exercise in non-sensory cognition.  It is as if one closed one’s eyes to sensory perception and imagined a different mental world entirely.  That exercise in super-sensory cognition is linked in the movie’s argument to the need to use one’s imagination to see how others live, to adduce their true motives, and to empathize with their suffering.  Only such imagination can permit us to live cooperatively without distrust and to empathize with and help one another at times of economic crisis.  In a crucial plot move, a wealthy man, after initially being suspicious of the motives of showgirls, learns that they have virtue and are responsible and hardworking.  Despite appearances or prejudices, they are not in fact “gold diggers.”  They deserve help.  The argument of the film is that we can trust others in times of crisis; we should empathize with those in need because they may in fact be us.  Using our imagination, our ability to engage in super-sensory cognition, we can inhabit their lives and sympathize with their needs.

Godfrey argues for realism and mocks and demeans the kind of imaginative social idealism Gold-Diggers promotes.  In the “real” world, imagination is a frivolous indulgence, as is self-pity.  Godfrey, himself wealthy though apparently poor, upbraids the wealthy for self-indulgence and frivolity.  The group’s survival is threatened because women have gotten out of control, play has supplanted the serious work of securing material survival, intellectuals and artists, who are portrayed as self-indulgent free-loaders and cheaters, have been given too much power, and the dominant male (played by an actor who resembles a silverback) has lost his position of dominance.  Godfrey’s task, one he succeeds at, is to restore that dominance by exercising his superior entrepreneurial abilities.  What is striking is the physical character of this exercise in restoration.  The free loading artist is expelled from the house violently, and the unfaithful wife is intimidated into assuming a seated position of subordination within the visual frame.  Physical force conjoined to expedient self-guided economic activity staves off the crisis of survival.

In the conservative vision, community cooperation interferes with the ability of the superior individual to pursue survival goals unimpeded and unregulated.  He, not they, should dominate if group survival is to be assured.  The liberal vision displays what non-sensory cognition has made possible for humanity–cooperative institutions, empathy, and the imaginative transformation of “reality.”  The representational style of the liberal film is predominantly connective and horizontal, while in the conservative vision the editing style isolates the individual from the group or assigns him significance as a superior being who stands apart from and above the community.  At different times in human history, each of these approaches has been adaptive, but if my argument here makes sense, then the more recently adaptive is the liberal approach.  The ancestral quality of the conservative approach is indicated by its physical character.  In this film, people literally put each other down, force each other to sit, or dominate through violence.  And “put down” also characterizes the style of humor, which demeans and derides others or gains humor from portraying them as inferior beings.  A movie like Godfrey helps clarify why conservative social policy tends to reinforce economic hierarchies organized around the unequal control of resources, advocates strong authority and leadership, fosters a lack of empathy towards others, argues for self-interest at the expense of the larger community interest, subordinates universal principles to expedient ends, and promotes a harsh “realism” or “objectivism” in cognitive attitude.

What might all of this mean as H. sapiens moves forward in time, torn between conflicting imperatives launched by very different social groups whose ideologies are rooted, apparently, in genetic differences?

If governance requires an ability to embrace principles and to subordinate expedient ends to universally valid norms, an ability that itself requires advanced non-sensory cognitive abilities that liberals seem to posses and conservatives do not, then conservatives may be ill suited for such labor.  Their dispositions may simply be too ancestral, too rooted in survival imperatives that make them incapable of the tempering of self-interested urges that thinking in principles mandates and requires.  Self-interest will always in their thought and action prevail for simple physiological and genetic reasons.  As we have seen in the U.S. regarding the attempt to create a principled health care system with universal applicability in the recent past, conservatives always subvert principled ideas that take resources from them.  But more problematically, they oppose such principled ideas because they simply cannot grasp the formal, non-sensory, universalist reasoning that makes such principled ideas reasonable.  They are incapable of seeing that helping others improves the likely survival of the community and thus also of oneself.

What we witness in such situations is not disagreement but incapacity, and that insight has consequences for how we move forward as a human group that is aware of its internal divisions.  One of the problems that is now evident with the current model of democratic governance is that it gives conservatives equal say with cognitively better equipped liberals in the project of building a more principled community even though conservatives, by virtue of their cognitive incapacity, must oppose that undertaking because it threatens their perceived survival interests.  Giving much of government’s responsibilities to a meritocratic civil service with high cognitive standards would help solve this flaw in democracy.

The commercial activities of conservatives would need to be regulated and controlled so that they cannot continue to threaten civility as they have in recent years through the self-interested manipulation of financial instruments.  In the U.S. healthcare and financial systems, conservatives have made self-interest paramount to principle by making healthcare too costly for the community and by almost wrecking the world economy by using the ideal of “freedom” to elude appropriate community controls over their activities.  In recent years, they have allowed self-interested risk to prevail over a more community-preserving sense of caution.  To control the danger their strong survival urges pose for the larger community, it would be necessary to eliminate the strong incentive to over-accumulate financial resources.  The principle of a “maximum wage” similar to the principle and institution of a “minimum wage” would help solve this problem by removing the incentive for incivility.  The amount any one person can take out of the social pool would be regulated by a siphon that would increase redistributive taxation substantially in relation to income.  At a deeper level, we need to rethink those points where evolved adaptive actions such as taking advantage of others’ needs to increase one’s own survival chances intersect with community-sustaining activities such as trade.  The supposed “law of supply and demand” grants a license (by not restricting) the evolved adaptive tendency to take more than one needs or merits (in an overall picture or scheme of relations) when the opportunity affords itself through scarcity to charge more for something.  These basic natural components of economic life cede to conservative instincts processes that should be regulated by liberal principles of civility.

Because words are things which have physical effects (Ingram), conservative public discourse, especially in the televisual media, must also be regulated to assure that harm is not done to the principles of civility.  Other countries such as Canada are much better than the U.S. in this regard, and that probably explains why verbally violent conservatives such as Ann Coulter have a more difficult time speaking there without opposition from proponents of civility.  The liberal formal ideal of free discourse must be revisited and returned to take conservative verbal violence and deceptive trickery into account.  Both need to be restrained for the sake of the community and for the sake of the ideal of civility.

Finally, conservatives choose violent solutions to conflict than liberals largely, I would argue, because they fear death more.  Still bearing an ancestral fear of predation within them, they have been incapable of developing the same higher order cognitive abilities that allow liberals to formulate and to embrace universal principles that regulate community behavior for both the common good and the good of the individual organism.  Conservatives’ cognitive abilities do not have the kind of non-sensory architecture that places restraints on affect.  They as a result use mental representations that are fuzzy, non-realist, undifferentiated, mythographic, and fused.  Religion and an opposition to science were, as a result, in the Bush years as common in governmental discourse as bellicosity, dominance behavior, resource over-accumulation, and predatory defensiveness.  Nevertheless, conservative mental representational abilities are quite clear and well-focused in regard to defensiveness, and that is where the true danger lies in continuing to permit conservatives access to certain kinds of governmental power.  For access to government is access to weapons.  And since conservatives lack a cognitive module that allows the interests of the community to trump the individual organism’s survival interest, the danger always exists that something as anti-communal and unprincipled as the use of nuclear weapons for expedient, self-interested, and particularistic ends is possible.  Recall that Bush did entertain the idea of using “tactical” nuclear weapons against Iran but was prevented from doing so by his military officers.[vii] The appropriate solution, based in universal principle, to this problem is for all national military establishments to be eliminated and replaced with one single one that is in the hands of the United Nations.

Finally, it is no doubt wise and necessary to distinguish kinds of conservatives.  It is a singular word, but if there is a piece of human genomic hard-wiring that expresses itself as hardcore ideological conservatism, there no doubt also is an epigenetic variant of the phenomenon.  Many conservatives seem more victims than perpetrators.  Poverty and harsh living conditions replicate earlier human evolutionary locations.  We carry part of the past with us in a way, and some of us lead brutal lives as a result that resemble lives many centuries ago, even lives in supposedly civil conditions.  Homelessness is one version of that, but so is low income life in general.  Such social environments may trigger a defensive disposition that is present in most humans and that contains elements of the conservatism I have described here.

My argument has been that human cognition made a major advance in the first milennium BCE that included becoming capable in a more advanced way than before of distinguishing form from substance.  A capacity for formalism gave us universalism, and universalism gave us civilization in its modern normatively regulated, highly integrated iteration.  But formalism has also blinded us to differences of substance that we need to address.  According to the principles of formal universalism, we are all the same.  But in evolutionary substance, we are not.  Addressing that problem (and it is a problem) will require steps that offend the ideals of formal universalism.  But it is possible that such universalism needs to be supplemented with newer, more complex kinds of thinking and theorizing if it is not capable of solving the problems that face us.

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Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms (Princeton, 2007)

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[ii] The history of western literature is a history of increased realism, and that would suggest a development over time that was characterized by an increased number in the population capable of more developed non-sensory cognition.  It is suggestive that more detailed and realist mental representations are linked to a greater capacity for individuation and separation from the object world and that both modern liberalism (a legal and political doctrine organized around the ideal of the individual and his/her rights) and modern science (which presupposes increased objectification of the world) come into being at the same roughly time as modern literary realism.  From Galileo and Boccaccio to Darwin and Zola, a development and a linkage is imaginable.

[iii] “Once a trait has become genetically fixed, it may continue to be expressed even if an environmental change causes it to lose its advantage or become detrimental. . . . Possibly the most important aspect of local adaptation in two antagonistic species is the relative rate at which they (co)evolve.”  T. Kawecki and D. Ebert, “Conceptual Issues inn Local Adaptation,” Ecology Letters (12 Noveember 2004), Volume 7, Issue 2, pp. 1225-121.

[iv] “Thus restricted gene flow is a pre-requisite for local adaptation. Restricted gene flow (due to low passive dispersal or active habitat choice) also makes the conditions for maintenance of polymorphism more favourable. The conditions for maintenance of polymorphism are more favourable for loci with large effects; such loci also show greater differentiation of allele frequencies under divergent selection. Furthermore, alleles with strong effects are less likely to be lost by drift. Therefore, loci with large effects on fitness should disproportionally contribute to local adaptation.”  Kawecki and Ebert, op.cit.

[v] Letter to Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/petrarch-ventoux.html.

[vi]Gregory Clark contends in A Farewell to Alms (Princeton, 2007) that demographic changes during late Medieval times account for the change in intellect evident in the 18th century across western Europe, but such reasoning does not account for the earlier presence of similar cognitive abilities both during the Greek Enlightenment and across Eurasia at the same time.

[vii] Michael Chossudovsky, “Is the Bush Administration Planning a Nuclear Holocaust?”  Global Research.  February 22, 2006. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2032