The Evolution of Nice

My friend Rachel recently wrote a book review for the Washington Post on Richard Wrangham’s latest tome, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. Rachel’s review piqued my interest, so I made it a point to get my hands on Wrangham’s book and give it a thorough going over. 

I say “going over” because I’ve long viewed Wrangham’s theories with a serious dose of suspicion; after all, he has written volume after volume claiming that men are violence-prone sexual predators. Obviously, there’s no point in arguing that no men are ever like this. I mean, you’ve got your occasional pimp, president, and Supreme Court justice that fills that bill, but I don’t accept Wrangham’s characterization as an accurate, all-around portrait of my gender.

I was surprised, however, to discover that some of what Wrangham writes in The Goodness Paradox is quite thought-provking. In particular, I thought his “execution hypothesis” might deserve consideration. At least it stands a chance of holding up to further scrutiny.

The very name, “execution hypothesis”, smacks of a certain Wranghamian grisliness, but it nevertheless might make sense. At least a little sense. Wrangham wants us to believe that we Homo sapiens have domesticated ourselves through eons of evolution and have done so by promoting moral behavior through snuffing each other out. His idea is not that our ancestors went about clubbing and spearing each other willy-nilly. Rather, he believes that about a half a million years ago, human males began focusing on the bullies in their midst and systematically executing them. The result was a domesticated species, one in which impulsive aggression, what he calls “reactive” aggression, was largely bred out of the bloodline.

Wrangham’s ultimate aim is to identify the Darwinian forces that brought about human morality, hence the title of his book, The Goodness Paradox. The quest for the evolutionary roots of good and evil is a longstanding one, and quite a few brilliant thinkers have speculated about it, including Darwin himself.

A common moral principle among tribal peoples, one found in hunting and gathering societies the world over, is the rejection of bullies and self-aggrandizing scoundrels. In hunting-gathering societies, if you start spouting off about how you have the best words, or you know more about hunting than the top hunters, you will quickly become an object of mockery, derision, and social rejection. Try to bully or intimidate others into doing your bidding and you may wind up dead.

The widespread hostility toward boastful and bullying men, Wrangham believes, is a continuation of an ancient Pleistocene pattern which included actual executions of the worst offenders. The consequence, he claims, is that we have become a biologically domesticated species, one that only rarely resorts to reactive aggression.

In our day-to-day tolerance of each other, we resemble domestic cattle, cats and dogs more than we do non-domesticated animals like water buffalo, lions, and wolves. Wrangham points out that domesticated species like dogs and domestic foxes exhibit a set of physical traits which include, for example, floppy ears, shortened faces, and white markings especially on the face and limbs.

Non-domesticated animals are prone to reactive aggression. Our close relative, the common chimpanzee, for example, is typically primed to explode with reactive aggression as soon as he (we’re talking mainly males here) senses another chimp is about to throw shade his way. Chimps, consequently, live in noisy, rowdy troops filled with incessant bickering and backbiting – kind of like the adults at Little League games, except the chimps are much quicker than the human adults to spill real blood with actual backbiting. It’s the reluctance to get viciously physical in most agonistic situations that makes us different from undomesticated species.

Wrangham hastens to point out that humans don’t entirely refrain from aggression, but, he argues, most human aggression is proactive, that is, premeditated and planned rather than spontaneous. This, in fact, is the basis of feuding, raiding, warfare, and first-degree murder, four activities that remain widespread in the human repertoire.

I can’t say I buy Wrangham’s notion that we are a domestic species. I mean, where are the floppy ears? Or the other markings of domestic animals that he cites, such as white markings on face and limbs?

Still, it is true that our Pleistocene ancestors apparently knew how to treat bullies and braggarts – they isolated them with all the mockery and contempt they deserved. However, if this is true, it leaves us with the question of why we don’t do the same to bullies and blowhards today. Well, it turns out there are explanations for this, most of them having to do with increased social complexity and the emergence of property as a weapon of social domination. But that’s a topic for another day.

 

The Tribesman's Creed: "Don't tread on me, you bumptious blowhard."