Authors: Unknown
I
have mentioned kinship and reciprocation as the twin pillars of
altruism in a Darwinian world, but there are secondary structures which
rest atop those main pillars. Especially in human society, with
language and gossip, reputation is important. One individual may have a
reputation for kindness and generosity. Another individual may have a
reputation for unreliability, for cheating and reneging on deals.
Another may have a reputation for generosity when trust has been built
up, but for ruthless punishment of cheating. The unadorned theory of
reciprocal altruism expects animals of any species to base their
behaviour upon unconscious responsiveness to such traits in their
fellows. In human societies we add the power of language to spread
reputations, usually in the form of gossip. You don't need to have
suffered personally from X's failure to buy his round at the pub. You
hear 'on the grapevine' that X is a tightwad, or - to add an ironic
complication to the example - that Y is a terrible gossip. Reputation
is important, and biologists can acknowledge a Darwinian survival value
in not just being a good reciprocator but fostering a
reputation
as a good reciprocator too. Matt Ridley's
The
Origins of Virtue,
as well as being a lucid account of the
whole field of Darwinian morality, is especially good on reputation.*
*
Reputation is not confined to humans. It has recently been shown to
apply to one of the classic cases of reciprocal altruism in animals,
the symbiotic relationship between small cleaner fish and their large
fish clients. In an ingenious experiment, individual cleaner wrasse,
Labroides
dimidiatus,
that had been observed by a would-be client to
be diligent cleaners were more likely to be chosen by the client than
rival
Labroides
that had been observed neglecting
to clean. See R. Bshary and A. S. Grutter, 'Image scoring and
cooperation in a cleaner fish mutualism',
Nature
441,
22 June 2006, 975-8.
The
Norwegian economist Thorstein Veblen and, in a rather different way,
the Israeli zoologist Amotz Zahavi have added a further fascinating
idea. Altruistic giving may be an advertisement of dominance or
superiority. Anthropologists know it as the Potlatch Effect, named
after the custom whereby rival chieftains of Pacific
north-west tribes vie with each other in duels of ruinously generous
feasts. In extreme cases, bouts of retaliatory entertaining continue
until one side is reduced to penury, leaving the winner not much better
off. Veblen's concept of 'conspicuous consumption' strikes a chord with
many observers of the modern scene. Zahavi's contribution, unregarded
by biologists for many years until vindicated by brilliant mathematical
models from the theorist Alan Grafen, has been to provide an
evolutionary version of the potlatch idea. Zahavi studies Arabian
babblers, little brown birds who live in social groups and breed
co-operatively. Like many small birds, babblers give warning cries, and
they also donate food to each other. A standard Darwinian investigation
of such altruistic acts would look, first, for reciprocation and
kinship relationships among the birds. When a babbler feeds a
companion, is it in the expectation of being fed at a later date? Or is
the recipient of the favour a close genetic relative? Zahavi's
interpretation is radically unexpected. Dominant babblers assert their
dominance by feeding subordinates. To use the sort of anthropomorphic
language
Zahavi
delights in, the dominant bird is
saying the equivalent of, 'Look how superior I am to you, I can afford
to give you food.' Or 'Look how superior I am, I can afford to make
myself vulnerable to hawks by sitting on a high branch, acting as a
sentinel to warn the rest of the flock feeding on the ground.' The
observations of Zahavi and his colleagues suggest that babblers
actively compete for the dangerous role of sentinel. And when a
subordinate babbler attempts to offer food to a dominant individual,
the apparent generosity is violently rebuffed. The essence of Zahavi's
idea is that advertisements of superiority are authenticated by their
cost. Only a genuinely superior individual can afford to advertise the
fact by means of a costly gift. Individuals buy success, for example in
attracting mates, through costly demonstrations of superiority,
including ostentatious generosity and public-spirited risk-taking.
We
now have four good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic,
generous or 'moral' towards each other. First, there is the special
case of genetic kinship. Second, there is reciprocation: the repayment
of favours given, and the giving of favours in 'anticipation' of
payback. Following on from this there is, third, the Darwinian benefit
of acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness.
And fourth, if Zahavi is right, there is the particular additional
benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably
authentic advertising.
Through
most of our prehistory, humans lived under conditions that would have
strongly favoured the evolution of all four kinds of altruism. We lived
in villages, or earlier in discrete roving bands like baboons,
partially isolated from neighbouring bands or villages. Most of your
fellow band members would have been kin, more closely related to you
than members of other bands - plenty of opportunities for kin altruism
to evolve. And, whether kin or not, you would tend to meet the same
individuals again and again throughout your life - ideal conditions for
the evolution of reciprocal altruism. Those are also the ideal
conditions for building a reputation for altruism, and the very same
ideal conditions for advertising conspicuous generosity. By any or all
of the four routes, genetic tendencies towards altruism would have been
favoured in early humans. It is easy to see why our prehistoric
ancestors would have been good to their own in-group but bad - to the
point of xenophobia - towards other groups. But why - now that most of
us live in big cities where we are no longer surrounded by kin, and
where every day we meet individuals whom we are never going to meet
again — why are we still so good to each other, even
sometimes to others who might be thought to belong to an out-group?
It
is important not to mis-state the reach of natural selection. Selection
does not favour the evolution of a cognitive awareness of what is good
for your genes. That awareness had to wait for the twentieth century to
reach a cognitive level, and even now full understanding is confined to
a minority of scientific specialists. What natural selection favours is
rules of thumb, which work in practice to promote the genes that built
them. Rules of thumb, by their nature, sometimes misfire. In a bird's
brain, the rule 'Look after small squawking things in your nest, and
drop food into their red gapes' typically has the effect of preserving
the genes that built the rule, because the squawking, gaping objects in
an adult bird's nest are normally its own offspring. The rule misfires
if another baby bird somehow gets into the nest, a circumstance that is
positively engineered by cuckoos. Could it be that our Good Samaritan
urges are misfirings, analogous to the misfiring of a reed warbler's
parental instincts when it works itself to the bone for a young cuckoo?
An even closer analogy is the human urge to adopt a child. I must rush
to add that 'misfiring' is intended only in a strictly Darwinian sense.
It carries no suggestion of the pejorative.
The
'mistake' or 'by-product' idea, which I am espousing, works like this.
Natural selection, in ancestral times when we lived in small and stable
bands like baboons, programmed into our brains altruistic urges,
alongside sexual urges, hunger urges, xenophobic urges and so on. An
intelligent couple can read their Darwin and know that the ultimate
reason for their sexual urges is procreation. They know that the woman
cannot conceive because she is on the pill. Yet they find that their
sexual desire is in no way diminished by the knowledge. Sexual desire
is sexual desire and its force, in an individual's psychology, is
independent of the ultimate Darwinian pressure that drove it. It is a
strong urge which exists independently of its ultimate rationale.
I am
suggesting that the same is true of the urge to kindness - to altruism,
to generosity, to empathy, to pity. In ancestral times, we had the
opportunity to be altruistic only towards close kin and potential
reciprocators. Nowadays that restriction is no longer there, but the
rule of thumb persists. Why would it not? It is just like sexual
desire. We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a
weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) than
we can help ourselves feeling lust for a member of the opposite sex
(who may be infertile or otherwise unable to reproduce). Both are
misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes.
Do
not, for one moment, think of such Darwinizing as demeaning or
reductive of the noble emotions of compassion and generosity. Nor of
sexual desire. Sexual desire, when channelled through the conduits of
linguistic culture, emerges as great poetry and drama: John Donne's
love poems, say, or
Romeo and Juliet.
And of
course the same thing happens with the misfired redirection of kin- and
reciprocation-based compassion. Mercy to a debtor is, when seen out of
context, as un-Darwinian as adopting someone else's child:
The
quality of mercy is not strained.
It
droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon
the place beneath.
Sexual
lust is the driving force behind a large proportion of human ambition
and struggle, and much of it constitutes a misfiring. There is no
reason why the same should not be true of the lust to be generous and
compassionate, if this is the misfired consequence of ancestral village
life. The best way for natural selection to build in both kinds of lust
in ancestral times was to install rules of thumb in the brain. Those
rules still influence us today, even where circumstances make them
inappropriate to their original functions.
Such
rules of thumb influence us still, not in a Calvinistically
deterministic way but filtered through the civilizing influences of
literature and custom, law and tradition - and, of course, religion.
Just as the primitive brain rule of sexual lust passes through the
filter of civilization to emerge in the love scenes of
Romeo
and Juliet,
so primitive brain rules of us-versus-them
vendetta emerge in the form of the running battles between Capulets and
Montagues; while primitive brain rules of altruism and empathy end up
in the misfiring that cheers us in the chastened reconciliation of
Shakespeare's final scene.
If
our moral sense, like our sexual desire, is indeed rooted deep in our
Darwinian past, predating religion, we should expect that research on
the human mind would reveal some moral universals, crossing
geographical and cultural barriers, and also, crucially, religious
barriers. The Harvard biologist Marc Hauser, in his book
Moral
Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong,
has
enlarged upon a fruitful line of thought experiments originally
suggested by moral philosophers. Hauser's study will serve the
additional purpose of introducing the way moral philosophers think. A
hypothetical moral dilemma is posed, and the difficulty we experience
in answering it tells us something about our sense of right and wrong.
Where Hauser goes beyond the philosophers is that he actually does
statistical surveys and psychological experiments, using questionnaires
on the Internet, for example,
to investigate the moral sense of real people. From the present point
of view, the interesting thing is that most people come to the same
decisions when faced with these dilemmas, and their agreement over the
decisions themselves is stronger than their ability to articulate their
reasons. This is what we should expect if we have a moral sense which
is built into our brains, like our sexual instinct or our fear of
heights or, as Hauser himself prefers to say, like our capacity for
language (the details vary from culture to culture, but the underlying
deep structure of grammar is universal). As we shall see, the way
people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate
their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or
lack of them. The message of Hauser's book, to anticipate it in his own
words, is this: 'Driving our moral judgments is a universal moral
grammar, a faculty of the mind that evolved over millions of years to
include a set of principles for building a range of possible moral
systems. As with language, the principles that make up our moral
grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness.'
Typical
of Hauser's moral dilemmas are variations on the theme of a runaway
truck or 'trolley' on a railway line which threatens to kill a number
of people. The simplest story imagines a person, Denise, standing by a
set of points and in a position to divert the trolley onto a siding,
thereby saving the lives of five people trapped on the main line ahead.
Unfortunately there is a man trapped on the siding. But since he is
only one, outnumbered by the five people trapped on the main track,
most people agree that it is morally permissible, if not obligatory,
for Denise to throw the switch and save the five by killing the one. We
ignore hypothetical possibilities such as that the one man on the
siding might be Beethoven, or a close friend.
Elaborations
of the thought experiment present a series of increasingly teasing
moral conundrums. What if the trolley can be stopped by dropping a
large weight in its path from a bridge overhead? That's easy: obviously
we must drop the weight. But what if the only large weight available is
a very fat man sitting on the bridge, admiring the sunset? Almost
everybody agrees that it is immoral to push the fat man off the bridge,
even though, from one point of view, the dilemma might seem parallel to
Denise's, where throwing
the switch kills one to save five. Most of us have a strong intuition
that there is a crucial difference between the two cases, though we may
not be able to articulate what it is.