Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (3 page)

It is a subject that touches the most fundamental aspects of our lives. We will see in the chapters of this book that our responses to culture have produced some of our best and our worst tendencies, creating a species brimming with contradictions. Our possession of culture is responsible for our art, music, and religion, our unmatched acts of charity, empathy, and cooperation, our sense of justice, fairness, altruism, and even self-sacrifice; but also for our undeniable self-interest, our tendency to favor people from our own ethnic or racial groups, wariness of strangers, xenophobia, and predilections to war. But it goes further than this. The nature of our culture will tell us why we alone as a species have language, why it is that we alone can show kindness to strangers, and even to other animals, but also why we can be callous and murderous. It is why we are the only species with morality, but also why we apply it capriciously to suit our needs. Culture equips us with envy, jealousy, and spite, indignation and contempt, but also with friendship, forgiveness and affection, and a conscience. It is why we, and probably we alone, have consciousness, and yet why our conscious mind is often divided between reason and passion, unsure or even in conflict with itself over how to behave. It is why we differ from each other, why we differ so from the other apes despite sharing so many of their genes, why we are shrewd and deceptive, and even why we deceive ourselves. We will see that our cultures can even get us to kill our own children—so-called honor killings—and at the same time can get us to behave so selflessly that we would have to travel all the way to bees in a hive or to the cells in our body to see anything else like it in nature.

True, it would be wrong to suggest we are the only species with culture; it is just that only in humans has the handover been so great and the occupation of our minds so complete. New Zealand’s chaffinches, a songbird carried to those islands by homesick Europeans, learn their songs from their parents and thereby produce a surprising range of local dialects. Some chimpanzee troops have cultural traditions in the styles of tools they use to fish insects from the ground, or in the stones they use to crack nuts. Some meerkat colonies living side by side have persistent but arbitrary differences in the times they get up in the morning. There are idiosyncratic hunting styles among some dolphin pods and variety among the songs of some whales. In another dolphin species, females wear decorative sponges on their noses that they have gathered up from the seabed, and some groups of orang-utans make leaf-bundle “dolls.” Japanese macaques produce a wonderfully humanlike potato-washing behavior beloved of television documentaries. These cultural achievements are delightful, often entertaining, and sometimes even unexpected. But they bear about as much resemblance to human culture as a gorilla beating its chest or a chimpanzee drumming on a log does to a Bach cantata, scarcely deserving to be compared to the varieties, contrivances, complexities, and intricacies of human science, technologies, language, art, music, and literature.

Still, is the 160,000 to 200,000 years we have been around long enough for traits to have evolved in response to living in the social environment of our cultures? Has there been time enough to become wired for culture? The simple way to answer this question is to look around you. For instance, sometime around 25,000 years ago, people began living above 12,000 feet in the high Tibetan plateau, and they acquired physiological adaptations that allow them to cope with the reduced oxygen at these altitudes. One of these was so advantageous that it might have spread to 90 percent of all Tibetans in just four thousand years. The Dinka tribespeople of Sudan are tall and slim and have unusually dark skin. The Inuit people of northern North America are shorter, of stocky build, and have lighter skin. The Dinkas’ spaghetti-like body shape gives them a large surface area for shedding heat, while the Inuits’ more spheroid shape reduces their surface area to conserve it. The Dinkas’ dark skin protects them from the sun, but the melanin needed to produce it isn’t needed in the Arctic, so the Inuit make less of it.

These are all genetic adaptations acquired, in the case of the Tibetans and the Inuits, since our species walked out of Africa: a Dinka raised in the Arctic will not look like an Inuit, and vice versa, and the Tibetan capacity to live with reduced oxygen levels doesn’t evolve at low altitudes. If this kind of rewiring of our genes and physiology can take place over such short periods of time, this tells us that other features of our nature, including our psychology and social behaviors, have had plenty of time to evolve since we acquired culture.

Even so, many people hold the view that humans fall outside the grip of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. We are intelligent beyond comparison to other animals, we use language creatively, we have art, music, dance, and religion, and, above all, a free will. But we must be careful. The standard philosophical objection to free will is that we aren’t as free to do what we “want” as we would like to think we are, because our current “wants” will always be influenced by our previous wants. And these previous wants form a chain leading all the way back to our birth and early upbringing when we were unable to make free choices. The first of these events over which we had little control might have been the accident of being born into a particular culture.

And to an evolutionist free will isn’t even all it’s cracked up to be anyway: good judgment should trump free will in most circumstances. Throughout our evolutionary history those of us who behaved in ways that promoted our survival and reproduction, rather than merely doing what we “wanted” to do, will have left the most descendants—descendants who will have inherited these same tendencies. If even just one of your ancestors had decided to give up having children for his or her art, the consequences for you would be no different than had that ancestor been killed—you would not be here today reading this book. Indeed, it is an underappreciated fact of biology that throughout history the overwhelming majority of individuals ever born, hatched, or budded off died long before adulthood. So the world is populated today by a select group of survivors whose ancestors had the dispositions and the wherewithal to survive and reproduce, and this alone tells us there is no particular reason to believe that free will per se has been positively favored throughout our evolution. Survival is a rare thing, far too valuable to be entrusted to what could be a capricious free will.

Many people believe that to allow natural selection a role in defining who we are consigns us to having a selfish agenda, one in which our genes single-mindedly promote their existence. Our genes do that, but it is a misunderstanding of evolution to think that natural selection always favors a nasty and ruthless nature. It is far more creative than that, and nowhere more it seems than in our species. In fact, if the history of biological evolution teaches us anything, it is that natural selection can often achieve the most for its genes by building cooperation among actors or even among genes that avoids debilitating conflict, returning greater gains than could be achieved by competition or a solitary existence. Among the triumphs of modern evolutionary biology is the demonstration that many of the outlines of culture and of our behaviors can be explained as strategies for promoting our survival and reproduction. The influential evolutionary theorist William Hamilton anticipated this some years ago, saying:

to come to our notice cultures, too, have to survive and will hardly do so when by their nature they undermine the viability of the bearers. Thus we would expect the genetic system to have various inbuilt safeguards and to provide not a blank sheet for individual cultural development but a sheet at least lightly scrawled with certain tentative outlines… .

It is those “tentative outlines” we seek to understand.

THE REST OF THIS BOOK

THE REST
OF
this book is about how our cultures came to occupy our minds, what they demanded of us, how those demands have been met, and whether our cultural nature provides useful solutions for living in a modern world. For many people, I think one of the most distinctive and salient features of life in human societies is the sense of belonging to a particular cultural group to which they often feel a surprising attachment and allegiance, one that can even extend in some circumstances to giving up their lives for it. So finely tuned is this tendency in us that even within our societies the cultural subdivisions can acquire a bewildering degree of complexity, as people from different regions detect minute differences in accents, preferences for food, styles of dress, religious beliefs, and manners. To outsiders, these differences may be barely, if at all, detectable. But it is a complexity that seems entirely natural to someone from one of those societies, and the differences that are so small to an outsider can seem large indeed from the inside.

In the Preface I described a tendency throughout our history to form into small
tribal
societies. Some will cavil at this term, thinking it carries bigoted or prejudicial overtones, but I use it far more simply to capture that sense of a group of people, somehow organized around an identity. Even if no one can agree precisely what that identity is at any given moment and who has it or not, most people have a sense of which group they belong to, and just as importantly who doesn’t. Our dispositions to form into these groups is a phenomenon that has held throughout our evolutionary history and its effects linger in our behaviors and psychology today. We will see them over and over in this book and so we want to try to understand why we have this particular nature.

I want to call these tribal groups
cultural survival vehicles
. This might seem a cumbersome term, but it is one I have found useful in trying to understand our species. Indeed, it proves so central to understanding what makes us human that it could have been the title of this book. The zoologist Richard Dawkins in
The Extended Phenotype
coined the term
vehicles
to describe structures that carry
replicators
. An example of a vehicle is your body, or the body of a cat or a dog. A replicator, on the other hand, is something that can make copies of itself, such as a gene. Putting these two ideas together, we can see that replicators (think of genes) exert their effects on the external world, and thereby influence the likelihood that they will survive, through the vehicles (think of your body) they build. The distinction between replicators and vehicles is important because it reminds us that an animal’s body is merely a temporary structure built by its genes to promote their survival and reproduction. It can be difficult to shake the habit of thinking we are the main players in evolution rather than our genes, but your body is not replicated in your offspring; rather, your genes are, and then again in theirs.

When I use the term
cultural survival vehicle
,
it is to capture the idea that our species evolved to build, in the form of their societies, tribes, or cultures, a second body or vehicle to go along with the vehicle that is their physical body. Like our physical bodies, this cultural body wraps us in a protective layer, not of muscles and skin but of knowledge and technologies, and as we will see in the later chapters, it gives us our language, cooperation, and a shared identity. We are the actors that produce this vehicle, behaving almost like individual genes clamoring inside it to exert our effects on the outside world, and influencing
our
likelihood of surviving. Our nature is wrapped up in the strategies we evolved and now deploy to make the cultural survival vehicle work for us. It doesn’t matter that it is a shifting and fluid vehicle whose members might come and go, or that we cannot draw clear boundaries around it as a thick layer of hide or skin does. The same could be said of an ant’s nest, a lion’s pride, a troop of monkeys, or even a herd of wildebeest, and no one doubts that they are also vehicles to promote the survival and reproduction of their inhabitants.

Still, there is a fundamental evolutionary difference between our cultures as survival vehicles and our physical bodies, and it is a difference that will make all the difference. Our genes share a common route into the future, all of them living or dying with their particular body, and this has enforced a degree of agreement among them. So complete is that agreement, most of the time our genes work together seamlessly to build our bodies, not bickering or wishing to go off in different directions. Our societal vehicles are different. Like our physical bodies they have been fundamental to our success, and this is a point that is difficult to overemphasize. Even so, we as inhabitants of these vehicles do not all share a common route into the future. Each of us, unlike our individual genes, is free to reproduce on our own. The essential balancing act of human societies is that they will normally work best when everyone pulls together, but at any given moment what is best for you might differ from that which is best for your group. Our psychology is the outcome of this balancing act. It is the set of temperaments geared toward using our cultural vehicles to promote our individual survival in a world full of others like ourselves.

The topics I shall consider in this book—cooperation, learning, identity, self-sacrifice, language, religion, consciousness, creativity, altruism, deception, greed, and self-interest—have all been studied before and all of us will be familiar with them, having used, experienced, or somehow “participated” in each of them most days of our lives. But if this idea of a cultural survival vehicle can help us to organize our thoughts about humans, it will also help us to see these familiar topics in new ways, and maybe even come up with new explanations for their existence or for why they take the forms they do.

A point that it is difficult to stress too much is that my attempts to understand our traits in Darwinian terms are not meant to promulgate any sort of morality based upon the notion of survival of the fittest. Evolutionists sometimes refer to the failure to distinguish “is” from “ought” as the
naturalistic fallacy
. Just because something has evolved doesn’t make it right, even if it has contributed in the past to our survival and reproduction. But if it has evolved for these reasons it is something we might wish to take seriously because it will lurk somewhere in our nature. Equally, to say we have an evolved social nature is not to suggest that our behaviors are determined by genes, but to say we have certain predilections and tendencies. In any given circumstance, the behaviors we produce are some result of genes and the environment of the actor. This is far from determinism, but still revealing of who we are and why we might have the tendencies to behave as we do.