Prof: Now,
today I am giving a lecture,
on which you're not going to be
tested.
Okay?
 
So I'm being an idealistic,
academic intellectual today,
and I'm talking about stuff
which is of general interest and
is not going to be on the final
exam.
So I want you to kick back and
enjoy this final lecture before
Spring Break,
and perhaps it will stimulate
some things for you to think
about.
If you want to read further
about this,
you can go to the Resources
page and look up Major
Transitions,
right here, and you'll pick up
a commentary written in
Evolution to which this talk is
relevant;
it's structured a little bit
differently.
 
Now I want to give you a little
bit of background on my current
thinking about this area,
because I'm likely to run out
of time towards the end;
so I better tell it to you at
the beginning,
otherwise you won't hear it.
>
 
I began worrying about this
issue of whether we're stuck in
the middle of a major
transition,
between individual and group,
about now fifteen to eighteen
years ago.
 
And in 2005/2006,
after I finished being chair of
the department,
Yale very kindly gave me a
full-year sabbatical,
and I spent the year reading
widely in how evolutionary
thought had impacted psychology,
anthropology,
political science,
economics;
all of these cognate fields
that have something to do with
human behavior,
and that bear on the issue of
whether or not we have been
selected to behave in certain
ways in social contexts.
And I'm going to give you today
a talk that describes my
motivation to do that,
and the preliminary conclusions
that I came to.
 
And you can read about that in
more detail in that commentary
in Evolution,
if you wish.
You just download the PDF from
the website.
When I finished all that
process, and I thought about
sitting down to write a book,
which I did last summer,
what I discovered is that there
were certain key elements in the
logic of the argument that
simply were not well
scientifically established at
this point.
And I therefore had to make a
decision: Do I remain agnostic,
or do I go for a colorful and
publication worthy thrill?
I decided to remain agnostic.
 
I could have published a book
that made claims that probably
would've gotten into the New
York Times fairly easily.
And I decided not to.
 
And basically the reason for
that is that I'm a natural
scientist,
and I don't want to make
claims, to the broadly educated
public,
about the nature of the human
condition,
without having all the links in
the chain of logic pinned down
by experiments.
 
I think it's perfectly valid to
do what I'm doing today.
I'm going to advance some
hypotheses.
I'm going to tell you where
they are or where they are not
well established;
and I think that by doing that
I can show you that there are
some really fascinating issues
here.
 
But I don't think it would be
responsible for me to go out and
publish a book,
in the general trade industry,
that made the central claim.
 
This is the central claim:
That we're stuck in a major
evolutionary transition.
 
We're feeling the pain.
 
The pain is caused by the fact
that there is a conflict between
individual interest and group
interest,
and that conflict has not been
resolved,
and the selection mechanisms
that have been pushing us in
that direction are starting to
break down.
So it's an interesting idea.
 
And, in fact,
the feedback I've had from that
commentary is that people were
absolutely amazed that
Evolution allowed me to
publish it,
and it was deeply interesting
and troubling,
but that clearly it's still an
open issue.
So I think that the colleagues
I have in the evolutionary
biology community agree that
it's interesting and unresolved.
So all of that upfront.
 
Okay, let's go.
 
This has to do with the impact
of evolutionary thought on the
social sciences,
and its implications for
understanding what we are.
 
I begin with some of the
remarkable observations that led
me to these ideas.
 
I was an early Vietnam War
protestor.
I was deeply concerned with the
issue of why I should die for my
country;
back in 1966/1967.
Well here are some,
to me, really incredible
observations about human
behavior.
The first day of the Battle of
the Somme, July 1^(st),
1916.
 
One day.
 
The British Expeditionary Force
lost 58,000 men,
in 24 hours.
 
That's as many as were killed-
American were killed in the
entire Vietnam War,
over about eight years.
The British continued to attack
until winter.
They lost another 420,000 men.
 
During that time the French
lost 200,000;
the Germans lost half a million.
 
So, over six months more than a
million people,
led by idiots,
died in useless slaughter.
And here's the point:
throughout the next two years,
young males continued to
volunteer for service and to
obey their leaders.
 
That's one hell of an
observation.
It tells you something very
deep about humans.
Now, we are susceptible to lots
of other social emotions besides
patriotism.
 
We express love,
empathy, compassion,
guilt, shame,
embarrassment,
duty and honor;
and we do it by the age of
three.
 
Paul Bloom, in the Psych
Department,
has watched the development of
the moral emotions in humans,
in his own children,
and says that by age three they
had already committed all of the
Seven Deadly Sins,
except lust.
 
Okay?
 
So it looks like the
susceptibility to moral emotions
is innate.
 
People who lack moral emotions
we call psychopaths,
or sociopaths.
 
They commit crimes and end up
in prison.
We will trust strangers enough
to engage in economic
transactions;
we'll even do it on the web,
with our credit cards.
 
That's pretty amazing too.
 
There's a great story in Paul
Seabright's book about this,
where about 1500 years ago
traders show up on the banks of
the Volga River,
to trade with the Khazars;
and the Khazars are a
bloodthirsty people,
but they've got money.
 
Right?
 
So the goods are put down on
the bank of the river.
The traders go away.
 
The Khazars come back,
look at the goods.
They place a pile of money over
there.
The people never see each other.
 
They go back and forth for two
or three days,
kind of bargaining,
by just putting stuff down on
the ground,
until finally a stake is
pounded in,
and it's a deal,
and one side takes the money
and the other side takes the
goods.
 
It is not clear under what
circumstances people can trust
each other enough to engage in
an economic transaction;
especially not since Bernie
Madoff.
We are willing to pay taxes to
the government,
in return for services that
benefit the entire country;
not just ourselves,
not just our relatives.
And if you look at the major
religions of the world,
you'll find that their central
moral messages are mostly about
stabilizing social behavior.
 
Okay?
 
So in Christianity we've got
the Sermon on the Mount.
So you should be gentle.
 
You should be merciful;
that means you should be
forgiving.
 
You should make peace;
so you should stabilize social
conflict.
 
If you got angry with your
brother,
you're going to be guilty
before the court,
and the central Sermon on the
Mount statement is do unto
others as you would have them do
unto you.
If we look at Islam--this is in
the Koran--
so do good to your parents
and kinsfolk and orphans and
needy,
and to the neighbor of your kin
and the neighbor not of your
kin,
and to the fellow neighbor,
and to the wayfarer.
Look at how that sentence
neatly expands the moral circle
that Peter Singer talks about,
of how far, how distantly
related does something have to
be to us,
for us to feel like we should
behave morally towards them?
And the Koran lays that out
very explicitly.
Forgive people who offend
you.
Give to those who refuse you.
 
Stretch a hand of peace to the
one who quarrels with you;
very much like turn the other
cheek.
Okay?
 
Another great tradition,
Confucianism.
Love others;
be benevolent,
charitable and kind.
 
 Okay?
 
We're now in sixth century BC
China.
Do your duty to honor your
family and neighbors;
social relationships.
 
And what you don't want for
yourself, don't do to
others.
 
So a neat little inversion of
the Golden Rule in the Sermon on
the Mount, in Confucius 500
years earlier.
Well the idea behind this is
that things like nationalism and
religion are culturally
transmitted value systems,
and biology is providing
handles on which those value
systems can pull.
 
And the way it does it is very
probably by genetic influence on
hormones and their receptors.
 
There are probably other
mechanisms as well,
but that's at least one of
them, and some of this stuff is
now under experimental
investigation.
So, for example, oxytocin.
 
If I want to stabilize trust,
I can give people lots of
oxytocin,
and they'll cooperate and trust
each other a lot more than they
will if I give them an overdose
of something like testosterone.
 
Okay?
 
So testosterone is more or less
more aggression,
and oxytocin is more trust and
cooperation.
In other words,
we contain within ourselves
physiological mechanisms that if
genes want to,
they can dial up and down like
rheostats,
and that will have some kind of
indirect influence on the
general level of either
aggression or trust,
in a group.
 
So my questions about these
kinds of problems are,
are we in fact stuck in a major
transition between individual
and group?
 
Has it gotten stuck because the
selection mechanisms have broken
down?
 
Has the breakdown left us in a
state of tension,
caused by conflicts between
individual and group?
And do these individual group
conflicts define a significant
part of the human condition?
 
You know, once you've seen that
list,
it's easy to start telling
just-so stories,
and throwing up lists of
things: unions in conflict with
management;
Democrats in conflict with
Republicans over the role of the
individual and the role of
society in constructing
government policy;
Communism versus Capitalism;
the way I feel about whether or
not I should donate to a charity
or keep the money for my wine
cellar.
 
You know?
 
There's lots of different
contexts in which that can
happen.
 
You can ask yourself,
well what would happen if we
really went right through the
major transition?
Well, some things have.
 
Eusocial insect colonies have
gone through this transition;
and they are defined by
reproductive suppression.
So if you were living in a
state in which the opportunity
to reproduce was in fact
determined by the group and not
by the individual,
that would probably be a pretty
strong signal that you had
completed the transition.
We're nowhere near that at the
moment.
However, we are certainly in a
circumstance in which some of
that happens.
 
The Chinese One-Child Policy is
an indication of that.
The sort of political
correctness of the environmental
movement that encourages people
towards zero-population growth
and only having two children is
that kind of thing.
So we haven't made the
transition, but certainly there
are signals that we're partway
into it.
So here are the hallmarks of
major transitions.
And I want to remind you of
this;
this is from the lecture on
genetic conflict,
and it's also from the lecture
on major events in evolution.
In a major transition,
things that were previously
independent fuse into a larger
whole and lose their
independence.
 
Then units in that larger whole
specialize on different
functions;
they achieve a division of
labor.
 
That division of labor has to
be stabilized,
and it then integrates the new
unit and improves performance,
in competition with like units.
 
And the cohesive integration,
that's needed within the group,
requires suppression of
intra-group conflict,
among previously independent
units,
so that you can be effective at
competing with other similar
groups.
 
Often during this process a new
system of information
transmission will emerge.
 
So this is something that's
happened four or five times in
evolution: prokaryotes to
eukaryotes;
single-celled eukaryotes to
multi-cellular organisms;
multi-cellular organisms into
family groups;
family groups into insect
societies;
and in mammals into naked
African mole rats and dwarf
mongooses, things like that.
 
And in humans the new system of
information transmission is
cultural transmission,
with language.
So we now have a parallel
genetic and language
transmission of information,
and they can be in conflict
with each other.
 
So to see if these ideas make
any sense, we need to evaluate
hierarchical selection.
 
That sets up conflict between
individual and group.
We need to see what kind of
cultural group selection might
be going on, to select for
cohesion, promoting group
performance.
 
We need to see how conflicts
are generated and resolved,
in a selective hierarchy;
so the origins of group
cohesion.
 
That brings us to the
contentious subject of whether
there are tribal social
instincts and how they might
originate.
 
I would claim that if I were to
take you guys and put you on a
desert island,
and call half of you greens and
half of you blues,
and divide the territory of the
island in two,
that you would develop green
identity and blue identity,
within about six hours,
and start organizing for
competition.
I think humans self-organize to
do that real quick.
There have been experiments
done on that.
Then, as part of the claim of
the overall hypothesis that
we're stuck in the transition
and we're probably not going to
complete it,
is group selection,
biological and cultural,
breaking down,
in our current civilization?
 
So let's run through that.
 
Here are the basic issues in
hierarchical selection.
The thing you need to focus on
is the distribution of variation
within and among units.
 
So if most of the variation in
the population is within each
group,
and the groups don't differ too
much from each other--
they're all kind of motley,
but they're all similarly
motley--
then you won't really have very
much opportunity for group
selection.
 
But if the variation in the
population is homogenous within
groups,
and different between groups,
you have a much bigger
opportunity for group selection.
The strength of selection,
in part, is going to be
determined by the rate at which
units are born and die.
So if the little units,
inside the groups,
do things very rapidly,
and the big units,
the groups, do things very
slowly, then that's going to
prejudice things towards the
individual and away from the
group;
and vice-versa.
Okay?
 
Then you need to look at the
correlation of reproductive
success, with trait variation at
each level.
That just takes us back to the
first lecture in the course.
Right?
 
Conditions, four conditions,
for natural selection.
And when we think about how
cultural selection might work,
when biological group selection
is usually ineffective--
and, by the way,
there've been a lot of
publications on this recently,
and they've been in high-end
journals,
like Nature and
Science--
we can see that one of the
things that happens is that
social norms spread rapidly
through imitation.
 
So if, within a group,
a new social norm arises,
it can spread through that
group and homogenize that group
pretty rapidly,
simply because we are creatures
that learn rapidly,
and we imitate others,
and we respond to social
pressure,
and to things like political
correctness.
This is essentially a
description of the spread of
political correctness.
 
You can accelerate that spread
with moralistic punishment,
and that will--that's a very,
very powerful force.
Moralistic or altruistic
punishment is the following:
I notice that Blake is doing
something that is violating a
group norm, and I punish her for
it.
Blake doesn't like that,
and she elicits a- imposes a
cost on me, for having the
effrontery to having punished
her for doing that.
 
However, my punishment
continues, and is strong enough
finally to force Blake to obey
the group norm.
In the process I have--she's
really elicited quite a bit of
cost from me.
 
Okay?
 
Perhaps I'm battered and
miserable, but she's behaving
now.
 
Well that's benefited everybody
in the group,
at my cost.
 
If there is any selection for
people who behave that way,
who go around going, "Nah,
nah, nah, nah,
nah," that will actually
accelerate the spread of social
norms,
and rapidly make them uniform,
within groups.
 
Now part of the process of
cultural group selection would
be the extinction of a group,
or the reproduction of a group.
And the extinction of a group
culturally doesn't require
biological group extinction.
 
The Gauls did not die when they
were conquered by the Roman
Empire, and stopped speaking
Celtic, and started speaking in
Latin.
 
There was a horizontal
transmission of a language that
Latinized France and made it no
longer a Celtic,
quasi-Germanic society.
 
The people didn't die,
but the culture died.
Or think of Tibet,
if you want a current day
example.
 
And cultural group reproduction
doesn't require biological group
reproduction.
 
So the Romans basically
reproduced their culture in
France, 2000 years ago.
 
A horrible statement, isn't it?
 
Very true.
 
I would challenge you to find
any individual who has ever
lived on this planet,
who has lived at a time in
which no war was going on
anywhere on the planet.
Their own particular local
group might not have been in
warfare, but it's almost
impossible to find a time in
which war is not going on.
 
I could put up a slide like
this, by the way,
for China, and I'd have to
redefine the Y-axis,
because the number of deaths is
so much greater.
It's difficult to reconstruct
the demography of Central Asia,
or of Africa,
but one can be pretty sure that
similar graphs would be put up.
 
And the take-home message,
when you look at this history,
is that humans--we think about
how nice we are and how
aggressive those chimpanzees
are,
and stuff like that.
 
But if you were another
species, looking at the human
race, you would say,
"Oh, they are B-A-M-Fs;
they are bad-assed
mother-fuckers.
>
 
And I use that--I thought,
should I use that term in an
introductory biology lecture or
not?
Should I drop that particular
linguistic bomb into the mix?
And I decided yes,
because I want you to remember
it.
 
Okay?
 
That's why I did it.
 
Now we have some other evidence.
 
Troy and Jericho.
 
You go back in Jericho and you
go through forty-two layers of
Jericho getting burned down.
 
I've been to the museum in
Istanbul and I have looked at
the excavation layers of Troy.
 
The Trojan War was sack number
nine;
or no, sack number six I think.
 
And so Troy was burned down a
total of about fifteen times.
You look into our great
mythologies, and they are all
structured around warfare:
Iliad,
Mahabharata,
Niebelungenlied.
You look into the histories of
any of the civilizations that we
have at hand,
you'll find that there's war.
Okay?
 
So there's a lot of opportunity
for group performance to be
tested by lethal competition.
 
That's the take-home message of
the prevalence of warfare.
Now the genetic differences
between early human groups
probably were long enough- large
enough for lethal inter-group
competition to account for the
evolution of altruism and
cooperation within the groups.
 
In other words,
we all have to band together,
because if we don't cooperate
with each other,
those guys next door are going
to wipe us out.
And the necessary condition for
that,
in the theoretical models,
is reproductive leveling within
groups,
that's generated by food
sharing beyond the immediate
family,
that's generated by monogamy
and generated by other
cooperative means.
 
So this is--I told you,
this stuff is getting published
in Science and
Nature.
This is Sam Bowles.
 
Sam's a Yale College graduate.
 
His dad was Ambassador to
India, under John Kennedy,
and Sam's an economist.
 
And he's actually a fairly
committed group selectionist--
so mainstream evolutionary
biologists look on his work with
some skepticism,
because of that--but he's very
much concerned about whether or
not there were conditions that
would tend to take the selfish
Darwinian model of short-term
selfishness--
homo economicus;
strictly short-term,
selfish, rational--and tend to
convert that into a person who
is more socially empathetic and
more cooperative,
at least within the immediate
group.
 
So he's concerned with that
kind of process.
Well we would very much like to
know, if this is going on,
how a social norm,
like food sharing or monogamy,
gets fixed in a group.
 
Culture is very real.
 
Cultural transmission is there,
and it's important,
and it's different from
biological genetic transmission,
and it's a fact on the ground.
 
Okay?
 
And you will find that,
if you look across the face of
the earth, tremendous cultural
variation.
And a group of people,
who are centered around Sam
Bowles and Pete Richardson and
Rob Boyd and Joe Henrich and
some others,
are arguing that cultural group
selection will explain the
spread of social norms,
that promote group cohesion and
group performance.
So that one of the things that
happened is--
language and cultural
transmission emerged in the
human lineage,
and became important probably
between about 100 and 50,000
years ago--
is that this process could
start.
And it's been commented on.
 
There's a great Muslim
historiographer named Ibn
Khaldun.
 
He was kind of the Henry
Kissinger of his day.
He was born in Andalucia,
in Southern Spain,
and he was active politically
in kingdoms there,
and in North Africa,
and he became the leading
professor on the Law Faculty in
Cairo.
And when Tamerlane,
Timur the Lame,
invaded Syria--Timur the Lame
was one of Genghis Khan's
descendants--
Ibn Khaldun went up,
with the army from Egypt,
the Muslim army from Egypt,
to defend Damascus,
and he was in Damascus when it
was besieged,
and Tamerlane asked to meet
him, because he was such a
famous guy.
So he got lowered over the
walls of Damascus,
in a basket,
and was taken to Tamerlane's
camp, and gave us the only
written description of
Tamerlane.
 
Tamerlane himself was
illiterate.
Okay?
 
So this guy had an interesting
life.
He also had the tragedy of
standing on the breakwater at
Alexandria,
watching the ship,
that was bringing his wife and
children in from Spain,
sink in front of his eyes,
and they all drowned,
in front of his eyes.
 
So he was a guy who was marked
by intense political and human
experience.
 
And what he said was this:
It's religious propaganda that
gives a dynasty its power.
 
And he claims that that's how
the Arabs managed to achieve
these great victories,
at the beginning of their
conquests in 632,
when they radiated,
after the death--
well it started with Muhammad,
but shortly after his death
there was a real breakout and
they conquered the Middle East
and spread across North Africa
very rapidly.
 
And in one case they were
fighting at Yarmouk,
with 30,000,
against 120,000,
and against Heracleus,
who was in the Eastern Roman
Empire,
against 400,000 and neither of
those big armies could withstand
the 30,000 Muslims who were
fighting them,
and he claims it was religious
propaganda that gave that
cultural force to that army.
I recommend the
Muqaddimah.
It's a very interesting piece
of work,
a brilliant piece of work,
by a guy who was writing
generally about problems of
politics and aggression and
stabilization,
role of culture,
in human life,
long before the Social Sciences
really emerged as a field in the
West.
How does a norm spread through
a group?
How does something like that
propaganda spread through a
group?
 
Well we have--and this is one
of the places where perhaps
biology is providing a handle
for culture--we have a number of
learning mechanisms.
 
One of them is to copy the
successful, the dominant,
the frequent.
 
You may not have thought
explicitly about it,
but the whole point of
education is to try to keep you
from having to learn everything
by trial and error,
so that you don't have to
repeat all the mistakes of all
of the previous generations of
all the humans who ever lived,
in order to get to a certain
state of enlightenment,
by the time you're
twenty-one-years-old.
Well how do you do it?
 
One of the ways is this.
 
But that won't explain the
spread of an individually costly
norm, like me trying to punish
somebody for violating a social
norm.
 
One can punish defectors from
group norms, even if it costs
you.
 
That's a very powerful force,
and it's powerful enough to
overcome inherited biological
tendencies.
So it's powerful enough to
explain why we get celibate nuns
and priests,
why we get to declining
birthrates,
why we get other things that
reduce lifetime reproductive
success.
How do we get it?
 
Well it's not clear.
 
By the way, there are now--if
you ever wanted to write a paper
on this,
there are three or four models
in the literature about how
altruistic punishment might
evolve,
and under what conditions it
would be stable.
 
You need to have pretty strong
inter-group conflict for it to
work.
 
And why would that happen?
 
Why would we get altruism?
 
Okay, here's Nathan Hale,
and his individual fitness was
strikingly in conflict with the
social cohesion that was needed
for the revolutionary American
army to resist the British.
Okay?
 
So this guy graduates from
Yale, and he's a school teacher
down in New York,
and he's spying for the
American Army,
and gets caught and hanged.
And he was executed at age
twenty-one.
He left no children.
 
He said famously,
"I only regret that I have
one life to give for my
country."
And he's a social hero and a
Darwinian madman.
>
 
Okay?
 
That's the tension.
 
So how can you resolve that
kind of conflict?
Well there are actually a lot
of ways to do it.
I've mentioned some of them
already, in the course.
You can convert individual
stakes into common stakes,
so that whatever an individual
is going to get,
out of living its life,
is going to be identified with
whatever a group can get out of
performing better.
Ecological constraint can be
imposed on the group;
the threat of outside risk will
stabilize interactions within a
group.
 
One can cooperate with and
sacrifice for kin;
that's just straightforward kin
selection.
You all now know how that works.
 
You can punish defectors;
that's the punishment of
violators of social norms,
altruistic punishment.
You can stabilize the division
of labor;
that will certainly reduce
conflict,
by making sure that say all the
people who are making shoes are
not in conflict with all of the
people who are making shirts.
They're actually cooperating
with each other;
they're each making something
that the other one needs.
It's win-win, for them.
 
You can promote reciprocity.
 
There could be cultural norms
to promote reciprocity,
and that is the basis of trust;
and trust is the basis of
cooperation.
 
I'll step through these.
 
How do you convert separate
stakes into common stakes?
Well you know one of them
already.
That's how you randomize
success.
That's meiosis in the
parliament of the genes.
Once you set up a mechanism
that means that every single
gene in the genome has the same
probability of getting into the
next generation,
then that is a structure that
imposes homogeneity of success,
on all of those genes.
Meiotic drivers violate it,
meiosis stabilizes it.
At the cultural level you can
homogenize success with
monogamy.
 
So we have the Chinese
One-Child Law.
You can share food with non-kin.
 
And if competition within a
group is not an option,
then the only path to better
performance is the performance
of the whole group.
 
So that's the rising tide lifts
all boats part of it.
An example of imposing
ecological constraint:
We can see in the meerkats,
they have sentinels,
that altruistically look out
for predators and give alarm
calls,
and larger groups of meerkats
have better defense and offense.
 
And if you leave the
group--this is a Cape Cobra;
here are six meerkats
confronting a Cape Cobra.
The six of them together have a
much better chance of dealing
with it, than would one of them
alone.
And there are Batteleur Eagles
and things like that,
that are cruising the landscape
and that pick off meerkats cats
pretty quickly,
if they're on their own.
So if you- if it's very risky
not to be in a group,
that will increase your
willingness to bear a cost
imposed by group membership.
 
In this particular species,
the cost imposed by group
membership is that you can't
reproduce,
if you're a female,
so long as the dominant
female's in charge.
 
She won't let you in the group.
 
She'll kick you out if you try
to have a baby.
That's a pretty strong cost.
 
Nevertheless,
meerkats go into
groups--okay?--because the
alternative is death,
within about twenty-four hours.
 
You can cooperate with and
sacrifice for kin.
So multi-cellular organisms
integrate very easily,
because they are clones that
originate in a single cell.
So they're all 100% related to
each other.
And you can see the division of
labor here,
between the chlorophyll
producing cell,
cells that are producing
carbohydrates and cells that are
going to be actually reproducing
that group.
This is in a multi-cellular
alga.
This is a model for the origin
of multi-cellularity.
It's well known,
from anthropological work,
that many hunter-gatherer
groups consist mostly of close
kin.
 
There are interesting analyses
of asymmetries in that,
and there's big controversy
over some of it.
But it is nevertheless,
I think, a pretty safe broad
generalization that many human
groups consist of close kin,
and therefore we can expect
that kin selection has been
operative,
and that it has been promoting
cooperation,
altruism and sacrifice.
You can punish defectors,
and in a multi-cellular body
one can, for example,
eliminate the defecting cancer
cells through apoptosis.
 
So there certainly are ways
that the immune system does
attack, and partially succeeds
in controlling cancer cells.
And in social groups one can
punish those who break social
norms.
 
So I'm going through a series
now of analogies between
multi-cellular organisms and
potentially emerging
cultural-level group integration
in humans.
You can stabilize the division
of labor.
In biology that's done with
epigenetic mechanisms;
epigenetic information is what
stabilizes development and makes
sure that brain cells stay brain
cells, and liver cells stay
liver cells.
 
And in culture we've got things
over history,
like guilds,
classes, castes,
professions,
job descriptions.
There are all kinds of ways
that the division of labor gets
stabilized culturally.
 
You can promote reciprocity.
 
In evolutionary biology it's
much easier to promote
reciprocity in a two-dimensional
surface where people are playing
against their neighbors,
than in a very well mixed kind
of liquid.
 
That's the basic take-home
message of Martin Nowak's work
on the evolution of cooperation.
 
And a way to stabilize
reciprocity culturally is
through win-win economic
exchange.
So transactions in which both
sides profit;
that's the basis of business.
 
So lots of ways to resolve or
suppress conflict,
but there are some problems.
 
If you're going to stabilize
conflict within a group,
you very probably need a
leader.
You need the leader both to
direct the collective within the
group,
and you need the leader to
basically take over foreign
policy >
, to deal with extra group
relationships.
And in the multi-cellular body,
that's been done by the central
nervous system,
and in the emerging social
group, that's done by something
like a president.
Well this guy wasn't selected
at random, and there are some
issues.
 
Groups need leaders.
 
A psychological predisposition
to defer to authority is what
would permit a strong,
unrelated leader to emerge.
You might trust your dad or
your uncle, but the issue here
is why is it that in groups
humans actually will trust
somebody unrelated to lead them?
 
That's, in other words,
going beyond the kin selection
model.
 
Most of us, around the world,
really just want to be left
alone to do our own thing,
and we would like to delegate
to leaders this business,
this complicated business,
of interacting with other
groups,
particularly if it's aggressive.
 
But that's a double-edged sword.
 
Okay?
 
Deference, which may have
evolved--
this may be one of the human
social instincts that's kind of
a handle on which culture can
pull--
deference to leadership will
let a selfish leader exploit the
public.
 
And selfish leaders invade.
 
They've got to be controlled,
while they're leading.
And this is what the
U.S. Constitution is all
about.
 
A group that constrains its
leaders to pursue public
interest will have a competitive
advantage, because they will be
internally cohesive.
 
If you have a long series of
defecting leaders who are
corrupt and who subvert the
public interest,
you will have the breakdown in
social reciprocity and trust,
and you will end up with
situations which are similar
today to Zimbabwe,
to the Congo,
to Sudan, and other failed
states.
So this defection is a recipe
for the creation of a failed
state.
 
Nevertheless,
leaders are motivated to
defect, if they're selfish.
 
Well let's take a quick look at
some very idealistic people in
history who have tried to say we
should work for the group good.
Christ; the invasion of the
Christian Church by the Borgia
family,
and the remarkable situation of
corruption in fourteenth and
fifteenth century Italy,
where the Borgia's essentially
managed to make a personal
fiefdom out of about a third of
Northern Italy.
Karl Marx, who said a lot of
things that were quite similar
to Christ,
and who tried to describe a
very idealistic world in which
people were sharing property and
were really cooperative and were
helping each other,
getting subverted by the
nomenklatura;
and again and again,
you find that selfish mutants
are invading.
 
The French Revolution, in 1789;
Liberté,
Equalité,
Fraternité,
was a very idealistic attempt
to overthrow a selfish
aristocracy and establish--
kind of wipe the slate
clean--and establish a new sort
of society that was much more
egalitarian.
 
And it rapidly got invaded by
this guy, who probably was
responsible for more deaths of
young Frenchman than any other
person in history.
 
I think that Napoleon's armies
lost somewhere between 20,25
million people;
a lot.
A very dramatic and very
effective piece of data
presentation showing the width
of Napoleon's army,
as it went to Moscow and came
back.
And it goes in as a river and
it comes back as a little line
on the page.
 
So there's a problem with
defecting leadership.
And when you think about that,
you think about deference,
patriotism, empathy,
trust;
where do those emotions come
from?
Where did guilt come from?
 
Why do we get embarrassed?
 
Do you think that it's
conceivable that an adult male
grizzly bear is capable of
embarrassment?
No way in hell.
 
He's going to eat all those
babies wherever he can get them.
Ditto male lion.
 
Okay?
 
I will forbear commentary on
provosts.
Now outrage at defection,
where does that come from?
Why do we want to punish
defectors?
We're very sensitive to
defectors.
We're very, very sensitive to
people who deceive us.
Why do we have a desire for
revenge?
Often that is a spiteful,
self-defeating kind of a thing.
Why do we have an impulse to
conform?
There's been lots of good
psychological studies on this
one;
we have a frightening impulse
to conform.
 
Well the tribal social
instincts hypothesis,
that Richardson and Boyd have
advanced, attempts to explain
this kind of thing.
 
They claim basically that gene
culture co-evolution built
social imperatives into our
genes;
that genes use hormones that
create emotions,
that manipulate our phenotypes;
and that those emotions then
are the biological handles on
which culture pulls.
Okay?
 
So that would be an assertion
that our minds are not blank
slates,
and that we entered the world
partially pre-programmed,
and that some of the
programming is for social
interactions.
That's a big claim.
 
There's some evidence.
 
Joe Henrich was one of Rob
Boyd's Ph.D.
students, and Joe and Rob and
Pete Richardson and Sam Bowles
and others got money from the
MacArthur Foundation to fund
fifteen anthropologists to go
out and play the Ultimatum Game
in fifteen different cultures.
 
So the Ultimatum Game basically
works like this.
I walk into a room with you
guys, and I've got in my hand
enough money to make you
interested--
let's say I've got
$1000.00--and I give the
$1000.00 to Blake,
and I say, "Blake,
here's how it works.
 
You make him an offer,
and if he accepts it,
that's the deal,
you get to keep it.
If he turns it down,
neither of you gets
anything."
 
If Blake is homo-economicus,
a selfish Darwinian model,
Blake will keep $999.00,
and offer him one,
on the hypothesis that one is
better than zero.
Okay?
 
So that's the Ultimatum Game.
 
And if he says,
"That's totally unfair.
I'm not accepting it.
 
Go to hell."
 
Then neither of them gets
anything.
Okay?
 
That's why it's called the
Ultimatum Game.
Well all cultures tested
rejected complete selfishness.
Everybody demanded some degree
of fairness.
The worst that anybody was able
to accept was 200 bucks;
so 800/200, that was the worst.
 
They varied in how much
selfishness they tolerated,
and the amount of selfishness
was actually related to the
cohesion of the culture.
 
So the ones that demanded the
most--
so, for example,
the one that would say--
say Blake offers you $500.00,
and you say no,
but she offers you 600 and you
say yes,
and she only gets 400--that
would be the Lamalera whale
hunters of Malaysia.
 
They get into small boats,
unrelated people get into a
small boat and go out to hunt
whales, and their lives depend
upon each other;
it's dangerous business.
So unrelated people are
cooperating, and they're
literally in the same boat.
 
Okay?
 
They're the ones that demand
the most fairness.
The ones that demand the least,
the twenty-percenters,
are scattered,
wandering, single-family groups
of Native American Indians in
the Peruvian jungle.
They have very little social
interchange and very little
economic life,
and they are willing to accept
20%;
but that's the minimum.
Okay?
 
So it seems that for social
emotions, biology is important,
culture does make a difference.
 
Biology is providing a
principle;
culture's setting the
parameters.
That's kind of like language,
the way that Chomsky thought of
it.
 
And it looks like we display a
lot of symptoms of group
adaptations.
 
The mechanisms that might have
selected them are plausible;
they're not yet strongly
supported.
So are we going to fuse into a
group identity,
or are we going to remain torn
between private interests and
those of the group to which we
belong,
which is our current state?
 
Well, when we went from
transition- when we transitioned
from hunger-gatherers into
agricultural settlements,
the relationships among group
members decreased,
group size increased,
and the average encounter was
no longer with a relative but
with a non-relative.
That's a big city.
 
Okay?
 
There weren't any cities before
agriculture.
Now we then started getting
engaged in large-scale economic
exchange, and it both reinforces
and erodes cultural group
selection.
 
So exchange within groups
promotes group cohesion;
exchange among groups erodes
group boundaries.
This is a diagram of global
trade a few years ago;
the width of the arrows is how
much is flowing.
It shows, as the current
economic crisis just shows so
clearly, that we are now
globally integrated by
economics.
 
So group boundaries are being
strongly eroded by
globalization.
 
Our group identity is now
multi-dimensional.
So it used to be,
if you were in a
hunter-gatherer band,
or even if you were in a
medieval guild,
that your ethnicity,
your religion and your politics
pretty much overlap.
But it's now possible for
people to belong to different
dimensions of identity,
all at the same time.
So you can be a Black Catholic
Democrat, or you can be a Black
Muslim Republican.
 
Right?
 
And that didn't used to be
possible.
Those things are now breaking
apart.
So the power of cultural group
selection is decreasing,
because these things are not
adding up to push all in the
same direction;
they're pushing in different
directions.
 
In the evolutionary social
sciences,
by which I mean basically
economic psychology and
political science,
we're stuck in the major
transition between individual
and group.
There's quite a bit of support
for that.
The transition stalled,
and the breakdown has left us
in a state of tension.
 
But, these conclusions are
supported by plausibility
arguments,
and these plausibility
arguments basically only achieve
the level of consistency with
the evidence.
 
Consistency is a weak logical
criterion.
There's a lot of stuff that's
consistent, but not necessarily
true.
 
It is much more difficult to
demonstrate necessity and
sufficiency.
 
Basically to do that,
you have to take the Social
Sciences and transform them into
the Natural Sciences,
with the same standards of
experimental demonstration and
admission of evidence.
 
Well that is a long-term,
big project.
That's not easy.
 
So I say that,
at the end, because I don't
want to leave you with the
impression that this idea,
that we're stuck in a major
transition,
is well established.
 
I think that it is consistent
with the evidence that I know
of, but I don't think the
evidence is strong.
And of course,
down in my gut,
when I take off my scientist
hat,
and my teacher hat,
and I am sitting there alone
quietly at 2:00 in the morning,
in my house,
thinking about this,
I think it's probably true.
>
 
Okay.
 
