Interesting Books
Interesting Books
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The search for the basis of human sociality, unlike those for the physical basis of the universe, affects nothing so much as it does our social lives and futures, individually and collectively. It is chapter one of the search for the foundations of ethics, the chapter missing, I believe, from the grand search as it has been conducted before this time in our history. It is a quest that, again unlike that of the theoretical physicists, leads not merely to skepticism but to hostility, fear, resistance, and even bitter and vituperative rejection. These emotions are aroused, I think, because the effort to understand the social universe involves ourselves, because it is seen as threatening to affect our everyday lives. Indeed, as I shall argue below, it threatens to affect our individual rights and opportunities to seek happiness and success in our own individual fashions. We do not hesitate to call the efforts of the physicists "science," but we are more apt to ridicule and dismiss the efforts of the behavioral scientists who study humans. In all the universe, the only topic we do not wish to be too well understood is human behavior (including, necessarily, our own) even, it would seem, if that kind of understanding represents the only clear way to diminish the threat of self-extinction. The reason for this resistance, and for the threat mentioned above, is that human behavior involves conflicts of interest. Anyone who understands some aspect of it very well will likely be able to use the knowledge to serve his own interests and thwart those of others. Social research, for example, does not flourish when its results threaten the policies of the government that furnishes its financial support. Nor are those people viewed with favor who speak of seeking to understand human behavior so as to "manipulate" or "control" the actions of the populace in respect to as yet unspecified goals. By resistance to self-understanding, then, I mean not knowledge about ourselves personally, or to understanding others (both of which we seem to approach with relish), but rather resistance to the concomitant condition of being understood by others.
We weren't specifically interested in homicide when we started this project eight years ago. We were interested in the applicability of contemporary evolutionary theory to the analysis of human motives and perceptions of self-interest, and we were interested in where and why individual interests conflict. We doubted the utility of the usual psychological research methods (questionnaires, contrived social psychological experiments, and so forth); we wanted to know about conflicts that were both genuine and severe. Murders obviously filled the bill on both counts, and they also seemed likely to be exceptionally well documented. So we began reading the homicide literature, seeking answers to such questions as "What demographic features are associated with risk of filicide, parricide, and fratricide?" or "Under what circumstances do men kill their wives?" To our surprise, the answers simply weren't there.
Gradually we came to realize that whereas aggregate homicide data have been studied by sociologists seeking social structural explanations for variable rates, and individual homicide cases have been studied by psychiatrists seeking syndromes, hardly anyone has yet approached the analysis of homicides in the light of any sort of theory of interpersonal conflict, evolutionary or otherwise. No-one had compared an observed distribution of victim-killer relationships to any sort of "expected" distribution, nor asked about patterns of killer-victim age disparities in familial killings, nor carried out any of a dozen other kinds of analyses that you will encounter in this book. We believe that an evolutionary psychological approach affords a deeper view and deeper understanding of homicidal violence.
Paul W. Sherman,
Jennifer U.M. Jarvis,
and
Richard D. Alexander,
ed.,
The Biology of the Naked Mole-Rat,
1991,
Princeton University Press,
Princeton;
ISBN:
0-691-08585-4.
In the mid-1970s, R.D. Alexander, a professor at the University of Michigan, lectured on the evolution of eusociality at several universities in the western United States. In an effort to explain why vertebrates had apparently not evolved eusociality, he hypothesized a fictitious mammal that, if it existed, would be eusocial. This hypothetical creature had certain features that patterned its social evolution after that of termites (e.g., the potential for heroic acts that assisted collateral relatives, the existence of an ultrasafe but expansible nest, and an ample supply of food requiring minimal risk to obtain it). Alexander hypothesized that this mythical beast would probably be a completely subterranean rodent that fed on large tubers and lived in burrows inaccessible to most but not all predators, in a xeric tropical region with heavy clay soil.
When Alexander presented his lecture at Northern Arizona University in May 1976, T.L. Vaughan was in the audience. After the lecture, Vaughan astonished Alexander by saying "Your hypothetical eusocial mammal is a perfect description of the naked mole-rat of Africa."
Morality is as firmly grounded in neurobiology as anything we do or are. Once thought of as purely spiritual matters, honesty, guilt, and the weighing of ethical dilemmas are traceable to specific areas of the brain. It should not surprise us, therefore, to find animal parallels. The human brain is a product of evolution. Despite its larger volume and greater complexity, it is fundamentally similar to the central nervous system of other mammals.
We seem to be reaching a point at which science can wrest morality from the hands of philosophers. That this is already happening--albeit largely at a theoretical level--is evident from recent books by, among others, Richard Alexander, Robert Frank, James Q. Wilson, and Robert Wright. The occasional disagreements within this budding field are far outweighed by the shared belief that evolution needs to be part of any satisfactory explanation of morality.
