This is a truncated outline of a lecture presented by Kristen Hawkes, Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah, to the February 9, 1995 meeting of the Humanists of Utah.

I begin with a disclaimer: Mr. (Ron) Healy invited me to talk about the recent book by Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, with special attention to the issues of competition and cooperation from an evolutionary perspective. At the time I had just begun to read the book and didn't suspect Wright of a moral tract. His lucid review of recent ideas and his engaging use of the life of Charles Darwin to illustrate them are a nice introduction to some of the most exciting work on human behavior that has emerged in the last few decades from developments in evolutionary biology. I recommend the book to you. It is well written and has the virtues of good scholarship. If you wish to follow up his assertions and generalizations, footnotes give the key references to get you started. But the book does end with an argument about what Wright sees to be moral implications of an evolutionary perspective. Now, this may be exactly the forum in which to debate such ideas. But I am not a moral philosopher. Since I don't find Wright's moral prophesies convincing, a focus on them would put me in the position of summarizing arguments about an area in which I can claim no special expertise, with which I don't agree, only to then criticize my own summary. You would not get your money's worth.

So please indulge instead a consideration of the conceptual tools provided by current evolutionary views of competition and cooperation (which are introduced in Wright's book). Let me show you some of the ways these tools are useful for the task of investigating and explaining human behavioral variability over time and space. That way I can talk about things I actually work on.

Let's begin with Darwin's deceptively simple theory of evolution by natural selection. By the first half of the 19th century the evidence had accumulated in Darwin's circle (some due to his own work) that the distribution of plants and animals in the living world was consistent with "descent with modification." Variation over both time, in fossil sequences, and over space, in biogeographically diversity (neighboring populations being more alike and marked by barriers to migration) suggested ancestral relationships among distinct species. The question on the table was this: what process propelled and directed the changes?

Darwin says himself that his insight that natural selection was the process came on reading Malthus' essay "On Population" in which Malthus lamented the fact that populations can increase faster than their food supplies. Darwin saw that this simple fact implied competition for scarce resources. And since (as cursory observation shows) individuals within any population vary and if any of this variation makes some individuals even slightly better able to solve the current problems of surviving and reproducing, then any heritable component of such variation must increase over time, out competing the heritable component of variants less able. As circumstances changed, the variants more suited would be favored. This process would result in an association between features and the circumstances in which they occur.

Darwin knew nothing of genes and the problem of inheritance was one he never solved. But in the first half of this century Mendelian inheritance and natural selection were joined in the synthetic theory of evolution. That provided the fundamental elements of modern evolutionary theory. It took some additional work on them before their promise was realized. Especially important developments in the study of animal behavior only took place in the 60's and 70's when G. C. Williams published Adaptation and Natural Selection: a critique of some current biological thought, William Hamilton explained the implications of kin selection, and John Maynard Smith developed the concept of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies. All this is recent enough that it is not surprising that applications of these ideas to questions of human behavior seems barely begun.

The result of these developments was a way of investigating the living world by constructing hypotheses about any particular puzzling feature on two central assumptions. First, natural selection is the process that has designed living organisms. Second, time and energy are always limited so that individuals must make tradeoffs in the face of constraints. The first is the basis for expecting individuals to do things likely to maximize their reproductive success or more generally their inclusive fitness--their relative contribution to descendant gene pools. Over evolutionary time characteristics spread and persist when the individuals with those characteristics are better at contributing genes to descendant generations. The second assumption is the basis for the use of economic logic. Tradeoffs are unavoidable. Everything has a cost. More spent on one thing means less to something else.

With these working assumptions researchers use models (sometimes quite simple ones) to investigate topics that include: why males and females behave differently; why the character and extent of those differences varies; why individuals do different things at different ages; why patterns of time allocation vary not only by sex and age but also by sex and/or wealth; why individuals use different resources from one time and place to another; why family arrangements take different shapes, why there is more sharing and help in some cases than others, over some things than others, with some associates than others. The theoretical foundation of behavioral ecology makes the answer to these questions in one research setting directly useful elsewhere. Not because it explains away the variation. Different cases show whether variables actually do co-vary in the ways expected. Work over the last few decades has, if anything, revealed more variation than previously guessed. But it reveals larger regularities within the variation not only among other animals but among people as well.

There are four important issues about competition and cooperation to clarify. I'll briefly elaborate on each. First is the importance of distinguishing the interests of groups and the interests of their individual members. Second is the way that the "genes eye view" shows how individual fitness interests can overlap, but never perfectly--so that conflicts are expected even among the closest kin. Third the fitness interests of males and females differ with implications for conflicts both between and within the sexes. The fourth is an array of issues arising in the cooperation of distant kin. This last category includes models illustrating both the limits on cooperation and showing when it might be quite robust.

Each of these issues can be illustrated in recent work like mine on human behavioral variation within and among communities dependent on wild foods. Hunter-gatherers, without farming or herding, must solve the problems of life that faced people everywhere before the origins of agriculture. If we find that variation in the problems they face and the ways they solve them are systematically related to features of local ecology, and can be explained by applying the use of evolutionary models, we can use those relationships to provide hypotheses about variation in the past. I note some examples.

An evolutionary perspective focuses attention on fitness related costs and benefits to individuals. It allows us to construct and test hypotheses about variation in behavior. By appealing to a general theory about behavioral variability we can take our results to the archeological and paleontological record left by people in the past. And we can compare human behavior to the behavior of our closest living non-human relatives--the other primates, a comparison that increasingly shows how much more like us they are than once supposed.

If a moral implication must be drawn, consider this: evolutionary ecology offers some useful tools for exploring and explaining when and why people and perhaps some other primates are concerned about morality. As very social animals our associates can be a source of both large costs and also large benefits to each of us. But explaining why conflicts of interest always plague us, so that the behavior of individuals often follows a course that results in "irrational" group level outcomes, does not make the fundamental conflicts of interest go away.

--Bob Green