Discussion Group Report

Are men and women really built for monogamy? What is the evolutionary logic behind office politics--or for that matter politics in general? Why did natural selection give us the vast guilt repository known as the conscience? Why do we so easily exclude large groups of people from the reach of our sympathy? Considering that we have an unconscious mind, is intellectual honesty possible? Whose interests do parents who inflict psychological damage on their children have at heart?

In recent years new light has been shed on such important questions--and on just about everything that matters--through the work of evolutionary psychologists. A new view has emerged, called "the new Darwinian paradigm," which has radically deepened the insight of social scientists into the social behavior of animals--including us. The dominant view of psychologists during most of this century has been that environmental factors were the predominant influences on human behavior, but now discoveries relative to the new paradigm show compelling evidence that there is a deeper evolutionary basis for much that has been considered environmentally caused. B. F. Skinner's behaviorism, the sense that a human being can become any sort of animal with proper conditioning, is not faring well.

Robert Wright, in his book The Moral Animal, which was reviewed by our study group this month, says that today's Darwinian anthropologists "focus less on surface difficulties among cultures than on deep unities. Beneath the global crazy quilt of rituals and customs, they see recurring patterns or themes in culture after culture in the structure of family, friendship, politics, courtships, morality...a thirst for social approval, a capacity for guilt." Differences between groups of people or among people within groups appear as products of a single human nature responding to widely varying circumstances.

Can a Darwinian understanding of human nature help people reach their goals in life? Can it help them choose their goals? Can it help distinguish between practical and impractical goals--or which goals are worthy? Does knowing how evolution has shaped our basic moral impulses help us decide which impulses we should consider legitimate? To all these questions Wright answers, "Yes."

John Stuart Mill, in his concept of utilitarianism, wanted to maximize overall happiness. This is accomplished by everyone being thoroughly self-sacrificing, that is, to consider the welfare of everyone else exactly as important as one's own welfare. Darwin embraced Mill's principle but he encountered an important problem in doing so. He saw how deeply his ethics were at odds with the values that natural selection implies. To ponder it, says Wright, is to realize that the purpose of a single, slight "advance" in organic design, "--longer, sharper teeth in male chimpanzees, say--is often to make the other animals suffer or die more surely. Organic design thrives on pain, and pain thrives on organic design."

Darwin did not agonize much over this conflict between natural selection's morality and his own. He rejected nature's values as a basis for morality. Wright observes, "It is remarkable that a creative process [natural selection] devoted to selfishness could produce organisms [human beings] which, having finally discerned this creator, reflect on this central value and reject it."

The new Darwinian paradigm, nevertheless, points out what seems to be a genetic propensity for humans to deceive themselves. We like to think of ourselves or of the group we belong to as moral, even when we are not. We are prone to grow indignant about the behavior of distinct groups of people (nations, say) whose interests conflict with a group to which we belong. We tend to be inconsiderate of low-status people and very tolerant of high status people, when there is little evidence that the latter have any particular proclivity towards conscience or sacrifice.

Wright says, we have the technical capacity for leading an examined life, but we are only potentially moral animals, not naturally moral ones. "To be moral animals, we must realize how thoroughly we aren't."