The Faith Instinct (6 page)

The surprising idea that people might be inherently moral was difficult for biologists and others to accept because it conflicted with the usual assumption that human nature is selfish. Even harder to swallow, for those not steeped in the concepts of evolutionary biology, was the assertion that something as precious as morality could have blossomed from the murky soil of strife and warfare.

Alexander’s book was largely theoretical. It was a work of practical observation that gave substance to his views. Frans de Waal, now at the Yerkes National Primate Center, had spent many years observing apes and monkeys in captivity. He noticed that each species had its own special protocols for peacemaking and for patching things up after fights.

Why would animals have any interest in peacemaking ? Social monkeys and apes, de Waal observed, live in just the conditions specified by Alexander as conducive to the emergence of morality. In many primate species there are conflicts between rival groups. Chimpanzees are territorial and patrol their boundaries, killing any neighboring male they find. Sometimes chimps conduct lethal raids into their neighbors’ territory, trying to kill off male defenders one by one in a systematic campaign. If successful, they then take over their neighbors’ property.

Female chimpanzees seem to be aware of the dangers posed by internal strife. If their males kill or maim one another, the community is less well defended against neighboring bands. So it is greatly in their int
erest to prevent or assuage conflicts between rival males. De Waal observed that in captive chimpanzee colonies the females would sometimes prize stones or sticks out of the hands of males who are about to fight.

The art of reconciliation and peacemaking is one of the building blocks of primate behavior from which human morality later evolved, in de Waal’s view. He has found several other such building blocks of morality in monkey and ape societies. A basic one is empathy, the ability to perceive another’s emotions. Many social animals seem aware of one another’s pain. In a particularly striking experiment, rhesus monkeys allowed to take food only from an apparatus that delivered an electric shock to a companion would starve themselves, for 5 days in one case, for 12 days in another.

But it could be that the monkeys were not trying to help their
companion but were personally distressed by their cries. Chimpanzees present a clear
er case for empathy. They regularly console the loser of a figh
t. In distress, they elicit sympathy with a range of very human expressions. “
When upset, chimpanzees pout, whimper, yell, beg with outstretc
hed hand, or impatiently shake both hands so that the other wil
l hurry and provide the calming contact so urgently needed,” de Waal wrote.
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Chimps have been known to try to save others from drowning in the moats that sometimes surround zoo colonies. This is a huge risk for them because they cannot swim.

A third moral building block is an ability to learn social rules. Infant monkeys are accorded much license, but as they grow older they learn how to respect the food and space of dominant animals. Monkey and ape societies are organized in hierarchies, in which each individual knows its place. Each species has its own repertoire of signals for communicating who is higher in the hierarchy and who is lower. Among rhesus monkeys an inferior will give a bared-teeth grin to an approaching superior and often present its vulnerable rear quarters. The hierarchy gives the community a structure and an order.

A fourth likely building block of morality is a sense of recipr
ocity. This is not so far from the human concept of justice. Ch
impanzees remember who is a good sharer of food and who isn’t, indicating they ha
ve a notion of fair treatment. In a fascinating experiment with capuchin monkeys, de
Waal trained them to exchange tokens for a food reward, either
a grape or a slice of cucumber. When capuchins saw their neighbor get a grape in ex
change for a token, but they were given just a slice of cucumbe
r, they seemed outraged by the unfairness of it all. Some refus
ed to eat the slice of cucumber they were handed or even flung it back at the researcher.
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So what then is morality? De Waal’s definition, from his perspective as a primatologist, is very different from that of rationalist philosophers. “We understand morality as a sense of right and wrong that is born out of group-wide systems of conflict management based on shared values,” he writes. “Moral systems thus provide a set of rules and incentives to resolve competition and conflicts within the group in the service of the ‘
greater good,’ that is, benefits (to individuals) derived from resource distribution and collective action. Morality, by this definition, is closely related to social behavior.”
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By breaking out of the specialist frameworks in which philosophers and psychologists had long imprisoned the study of morality, De Waal established that morality is a biological behavior and that evolution is the only framework in which the origins of morality can be addressed.

In the terms of Haidt’s distinction between people’s moral intuition and moral reasoning, it is easy to see how the moral intuitive process could have evolved by slow degrees in the human lineage from the four building blocks described by de Waal in primates—getting along (techniques for reconciliation after conflict), empathy, learning social rules and a sense of reciprocity.

Moral reasoning probably evolved because justifying one’s actions to the group would have helped burnish one’s reputation, a matter of the greatest importance for survival in small hunter gatherer bands.

People in a small community gossip all the time and maintain elaborate mental dossiers on one another’s behavior. Any infraction of social norms may be remembered for years. Guarding one’s reputation would have become critical. Hunter gatherer societies don’t run prisons or have a penal code. You’re either in or you’re out, and if you are ostracized your prospects of surviving alone in the wilderness are unpromising. Better learn quickly to fit in and conform.

The fear of disobeying the community’s rules could well have solidified into something close to an imperative. Philosophers looking at the primatologists’ descriptions of primates’ pro-social behaviors like to echo Hume’s remark that there is no way of stepping from “is” to “ought.” But in social situations in which an individual fears community disapproval if he fails to do something, the “is” lies pretty close to the “ought.”

Consider a remarkable human behavior, one seldom hailed as distinguishing people from other animals but quite unique all the same—that of blushing. No other species changes its skin color, against its conscious will, so as to signal to others that it is ashamed or embarrassed. It is hard to reconstruct how blushing evolved. It’s good for the social fabric, so perhaps societies full of blushers were more cohesive and successful. Or maybe individuals who blushed seemed more honest and trustworthy, giving them an advantage.

But however the blushing reflex evolved, it shows how acutely attuned humans have become to the necessity of observing social rules, and to their discomfiture when they feel they have transgressed the bounds of
accepted behavior. Morality is at the heart of our social behavior. Evolution seems to have inscribed not just the capacity for learning the moral rules of one’s community, but a significant part of the content.

There may be a universal moral grammar, as Hauser suggests, a counterpart of the universal grammar machinery that enables children to learn the language of their community. But the moral grammar, unlike that for language, is not content free. Many moral rules are universal and therefore likely to have a genetic origin. The anthropologist Donald Brown, in his survey of universal human behaviors found in societies throughout the world, cites reciprocity as the cornerstone of moral values. “The strong moral feeling attached to reciprocity, and the assiduousness with which reciprocal action and reaction are watched also suggest some degree of innateness,” he writes.
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The Universal People, as he calls the exemplars of typical human behavior, display other moral behaviors. They care for children and the helpless. They deplore and punish the following actions: killing, stealing, cheating, lying, breaking promises and committing adultery.
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Causing harm to others is also forbidden, and the three principles uncovered by the trolley problems show how finely grained are the innate moral rules in this category. They distinguish the in-group from the out-group, being more disposed to cooperate with the first.

Moral behavior, on the basis of the findings discussed above, seems very likely to have a genetic basis. The joint ancestors of chimps and humans, who lived some 5 million years ago, were presumably capable of premoral behaviors much like those seen in chimpanzees today. But down the human side of the chimp-human split, individuals were evolving larger brains which eventually reached a volume three times that of chimps.

With the increasing power of the human mind, individuals started to think for themselves and to calculate where their own interests lay. Their assessments of their self-interest often proved to differ from what their moral instincts told them was in the community’s interest. If societies of these cognitively advanced hominids were not to disintegrate, a higher level of social cohesion had to come into play. A new kind of behavior evolved, one that induced individuals to subordinate their own interests to that of the group. This new behavior, the instinct for religion, enforced moral instincts by making people fear deeply the consequences of ignoring them.

EDWARD O. WILSON
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I. M. LEWIS
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T
he human form has undergone extraordinary changes since its lineage split from that of chimpanzees some 5 to 6 million years ago. Our brain tripled in size, our body hair was shed, we downsized our teeth, shriveled our gut and gained a fine facial appendage for conserving moisture in dry climates—the nose.

Equally radical and transformative, though less well appreciated, have been the changes in human social behavior. In the societies of our apelike forebears, coordination was achieved relatively simply, through a strict hierarchy dominated by the alpha male. Hunter gatherer societies are organized on a very different principle—they are completely egalitarian. It was during the transition from male dominance to egalitarianism that religious behavior emerged.

Many other social innovations developed in the human lineage as this new species, driven by the increasing intellectual capacity of its individuals, experimented with one novel mechanism after another for communicating among members of a group and governing the interactions among them. The surprising gift of music appeared in the repertoire of human facul
ties. Even more remarkable was language, a wholly novel system for conveying precise thoughts from one individual’s mind to that of another. Humans developed or enhanced a skill known to psychologists as theory of mind—the ability to infer what someone else knows or intends. Groups possessing these new skills in various strengths competed furiously with each other in the struggle to survive. All these new faculties were doubtless drawn upon as natural selection searched for an effective solution to the most pressing of all problems for a social species—how to make selfish individuals place society’s needs above their own. This departure from self-interest required not just moral self-restraint and social cohesiveness, but an emotional commitment to the group so fierce and transcendent that men would quite readily sacrifice their lives in its defense.

The solution that evolved was religious behavior. It was those who learned to bond to each other through ritual song and dance who developed the most cohesive communities. It was those who believed that the gods or their dead ancestors were seeing into their hearts who hewed closest to their society’s rules. It was those who most feared supernatural retribution who built the most moral societies with the strongest social fabric and the resilience to outlast others.

The principal evidence for thinking religious behavior is an evolved part of human nature is the fact that religion is universal. Every known society possesses some form of religion. And though there are wide cultural variations—religions across the world are very different from one another—there are also many shared elements. These constant or almost constant features of religious behavior are the ones likely to have a genetic basis.
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All religions are centered on rituals, and the rituals include music. Dance is also a regular part of ritual in primitive societies though it has been eliminated from the religion of many settled societies.

All societies have rites of passage, rituals that mark birth, puberty, marriage and death. The music that accompanies these often includes percussive effects, since drums or rhythmic beating are widely held to be a way of communicating with the spirit world. The initiation rites accompanying puberty often involve pain and terror, a way of instilling courage and loyalty in future warriors.