The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (47 page)

As it happened, none of Darwin's capital was lost. He came out smelling like a rose. Before the Linnean Society, Hooker and Lyell described what had happened after Darwin received Wallace's paper. "So highly did Mr. Darwin appreciate the value of the views therein set forth, that he proposed, in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, to obtain Mr. Wallace's consent to allow the Essay to be published as soon as possible. Of this step we highly approved, provided Mr. Darwin did not withhold from the public, as he was strongly inclined to do (in favour of Mr. Wallace), the memoir he had himself written on the same subject, and which, as before stated, one of us had perused in 1844, and the contents of which we had both of us been privy to for many years... ,"

More than a century later, this sanitized version of events was still the standard version — an utterly scrupulous Darwin virtually coerced into letting his name appear alongside Wallace's. Darwin, one biographer wrote, "seems hardly to have been a free agent in the face of Lyell's and Hooker's pressure for publication."

There is no basis for concluding that Darwin consciously orchestrated his eclipse of Wallace. Consider the judicious appointment of Lyell as "Lord Chancellor." The natural impulse, in times of crisis, to seek the guidance of friends feels perfectly innocent. We don't necessarily think, "I'll call a friend, rather than some stranger, because a friend will share my warped ideas about what I deserve and what my rivals deserve." So too with Darwin's pose of moral anguish: it worked because he didn't know it was a pose — because, in other words, it wasn't a pose; he actually felt the anguish.

And not for the first time. Darwin's guilt about asserting priority — pulling rank on Wallace in a quest for still higher rank —
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was just the latest in a lifelong series of comparable pangs. (Recall John Bowlby's diagnosis: Darwin suffered "self-contempt for being vain." "Time and again throughout his life his desire for attention and fame is coupled with the deep sense of shame he feels for harbouring such motives.")
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Indeed, it was the proven authenticity of Darwin's anguish which helped convince Hooker and Lyell that Dar win "strongly" resisted glory and thus helped them convince the world of it. All the moral capital Darwin built up over the years had come at a large psychological cost, but in the end the investment paid dividends.

None of this is meant to imply that Darwin behaved in perfectly adaptive fashion, constantly attuned to the task of genetic prolifei ation, with every bit of his ample striving and suffering warranted by that end. Given the difference between nineteenth-century Eng land and the environment(s) of our evolution, this sort of functional perfection is the last thing one should expect. Indeed, as we suggested several chapters ago, Darwin's moral sentiments were manifestly more acute than self-interest dictated; he had plenty of capital in his moral savings account without losing sleep over unanswered letters, without crusading on behalf of dead sheep. The claim here is simply that lots of odd and much-discussed things about Darwin's mind and character can make a basic kind of sense when viewed through the lens of evolutionary psychology.

Indeed, his whole career assumes a certain coherence. It looks less like an erratic quest, often stymied by self-doubt and undue deference, and more like a relentless ascent, deftly cloaked in scruples and humility. Beneath Darwin's pangs of conscience lay moral positioning. Beneath his reverence for men of accomplishment lay social climbing. Beneath his painfully recurring self-doubts lay a fevered defense against social assault. Beneath his sympathy toward friends lay savvy political alliance. What an animal!
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The picture of human nature painted thus far isn't altogether flattering.

We spend our lives desperately seeking status; we are addicted to social esteem in a fairly literal sense, dependent on the neurotransmitters we get upon impressing people. Many of us claim to be self-sufficient, to have a moral gyroscope, to hold fast to our values, come what may. But people truly oblivious to peer approval get labeled sociopaths. And the epithets reserved for people at the other end of the spectrum, people who seek esteem most ardently — "self-promoter", "social climber" — are only signs of our constitutional blindness. We are all self-promoters and social climbers. The people known as such are either so effective as to arouse envy or so graceless as to make their effort obvious, or both.

Our generosity and affection have a narrow underlying purpose. They're aimed either at kin, who share our genes, at nonkin of the opposite sex who can help package our genes for shipment to the
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next generation, or at nonkin of either sex who seem likely to return the favor. What's more, the favor often entails dishonesty or malice; we do our friends the favor of overlooking their flaws, and seeing (if not magnifying) the flaws of their enemies. Affection is a tool of hostility. We form bonds to deepen fissures.
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In our friendships, as in other things, we're deeply inegalitarian. We value especially the affection of high-status people, and are willing to pay more for it — to expect less of them, to judge them leniently. Fondness for a friend may wane if his or her status slips, or if it simply fails to rise as much as our own. We may, to facilitate the cooling of relations, justify it. "He and I don't have as much in common as we used to." Like high status, for example.

It is safe to call this a cynical view of behavior. So what's new? There's nothing revolutionary about cynicism. Indeed, some would call it the story of our time — the by now august successor to Victorian earnestness.
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The shift from nineteenth-century earnestness to twentieth-century cynicism has been traced, in part, to Sigmund Freud. Like the new Darwinism, Freudian thought finds sly unconscious aims in our most innocent acts. And like the new Darwinism, it sees an animal essence at the core of the unconscious.

Nor are those the only things Freudian and Darwinian thought have in common. For all the criticism it has drawn in recent decades, Freudianism remains the most influential behavioral paradigm — academically, morally, spiritually — of our time. And to this position the new Darwinian paradigm aspires.

On grounds of this rivalry alone, disentangling Freudian psychology and evolutionary psychology would be worthwhile. But there are other grounds, too, perhaps more important: the forms of cynicism ultimately entailed by the two schools are different, and different in ways that matter.

Both Darwinian and Freudian cynicism carry less bitterness than garden-variety cynicism. Because their suspicion of a person's motives is in large part a suspicion of unconscious motives, they view the person — the conscious person, at least — as a kind of unwitting accomplice. Indeed, to the extent that pain is the price paid for the
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internal subterfuge, the person may be worthy of compassion as well as suspicion. Everyone comes out looking like a victim. It is in describing how and why the victimization takes place that the two schools of thought diverge.

Freud thought of himself as a Darwinian. He tried to look at the human mind as a product of evolution, a fact that — by itself, at least — would forever endear him to evolutionary psychologists. Anyone who sees humans as animals, driven by sexual and other coarse impulses, can't be all bad. But Freud misunderstood evolution in basic and elementary ways.
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He put much emphasis, for example, on the Lamarckian idea that traits acquired through experience get passed on biologically. That some of these misconceptions were common in his day — and that some were held by Darwin, or at least encouraged by his equivocations — may be a good excuse. But the fact remains that they led Freud to say many things that sound nonsensical to today's Darwinians.

Why would people have a death instinct ("thanatos")? Why would girls want male genitals ("penis envy")? Why would boys want to have sex with their mothers and kill their fathers (the "Oedipus complex")? Imagine genes that specifically encourage any of these impulses, and you're imagining genes that aren't exactly destined to spread through a hunter-gatherer population overnight.

There's no denying Freud's sharp eye for psychic tension. Something resembling the Oedipal conflict between father and son may well exist. But what are its real roots? Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have argued that here Freud conflated several distinct Darwinian dynamics, some of them grounded ultimately in the parent-offspring conflict described by Robert Trivers.
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For example, when boys reach adolescence, they may, especially in a polygynous society (such as our ancestral environment) find themselves competing with their fathers for the same women. But among those women is not the boy's mother; incest often produces deficient offspring, and it's not in the son's genetic interest to have his mother assume the risks and burdens of pregnancy to create a reproductively worthless sibling. (Hence the dearth of boys who try to seduce their mothers.) At a younger age the boy (or for that matter a girl) may have a paternal conflict that
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is over the mother — but not with sex as its goal. Rather, the son and father are fighting over the mother's valuable time and attention. It the struggle has sexual overtones at all, they are only that the father's genetic interest may call for impregnating the mother, while the son's would call for delaying the arrival of a sibling (by, for example, continued breast-feeding, which forestalls ovulation).

These sorts of Darwinian theories are often speculative and, at this early stage in the growth of evolutionary psychology, meagerly tested. But unlike Freud's theories, they are tethered to something firm: an understanding of the process that designed the human brain. Evolutionary psychology has embarked on a course whose broad contours are well-marked and which should, as it proceeds, find continual correction in the dialectic of science.

The path to progress begins by specifying the knobs of human nature — the things that Charles Darwin, for example, shared with all humanity. He cared for his kin, within limits. He sought status. He sought sex. He tried to impress peers and to please them. He tried to be seen as good. He formed alliances and nurtured them. He tried to neutralize rivals. He deceived himself when the preceding goals so dictated. And he felt all the feelings — love, lust, compassion, reverence, ambition, anger, fear, pangs of conscience, of guilt, of obligation, of shame, and so on — that push people toward these goals.

Having located — in Darwin or anyone else — the basic knobs ot human nature, the Darwinian next asks: What is distinctive about the tuning of the knobs? Darwin had an unusually active conscience. He nurtured his alliances with unusual care. He worried unusually about the opinions of others. And so on.

Where did these distinctive tunings come from? Good question. Almost no developmental psychologists have taken up the tools of the new paradigm, so there's a shortage of answers. But the route to the answers, at least broadly speaking, is clear. The young, plastic mind is shaped by cues that, in the environment of our evolution, suggested what behavioral strategies were most likely to get genes spread. The cues presumably tend to mirror two things: the sort ot
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social environment you find yourself in; and the sorts of assets and liabilities you bring into that environment.

Some cues are mediated by kin. Freud was right to sense that relatives — parents, in particular — have a lot to say about the shape of the emerging psyche. Freud was also right to sense that parents are not wholly benign, and that deep conflicts between parents and offspring are possible. Trivers's theory of parent-offspring conflict holds that some of the psychic fine-tuning may be for the genetic benefit not of the tunee (the child), but of the tuner (the parent). Disentangling the two types of kin influence — to teach and to exploit — is never easy. And in Darwin's case it's especially hard, for some of his trademark traits — great respect for authority, weighty scruples — are, in addition to being useful in the wider social world, conducive to sacrifice for the family.

If behavioral scientists are to use the new Darwinism to trace mental and emotional development, they will have to abandon one assumption often implicit in the thought of Freud and psychiatrists in general (and, for that matter, just about everyone else): that pain is a symptom of something abnormal, unnatural — a sign that things have gone awry. As the evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse has stressed, pain is part of natural selection's design (which isn't, of course, to say that it's good). Vast quantities of pain were generated by traits that helped make Darwin an effective animal: his "overactive" conscience, his relentless self-criticism, his "craving for reassurance," his "exaggerated" respect for authority. If indeed Darwin's father, as alleged, encouraged some of this pain, it may be a mistake to ask what demons drove him to do it (unless, perhaps, you then answer: "Genes that were working like a Swiss watch"). What's more, it may be a mistake to assume that the young Darwin didn't himself, at some level, encourage this painful influence; people may well be designed to absorb painful guidance that conduces to genetic proliferation (or would have in the ancestral environment). Many things that look like parental cruelty may not be an example of Trivers's parent-offspring conflict.

One condition that may resist comprehension so long as psychologists deem it unnatural is something Darwin suffered from: insecurity. Perhaps over the eons it has made sense for people who
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couldn't ascend the social hierarchy through classic means (brute force, good looks, charisma) to focus on other routes. One route would be a redoubled commitment to reciprocal altruism — that is, a sensitive, even painfully sensitive, conscience, and a chronic fear ot being unliked. The stereotypes of the arrogant, inconsiderate jock and the ingratiating, deferential wimp are no doubt overdrawn, but they may reflect a statistically valid correlation, and they seem to make Darwinian sense. At any rate, they seem to capture Darwin's experience well enough. He was a good-sized boy but awkward and introverted, and at grade school, he wrote, "I could not get up my courage to fight." Though his reserve was misinterpreted by some children as disdain, he was also known as kind — "pleased to do any little acts to gratify his fellows," one schoolmate recalled.
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Captain FitzRoy would later marvel at how Darwin "makes everyone his friend."
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