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Chapter 1
Introduction
If you?re reading this you are very probably human, a member of one of the most successful species on the planet earth. Our ancestors evolved gradually over millions of years, much as all other living creatures evolved. In the case of Homo sapiens, however, something extraordinary happened to change this rate of evolution into the explosive rates we see today. Something unique happened to our species and to our species alone. It was as if our genes became supercharged in some remarkable way to let us evolve much more rapidly than had been possible in the past.
Evolution and behaviour are inextricably linked. Human behaviour has fascinated people for thousands of years. Ancient Greek plays show it was as much of an enigma 2500 years ago as it is today. Vast numbers of research papers and books have been published on the subject and yet we still do not have a compelling model of what it is that motivates us and makes us behave the way we do. Surely something that affects every one of the people on the planet can be explained, if only in the most general terms, in a way that you and I can feel resonance with, that helps us understand better how our human society works?
I am an active research astrophysicist in the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge, England. Cambridge is an astonishing place to be an academic ? a wonderful, stimulating environment where one can find a world expert on almost any subject within 10 minutes by fast bicycle. As a scientist I know how well the scientific method works. When we do not understand something, we gather together as much of what is known about it as we can find from as broad a range of sources as possible. Then look critically at each piece of work in turn, decide what it really tells you rather than what the authors would like you to believe it tells you. Finally, assemble the pieces of the jigsaw in a way that is as consistent with the data as possible, trying to keep your own prejudices well to one side so that your new synthesis is as un-biased as possible. Very straightforward! So, as a scientist working in Cambridge, I felt that it must be possible to make some progress even with something as complicated a subject as human behaviour and evolution. The worry is that every researcher has an intimate personal experience of the behaviour of friends and colleagues and acquaintances. We scientists like to think that by taking an outsider?s view of a subject, we might discern patterns of human behaviour that others working much closer to the coalface are unable to see. I have been fascinated by the subject for many years and realised that if I did not try to write down what I discovered on this exciting quest then perhaps no one else would for some time.
The purpose of this book is to explore how our species has changed over the last hundred thousand years and how these changes affect our lives today. What I found is that it is the intimate connection between behaviour and evolution that is at the core of what has happened, and that this is important for explaining our progress. Our behaviour is now the engine driving our evolution as a species. Behaviour is something that is widely studied and yet it is surprising how little progress has been made towards a compelling model of what is our motivation, what it is that makes us move forward in our lives. My approach is to ask simple questions about everyday behaviour ? the little decisions which are of very little consequence ? rather than to worry about life changing decisions made, for example, by stone-age hunters in pursuit of food. I believe we can gain a great deal of insight by trying to understand how this micro-behaviour affects how successful we became both individually and as a species and how our evolution is now a consequence of the success or otherwise of our behavioural strategies in life. Sometimes it is these quite elementary questions that raise important issues about the way we lead our lives.
For example, let us start with what seems to be a very simple question: why are you reading this book? I am not asking how you came by it, whether you bought it because of the extraordinary reviews it has received, whether it was given to you by a favourite aunt who imagines you enjoy reading ?this sort of stuff? or whether you found it remaindered on a second-hand bookstall. We know you have it in front of you, but why are you continuing to read? What is it that you expect to get out of reading it? Even if it is just to while away the time, there are thousands of other books you could have chosen, many of which would be an easier read. Reading this book will not make you healthier or slimmer, nor will it make you any more attractive to the opposite sex. But for you to continue with it you must expect in some possibly subconscious way that this book will add to what you are. You must hope it is going to make you a better person in some subtle way. The purpose of this book is to try to understand what it is that our human behaviour is trying to achieve. Understanding how humans behave might explain how we have developed and evolved in the recent past so rapidly and so astonishingly successfully. By understanding what has happened to our species we can develop a model of what it is that drives us forward.
In many ways it is surprising that we really know so little about what it is that motivates us and drives us forward from day-to-day. The population on earth is approximately 6.6 billion people (mid-2007) and increasing at the rate of approximately 2.5 people per second or 75 million people per year. Each of us is equipped with an remarkably powerful brain. We have a great deal of knowledge and understanding of how we developed over millions of years and our relationship with other animal species on the planet. Our human society has evolved greatly in the very recent past so that now we live and work in an extremely complicated society with rules and behaviour patterns that help us work together. The progress we have made has been so rapid and substantial that the engine behind that progress must be very directed. Why have we not been able to work out why we are evolving so rapidly already? I believe there are many reasons for this including the way that we see the world and interpret what is happening around us. There is so much to know that we are losing the capacity to take a broad overview of large areas of human knowledge so we are less able to recognise the connections between apparently quite separate disciplines. In many ways we are being overwhelmed by the deluge of information. The British Library receives around 3 million new items every year requiring about 12 kilometres of additional shelf space, and they receive only a fraction of what is actually published worldwide. In addition there is the Internet. Google currently is believed to index over 40 billion web pages with its search engine. To try to accommodate all this information in any meaningful way is completely unthinkable yet we must find some way to make progress. Something as fundamental as the way that we behave and evolve has to be explained. The answer may well be something that is instinctively understood by all of us. The Lord Buddha said: ?Each of us is a God. Each of us knows all. We need only open our minds to hear our own wisdom?. If only it were as simple as that.
Our Insulation from Reality
Humankind is brilliantly defended against reality. Even in the most primitive societies, each of us is assaulted continually by an exceedingly complex world of sounds, smells, sensations and images. Together they constitute an extraordinary amount of information which must be processed and abstracted into a form that our brains can handle. To get some idea of the magnitude of the problem consider that a single good-quality digital photograph might be five megabytes in size. Our eyes and our brains are capable of processing high-quality colour images every second without any apparent effort despite the fact that five megabytes is equivalent to the amount of information contained in the entire Shorter Oxford Dictionary. Imagine coping with the information contained in a substantial dictionary every second we are awake. We are protected from that amount of information by the neural processing networks behind the retina of our eyes, in the neural pathways between the eye and brain and by a significant fraction of the processing power in our own brain. We can demonstrate this quite easily. If you look at a single letter on this page and try to see how many other letters around it you can make out while still staring at that first letter then you will discover that the field of view you actually have is incredibly small. High-resolution information from outside this field of view is being recorded by your eye but is being processed so that you have the comfort of thinking you have a high-resolution, wide field imaging capability while the information actually passed to your brain is much more limited. If you take a picture of the retina of your eye you will see it crossed by a large number of blood vessels which supply the energy to keep your vision system working properly. When you look at this page you do not see any evidence of these blood vessels which do actually block part of your field of view. Your brain has processed them out so that you are not confused by them. In a similar way we have a perception of wide-angle full colour vision. However, if you imagine trying to compare two colours towards the periphery of your field of view then you will quickly appreciate that the quality of colour sensitivity out there is very poor in comparison with the quality you have at the centre of the field of view. Your brain keeps you happy with what you see and does not worry you about subtle things such as colour vision fidelity at the edge of your field of view. However if something moves in that peripheral field even very slightly then your eye and the attached processing system picks it up with extraordinary sensitivity. This demonstrates that you do in fact have high-resolution vision in your periphery but that it is normally blocked by your neural pre-processing systems. This sensitivity to peripheral motion is critical for your survival because that almost imperceptible movement could be a tiger creeping up on you to attack you or steal your food. This is why it is vitally important that you know about anything that is happening out of the ordinary at the very edge of your field of view, no matter how slight. However, it would be quite impractical for you to be made continually conscious of everything happening around you because you would have no brain power left to get on with life. You would be permanently distracted. Your eye/brain neural system takes care of all this for you by only passing to your consciousness information that you really need to be aware of.
We see therefore that what we are being presented with all the time is not reality but an abstraction of reality heavily filtered by a complex image processing system designed to protect you from the complexity of the world you live in. This works in other important ways. When we are searching for something we search for an abstracted pattern of the reality of what we want to find, whether it is a bunch of keys, one?s spectacles or a person in a crowd. If you imagine searching for a friend in a crowd it is simply not practical to look at each and every face to see whether that is your friend. What you do is search for an abstracted, categorised version of your friend. Basic parameters such as male/female, hair colour, height, weight, age, etc., allow you to reduce the number of potential pattern matches by a large factor. You may also know approximately what your friend is wearing and again your search pattern will be refined in order to reduce the number of possible matches to a level that starts to be tractable. Now you only need to look carefully at individuals who are a fairly good match to your friend and quickly pass over any others in the crowd. This can sometimes cause problems. I sometimes find while waiting for my wife that I completely fail to see her walking directly towards me because I had in mind that she was wearing quite different clothes from what she is actually wearing. Looking for someone in a pink blouse and dark trousers almost eliminates the possibility of recognising the same person wearing a long coat. She can walk right up to me before I realise she is there.
Every time we receive any information from the world around us it is being processed and abstracted and categorised in terms that reflect our experience of the world. There can be no such thing as taking an objective view of anything because we do not actually have any reliable access to reality. When we experience something it is interpreted in terms of patterns that we have already experienced. We may be more or less open to new ideas and new experiences and so our brains may be more or less amenable to developing new interpretations of what we see and hear. It is inevitable, however, that each of us is inclined to detect patterns in the world around us with which we are already familiar. A biologist will see many things in biological terms and will be more likely to interpret complex phenomena using biological analogues with which he or she is familiar. A psychologist having the same experiences is much more likely to interpret those in terms of his or her knowledge of the workings of the mind and of society. A historian or an artist will again have a different take on those experiences and interpret them and understand them in yet another way. In addition to our academic background each of us has what amounts to a political philosophy of life that will colour our views of everything that we experience. There are many instances where the conclusions of scientists about things as ill-defined as the subtleties of human behaviour have been distorted by their political backgrounds and their belief systems. When we have very straightforward experiences then most will give a very similar account of the event. More complex events, however, will be reported differently. When we question people who have witnessed the same event, for example at a crime scene, accounts of what occurred are often wildly discrepant. The more complex and difficult it is to understand a subject, the less likely people will agree on interpretations. This is, I think, the essential difficulty we have in developing an understanding of what underlies human behaviour and evolution. This is a terribly complex subject with which each and every one of us has been engaged from the moment our heart beat for the first time. It is a subject with which will continue to engage us until that last heart beat.
The increasing complexity of our world and the increasing data input rate we handle means we are more and more required to reduce, simplify, abstract and categorise all the information coming to us. We do not want a detailed report on a meeting or a review of a film that runs to many pages. What we look for is something short and punchy, something that covers the salient points and goes directly to the conclusions. We are forced to accept the summaries of others increasingly because we simply have not got the mental capacity or the time to go through the full report and to consider whether the conclusions drawn by the author are the ones that we ourselves would have drawn from that meeting report or film review. Our desire for the one line summary, the soundbite or the appealing slogan makes it increasingly easy for information to be distorted and our reactions to it manipulated. This makes us even less likely to be able to take an objective view of something. Take it on trust and move on. It is important to appreciate that this is something that has become much more of an issue in recent years. It is one of the most critical downsides of the information explosion information overload can be very hard to deal with.
There is a further aspect of the way we filter reality that is also important. Static visual clues at the periphery of vision are suppressed. Only if something moves is our consciousness alerted because that is a potential source of danger. This strategy of only responding to changes and differences affects a much wider range of human behaviour than you might imagine. We have an extraordinary capacity to get used to the way things are. We can accommodate chronic pain and much discomfort so that only changes in what we feel are registered. Socially we strive for a change in our present condition rather than the achievement of some more absolute material goal. The descriptions in Rohinton Mistry?s book, A Fine Balance, of life in an unnamed city in India during the State of Internal Emergency of 1975 are extraordinarily moving. Self-improvement in those slums is a change from the most abject poverty to slightly less abject poverty, and within that environment people have the capacity for optimism and a degree of contentment. Partha Dasgupta in An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (1993) describes many aspects of this in his studies of the economics of poverty and its alleviation. The downside is, perhaps, the way that so many people are still dissatisfied, and probably always will be, with their lot in the West, even though by any absolute standard they are healthier and wealthier than they have ever been before. Whatever we have, we get used to and want more. It is only change, often change for change?s sake, that matters to us and indeed that urge may be one of the reasons why, as a species, we are still driven in so many ways. We can get used to anything, and stop appreciating what we have. If we have been doing something long enough it ceases to feel wrong or inappropriate or illegal, whether it is stealing pencils from work, driving a large and polluting vehicle, or working as a hangman.
Perhaps before continuing I should tell you a little about myself, and why these subjects interest me. I was trained as a physicist at Edinburgh University and then studied for a PhD in the Radio Astronomy Group of the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University, supervised by Professor Sir Martin Ryle, FRS, who won the Nobel Prize in 1974. As an astronomer working with radio sources I became interested in their optical counterparts and found that the instrumentation used by optical astronomers to take pictures and measure the colours of distant galaxies was rather mediaeval. I started developing new kinds of detector systems which are now used widely around the world for this work. In 1985 I was involved in setting up a company (AstroCam Ltd) to manufacture and sell similar cameras for a range of scientific research applications. These cameras have extraordinary sensitivity and give remarkable image quality, dramatically better than anything previously available. Through the company I found myself working with research scientists from a wide range of backgrounds and I found I had to learn something of many different research areas. Our cameras found their way into many different applications. We developed automated DNA sequencers so I learned about the structure and function of DNA. We developed protein electrophoresis systems so I learned about many aspects of protein expression and chemistry. Electron microscopes were used to examine the structure of rocks and fossils, and optical microscopes looked at the structure of cells and organisms in many different ways. Looking at stars and distant galaxies with a telescope may seem the very opposite of looking down a microscope at the smallest living structures yet, surprisingly, in many ways they are similar. I suppose all I was really doing much of the time was looking down the wrong end of the telescope. In each of these areas I was impressed by the extraordinary depth of knowledge and understanding the research workers had but I was also surprised by how restricted their thinking was to their own field.. They were also often worryingly ignorant of what was going on in other branches of science, even ones relatively close to their own discipline. I also found that although they had plausible ideas as to how their work fitted into a larger picture, the larger pictures were often quite inconsistent and incompatible between fields. I also had the chance to observe many of these people in different social contexts, presenting their results and negotiating at meetings for funding or other resources. I became fascinated by what motivated them and what common ground there might be in the different areas that might lead to a better understanding of human behaviour. You might also ask what sort of biases I bring with me and what are the patterns with which I am familiar and which I might then impose subconsciously on what I have learned about human behaviour and evolution. One of the reasons I hope that this book might be relatively unbiased is that it is difficult to imagine that any of the knowledge I have about the structure and evolution of stars and galaxies has much to do with the evolution of humans. A detailed knowledge of imaging detector electronics and software should not, I hope, constrain my imagination too greatly nor impose on this book on human behaviour too predictable a pattern. But you can never be too sure about these things. I, like everyone else, have a wide range of inbuilt prejudices and you, dear reader, must remain always on your guard. Thomas Jefferson, the US President, in a letter dated 20 September 1787, said: ?The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the tracts which favour that theory?. I hope not to fall into that trap.
If we are to understand more about our motivation as a species we need to be prepared to look much more carefully at the scientific evidence that we have of our origins, of what is known about the way we have evolved since geological times. We need to understand what is known about our biology that allows us to function as physical beings on this planet and what we know about the ways that we develop as individuals and function within our society. We need to be very clear about what we do know and what we have been led to believe, possibly mistakenly, as a consequence of the oversimplifications that are an inevitable part of life in the 21 st century. It is a big task but it is not insuperable as long as we do not let ourselves get too bogged down in unnecessary detail. However, we do need to question at every stage whether our interpretation is one that would be agreed widely or whether that interpretation could be coloured and therefore biased by our own experiences. There is bias in everything but we can work with it provided we appreciate when those biases exist.
It is also important to be clear about what expectations we might reasonably have when trying to improve our understanding of human evolution and behaviour. We know this is a terribly complicated topic and therefore we should not expect to come up with a theory that can be expressed in a few lines, and subjected to a couple of straightforward experiments to confirm or refute the theory. For every piece of evidence that supports the theory there may well be others that go against it. At present some aspects of evolutionary theory are widely accepted because of the extensive body of scientific evidence that confirms them. Others are much less well founded, sometimes being little more than groupings of plausible stories woven around one another to make what looks like a coherent scientific whole but is, however, built on sand. We will never really know how we got to where we are because there simply is no rewind and replay button for human evolution. Even going back a few thousand years many critical pieces of evidence are simply absent. Scientists infer what might have happened and what might not but the evidence can sometimes be remarkably scant. Patchy and inadequate evidence often becomes a useful breeding ground for a fanciful stories which are attractive but remain fantasies.
I should also make it clear from the outset where I think religion comes into this. Joseph Campbell in The Way of the Myth (1994) said: ?What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man?s imagination?? Many people believe that there is a god that created heaven and earth and all that there is. Such beliefs may make many people feel more comfortable about their place in the universe, and they will find that much of what they see around them affirms that faith. There are many who believe, for a variety of reasons, that evolutionary theory and in particular Darwinian evolution is a myth. Their reasons are many and varied. Those reasons all derive from an unprovable act of faith, and as a consequence those reasons cannot diminish the strength of the evidence for Darwinian evolution. A detailed discussion of the relationship of science and religion is out of place here. Daniel C. Dennett?s book Breaking The Spell (Penguin, 2006) gives an excellent and thoughtful review. Although I will comment critically throughout this book on many aspects of human evolution theory there is far too much evidence about the way that this planet was formed billions of years ago, and how the creatures evolved and how they were selected by their degree of adaption to their environment. If you are reading this book in the hope of finding an alternative to Darwinian evolutionary theory you will be disappointed. The evidence for the ideas of Darwin is very strong. What I will suggest is that Darwin has only exposed part of the story and that there is more to human evolution than simple biological evolution. There will be no comfort here for those who believe in intelligent design or any of the other myths that are popular today. Nevertheless, whatever your beliefs might be I think that many of the ideas in this book about human behaviour and motivation and what it is that drives us from day-to-day may still be of interest to you and indeed be compatible with your views. It is unlikely you will be offended by the book, at least that is not my intention.
The Core of the Problem
I have already tried to make it clear that we should not expect a theory of human evolution and behaviour that is narrow, precise and instantly testable. This is not Einstein?s Theory of Special or General Relativity. Those theories make extremely accurate predictions that scientific experiment proves to be correct. We may find that future work shows that there are details about Einstein?s theories that need to be refined but the theories are, for practical purposes, broadly accepted. With human behaviour and evolution what we can only hope to develop is a new paradigm or model of how this might work. If it is successful then we should find it much easier to understand many aspects of human behaviour that are otherwise rather baffling. Only by finding that the greater part of human behaviour is more consistent with one particular paradigm than another will it become accepted as being a more useful account of human behaviour and evolution. Even then, there is every expectation that a further paradigm will come along that provides an even more compelling account of these topics, and that will, in its turn, be the principal model that scientists and others work with.
I start from the conviction that the way we behave today should be something that we can understand as being a consequence of the way we are evolving today, and the way we are evolving today is a consequence of the way we behave today. The way we are today is because we have grown and changed and evolved from the way we were yesterday. Essentially evolution is a measure of the way that behaviour is changing. Mathematicians might think of evolution as being the first derivative of behaviour. Theories of either evolution or behaviour in which evolution and behaviour are not fundamentally interlinked must account for the relationship between them in some other way. It is important to remember that behaviour is not just about the way we carry out high level activities such as following a programme of research or the way that we conduct ourselves in public. It must include all the little tiny aspects of behaviour such as why we choose particular clothes to wear or food to eat, why we watch certain television programmes and decorate our homes the way we do. It must be a comprehensive model that is free from qualitative judgments such as the impression given by some anthropological studies that primitive tribes behave in a way that is somehow purer than the way gangs of thugs behave in urban ghettos. Above all it must be a model that appeals to our commonsense and that resonates with our own experience of life, because when we talk about human behaviour we are actually talking about the way that you and I behave, not about some laboratory creature in a strange and artificial environment. A surprising number of scientists think of commonsense as virtually incompatible with good science. Lewis Wolpert, a British biologist, in his book The Unnatural Nature of Science (1992), says ?I would almost contend that if something fits in with common sense it almost certainly isn?t science?. There are undoubtedly many branches of science that have ideas and theories that are well accepted which are very far from being commonsense, but they all deal with areas that are far outside everyday experience. We cannot expect to have commonsense about quantum field theory or about loop quantum gravity theories of a multidimensional universe. But to say that a commonsense theory of human evolution and behaviour isn?t science by definition is simply ridiculous.
We understand a great deal about Darwinian evolution ? the way that we and all other animals have evolved biologically so that those creatures best adapted to their environment survive and propagate. This is the process popularly known as natural selection. We also know that the rate of Darwinian evolution is very slow, happening on timescales of many millions of years. Human evolution in recent years, however, has been progressing more and more rapidly, on incomparably shorter timescales, and in a much more directed manner than Darwinian evolution. We will never know what triggered this but many scientists believe that the unique feature that distinguishes us from animals is our use of language. There is extensive fossil evidence that the brain size of humans grew rapidly in relatively recent times, and that this may well be associated with the development of the first human social groups. In more recent times there has been an explosion in the size and complexity of our society, with advances happening on progressively shorter timescales. Although there have been multicellular creatures on this planet for about 2 billion years, the apparently near-simultaneous (within a few hundred thousand years) increase in human brain size, the development of language and the development of complex societies where hundreds or thousands of individuals live in one community is too much of a coincidence not to be related in some significant way. However, we must remember that this association is circumstantial.
The view of most mainstream scientists working in evolutionary theory is that human biological evolution today still moves ahead on Darwinian timescales. They point out that there are genetic adaptations that have been made relatively recently by humans to allow them, for example, to digest dairy produce, and that these adaptations are now coded into the biological genes (biogenes) of some of us. However these and a few other recent genetic changes are very much in the margins of our biogenetic inheritance. We are now evolving biologically at a relatively slow rate. Indeed population genetics tells us that as our human population is now so large, genetic evolution must be very slow. Nevertheless the most popular model today of how we evolve, according to Laland & Brown in Sense and Nonsense (2002) is that provided by evolutionary psychologists. The paradigm that evolutionary psychologists use as a model of human evolution and behaviour is that our behaviour patterns were established in the Pleistocene, about 2 million years ago, on the grass plains of Africa. Various aspects of our behaviour that became fixed in those distant times have been incorporated into our genes so that our brains today consists of many hundreds or thousands of functional modules encoded into DNA that make us behave the way we do. Evolutionary psychologists see many of the behaviour patterns in the modern world as being a consequence of the mismatch between behavioural patterns established in this distant past and our present environment. This view of human behaviour has been criticised devastatingly in a recent book by David J Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (2005). Buller makes it clear that not only is there are no evidence for the hypothesis that our behavioural patterns were established all these years ago, but that much of the evidence used to support these ideas falls apart on closer inspection.
There is a further problem with the idea that our complex behaviour patterns are largely coded into our biogenes. This comes from the discovery that the genetic complement of humans is only very slightly different from that of our nearest relative, the chimpanzee. Scientists were initially surprised that the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, showed that the number of genes in the complete set contained in our chromosomes was rather small at just over 20,000, according to Michele Clamp from Harvard (2007). It has also been discovered that the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees amount to probably only a few hundred genes. It is true that we are learning rapidly that there is a great deal we do not know about the structure and functioning of the DNA from which our genes are constructed, and the way these genes are expressed to make proteins in every cell of our body. However there is no possibility that one could encode in any way the information needed to structure our brain to manage language as well as structure our brain to provide all the behavioural features that make us effective in modern society in only a few hundred genes. The complexity of our brain is extraordinary. There are as many nerve cells in each of our brains as there are stars in the Galaxy, and the processing power of our brains is also quite staggering. Understanding language is difficult and requires a considerable amount of processing power, and the idea that there are even hundreds of individual behavioural models genetically encoded to structure different parts of our brain does not hold water. There simply is not enough information carrying capacity in this number of genes. There must be something else that makes us human.
The conclusion has to be that our evolution is no longer something that depends solely or indeed largely on our biogenes. Yet evolution still goes on. Increasingly humans have developed methods of compensating for the inadequacies of their biogenes. We take drugs and undergo surgery to make us live longer, healthier lives. We take better care of ourselves, knowing what is good for our bodies and what is bad. Over the last century, white American males have increased their life expectancy by over 27 years. Some will say that this is not really evolution, that it is only medical science, but that is not good enough. There is no other species on earth that has ever managed to achieve this, even on timescales of millions of years. It is a remarkable achievement for our species to achieve it in a century and this achievement cannot simply be dismissed as a consequence of better nutrition and the development of medicine. It is another great success for our species and for our civilisation. Traditionally evolutionary scientists have preferred to ignore real human behaviour, with the exception of the behaviour of the most primitive tribes on earth. They have often preferred to learn from animal behaviour and extrapolate those results to our species. On the other hand, social scientists have carefully avoided getting involved in extensive systematic studies of human behaviour, often preferring to study social policy and politics. The net effect is that little attempt has been made to ask humans what they think motivates them and makes them behave the way they do. The scientists who have come closest to understanding what it is that motivates us are the social psychologists, and they do indeed seem to have made some significant progress. They have a great deal of evidence that we are inclined to overestimate the importance of the individual and underestimate the effects of the group membership and social environment on our behaviour.
What we see all around us is a Darwinian-like struggle for survival within our social world. Our biogenes are barely under threat at all from our physical environment. Our survival depends principally on just how well each of us is adapted to our social environment. The better adapted we are socially, the more successful we will be. If you ask people how they measure success, it is a combination of their relationships with others, their status and power and the degree of influence and control that they exercise. If you ask people what they think they want to leave behind them when they die and to pass to future generations, few place the highest importance on propagating their biogenes. Indeed if this was important we would expect to see large numbers of would-be sperm donors, whereas in fact they are in very short supply. What we really want is to pass on a bit of what we have achieved in our own lives and experience. We want to pass on our knowledge of the world. Basically we don?t want to die. We want some kind of immortality. Although this is promised by virtually all religions we know in our hearts it is not enough and may well not be deliverable. We can only achieve a degree of immortality by making a significant mark on the world. Attempts to achieve immortality were central to the civilisation of ancient Egypt as was the tomb of China?s first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi which included the extraordinary terracotta army. Today American presidents have Presidential Libraries to ensure their legacies. We are much more concerned to propagate what we are over and above what is represented by our biogenes. Certainly we want our children to have some of the influence that we ourselves have and we want our children to build upon that. But in reality we want to propagate our ideas not just to our children but to others of every generation, as widely as possible.
In the battle for survival humans need an evolutionary strategy that is faster and therefore more competitive, but above all it must be strongly directed. By developing language and society we were able to develop and evolve much more rapidly. We express different aspects of our personality in different social circumstances and our success depends on how well these different ways we express ourselves are adapted to the social environment within which we find ourselves at the time. This competitive struggle for advancement and success echoes substantially the way that Darwinian natural selection works on our biogenes. This suggests an analogy between our biogenes contained in the cells of our bodies on one hand and the entire contents of our brain, the sum total of all our experiences, attitudes, feelings, emotions, knowledge, etc. on the other hand. It is this ?everything else? that we are over and above what is encoded in our biological genes that I call our Supergenes. Like all analogies it should not be taken too far but there are many similarities in the way supergenes and biogenes work. Together with our biogenes, supergenes have given us an incredible edge in the battle for survival on the planet and are continuing to give us an extraordinary evolutionary advantage in the sense of the speed at which we can adapt and evolve. This is why we have become so special, and this is what is at the very core of being human. There are also disadvantages in this evolutionary strategy that we will look at later.
A much more detailed description of the properties of biogenes and supergenes will be developed in later chapters but I summarise here the similarities and differences that there are between biogenes on one hand and supergenes on the other hand.
The Properties of Supergenes
What Are Our Genes and Where Are They Found?
Biological genes (biogenes) are found in almost every cell in the human body. They consist of sequences of four molecules that provide a set of templates for the proteins and other chemicals in our body. They provide the information for virtually every structure contained in our bodies. Individual genes can be unambiguously identified by modern biochemical methods. Our genes are encoded in about 3 billion molecules and together they make up approximately 20,000 individual genes. Certain aspects of our behaviour may indeed be encoded in biogenes so that there is not a unique and unambiguous separation between physiology and behaviour.
Supergenes are the totality of the complex electrical connections in our brains. It seems most unlikely that they can be identified in any individual sense and it is not even clear that the concept of a single supergene is of any importance. They represent every aspect of what each of us is apart from what is encoded in our biogenes. Our brains are much more complicated than the DNA in our cells. The brain contains about 100 billion nerve cells each of which is connected to approximately 1000 others, making a total of 100 million million connections. Each of these connections effectively act as very low powered computers and it is the information that is stored in the networks of these interconnections that is the essence of our supergene pool. The information storage potential of our brain is immeasurably larger than the information storage potential of the DNA in our cells.
How Are These Genes Expressed?
Biogenes: small groups of biogenes are triggered to express proteins in specific cellular environments. Different groups of biogenes are triggered therefore in muscle cells and in neurons for example. In most cells the great majority of biogenes are inactive.
Supergenes: a subset of our supergene pool, the content of our brain, is expressed in particular social environments. At any one moment most of what is contained in our brains is held at an unconscious level and only a small subset is expressed at any one moment. Different social environments lead to the expression of different subsets of our supergene pool. We behave differently when we are with friends or in a meeting at work, when we are on vacation or when we are in a supermarket. In each environment different subsets of our supergene pool are expressed.
Where Did These Genes Come from?
Biogenes: the genes in our body are established irrevocably at the moment of conception when the egg in a woman?s body is fertilised by the sperm from a male. This genetic makeup is fixed thereafter although there are relatively minor epigenetic influences on the operation of different cells which can moderate the expression of certain proteins throughout the life of the individual.
Supergenes: our supergenes are progressively assembled from our earliest days. In no sense is our supergene pool static. Ideas, attitudes and beliefs may be modified throughout life in response to our experiences including internal reappraisal and re-evaluation ? in short by thinking about things in response to internal and external promptings. As a consequence, the way we behave also evolves rapidly as we adapt to our evolving social environment.
How and to Whom Are These Genes Propagated?
Biogenes: these may only be propagated by the creation of children and then only half of our bio-gene pool may be propagated at any one time. It requires a fertile partner of the opposite sex who also contributes half of his or her biogene pool. The child will have an essentially random selection of genes from each parent. The child will therefore inherit certain physiological traits from each parent in a relatively unpredictable manner. In a population of a species as large as that of humans biogenetic evolution is inevitably extremely slow although almost certainly still continuing. This relatively slow rate of evolution confers a high degree of stability on the biological evolutionary process.
Supergenes: we can propagate our supergenes to anyone that we have any contact with and our own supergene pool may be modified in response to supergenes propagated from others to us. Supergenes may be propagated to and from individuals of any age or fertility or sexual orientation. The conditions under which we can propagate our supergenes to others and under which we will be prepared to receive and accept supergenes from others are complicated. Broadly speaking, this depends on the relationship that we have as an individual with others, essentially our position in that social group. It is affected by a number of human characteristics including levels of influence, charisma, power, status, etc. Supergene transmission can be in very small packages but the opportunities for this are infinitely more frequent than they are for biogenes.
What Causes Specific Genetic Traits to Survive?
Biogenes: the new human most likely to survive long enough to be able to reproduce is the one best adapted to the physical environment in which it finds itself. Increasingly humans have been able to insulate themselves from this environment with houses, clothing and most recently medical advances that can suppress or eliminate the significance of their non-adaptive characteristics so that Darwinian natural selection pressures are now greatly diminished in humans.
Supergenes: the subset of the human supergene pool that is expressed in the social context (the behaviour of the individual in the broadest sense in that context) will have the best chance of influencing others if it is optimally adapted to the prevailing social environment. Good adaptation leads to an enhanced status within the group and overall a position of greater influence and power. Behaviour less appropriate to that environment is therefore poorly adapted to it. The degree of inappropriateness of behaviour and its frequency will reduce the influence of the individual and can ultimately lead to his or her exclusion from the group.
What are the Evolutionary Timescales?
Biogenes: significant biological evolution is only possible on timescales of millions of years. There is good evidence of much less significant biological evolution on shorter timescales, but the random nature of biogenetic inheritance and the size of the human population makes serious biological evolution extremely slow indeed.
Supergenes: each and every one of us has the capacity to evolve our supergene pool on very short timescales indeed. At the simplest level, we can change our opinion just by receiving information that corrects some misapprehension we held. A more substantial modification of behavioural patterns may take a much longer time and indeed some that have been established in childhood or that are a consequence of a major traumatic event may be almost impossible to erase completely. Nevertheless we have a remarkable capacity to adapt and make sure that we only express appropriate supergenes in a particular circumstance. For example there are a number of things we would avoid talking about in the presence of someone recently bereaved.
How Stable are these Evolutionary Strategies?
Biogenes: the much longer timescales involved in biogenetic changes ensure that the evolution is gradual and between robust, stable states. Selective pressures on these states will be relatively subtle with plenty of time for less well adapted individuals to be selected against.
Supergenes: as supergenes can be acquired very rapidly it is easy for individuals and groups to acquire behavioural traits that are self-consistent and functional in the context of a particular social environment. However, they may be poorly adapted to the real social world. Examples here are some of the more extreme religious cults, and certain criminal gangs. The social pressures that lead to the selection against those supergenes work on much longer timescales and therefore aberrant behaviour is something that can survive for a significant time before it is suppressed by selective pressures on these supergene pools. The overall effect is that supergene selection is relatively poor at maintaining social balance and stability.
Chapter 2
How Did We Get to Be like This?
The strategy that I took in carrying out this quest was to look in detail at two major areas of central importance to our understanding of the human condition for which at present we have at best rather unsatisfactory accounts. The first major problem area arises from the undeniable fact that human evolution is happening at an ever accelerating rate, a rate that is inconsistent with Darwinian concepts of biological evolution, implying that some other mechanism is at work. The second area of concern is that we really have no serious models of human behaviour and motivation that can account convincingly for the way we behave in everyday life, how our societies work and the attitudes we have to a whole range of issues. This chapter and the next look at what we know or think we know about each of these in turn. The gap between theory and reality is worryingly large in many areas.
Modern ideas of biological evolution work remarkably well for all living creatures including man but in the case of Homo sapiens our evolution has accelerated to an extraordinary degree. This dramatic acceleration appears to be the consequence of Darwinian natural selection pressures acting within the social environment on our supergenes. This is in contrast with the way that, for most other animals, Darwinian natural selection pressures only act, or least act substantially, on individuals in response to their physical environment. However, we need to demonstrate that there really is a problem with attributing recent human evolution to conventional Darwinian biological evolution. This will give us a good understanding of how different modern human evolution is from animal evolution.
Few would disagree that human evolution has been driven and affected by a great variety of external influences. If we are to achieve any understanding of what it is that makes us so special on the planet Earth we need to appreciate how we achieved such remarkable things in such a short time. We are all animals with a finite lifespan so it is easy to think of human history over the past few thousand years as extending into the infinite past. Our religious books describe the beginning of time as being only a few thousand years ago because that was how the concept of the most distant past could be understood at the time those books were written. Now we know with surprising accuracy that our home planet formed 4.6 billion years ago. In reality humans have walked on this planet for a negligible fraction of that 4.6 billion years. Within that negligible fraction an even tinier part has been occupied by the explosive growth in mankind and its extraordinarily complex society. If we scale the 4.6 billion year history of the earth to one year, with the present at midnight on December 31, then the first multicellular creatures appeared on earth in July, the dinosaurs were wiped out on December 26, and the first hominids appeared about 12 hours before midnight. The great expansion in human population on this planet then started about 150 seconds before midnight. The first printed work appeared three seconds before midnight and the average life expectancy in the West is about half a second on this scale. This scale model helps us to appreciate the vastness of the time period over which creatures have been growing and evolving and changing on the planet and how incredibly recently human society has developed. There are many parts of the story of how our planet Earth came into existence and has since been evolving of which we are unsure. There is, however, a great deal of scientific evidence from many different directions that makes it clear just how old the universe is and just how old our planet is. Those who wish to believe otherwise by taking a creationist view of human development and evolution must be prepared to deny of the vast body of research that is accepted by the great majority of scientists from a wide range of intellectual, social and religious backgrounds. The general framework of how we got to where we are is, in the main, extremely well established. The evidence in most cases is very clear to those with eyes to see.
In order for us to appreciate what is so unusual about present-day human evolution we must have a clear understanding of our own origins and how our species evolved biologically along with the other creatures that share our planet. We need to understand what pressures our species was under that made it evolve into the creatures we are now. Understanding how this worked to our benefit will set the framework to help us understand how our more complex and much more rapid evolution as social creatures started to be important and now dominates completely.
The Formation of Life
Astronomers are confident that the earth formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The oldest rocks on earth have been dated by geologists at about 4 billion years. Remarkably soon after this the first evidence of photosynthesis appeared. However, it was to be 2 billion years later that photosynthetic activity by cyanobacteria enriched our atmosphere with oxygen and allowed the appearance of the first multicellular creatures. We are not sure exactly when the first animals appeared but there are many animal fossils as old as 600 million years. This was followed by an extraordinary explosion in the diversity of the animal kingdom but from about 250 million years ago there was a clear geological evidence of the largest mass extinction in history that wiped out about 90% of all marine animal species. We have little idea of what might have caused this extinction but it was probably either a volcanic explosion or possibly the result of the earth being struck by a giant meteorite. Soon after this disaster the first creatures began to colonise the land.
Readers who wish to learn more of these distant times and how evolution changed the myriad species on Earth will find much to interest them in Simon Conway Morris?s book Life ?s Solution (2003). The first dinosaurs also appeared following this mass extinction and they increased enormously until another substantial extinction event occurred approximately 65 million years ago. The evidence suggests that this was caused by the collision with the earth of an asteroid that was perhaps 10 km in diameter. Many geologists believe that the location of this was where we now see a large crater at Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. With the demise of the dinosaurs, the earth was ready for the age of mammals. About 5 million years ago the last common ancestor of both hominids and apes lived, thereafter evolving independently. The fossil sequence that leads to modern day humans (Homo sapiens) can be traced most conveniently by looking at the brain size of fossils. Over the last 5 or 6 million years it has increased from 350 millilitres to 1350 millilitres, or fourfold.
Homo sapiens first walked upon the earth about 500,000 years ago and modern Homo sapiens first appeared around 120,000 years ago. About 40,000 years ago the tools used by Homo sapiens became substantially more sophisticated and a variety of raw materials such as animal bones used to make tools for engraving increased dramatically. We see today some remarkably sophisticated artwork including cave paintings and simple sculptures. The timescale on which physiological characteristics of animals change are very long so that our ancestors of 40,000 years ago would only have looked slightly different from ourselves.
Darwinian Evolution
For several thousands of years people have wondered how it was that we came to be the way we are now ? why we look and behave the way we do. There are many aspects of humans that are recognisably similar to animals, and many of the earliest studies of evolution looked at animals and plants to try to make some sense of the complexity of the natural world. The most important intellectual breakthrough in this area happened in the middle of the 19th-century when Charles Darwin published his book entitled The Origin of Species (1859). We will look in much more detail at various theories of human evolution in the next chapter and only summarise here the essence of Darwin?s ideas that came to be known as the Theory of Natural Selection. Darwin realised that life on Earth for most creatures is a difficult, complex business where survival is far from a foregone conclusion. Each creature has a relationship with almost every other in its environment, whether it is as predator or prey, host or parasite. Darwin could see that in this unforgiving environment survival is quite marginal depending on the availability of food, shelter and many other aspects of life such as the climate and the variability of the weather. He concluded from studies of a great variety of plants and animals and other creatures that the survival of a species ? and indeed of the individual members of any species ? depended critically on the extent to which it was suited to its environment. Those creatures less well-suited were less likely to survive long enough to reproduce and raise their young. Members of a species that were better suited were more likely to produce viable offspring and raise them to maturity. The fittest members of a species ? and indeed the fittest species ? survive preferentially and this, Darwin deduced, was the mechanism that drove the biological evolution of all living things.
As an idea it was remarkable and had an electrifying effect on evolutionary thinking then as it does indeed today. In Darwin?s time, however, there was no understanding of what it was within an organism that was actually doing the evolving. There clearly has to be some structure somewhere within each member of every species that allows its principal characteristics to be transmitted from one generation to another with excellent fidelity. We see that the members of one species, whether a plant or insect or a bird, are all remarkably similar, clearly using identical biochemistry within their bodies, relying on identical physiologies and behaving in remarkably similar ways. At about the same time that Darwin was working on his theory of natural selection, Gregor Mendel in Brunn, Austria, was also working on the principles of heredity in plants in which he showed that the male and female contribute equally to the traits in the offspring, something that most people then as now instinctively understood because they could see the inherited similarities between children and their parents. He also demonstrated that acquired traits (traits that were not present in the offspring but were learnt or imposed on the organism) were not subsequently inheritable. Mendel is often portrayed as being an isolated monk working in an amateurish way on his own. The truth is very different. He was an extremely competent research scientist supported by a group of able assistants. His work was properly published and, although circulated widely, was largely ignored by the scientific community which did not know what to make of it. It took the work of Darwin to make sense of it.
By the end of the 19th-century it was realised that the chromosomes visible in every eukaryotic cell were critical to reproduction. Interest in these topics was so widespread that scientists held the First International Congress of Genetics in London in 1899. The first time that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was isolated was from salmon sperm in 1889 by Johann Meischer but the chemical structure of DNA was not understood until much later. What was understood, however, was that the chromosomes were central to inheritance. In the cells in our body, chromosomes occur in homologous pairs with each pair consisting of one copy of the maternal chromosome and a corresponding copy of the paternal chromosome. In 1911, E. B. Wilson showed that the gene for colour blindness was located on the X-chromosome, the first gene to be identified on a chromosome. The big breakthrough in understanding the chemical nature of DNA and its extremely complex geometric structure came from work in the early 1950s by Rosalind Franklin together with Maurice Wilkins at Kings College in London. They used x-ray crystallography to show that DNA exists as two strands wound together in a spiral or helical shape. Watson and Crick in Cambridge (1953) used the x-ray diffraction results of Wilkins and Franklin to allow them to deduce the detailed structure of DNA as being what we now describe as a double helix . For this work Watson and Crick shared a Nobel Prize in 1962.
The Structure of the Human Genome
The human genome is the name given to the complete set of DNA molecules contained in most cells of the human body. Certain kinds of cells in the human body, such as red blood cells, do not have a proper nucleus and therefore do not have any DNA. In virtually every other cell there is a complete copy of the DNA that is specifically characteristic of each and every one of us in each and every one of these cells. The function of DNA is quite complex. At this stage we can think of it as being made up of a series of genes each of which is essentially a recipe for one of the proteins in our body. In practice genes seldom act entirely on their own but are dependent on other genes and also, almost certainly, on their position within the three-dimensional structure of the chromosome in which they are found. The human genome consists of approximately 3.2 billion base-pairs of nucleotides arranged in 46 chromosomes. Within the genome only about 10% of the DNA comprises genes yet even within that 10% there are sections of the nucleotides that do not contain genetic information (non-coding nucleotide sections). Within the human DNA the percentage of actual coding DNA may be as low as 3% with the best guess currently putting it at about 5%. The remaining 95 % of DNA is often described as ?junk DNA? but there is increasing evidence that this junk DNA is important in its role in giving the precise three-dimensional structure to a particular DNA molecule thereby moderating the way that individual proteins are expressed by that molecule in whatever cell it happens to exist.
The number of genes in the human genome is not known precisely but estimates currently put it at around 20,000. At first that may seem to be a lot but when we bear in mind that there are vast numbers of different cells and different physiological and biochemical functions in our body as well as a vast number of structures it is surprising that there are as few genes as this. The number of separate parts in a motorcar is closer to 30,000 and, of course, the complexity of the human body is incomparably greater than even the most exotic motorcar. Whatever is encoded within the human genome must be a lot more complex than a simple one-to-one relationship between a gene and a protein or a physiological structure in the body. Proteins in the body are not made directly by DNA but by an intermediate molecule called ribonucleic acid (RNA), a single-stranded nucleic acid made up of nucleotides. The function of RNA is to act as a translator and carrier between the DNA molecules and the cell function. In reality the complexity that surrounds the entire mechanism that starts with DNA and, through a great variety of different RNA type molecules, leads eventually to the manufacture of a specific protein, is quite astonishing.
When thinking about the complexity of the human genome there is another issue which must not be forgotten. Every mechanism, every chemical or biological process within the body, consists of an action plus a corresponding mechanism to control and limit and manage the degree of that action. It is not wise for a cell simply to allow the expression of a protein unless it has a very good mechanism for controlling just how much protein is actually made. Having an electric heater in a room will simply cause it to get hotter and hotter. A thermostat is needed to control the maximum temperature and ensure that electrical power is not wasted. This combination of cause and counter-cause is usually described as a servo system and almost every system in life is designed in this way. What it does mean is that every time our DNA provides the recipe for a protein it must also provide the recipe for the control mechanism. What is clear, however, is that the expression of a protein (the phrase we use to indicate that a protein coded in the DNA is actually synthesised within that cell) is something that must be regulated by other aspects of the physiology of each cell. A cell in the brain or the nervous system is clearly very different from a muscle cell in the wall of the heart or a cell in the kidney. Each cell contains all the necessary information for creating every aspect of the human body. However certain cells develop within specific organs for specific functions. As they do, those cells lose the capacity to express proteins that are irrelevant or inappropriate for that particular cell.
Mammalian Reproduction
In order to understand how species evolve we need to understand what happens to our genes and how they are propagated as a consequence of the process known as reproduction. Chromosomes come in pairs. Each chromosome consists of two strands of DNA joined together in the centre to form an X-shaped structure. Because there are two strands of DNA it means that animals have two copies of every gene, one from their father and one from their mother. When a male creates a sperm and when a female contributes an egg the two strands of DNA must be combined into a single strand. The sperm and the egg from the father and mother respectively each contribute one copy of each chromosome and the combination means that the child has two copies of each gene. The sperm cell that leads to the embryo contains a single strand of DNA formed by taking a copy of one gene or the other randomly in the father. In the same way, the egg cell contains a single copy of one gene or other randomly selected from those of the mother. Because of the random nature of the selection of genes every child gets a different mixture of genes made out of the DNA from the father and the DNA from the mother. This is why children of the same parents can turn out to be so different, in so many ways. A gene is nothing
more than a formula for a single protein needed to allow that protein to be manufactured within a cell. In any animal (or indeed in any plant) there are two templates for every enzyme which may or may not be identical. The way in which one template dominates the other in driving what actually happens in the cell will determine the characteristics, to some extent, of the animal. It will also be clear that the genetic composition of the new individual is set at the point of conception and cannot effectively be changed thereafter. What will also be clear is that there is no way that a single gene or even a group of genes can be selected by this process because it is essentially a random selection of genes from one parent combined with an equally random selection of genes from the other that gives the new child its genetic complement. It should further be clear that, because of the extremely complex manner in which proteins are expressed in a cell, the way in which very slight genetic changes affect either the genome or how that a particular protein is expressed could have a significant effect on the overall properties of the individual. We cannot select for one gene or another and we cannot pass on to future generations one specific gene or another. The expression of a particular protein will require a particular gene, but the way in which that protein is expressed, and the quantity of protein that is expressed, compared with other proteins expressed in the same cell, is affected by many other genes and most likely by the considerable amount of so-called ?junk? DNA in the cell. Many of the genes that are individually blamed for particular genetic diseases are present in the DNA of all of us. The problem for the individual who suffers from a genetic disease is that the expression of that particular protein may be anomalously strong or weak because of the complex relationship between the gene and others in the cell. This should make it clear that the language of ?scientists have discovered the gene for.....?. shows a considerable ignorance of how genes work and how inheritance of genetically based characteristics actually happens.
Genetic Diversity and Evolution
What we are concerned with in particular in this book is what it is that causes human evolution in the broadest sense to happen, how it happens, when it happens and how fast it happens. The Darwinian view expressed in DNA terms is that a new individual is formed by combining the DNA of the parents, and that individual has to fight for survival in the environment. Within a cohort of individuals of one species, certain combinations of DNA are likely to enable particular individuals to thrive better than others, and, as a result, makes them more likely to be able to survive and mature to the point where they can reproduce and pass on their DNA to a subsequent generation. By ensuring that survival is biased towards those individuals who are best fitted to the environment, we can see that the DNA of the offspring is being progressively selected to improve its overall fitness. This is the essential source of the evolution that we see in all animals including humans. Of course it is never a simple as that. Every time the DNA is copied by cell division or when an egg or sperm cell is produced, it is clearly important that every one of the 3.8 billion base pairs are accurately copied. It turns out that there are many mechanisms to check that the DNA replication is indeed as accurate as it possibly can be, but random mutations can have an effect on the way particular proteins are expressed in a cell. These random mutations are probably quite important in causing, or indeed perhaps accelerating, the rate of evolution. There are many mechanisms for making sure that any random mutation does not get out of hand. Very often a random mutation simply stops that cell from functioning properly and it will die. This is what happens in the vast majority of random mutations. In other cases it may be that a random mutation might cause a cell to start to multiply in a relatively uncontrolled fashion. This is what happens with cancer. The DNA in a cell is damaged, possibly by radiation or some other carcinogenic agent such as the chemicals present in tobacco. This causes the mechanisms that limit cell growth and stop cell duplication proceeding in an uncontrolled fashion to be suppressed. Over time, however, it is possible for the genome of any organism to change slowly in a way that, on average, tends to maximise its fitness for its environment. But what should be clear is that this process of evolution will only proceed on very long timescales of hundreds or thousands of generations. Indeed, if the environment changes then this process will become even slower, since this can change a selective pressure from being helpful into harmful.
Within a particular species there is a natural diversity amongst individuals, and an occurrence of a variety of relatively normal forms account for the natural morphological diversity of that species. Humans are not the same as one other. When viewed from the point of view of a bird or an elephant, we humans may seem very much the same but from our point of view we know that there are subtle yet significant differences between individuals. Genetic differences that are common among organisms of the same species are called genetic polymorphisms, and the genetic differences that accumulate between species are the origin of what we call genetic divergence. It is genetic divergence that is responsible for herring being different from mackerel, and for the rose being different from the sunflower. The most common differences between individuals of a single species are known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). These differences in the structure of a particular gene are only one single base long and therefore they are the simplest difference that there can be between two genes. It is these SNPs which constitute the great majority of variations in the human genome. It is the analysis of the location of these SNPs within a sample of DNA that is the basis of DNA fingerprinting. This is because these SNPs are indeed unique to an individual and at least 50% of them are passed on to any offspring. Matching the position of these SNPs between different samples of DNA can, for example, check with great accuracy the DNA from two different samples. It can also be used to determine for example paternity or indeed whether an individual may be related to another individual if only relatively remotely. These SNPs also provide an extremely useful mechanism for looking at the statistics of populations and how populations evolve over time. The incidence of a particular SNP in a population does not change over time unless there is some other influence on it. Such an influence could arise if that SNP makes an individual less or more fit to survive in its environment. Darwinian evolutionary pressures suppress those SNPs that reduce fitness.
One important aspect of the statistical probability of a particular trait evolving is the number of individuals in the genetically isolated group within which the trait exists. If there is a very large population of individuals that mates reproductively, then the probability of any particular trait becoming dominant enough to affect the evolution and characteristics of the whole group is extremely small. By contrast if the group is extremely small (for example a group as geographically isolated as creatures on the Galapagos Islands) then individual traits have a much higher chance of becoming favoured because only a handful of individuals with that trait will be enough to bias the future evolution of the group. We see, therefore, that evolution is something that happens much more rapidly and aggressively when the size of the group is tiny. Conversely, we see that the prospects of the human species evolving significantly now as a biological creature must be very small because we are such a large, heterogeneous group. This is not completely the end of the story, because it may be that certain traits are helpful for any individual, and that this particular trait might occur quite frequently and be selected for positively. An example here might be increased brain size, on the assumption that a bigger brain would make us more intelligent, though a larger head does make the human birth process more difficult ? something that might be selected against quite strongly.
We can also turn the statistical methods round and look at the diversity in a population to work out the number of individuals from which we are descended. Because of the way that DNA is intermixed every time reproduction occurs, it is extremely difficult to get any sensible information from this. However, one important source of information arises from the fact that certain kinds of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) are only transmitted through the maternal line, and therefore without any blending or mixing of the mtDNA sequence from generation to generation. By looking at the intrinsic variability in mtDNA across a population we can deduce how many different copies of mtDNA that population is descended from. The evidence from both archaeological and genetic sources suggest that the population we have now of modern humans started with a period of very rapid growth in the population around the beginning of the Pleistocene era, about 1.8 million years ago. However the evidence originally found in 1972 by Haigh and Maynard Smith suggested that the total human population of the planet had collapsed to as few as 1000 individuals by around 40,000 years ago. Similar studies looking only at the distribution of chimpanzee and African human mtDNA suggests that both species suffered from a catastrophic collapse in population at around the same time so that human population in Africa might only have been about 72 individuals and around 260 chimpanzees. Although there are other interpretations suggested for these data, the general consensus is that there was a very great drop in the human population on Earth at around that time. We have geological evidence of much earlier mass extinctions and so it is easy to believe that a substantial environmental change such as an ice age, or an event like the Toba supervolcano might have been a trigger for this mass extinction of our ancestors. The Toba supervolcano erupted in Indonesia approximately 74,000 years ago with an energy roughly 10,000 times that of the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980. It may have been such an event which triggered the mass extinction. It is also clear that around the time that the population collapsed so dramatically, the first modern humans appeared and started to grow rapidly in number and in achievement. It may well have been that the population being so low at that time could allow it to evolve very rapidly in a way that capitalised on the unique characteristics of a very small number of individuals. If groups were as small as just a few individuals, then evolution would have been extremely rapid, and that may have provided the circumstances needed for humans to set off in a genetic sense on a completely different track towards where we are now. Humans are, in fact, very different from most animal species because of our amazing adaptability. The event that caused the near-extinction of humans may have favoured those that were much more adaptable to rapidly changing conditions since they were the ones more likely to survive. There are very few creatures that can be transferred to a substantially different environment and expect to survive. We have many stories about individuals being stranded on a desert island and managing to make do against incredible odds. Very few animals would be able to survive as well, and in such a wide range of conditions as would humans. All the evidence we have is that Homo sapiens was uniquely adaptable and therefore able to accommodate changes in the availability of food locally, which in turn was often driven by climatic variability. For example, it might be thought that an animal without body hair would be at a disadvantage because shelter and clothing is always essential. In fact the ability to choose where to live and how much to wear meant that it is possible to optimise survival and success in a wide range of environments. Even in a cold climate, an animal with a covering of fur is at a big disadvantage when running and chasing animals for food because it quickly becomes very hot. Clothes can be put on or taken off depending on what is being done and that can be extremely advantageous in terms of survival. More importantly, having a large brain that can use its experience intelligently to help it cope with a rapidly changing environment is a major advantage. Even minor changes from year to year because of the variability of the weather in many parts of the world has to be responded to efficiently if the individual is to survive. It is only in the most recent years that life for most is no longer brutal or short.
The Beginnings of Human Civilisation
We can identify three principal phases in the evolution of humanity, starting with the hunter-gatherer and then progressing into agricultural and technological phases. The way in which human lifestyles have adapted to the environment has inevitably been one of continuous change. Over the period that we are concerned with, beginning with the time of the major population expansion that followed the catastrophic collapse in population of about 40,000 years ago, most of the evolution has been cultural rather than genetic. There have been some changes in the physical appearance of humans over that period but they have been, however, very slight indeed.
During the last ice age (Upper Paleolithic, from 35,000 to 8000 years BC) roaming bands of hunting humans relied on a diet principally of meat, much as did the Inuit until relatively recently. They built huts with interlocking bones from mammoths and other large animals, and covered them with animal skins. Many of these people were forced further south during the glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago, a period of intense cold that lasted about 2000 years. At the end of that period the climate warmed markedly and humans started a significant period of technological and cultural evolution. As the population increased so the pressure on the supply of food grew. There is a lot of evidence that many of the largest land animals were extinguished by human activity. There is particularly good evidence for this from studies of the extinction of a miniature woolly mammoth that was unique to Catalina Island off the coast of California. This island was uninhabited and had an extensive population of mammoths that had adapted to the rather harsh conditions on the island by developing a much smaller variant. The extinction of these mammoths appears to be precisely synchronised with the earliest human remains found on the island.
Before we start looking at this next phase of human evolution it is important to be clear about what we are looking for in the evidence that is all around us. The earliest traces of human activity suggest that it took place in groups of modest numbers, typically a few tens of individuals. Humans lived in a social context and must have related to other humans in their group according to some elementary system of social norms. It was at this point that the ability of an individual human to survive started to depend significantly on its relationship with other members of the group. For the first time Darwinian selection of the biologically fitter individual started to be compromised by the growing importance of the social fitness of the individual as a key component in determining survival. Our evolution as a species from now on starts to depend increasingly on the social dimension. Our biogenes, which have provided a stable framework for a labourious and gradual evolution, are being enhanced by everything that makes us a social creature. We are now beginning to develop our supergenes.
The evidence that society was very important in the earliest human groups is compelling. We may think, for example, that a piece of art is the creation of an individual artist but that the art could only have been created with the knowledge and acquiescence of the other members of the social group. Indeed every kind of human activity must have been in a social context as it is today. When considering the achievements of an ancient and possibly primitive society we must be careful to distinguish in what respects those societies were different from the ones in which we live now. What we have is a great deal of evidence that our societies have evolved and achieved more and more but we must be clear that that does not imply that the members of ancient primitive societies were in any way less intelligent than we are. Education allows intelligence to be expressed in many more ways but it is a deep and fundamental mistake to think of the ancients as being in any way stupid. They may have been primitive, lived in the most abject poverty, had no education or experience outside their battle for survival and so had little opportunity to develop their innate skills, but they were not stupid. It is exactly the same in our modern societies. When we look out today on the sprawling slums in parts of Mexico City or Calcutta we must never forget that somewhere down amongst the pollution and the grinding poverty there are children with the intelligence of Einstein. In the same way we must be careful when examining the creations of ancient societies to remember that what one can create is totally constrained by the tools available. Had Michelangelo lived 5000 years earlier he would never have been able to create his statue of David. The technology to quarry and transport stone and to carve it had not been developed. His ability to proportion his work derived from the experiences of his predecessors, experience passed through the generations down to him, and provided an essential grounding for his own artistic efforts. We must never think of apparently primitive societies in the distant past or indeed in our present world as being inferior to our own. Not having television means having more time to appreciate and develop an understanding of the natural world that we can only dream of.
One can learn a great deal about the state and condition of a society by looking at its art. Cave or rock art consists of engraved and painted works on rocks on the floors and walls of caves. Many are found deep inside complex cave systems and are still being discovered today. They were generally created during the Upper Paleolithic between 40,000 and 10,000 BC. Outstanding cave painting was done by people in southern Europe, particularly in southern France in the Dordogne, the Pyrenees and in parts of Spain. The works of art found in these caves have a remarkable unity across many well-separated sites and in some sense constitute the first art system in human history. This artistic period is known as the Magdalenian, named after the Magdalene site near Lascaux in the Dordogne. It is sad that we know so little about the society that produced such remarkable art, even though it lasted for more than two thirds of the total time over which humans have created art. One of the great difficulties is that the paintings are extremely fragile and the ones which are most impressive today are those in caves which became sealed and the oxygen substantially depleted. Once the caves are opened oxygen affects the pigments used for the paintings causing them to deteriorate very rapidly. The paintings that were found in the Pyrenees during the First World War at Bedeilhac disappeared completely within six months of their discovery. Even the best photographs of these paintings cannot convey the astonishing impact of seeing exquisite renderings of vast herds of animals long since extinct . Some of the animals painted are known to have been extinct at the time of their painting, also showing that communication in those days was remarkably sophisticated. Even with the extremely limited range of colours that these ancient painters had available it is clear that the artists showed the greatest ingenuity. In the more recent caves such as those at Lascaux there are many fragments of the bowls used to mix the colours as well as a wide range of mineral samples that shows the effort put into finding the materials, transporting them considerable distances and processing the materials necessary for these paintings. The art found in these caves was not limited to painting. There are some exquisite carvings such as the beautiful piece known as the ?Licking Bison? which is approximately 12,000 years old and is now exhibited in the Musee National de Prehistoire at Les Eyzies.
The caves that we have studied in detail were special places, not habitations. Although a few examples of cave art had been found in the open air most are well hidden inside caves. This may have been purely because the artists needed to be sure that the artwork was properly protected from the climate. Some of the paintings could only have been created on fairly substantial scaffolding structures (we can see the holes cut into the walls to support the scaffolding today) in much the same way that Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. At one site in the Dordogne pictures of mammoths are painted over seven metres above the floor of the cave and at Lascaux there is one astonishing cave known as the Picture Gallery which is over 30 metres long and 12 metres wide. These cave paintings were probably of incredible importance to the people of that time. Even today, we who are perhaps somewhat jaded by the vast art galleries of the world, cannot but be stunned by the magnificence of the eight interlocking galleries of the great cave at Les Eyzies which unfold, one after another, to convey not just the outline but the extraordinary sense of movement amongst the animals depicted. There are, perhaps curiously, few instances of portraits or depiction of human form and when they are they are often little more than matchstick figures. The impact on a visitor who had never seen a building or never seen a picture before, at the time they were painted, must have been extraordinary. A gallery illuminated by flaming torches and painted brilliantly in pigments must have been one of the great experiences in the life of a Stone Age man or woman. We can only guess at what might have been the purpose of this art. It is utterly different from European art, for example, smothered as that has been for centuries by religious iconography. The cave paintings show no sacrifices, nothing that might be called a ceremony. The most plausible explanation is that they did this because they liked doing it and they enjoyed the outcome. The feeling that these caves induce in modern visitors is one of reverence and of wonder. Given the technical limitations of the time we can understand that the achievement they represent can stand alongside the greatest modern Western art in terms of the appreciation of beauty and the delicacy of feeling which those ancient artists showed. This artwork could only have been created in an environment where there were strong and effective social groups that made this work possible. The artwork represents a substantial investment of energy by the group and could only have happened with their full knowledge and approval. The skill of the work and the time over which it must have been created means that the artists were provided with food and clothing and did not have to look after themselves in those respects. It tells us a lot about the advanced nature of the social structures of the time and what they were able to achieve. There is no doubt that by this time already our supergenes were on the march.
As the population grew, dependence on hunting became less and less adequate as a way of feeding a group. The earliest settlements were in the Middle East, perhaps 11,000 years ago, and the first permanent settlements also appeared in this area around 10,000 years ago. Village life became much more common and much more practical with the first recorded division of labour. It also accompanied the development of hierarchical power structures and some form of leadership. It was a time of revolution in agriculture. It was also a time when the importance of the social group grew rapidly. A strong community provided an environment that allowed a very different approach to survival. For the first time it became practical for humans to feel secure enough to take the long view that it was worthwhile planting a crop and tending it for many months until it could be gathered. It was around this time, less than 10,000 years ago, that we started eating vegetable matter (and in particular carbohydrates) in large quantities. Before then our diet had been dominated by meat. Gradually the settlements grew during the Neolithic period, and led to the emergence of the first cities. It was in these dense settlements such as Catalhoyuk in what is now Turkey that we have the first evidence of large groupings, even by modern standards, of people living in one place. That city was probably home to over 10,000 people in what now appears to be shambolic disorganisation, even to the extent that the dead were buried under the floors of the houses. Soon after that came the first cities where there were substantial numbers of individuals who did not simply devote their time to agriculture, the first evidence for the accumulation of wealth (and its corollary, taxation) and the first evidence of written materials. We see already that something is driving individuals and groups towards the acquisition of power and status. These are not inventions of the modern world but are probably a deep and fundamental driving force in our psyche, a force critical to our evolution.
Civilisation in the Technological Age
The development of civilisation around the world is a fascinating subject but a detailed description of this history would not be appropriate here. What is of more direct influence on our lives today is the way in which science and technology developed over the last 2000 years so dramatically. The important significance of science-based inventions (as distinct from technological developments) is that they require progress to be based on an understanding of the underlying principles rather than pure trial and error. There is a great inclination in modern western society to see science and technology as being in some way less significant as an achievement of our culture than art and literature. In fact, it is only in the last hundred years that this separation has occurred because in reality it is impossible to separate technological development and application from its considerable influence on our social fabric. We also should not think of technology as starting with the first steam engines. Our technological society truly started when some individuals produced specialised items for others to use that allowed them to improve the quality of their lifestyle in some way. The earliest city-states would have been transformed by the use of wheeled carts to help the transport of food and other goods into the city as well as the transport of the waste material in the opposite direction. Tools are critical to even the most basic agriculture, and the development of better tools allows more efficient cultivation. This was almost certainly the limiting factor in the growth of the human population in the earliest times. The technology needed to build basic shelters had allowed humans to control their environment and improve the quality of life and conditions under which children might be raised. There are, in fact, few parts of the world where it is practical for humans to live outside all year round. Shelters are essential from the sun and the heat just as much as they are from the cold and the rain and the wind.
Large-scale developments followed, with road systems and water management and waste disposal systems. The more complex technologies could only be created effectively with the support of basic sciences and mathematics. In Babylon (in modern southeastern Iraq), a large city with a quarter of a million inhabitants by 2200 B C, we know that they established a legal system and had a detailed knowledge of medicine, mathematics and astronomy. They also left behind a small number of written texts. We can also tell from more recent civilisations such as ancient Greece and Rome just how advanced their technologies were because it would have been impossible to create the buildings or the ceramics, for example, without substantial supporting technologies and a substantial number of skilled artisans to carry out the work.
In more recent times significant technological changes have happened increasingly quickly. Some time before 1000 AD in Europe important agricultural developments include the development of the horse-drawn plough and an appreciation of the importance of rotation of crops. Windmills and water wheels became important and by the time of the Norman conquest of England (1066 AD) there were over 6000 water wheels in use in England for purposes such as the sawing of wood and the grinding of corn. The mechanical clock and the watch with a balance wheel and spring drive were also developed during a period known quite unfairly as the Dark Ages. In the beginning of the 15th century one of the most significant developments was the invention of printing using movable type. The first known printed book was the Bible printed by Johan Gutenberg in Germany in 1455 AD. This is really where the information technology revolution started. In parallel Chinese and Korean printing advanced using other methods but the development of printing was critical in allowing fast, efficient and accurate communication of ideas much more widely. It was the beginning of the information explosion which started with the widespread availability of paper and printing, radio, television and most recently the Internet.
Navigation became an established science which allowed the great voyages of discovery of the 15th and 16th centuries AD. Copernicus published his book De Revolutionibus Orbum Coelestium in 1543 showing that the Earth was a planet in orbit around the Sun. His ideas developed those of earlier Arab astronomers and mathematicians mentioned by him in that book. In a few hundred years, we have moved from there through the first documented telescope (built by a Dutch optician, Hans Lippershey in 1608) through the work of Galileo and Newton and on to Edwin Hubble who proved that our Milky Way is the view of our own galaxy seen edge on and that other galaxies we can see in the sky are incomparably more distant. We now have, named after Edwin Hubble, the Hubble Space Telescope, a remarkable instrument that has taken the deepest pictures of the most distant parts of the universe. Within four hundred years we have gone from the first telescope to being able to record pictures of galaxies so distant that the light detected by the Hubble Space Telescope was two thirds of its way towards us before the planet Earth was formed. We can design such an instrument and build it with extraordinary precision. If the mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope was scaled up to the size of the United States, the irregularities on its surface would be less than one centimetre in height. We can launch this telescope into space and we can repair it when it goes wrong so that it continues to let us look at the very edge of the universe. We can also look at distant gas clouds, gas clouds that are only now collapsing, soon to form a planetary system possibly much like ours on which one day other intelligent creative creatures will eventually evolve. It may take another four or five billion years but it no doubt will happen sometime. It has probably happened already very many times across our galaxy, and indeed in other galaxies across the universe.
We look back with amazement at these ancient civilisations and wonder what it must have been like such a long time ago. But in relative terms it is not that long ago at all. From the earliest days, however, for which we have evidence, it is clear that the basic behaviour of individuals and groups in society has been much as it is today with the emphasis so often on striving for advancement and success. I do not want to be too specific about what counts as success. It includes Maslow?s concept of self-actualisation, essentially the innate need of humans to strive to make the best of their abilities. But for some it will be a very modest level of achievement. For most, however, it is judged principally in terms of the power and influence of individuals and groups. The legendary Spanish conquistador Hernando Nunez de Valvida (La Serpiente Negra) wrote, in his diary entry on April 20, 1521 (the day he allegedly slaughtered 200 Aztecs), ?La gloria es un millon ojos asustados?, roughly translated as ?glory is a million frightened eyes? (Quoted by Marisha Pessl in Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Penguin Books, 2007). Our biological origins will always be important to us but the timescales on which Darwinian evolution can improve our capacity to survive are now hopelessly long. The evolution of our society is progressing much too rapidly for there to be any significant biological input to that. We simply cannot pretend any longer that human evolution is something that is purely biological. That may be basically all there is in the animal kingdom. We humans need to have a much better explanation.
I am convinced that the answers lie not within conventional biological evolutionary studies, but within a better understanding of what it is that underlies human behaviour. Our rapid evolution is a consequence of our species making it happen. It is moving far too rapidly to be a consequence of random, undirected chance. The evolution of our supergenes is something that we are doing to ourselves whereas biological evolution is something that is being done to us. Homo sapiens decided to take control of its own evolution as a species and that control is manifested in the way it behaves. We have taken and developed the biological strategies bodies found worked so well for successful evolution in our physical environment, and applied them in our even more complex social environment. What matters to us more than anything is for part of us to survive our physical death, not by relying on empty promises of priests, but by implanting our ideas in the minds of those who will survive us. We achieve that by striving to gain attention and control to let us increase our influence and power in the world, our opportunities to propagate parts of our supergene pool. But before we can look at the ideas that underpin the supergene hypothesis we have to understand what ideas are already current among scientists working in human behaviour and evolution. Many of these studies have been on animals and their application to the human condition is something which may be much less justified than has hitherto been assumed. In the next chapter we will look at what is known about human behaviour in the broadest context.
Chapter 3
Modern Ideas of Human Evolution and Behaviour
To be plausible our theory of human behaviour and evolution must account for as wide a range of human behaviour as possible and provide a better explanation than any other extant theory. It should also have the potential to predict human behaviour in other circumstances, and the outcomes of experiments yet to be tried. We must avoid being too ambitious when dealing with theories of human behaviour and evolution because these subjects are very complex indeed and a comprehensive theory will be difficult to develop initially. We must nevertheless try to make progress with the expectation that it will be refined and added to in the future. Above all, we need to develop a model that you, the innocent reader, can feel is consistent with your own very considerable experience of human behaviour.
The scientific method is fundamental to human progress. An unexplained phenomenon is examined to try to understand what is going on. An explanation is then produced (the theory) which ties together what is known already about the subject to some degree and, most importantly, makes predictions which can be tested by experiment. A good example of how this works was when a substantial depletion in the ozone layer that protects life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun was discovered in 1985 over the South Pole. Scientists were asked for an explanation. Relatively quickly they discovered that this depletion could be attributed substantially to the leakage of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from refrigerators and air-conditioning units. Scientists predicted that if we reduced the usage of these CFCs the depletion would ultimately be eliminated. This eventually led to a worldwide ban on their use as a refrigerant and there is now early evidence that the thinning of the ozone layer might have been reversed, though it is predicted to take at least 50 years to heal fully. This is an excellent example of how the scientific method can work. In nearly every area of human activity, scientists are engaged in trying to help us understand more clearly what is happening. Even in circumstances where our understanding is not at all advanced there are models and theories which are being tested, with the results of these tests allowing the models and theories to be refined and improved. Even in astronomy where we often have remarkably little information about the most distant objects in the universe, scientists produce models which can be tested in different ways. As they refine their knowledge an understanding of the universe gradually increases. What is surprising is that when it comes to an understanding of human behaviour and evolution there are no models that make any serious attempt to provide an overall explanation of what is going on in an area which is surely central and fundamental to what it is to be human. Virtually all current efforts in this area concentrate on a relatively narrow area of study and avoid making significant linkages with other areas.
This is not to say, however, that there are no models of how humans should and do behave, but we must distinguish between those ideas which have at their core a fundamental yet unprovable act of faith and those which do not. The central teachings of traditional Christianity are that Jesus is the Son of God, one of the Trinity of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; that his life on earth, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven are proof of God?s love for humanity and God?s forgiveness of human sins; and that by faith in Jesus one may attain salvation and eternal life. This teaching is embodied in the Bible, specifically in the New Testament, but Christians accept also the Old Testament as sacred and authoritative Scripture. Christianity provides a complete explanation of mankind?s place in the universe, a guide to acceptable behaviour and a promise of an everlasting life in heaven or hell depending on that behaviour. It is a full and self-consistent model for life but it is based on a fundamental act of faith for which there is simply no hard evidence. Sigmund Freud (1933) said that: ?Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires?. Just because we want to believe such things does not make them fact. Christianity is only one example, one with which I am most familiar having been born and brought up in Britain. There are many other faiths that also provide a complete prescription as to how to conduct one?s life. Each is different from the next, sometimes in relatively minor ways and sometimes in more substantial ones. All religions promise immortality in one form or another at least for the soul if not for the body, and the soul is essentially the more spiritual, more valued part of our supergene pool. Many religions promise eternal punishment as part of that immortality if the wrong choices have been made during life. There is nothing wrong in believing such ideas but they do remain simply a faith. If one is of that faith then almost every experience can be interpreted as confirming it but the fact that the entire edifice is built on something that is quite unprovable makes it hard to convince non-believers that their views should be taken seriously. The differences between faiths are sometimes remarkably subtle, yet the clashes and disagreements they provoke can be incredibly strong. Indeed one can often have the impression that it is the slightest difference that causes the greatest offence. We will come back to this when we try to understand how the struggle for the ascendancy of one?s supergenes has to focus on the differences with others, even if those differences are extraordinarily subtle and slight. If you are from a Christian background then the continuing battles between Sunni and Shia Muslims seems incomprehensible in the same way that someone from an Islamic background must view the troubles in Northern Ireland, a struggle between Protestants and Catholics, with the same degree of bemused disbelief. Indeed, Christians from outside Northern Ireland have a great deal of difficulty in understanding the conflicts there. There is a story told by the American Comedian, Emo Phillips, about the power of religious hatred. ?I was walking across a bridge one day and I saw a man about to jump. I said, ?Stop, don?t do it.? ?Why shouldn?t I?? he asked. ?Well, are you Christian?? I asked. He said: ?Yes.? I said, ?Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?? ?Protestant.? ?Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?? ?Baptist.? ?Wow, me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?? ?Baptist Church of God.? ?Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you reformed Baptist Church of God?? ?Reformed Baptist Church of God.? ?Me too. Are you reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?? He said, ?Reformation of 1915.? I said: ?Die, heretic scum,? and pushed him off?.
Any scientific theory may only provide a model for part of a problem but it must be founded on hard demonstrable fact and, most importantly, must be able to make predictions that can be tested experimentally so that the model can be verified, improved or discarded. What often happens, however, is that plausible ideas or stories become embellished with detail and take on a life of their own that lets them masquerade as a scientific theory when in reality there is no solid foundation for them. Unfortunately there are now many areas of intellectual activity outside religion where such an approach is commonplace, and ideas become accepted as being sound simply because they have been repeated again and again. This was understood by Lewis Carroll in his brilliant nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark: an Agony in Eight Fits, when he said: ?I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true?. There is no central authority that gives a stamp of approval on any theory. The most ridiculous ideas can propagate and survive and grow in importance with the right kind of publicity. In many cases it is obvious to most people that they are indeed nonsense, with examples such as the belief that the earth is flat (the website of the Flat Earth Society provides an amusing diversion but not a great deal of scientific accuracy). Intelligent Design is another version of creationism that is derived from a disbelief in evolution. The premise here is that there are so many incredibly complex lifeforms on earth that evolution could not possibly account for them. The conclusion is that only God could have created such designs. The scientific community widely sees this as not being a theory, only creationist pseudoscience. There was a time when the motions of stars and planets across the heavens was quite incomprehensible. We now understand these motions so precisely that we can land spacecraft on other planets. There are many aspects of evolutionary theory that we do not understand, and seem today to be a long way from that understanding. But to say that these details are fundamentally not ones we can ever understand is a conclusion far too premature to make. Voltaire (1764) put his finger on it when he wrote: ?Superstition sets the whole world on fire; philosophy quenches the flames?. Intelligent Design, along with the Flat Earth Society is rooted firmly in superstition.
An article by E. O. Wilson (New Scientist, November 2005) made one of the best points about why we should not believe in Intelligent Design using an argument that could just as well be applied to the question of the existence of God. He pointed out that there are probably several hundred million scientists in the world today. If anyone was to find incontrovertible proof either of Intelligent Design or the existence of God then that scientist would achieve an eminence much greater than that of Einstein or any winner of the Nobel Prize. It would be an absolutely extraordinary achievement because it would affect the lives of almost everyone on the planet. Such a scientist would quickly become fabulously wealthy and successful in an unimaginable way. Yet no such proof appears to be forthcoming from the scientific community.
These examples are fairly easy to see for the nonsense they are. Unfortunately there are many other ideas that sneak under the radar, that are not examined critically and gradually come to have a life of their own without any substantive foundation. Occasionally these new ideas lead to the formation of other theories which do indeed have a foundation in fact. It is also the case that a theory starts with a general description of some outstanding puzzle and then makes a number of testable predictions and becomes scientifically acceptable if those predictions are confirmed. Indeed it is often the case that a theory is accepted because of those successes. When dealing with models of human behaviour and evolution we have a much less tractable problem because of the intrinsic complexity of the subject we are working with, and the fundamental problem that we all have our own ideas and prejudices about it.
We cannot, however, allow this to deflect us from our quest for an understanding of these matters and so we must look at how the various approaches and models of human behaviour and evolution have arisen, and what are their strengths and weaknesses. We have been interested in where we came from and how we came to be the way we are for thousands of years. But in many ways modern attempts to understand how humans evolved and behave were re-energised by Charles Darwin. He is remembered for his remarkable book The Origin of Species (1859) which concentrated almost exclusively on animal evolution. Darwin?s central idea was to recognise that in any species no two creatures are absolutely identical and the differences are such that the chance of an individual being able to survive and ultimately reproduce depends on how well that individual is adapted to its environment. A creature may be affected by its environment in many ways. Particular individuals may do better or worse depending on the quality, type and quantity of food they eat, the climate, their capacity to deal with predators and many other factors. Individuals that do better are more likely to survive and therefore more likely to have the opportunity to reproduce and raise their young. After many generations the species will, on average, be made up of individuals that are progressively better integrated into their environment in the broadest sense and so are said to have been subject to a process of natural selection. In this way any population gradually evolves in response to environmental pressures. It is a view that has been confirmed by a vast range of studies and is now firmly established (see, for example, Steve Jones?s Darwin ?s Ghost: Almost like a Whale,1999). Darwin?s ideas revolutionised our views of animal evolution, and there was immediately great interest in what his views might be of human behaviour.
It was more than a dozen years before Darwin brought out a further two books on the subject of human evolution. These were The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). What was particularly exciting about these books is that they concentrated principally on how the mental capacity of humans evolved, as this process was clearly rather different between humans and animals. He suggested that greater mental ability would help in the struggle for survival, and therefore improve the chances of that individual?s reproducing and passing on his or her characteristics to later generations. Darwin?s view of the intellectual capacities of humans was that they were not as different from those of animals as many other people liked to think. He felt strongly that animals were much more than unthinking, unfeeling creatures. He recognised that humans and animals share many modes of behaviour such as the affection between mother and offspring. Darwin also recognised the way that many animals used gestures and facial expressions in ways similar to humans. He recognised that some animals used tools, a fact that was only really absorbed by biologists nearly a century later. He also felt that humans had developed less desirable characteristics such as a propensity for unnecessary violence and that in many ways animals represent a higher and purer form of creature. Darwin would have been appalled to discover that many species happily murder the young of the same species under certain circumstances (studies by Sarah Hrdy). It is interesting that this view of the purity and essential dignity of animals has perhaps made them more popular for study as a model for humans than they might otherwise have been. Our children are usually brought up with anthropomorphic stories of animals. Similar feelings about the decline and fall of humanity have also in some way advanced the study of the most primitive tribes on earth that were surely made up of savages much more noble than we in the degenerate West. Those views were, for many, best summarised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who wrote: ?Nature made a man happy and good, but............................................... society corrupted him and makes him miserable?. My own view is much closer to that of Sophocles who, in Antigone wrote: ?Of wonders there are many, but none more wonderful than man?.
Although some of the ideas that Darwin propounded are no longer accepted there is no doubt that he had an extraordinary influence on the development of theories of human evolution and behaviour, ever since the publication of The Origin of Species. Even today many research programmes, many theories and as a consequence many published research papers have ideas that are firmly rooted in Darwin?s philosophy. What is undoubtedly true, however, is that there are many different approaches to understanding human behaviour but none that come at all close to giving a plausible account of what is going on, an account that actually gives some broader understanding of how we behave as a species and how our evolution is linked to those behaviour patterns. There is a great deal to learn from each of the many approaches to understanding human behaviour and evolution. There is also a great deal said and written on these topics that is much less plausible. We need to look at each area in turn. Each may have gems of wisdom to offer, but there is an awful lot of mud.
The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov believed that human behaviour could be modified by techniques now known as ?Pavlovian conditioning?. These ideas arose from experiments in which dogs were fed shortly after a bell was rung. They soon associated the sound of the bell with being fed, and began to salivate immediately the bell sounded. Eventually they could be made to salivate whenever the bell was sounded, even if food was not forthcoming. Crudely engineering human responses in this way was an idea that appealed in post revolutionary Russia to the extent that it became the official view of the Communist Party. The Darwinian idea that evolution might be significantly involved in behaviour faded as the science known as ethology advanced. Ethologists studied the characteristic behaviour patterns of different species, and believed that instincts were inherited and arose from coordinated structures within the brains of the creatures. Many will be familiar with the picture of Konrad Lorenz being pursued by a line of young geese around the countryside of his native Austria. Lorenz demonstrated how incubator-hatched geese would imprint or become attached to the first suitable moving stimulus they saw within what he called a ?critical period? of about 36 hours shortly after hatching. Most famously, the goslings would imprint on Lorenz himself (actually on his wading boots). It was Lorenz, together with the Dutch zoologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, from the University of Leiden, who became the leaders of the science of ethology which developed into studies of the behaviour of animals in their natural environments. Ethology was very much a European science while in the United States there was much more emphasis on studies by psychologists rather than physiologists and biologists. The comparative psychologists tried to discover common behaviour patterns among different species because they believed that behaviour patterns were substantially affected by the environment in which they developed, and not purely a consequence of inherited instinct. Lorenz was very pessimistic about human nature, and in particular its propensity for aggression and violence, and discounted any prospect of being able to eliminate it even in part from human behaviour. He was convinced that aggression was a fundamental human instinct, and so was essentially uncontrollable. His book, On Aggression (1963), was widely criticised by fellow ethologists who objected to the connections he drew between animal and human behaviour, but the general status of ethology was much more damaged by Desmond Morris, who created a furore when he published his book The Naked Ape (1967). Morris claimed that humans were simply apes who became hunters, and that the way we behave now is really much the same as the behaviour of apes. His book made many extraordinary claims about human behaviour (without any particular foundation) but the massive popularity of the book, which was translated into many languages, undoubtedly compromised the future of ethology.
A detailed account of the history of studies of evolution and human behaviour would be out of place here. For an excellent account the reader is recommended the book Sense & Nonsense by Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown (Oxford University Press, 2002). This is a very articulate and readable account of the history and in particular of the current state of evolutionary studies and perspectives on human behaviour. What we will try to do here is to give an account of the current status of the studies and how many of the current theories of human evolution and behaviour are quite inconsistent with one another.
There are many people now working in the broad field of human behaviour and evolution. We have already seen that one of the critical strategies used by the human brain to cope with the vast quantities of data presented to it is to simplify what it sees so that it can efficiently compare and recognise patterns with which it is already familiar. Few of the people presently working in this field started out in it. Most have backgrounds in another scientific discipline such as psychology, biology, sociology or anthropology. Perhaps inevitably, their view of evolution is coloured by their past experience of their own field of study. This need not lead to bias as such but it is inevitable that people from one background will be much more likely to recognise patterns from that background in any new field to which they turn their attention. Our next step is to try to help understand the conflicting views held by present-day researchers starting by reviewing each of the main research subdivisions that seem to exist at present, but realising that these subdivisions are structured somewhat arbitrarily.
Human Sociobiology
By the early 1970s the field of ethology was being progressively sidelined as the importance of a new area of research in evolutionary biology started to grow. By asking why animals had come to behave the way they did rather than wondering what aspect of the environment had triggered their observed behaviour, the field of sociobiology started to grow. This growth was particularly rapid in the United States where the field of ethology had never had the following it had in Europe. In Europe the growth of interest in sociobiology happened at a much slower rate. By the middle of the 1970s sociobiology was well-established in American universities and for the first time in nearly a century it seemed that some of the ideas first propounded by Darwin were being re-examined. The new approach of sociobiology started to make sense of different behaviour patterns in different species which ethology had had great difficulties in explaining. But if these methods worked so well for animals could they not be applied to human behaviour? The explosion of interest in sociobiology was powered substantially by the publication of two very stimulating books in successive years. The first in 1975 was Sociobiology: the New Synthesis by E. O. Wilson of Harvard University and the second was one of the most popular scientific books ever published ? in 1976, The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins of Oxford University. Not only were these books extremely influential within the academic community, both were written to be very accessible so that laymen could understand many of the ideas of evolutionary biology.
Although The Selfish Gene concentrated almost exclusively on animal behaviour and kept relatively clear of the application of ideas to the human condition, Wilson was much less circumspect. He gave considerable attention in his book to human behaviour, and speculated at length about many aspects of human behaviour, including religion, aggression, the role of homosexuals and of women in society. Wilson had long been critical of social scientists and their tendency to rely on what were, in his view, unscientific methods, to arrive at their conclusions. He made no bones about his wish to drag the social sciences into the modern scientific arena. This approach might have been more successful had it been less confrontational. In no time, social scientists were at odds with Wilson and his heretical ideas on human sociobiology. Indeed, seen from the point of view of social scientists, the invasion of their field by an army of young, energetic biologists with little understanding or interest in the achievements of social science must have been quite terrifying, and more than slightly irritating. The battle lines were drawn almost as soon as these books were published.
So what is human sociobiology all about? By the early 1970s, a fairly substantial theoretical framework had been established for the study of animal behaviour from an evolutionary point of view. Wilson recognised that the social behaviour of groups of animals is extremely important and that the understanding of such behaviour is critical if we are to make sense of things such as reciprocal altruism and kin selection. Before the rise of sociobiology, little attention was paid to whether natural selection worked on individuals or groups. By examining selection from the point of view of the individual gene (the gene?s-eye view) many new insights were gained into selection processes in animals and subsequently into those affecting humans. Some ethologists claimed that certain animals might commit suicide (lemmings, for example) or otherwise restrict their levels of reproduction so as to maintain population densities at a supportable level. They argued that such an approach would be more effective for the good of the species than allowing population explosions followed by population collapse as food supplies become exhausted. They view many of the ways that creatures communicate principally as strategies to evaluate local population densities. The weakness of the view that individuals sacrifice themselves for the good of the group is its vulnerability to cheating by an individual who tries to maximise its own success at reproduction. Taking the view of the individual gene trying to maximise its incidence in subsequent generations has been described as the gene?s-eye view and this is the thesis so eloquently explained by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene.
In The Origin of Species , Charles Darwin was unhappy that he had no explanation as to why some creatures were apparently incapable of reproducing. Many species of insect such as bees and wasps rely on sterile workers to maintain the nest and raise subsequent generations produced by the queen insect. The explanation given by Bill Hamilton in his work on reciprocal altruism was that the worker insects are genetically very similar to the queen and that what they are effectively maximising is the chance of their own genes being transmitted to subsequent generations. This makes the helping of closely related kin to reproduce entirely sensible. The significance of kin selection was seized on by Wilson as an explanation for a great deal of cooperative parenting amongst a whole range of creatures from apes to aphids. Within the human context Wilson wondered whether the contribution of homosexuals in primitive societies towards raising closely related children could be explained in this way. He also suggested that other kinds of altruistic behaviour in humans could be accounted for by variations on the concept of kin selection.
The gene?s-eye view was also used to explain many aspects of the way that parenting is carried out both by animals and by humans. The way in which offspring cry out for food and the battles that ensue between parents and offspring at the time of weaning or fledging were interpreted as strategies designed to maximise the chance of survival of the offspring. Driven by the interest in gene?s-eye views, Robert Trivers at Harvard University looked for explanations for reciprocal altruism. Altruism is the business of helping another creature at one?s own expense. Repeated altruism would be an expensive strategy for an individual but it could be justified if there was a high enough probability that at some time in the future the altruism would be reciprocated, effectively cancelling out the accumulated debt. This sounds fine but it might not work if individuals were inclined not to reciprocate or to cheat on the deal. There are many examples of this in nature, for example the sharing of food with unrelated individuals. This happens, for example, with vampire bats that must feed at regular intervals. Bats that have been successful in finding a source of blood have been observed regurgitating blood for other members of the group that were not successful that night. Within the human context these ideas are central to views of friendship, gratitude and a sense of justice. There have been a number of studies of how this works using game theories whose origins were, incidentally, in the study of economics.
It was Wilson, almost single-handedly, who extended the burgeoning field of sociobiology by starting the new field of human sociobiology. In 1994 Wilson summarised his ideas on human sociobiology as follows (and quoted by Laland and Brown):
Human beings inherit a propensity to acquire behaviour and social structures, a propensity that is shared by enough people to be called human nature. The defining traits include division of labour between the sexes, bonding between kin, incest avoidance, other forms of ethical behaviour, suspicion of strangers, tribalism, dominance orders within groups, male dominance over-all, and territorial aggression over limited resources. Although people have free will and the choice to turn in many directions, the channels of their psychological development are nevertheless...........cut more deeply by the genes in certain directions than others. While cultures vary greatly, they inevitably converge towards these traits.
When these ideas were first put forward in the 1970s there was an explosion of opposition. To understand why they caused such an uproar we need to recall two deep-seated influences on thinking in those days. Both arose from the fact that memories of the Second World War were still very fresh and raw. There was an appreciation that models of human behaviour and evolution had been terribly misused in order to justify some of the atrocities of the Third Reich, and people working in these areas were especially sensitive to the possibility of doing or thinking anything that might lead to those mistakes being repeated. In addition, the Second World War was also a time of extraordinary social revolution with the old order of rigid social hierarchy and limited expectations swept aside. The attitude in the 1960s and 1970s towards human potential was that individuals were capable of achieving anything, no matter what their genetic background and origins might be. Within the universities, leftwing scholars reacted with hostility to Wilson?s views on human sociobiology as providing a genetic underpinning to many of the inequalities and injustices in the social structures that seemed to be crumbling by the day. They felt his views justified the status quo and the conservative view that nothing could be changed. Above all, they could not tolerate the idea that any aspect of human behaviour might be determined genetically. They saw Wilson?s ideas as underpinning pressures for sterilisation and eugenics programmes which ultimately led to the gas chambers of Nazi Germany, memories of which were then much stronger than they are today. Although this was not at all what Wilson intended to say, he was undoubtedly politically rather naive in the way he expressed his ideas. He was an academic of the old school who sincerely believed that something he wrote would be read by others with an open mind uncluttered by prejudice and bias. Rather than try to mollify his critics he criticised them in print with energy. He was particularly vociferous in criticising those who maintained that at birth the human mind was a blank slate (tabula rasa), a view that everyone was born equal and that their environment and upbringing causes the differences that we see amongst adults. This was a central tenet of Marxist philosophy. Although by the time human sociobiology was under attack and much of Marxist philosophy had been refined, the idea that what we might achieve in life could be limited by our genetic inheritance was quite at odds with the widespread feeling of optimism of the sixties and seventies. In 1978, Wilson published On Human Nature and won a Pulitzer Prize. His most prominent critics were two colleagues from Harvard, Richard Lewontin and the late Stephen Jay Gould. Lewontin was a very eminent and well-regarded scientist in his own right although with strong political views. He criticised Wilson in public endlessly. Although the public perception of these battles was that they were about ideas, they had fundamental differences as to how scientific research should progress. Wilson believed that one had to look at the big picture, to look for syntheses and ideas that crossed conventional boundaries. His views about the scientific method and how we should progress over the next many years are best expressed in his brilliant book Consilience (1998) in which he explains that we must concentrate on the ?ideas for the future unity of all knowledge and the need to search for consilience ? the proof that everything in our world is organised in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the particles underlying every branch of learning?. Wilson?s scientific career has been driven by his wish to break with convention when it came to thinking and philosophy. Above all he sees himself, to this day, as a beacon warning against the risks of the increasing specialisation that is presently overwhelming scientific research. Lewontin, by contrast, was deeply suspicious of the broad-brush approach to any scientific discipline, and felt that such an approach took unacceptable liberties with the precise and detailed knowledge that there was about many of these subjects.
What was not addressed satisfactorily by human sociobiology initially was the special place of human language as something that drives our culture and is an important part of our evolution. With Charles Lumsden, Wilson developed a much more quantitative, theoretical approach to the social transmission of cultural elements (which they called culturgens). These culturgens might be particular ideas or beliefs or ways of doing things. They suggested that it was the characteristics of the brain of the individual that determined whether or not a particular culturgen would be adopted. This process was dependent on what they called epigenetic rules. The work was published in 1994 by Lumsden in a book entitled Genes, Mind and Culture, which was largely ignored partly because it was rather mathematical in its approach but mainly because sociobiology had become discredited in the minds of many evolutionists by then.
Sociobiology has revolutionised the study of the extraordinary variety there is in animal social behaviour. Where do we now stand in relation to human sociobiology? One of the main problems is that many of the oversimplified criticisms of human sociobiology are still remembered even though they were often unfair and missed the point. In particular, the idea is still very popular that there is a single gene for almost everything which is either present or absent in each individual. The consequence of this is that human sociobiology is taken as implying that a rapist or a repeat burglar is someone who has the gene for being a rapist or a repeat burglar and that the genetic determinism implicit in human sociobiology means that we are not really in control our own destiny. What Wilson tried to explain, as we have discussed in previous chapters, is that our genetic makeup is extremely complicated and depends on key complex combinations of genes rather than on individual ones. This leads to genetic constraints or propensities which might, under certain conditions, lead to particular kinds of behaviour. The view of the human mind being a blank slate at birth is now substantially discredited. There is a lot of evidence that we are the product of our environment and of our genes to a comparable degree. However the corollary that our genetic inheritance is important in establishing what we might or might not achieve is still something that many are not really willing to accept, even though traits for depression, anxiety or phobias are commonly accepted as being, at least sometimes, heritable.
Another significant criticism of sociobiology comes from the approach that Wilson takes in addressing any area of science. Some assert that his ideas are no more than interesting and entertaining stories about human nature with little to substantiate them. In many cases this is a valid criticism, although to some degree it is inevitable when discussing human nature. Its intrinsic complexity makes it hard indeed to take a broad-brush approach without appearing vague and inconsequential. For example his suggestion that homosexuality might be genetically desirable because of kin selection is not borne out by the data on the degree of involvement or otherwise of homosexuals in the raising of closely related children. Social scientists rejected sociobiology partly because of the easy leaps that were made between animal studies and the human condition by people who were (inevitably) biologists and not social scientists. They understood that there was an awful lot more to human behaviour than an easy extrapolation of animal behaviour. They felt human sociobiologists applied their evolutionary theories without being particularly concerned whether there was much evidence to support their ideas, a slightly curious reaction when social scientists were increasingly turning their back on the scientific method in favour of a more narrative approach to the description of human behaviour. There is no doubt that sociobiology has made a serious contribution to our understanding of human behaviour. It is also clear that it has had much less influence than it ought to have had within the social sciences because of the initial hostility it faced.
Sociobiology also produced an enormous increase in the interest of scientists in evolutionary studies and many sub-specialisations came out of this work. These include human behavioural ecology, principally the field of anthropologists who believe that it is one?s social and ecological environment that establishes a cultural framework. Another branch is now known as evolutionary psychology, principally the field of academic psychologists searching for the mechanisms that are universal across the brains and mental capacities of all humans and which establish the way we all behave. Another branch, known as memetics, grew out of the ideas of Richard Dawkins that culture was composed of large numbers of elements called memes which compete for ascendancy within our brains and therefore, for the chance to communicate and propagate to others. Memetics has developed an almost cult following which we shall look at shortly. At around the same time that memetics was being promulgated, another approach called gene-culture co-evolution was being established by population geneticists. We shall look at each of these in turn in the following sections.
Human Behavioural Ecology
In the 1980s, several anthropologists set out to examine the predictions of sociobiology by looking at real groups of real humans in special environments. They were interested to discover to what extent differences in human
behaviour could be attributed to their environments and to what extent these behaviours had been adapted to match and cope with environmental pressures. They generated mathematical models of human behaviour which led them to claim to be able to predict a wide range of human behaviour including strategies for hunting, finding and gathering food and the way in which the numbers of children could be predicted. Anthropology traditionally looks at the influence of culture on individual behaviour, whereas human behavioural ecology was much more concerned with group behaviour and the structure of the societies in which individuals lived. Much of the earliest work simply studied groups of humans as if they were just another kind of animal. Human behavioural ecologists looked for correlations between their predictions and the actual behaviour in the societies studied. In animal sociology there was increasing evidence that the social systems of animals could be viewed as adaptions to the local ecology. The great majority of the research in human behavioural ecology has been done on small groups of very isolated humans influenced as little as possible by the modern world. These studies require an extraordinary amount of effort and time and many have produced quite remarkable results.
The view taken by human behavioural ecologists is that generations of selection have ensured that these isolated communities are now optimally matched to their environment. They believe that societies structure themselves as a consequence of conscious decision-making so as to maximise their reproductive success over a lifetime. They predict that societies are conscious of the subtle changes to their environment and make strategic decisions how to manage it by balancing the advantages and disadvantages of particular courses of action. In reality, there really are not any truly isolated societies left on the planet. Even the most remote areas have extensive contact with outside influences. It is also a simplification to think that the environment any of these tribes inhabit has been unchanging over the timescales that are needed for the relatively complex adaptations they infer to take place. The reality is that social and cultural changes happen on extremely short timescales, from generation to generation, so that even minor contacts with the outside world are likely to be significant. We must never underestimate the intelligence and the insight of humans even when they are perceived as being members of a very primitive tribe!
By the end of the 1980s, the field we now call evolutionary psychology was beginning to grow. They argued that human behavioural ecologies were taking too narrow an approach by simply deciding whether a particular behaviour pattern appeared to be sensible within a specific environment and then to test whether that corresponded to the behaviour of the group. It ignored, said the evolutionary psychologists, what was actually going on the human mind, so that they had no way of distinguishing between the carefully argued and understood strategy agreed by a group and the possibility that what they were doing just happened to work out by chance. They also felt that the way that these isolated societies worked now would have been established over many hundreds or thousands of generations, and that what was being observed were adaptions to some ancient historical average environment rather than the present-day environment. This could well be important because in many parts of the world the climate changes on relatively short timescales, certainly when viewed in comparison with evolutionary timescales. Human behavioural ecologists replied that it just is not important what the reasons are for a particular group to behave in a particular way. As long as what they do is adaptive then their models allow it to be predicted. There are many examples of animal behaviour that are highly adaptive. For instance, animals such as elephants make extended journeys to inaccessible locations that are rich in specific minerals they would otherwise lack in their usual environment. The application of the relatively complicated ideas used in behavioural ecology to model human behaviour, however, was not accepted widely by social scientists and anthropologists, at least in part because many in these fields are practitioners without a mathematical or scientific training and so often do not appreciate what human behavioural ecologists are really trying to do.
Evolutionary Psychology
The controversy that surrounded the early days of human sociobiology resulted in groups with very different ideas as to how human behaviour and evolution should be studied and explained. The need to emphasise their separateness from human sociobiologists caused a group of academic psychologists (who should not be confused at all with medical, clinical or social psychologists) to investigate the psychological mechanisms which had evolved to provide the fundamental framework for the mental and behavioural characteristics of mankind. These are the evolutionary psychologists.
The fundamental view of evolutionary psychologists is that the human mind was adapted to manage the environment of our ancestors in the distant past, probably in the Pleistocene era (perhaps 2 million years ago). They say we must think of our ancestors as hunter-gatherers living in the Stone Age principally concentrated in the savannahs of Africa. By understanding the problems of adapting to life all those years ago we would then better understand the structure of the mind and be able to develop models of how it works. The academic psychologists involved in this work were doing so at a time when there was a shift in the priorities of psychological research, from an emphasis on behaviourism to cognitive psychology. It was at a time when the use of animal models was being dropped and when ideas of the human mind as an analog of the computer was growing in importance. This happened because at the same time computers were becoming an important tool in the research environment. Many of the models that were used and are still used today by evolutionary psychologists show relatively little understanding of how modern computers actually work but the ideas of artificial intelligence and neural networks had a great influence on their views of the way in which the mind worked.
Evolutionary psychologists use the idea of an environment of evolutionary adaptedness which is essentially a model of the adaptive pressures that people were under in the distant past. They concentrate on understanding the psychological mechanisms that have evolved within that environment and believe that significant structural aspects of our brains have been modified by these pressures. Their view is that the way we process information in our brains has been shaped by our experiences in the distant past and the way they are now is because those strategies worked, helping us to survive and reproduce over thousands of generations. They see emotions such as jealousy and greed as being necessary and indeed helpful for survival in the Stone Age, which is why we experience them today. Because of the complexity that any psychological structure implies it is inevitable that these adaptations have evolved very slowly and therefore are not likely to have changed greatly over a period as short as 1-2 million years. For example, they view our ability to speak a complex language as being necessary for survival in the harsh competitive environment of that time, even though the evidence suggests that humanoid brains were a fraction of their present size, and the increase in human brain size is regarded to have been necessary for managing a complex language.
Evolutionary psychologists view the structure of the mind and the function of the brain as being highly compartmentalised. They believe that evolution has given us brains that are made of hundreds or thousands of different processing modules each of which provides a separate brain function. They do not really like the idea that the brain may be a general purpose processing tool because they do not believe such a structure could develop the various component facilities that they infer to be present in our minds. The methods of evolutionary psychology emphasise the creation of specific computational theories which allow them to design the specification of any program running in the mind capable of solving the problem. One has the impression when reading about the work of some evolutionary psychologists that they are reluctant to accept much of the impressive body of knowledge built up in recent years about the structure and localisation of function in human brain. Although we know that many functions are substantially localised we also understand that almost no function occurs in the brain without involving activity at some level throughout. We also know that a relatively small number of genes in our bodies seem to be associated with brain function. We have already seen that many of the subtleties of DNA functioning are still not understood but already it seems highly unlikely that our genes contain enough information to populate as many processing modules with the sort of complex processing power that evolutionary psychologists would like us to have.
Many of the criticisms levelled at human sociobiology can also be levelled at evolutionary psychology. Often their approach is rightly criticised for being a series of plausible stories woven around the distant and unknowable past. Remarkably little is known about our ancestors and the environment within which they operated. It might have been savannah-like for a few of them, but an awful lot of the world, then as now, is very different from that. We know that Stone Age people also lived in temperate lands, beside forests, in mountainous areas and indeed under Arctic conditions. Our ancestors have all been subject to evolutionary pressures not just over the last 2 million years, but for the last 2 billion years. The evolutionary psychologists ignore the considerable evidence that some catastrophic event or events diminished the human population between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago to probably no more than a few thousand and possibly only a few hundred. It is difficult to imagine that complex behavioural traits would persist through such an upheaval, an upheaval which we have seen may have triggered the rapid evolution of our society we see now. Nor can all humans simply be banded together as hunter-gatherers. Many other creatures are hunter-gatherers, and have not evolved into humans or indeed anything like them. If we look at modern people in urban Europe the only residual evidence of hunter gatherer activity is when they escape for autumn weekends to gather blackberries in hedgerows or mushrooms in woods.
A much more comprehensive, indeed a devastating critique of evolutionary psychology has recently been published by David J. Buller in his book, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (2005). Buller is not an evolutionary psychologist but a philosopher who has a background in the relation between science and philosophy. He developed an interest in evolutionary psychology while on sabbatical leave in London and started to read around the subject as someone with an interest but no particularly strong background in that subject, much like your present author. In his book, Buller examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology and rejects them all. He examines some of the principal and highly specific claims of evolutionary psychology, in particular human mate preferences (that males prefer younger fertile females and females prefer high-status males) and the idea that step-parents abuse their stepchildren more frequently than genetic parents abuse biological children. He draws on a wide range of research, including his own, to discredit the claims of evolutionary psychology. He finds that, in fact, males prefer females only slightly younger than themselves and from a background (social, educational, economic) very similar to their own. He also shows that female preferences reflect that pretty accurately, and that there is no evidence that step-parents are relatively more abusive towards their stepchildren. His book is excellent reading. He is quite happy about an evolutionary approach to human psychology and goes out of his way to be fair to evolutionary psychologists. He is very critical of some of Stephen Jay Gould?s attacks on evolutionary psychology. Despite giving the benefit of the doubt to evolutionary psychologists at every turn he concludes that evolutionary psychology is based on little more than a myth.
Increasingly, studies of animals are showing that many of the behavioural traits thought to be unique to man are found in other species. There is considerable evidence of intelligence in certain kinds of birds, and recently there has even been remarkable work showing that birds are capable of intentionally devious, deceitful behaviour ? something thought to be quite alien to any non-human species. In many circumstances organisms themselves modify significant aspects of their environment rather than adapting themselves to the environment. For example, termites build extraordinary mounds which provide protection as well as temperature control of their habitat. There are many other examples cited by J. Scott Turner (2000), in The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures. Perhaps most damning, however, is that evolutionary psychologists go to great lengths to deny that present-day human behaviour is in any significant way different from behaviour hundreds of thousands of years ago. They ignore the realities of life on Earth that force us to adapt to an environment that changes on very short timescales. We know that the climate on this planet undergoes quite substantial changes on very short timescales because of, for example, volcanic activity. We also know that the capacity to respond to these changes has been an important aspect of human survival. Modern evolutionary biology finds itself increasingly separate from evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary psychology ignores the more broadly-held view that evolution is a more complex phenomenon than evolutionary psychologists think it is. In particular it underestimates substantially the importance of cultural transmission as a mechanism for changing human behaviour.
Memetics and Gene-Culture Evolution
It is difficult to exaggerate the influence that Darwin?s work and his theory of natural selection has had on scientific thought and philosophy since the appearance of The Origin of Species in 1859. Almost as soon as this was published there was surprisingly widespread speculation as to whether fitness selection was a process that was significant in other areas. Several of the areas that were looked at we would now include under the definition of culture. The word culture is used in evolutionary studies not in the elitist sense associated with, for example, classical music or fine art or the works of Shakespeare, but rather as a word to describe the sum total of all the knowledge, values and every other factor that is passed from generation to generation. Even in the animal kingdom there are many examples of behavioural patterns that are learned and passed from generation to generation. These become clear when otherwise identical groups of animals behave in different ways and we observe that these behavioural differences persist generation after generation. One academic discipline, however, that is less affected by Darwinian approaches has been that of the social sciences. Amongst many social scientists there is a clear belief that the astonishing complexity of human behaviour and social structures simply cannot be explained in Darwinian terms, possibly not even in scientific terms. And yet culture does propagate from generation to generation and indeed it propagates between members of the same generation. Could it be that the propagation of culture can be understood in terms analogous to the way that genes are selected for and against in a struggle for survival?
In 1976, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, a book that proved extraordinarily popular with the general public. Its main point was to assert that the evolution of species was under the control of its biological genes and that those genes selfishly manipulated the organism to guarantee their survival. Its approach was very reductive and almost totally ignored the fact that our genes never work in isolation but only in concert with the other 20,000 in our DNA. Moreover, our own DNA cannot reproduce without the 20,000 genes in the DNA of another individual. This view of looking at single genes, and the way that Dawkins thought they work independently and selfishly, has persisted strongly in the public understanding of genetics. It is, however, highly misleading and we see regularly in media reports of discoveries of the ?gene for??? In the first edition of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins wondered in the last chapter about the following: could it be that, in the same way we understand genes to be the fundamental replicating units at the core of all biological evolution, there is an equivalent fundamental unit underlying all cultural transmission? As an analog of genes Dawkins coined the word ?memes? for the fundamental replicating unit of culture. Memes should be thought of as proper elements of information. In The Selfish Gene (second edition, 1989, page 192) he wrote:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.
Dawkins did not wish to imply that this is simply a metaphor of Darwinian evolution but rather that memes genuinely exist and have infected our brains, and that they compete with one another for ascendancy. The most successful memes are the ones that propagate preferentially to other brains. Individual and specific memes, he believes, survive and propagate because it is to their advantage though not necessarily to our advantage. His view almost makes us appear the helpless victims of a raging war that goes on continually in our brain much as our bodies are when attacked by viruses. Memes struggle to overcome other memes so that the ones most successful are propagated by their carriers. The descriptions of the way memes work within our brains depending on battles being waged within our minds ? a struggle that must lead to a great intellectual drain on our resources and brainpower ? is a view strangely at odds with the calm efficiency with which almost every other activity in the human body progresses. It all sounds terribly wasteful! Since Dawkins?s original suggestion, interest in memes has grown so that it now has an almost cult-like following. Susan Blackmore?s The Meme Machine (1999) is a very readable and energetic attempt to explore the potential of memetics as a way of explaining many aspects of human behaviour and evolution. She even suggests that memes could affect gene evolution significantly in a kind of meme-gene co evolution. This might happen, she suggested, if memes change the environment in which genes are selected to provide better and better meme propagation opportunities. The view that we are little more than automatons wandering around while memes fight it out for ascendancy within our brains has been criticised by several philosophers, in particular Mary Midgley, as being far too reductionist, and in particular for suggesting that our views of ourselves are simply some kind of semi-illusion. Our brains are remarkably powerful and a major part of our supergene pool is generated within our brains consequent on external influences and the way they are processed within our brains. We are not simply imitators although that is an important part of how we function. We are able to combine ideas to produce something greater than the sum the parts. Dawkins, working in Oxford, may feel like that but I?m sure that most of us in Cambridge, where I?m writing this, feel much more positive about what is going on within our minds and in our lives.
Memetics enthusiasts such as Susan Blackmore are inclined to interpret and understand everything in terms of memes. There are, however, significant issues to be addressed before memetics will be established as a proper scientific discipline. There are basic difficulties in trying to decide exactly what a meme might be, what is a unit of culture in this context, and to what extent the information content of a meme is critical to its effective propagation. The propagation of memes was described by Dawkins simply as a process of imitation but an awful lot of what we learn is because we have absorbed experiences from our social environment and learned from them, a procedure that psychologists call social learning. Psychologists tell us that there are very many ways in which we learn things, and some of these learning methods can also be seen in birds and other creatures.
Two crows from New Caledonia were taking part in experiments at the Department of Zoology in Oxford (Weir et al, Science, vol 297, 981, 2002). Various pieces of wire were provided, some straight and some hooked. The birds learned to use the wire hook to remove a small container of food from a vertical cylindrical glass tube. One day, the male crow (inevitably) got into some kind of huff, flew away and lost the hook leaving the female with a straight piece of wire. Perhaps a year earlier the crows had experience of manipulating flexible pipe cleaners but had no experience of manipulating wire. Nevertheless the female took a straight piece of wire and bent it into a hook so as to allow her to lift the food from the glass tube (and if you don?t believe this you can watch the movie of Betty the New Caledonian crow at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/trial7_web.mov). New Caledonian crows are used to making tools in the wild but the way that the wire was bent was not something she could ever have come across, either in the wild or in the laboratory. Weir et al make it clear that the implications of this ?purposeful modification of objects for use as tools without extensive prior experience is almost unknown?. In other experiments chimpanzees failed repeatedly to manage a task of comparable complexity. This simple observation (which has now been repeated several times with other crows) of the capacity in a creature so distantly related to humans to use its imagination in such a constructive piece of lateral thinking is extraordinarily exciting. But it is difficult to understand this kind of process (which does, of course, happen with humans) in terms of memes.
Many are critical of memeticists as being little better than storytellers, infected themselves by this rather curious notion (much along the lines of: the world has been invaded by aliens that are taking over our minds. The way you can tell that someone has been taken over by aliens is that they deny strenuously that the world has been invaded by aliens). However there can be no doubt that the concepts of memetics have been valuable in challenging some of the basic assumptions of most other models of evolution which deny that cultural processes, their propagation and evolution, play a significant part in the whole process of human behaviour and evolution. What memetics needs to do is to find some way of building a real scientific framework that allows predictions and hypotheses to be tested in a way that will convince others. The nearest that there is at present to such a framework is provided by another approach to the subject, known as gene?culture co-evolution.
Gene-Culture Co-Evolution
One of the more surprising things that one finds when reading about evolutionary studies is the way that most human behavioural ecologists and evolutionary psychologists are convinced that human evolution and behaviour is substantially a consequence of our genetic inheritance. In a similar way, most social scientists are convinced that our genetic inheritance is relatively unimportant, and that the way we behave and the way our society evolves is principally a cultural matter, less affected by any significant aspect of our genetic inheritance. Memeticists who try to combine both do not really address the extent or the way in which genes and culture might actually interact. The founder of sociobiology, E. O. Wilson, wrote that ?genes hold culture on a leash?, something that represented his firmly-held view that genes were dominant. He did, however, accept that culture might be significant, and indeed used the word ?culturgens? to mean something rather similar to Dawkins?s ?memes?. But could it not be that culture and genes evolve much more hand-in-hand than Wilson might allow? This is something that gene-culture co-evolution tries to address. We know that culture has been transmitted for a very long time. Stone age artefacts such as tools, etc., were manufactured using methods which have clearly been passed down from generation to generation. Artistic representations and painting styles in cave paintings can be followed over many thousands of years. The skills developed by one generation have clearly been passed to another. The concepts of gene-culture co-evolution (sometimes called dual-inheritance) theory have been developed principally by two groups of geneticists, Marc Feldman and Luca Cavalli-Sforza at Stanford and by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson at UCLA. Both groups have a strong background in the study of population genetics, one of the few branches of evolutionary studies that have a firm, substantial and accepted theoretical and mathematical foundation. Their published work is perhaps less well-known and less well understood than it should be because it is considerably more rigorous and demanding, and more technical than many branches of evolutionary studies.
The basic idea underlying gene-culture co-evolution is that the evolution of our biogenes can be affected by the way that people interact with one another and with society. We now have contraception that allows humans to control their fertility and therefore to choose when and whether they have children. That is clearly going to have an effect on the transmission of genes from one generation to another. The circumstances under which reproduction occurs are therefore modified to some extent by the social imperatives of the time. Another example of the way that our biogenes have responded to cultural drivers is the way that our bodies have changed (at least for some of us) so that we can digest cows? milk without problems. Many in the West will be surprised to realise that the great majority of the adult human population of this planet are made ill by the consumption of dairy products. Most people lack an adequate level of activity of an enzyme called lactose, which is necessary to allow digestion of the sugar, lactose. Lactose is one of the principal energy-delivering components in milk. If that enzyme is not present in a human, then milk consumption leads to diarrhoea and vomiting. The ability to digest milk is something that nearly all human infants possess, but the ability of adults to do so depends on whether they have a specific gene in one of their chromosomes. Studies of the incidence of this gene shows a strong correlation with regions that have a history of dairy farming. In such regions over 90% of the population are able to digest milk whereas in regions where dairy farming is traditionally absent the rate can be almost negligible.
Milk consumption by adults is a relatively recent phenomenon, at least in evolutionary terms. There is now evidence from archaeological data that adult humans have been consuming milk for at least 6000 years, or approximately 300 generations. Has the incidence of this gene been affected by societies involved in dairy farming? This is the sort of question that gene-culture co-evolution tries to address. One of the big difficulties for this subject, as it is for memetics, is that although theoretical models may be constructed it is rather difficult to make predictions that can be tested in real life.
The subject is at a relatively early stage and criticisms of the degree to which culture can be broken down into elements are not central to judging the validity of this approach. However, the fundamental principle that we can achieve a better understanding of human culture and therefore of human behaviour by using the methods and ideas originally espoused by Darwin is at the core of gene-culture co evolution. One criticism of gene-culture co-evolutionists is that the rate of genetic change is extremely slow whereas the rate of cultural change is rapid. However, there is no doubt that cultural influences can change quickly and can exert a considerable influence on which biogenes are propagated. That strong influence on reproductive success may therefore have made gene-culture co-evolution more important than that might otherwise have been. Although there are undoubtedly specific examples where gene-culture co-evolution is significant, it is difficult to find a convincingly wide range of examples where this could possibly be relevant.
What Do We Learn from These Evolutionary Theories?
There is a great amount of research effort going into studies that are relevant at some level to human evolution and behaviour. What is worrying, however, is that there is surprisingly little cross-fertilisation between the different areas. To some extent this is a consequence of each field being populated by researchers from a relatively narrow background. Human sociobiology is dominated by biologists and zoologists while human behavioural ecology is the realm of anthropologists. Evolutionary psychology is the field of academic psychologists and gene-culture co-evolution is principally the work of population geneticists. Memetics has a slightly broader range of people interested in it yet it is a subject that seems to encourage a less systematic approach towards the goal of providing an evolutionary theory. There is undoubtedly something in virtually every approach that is actually relevant to human behaviour and evolution. The difficulty is knowing how, given the intrinsic complexity of the subject, these different views can be synthesised into something more substantial.
The objections of each subdiscipline to the others are nevertheless often well founded. The idea that humans are equivalent to other animals for all practical purposes is certainly true in the biological, genetic sense. To use animal models of the biology and physiology of humans is also reasonable but then to extrapolate from that a belief that animal behaviour and human behaviour are also essentially the same is not at all reasonable. It ignores entirely the influence of our society on human behaviour and how many of the genetic imperatives are modified by conscious and subconscious social effects on each and every one us. The view of evolutionary psychology that we were made the way we are now for practical purposes a couple of million years ago on the grass plains of Africa ignores some other very important information that we have on human genetic origins. In the previous chapter it was mentioned that studies of mitochondrial DNA that are transmitted only from mother to daughter suggest that the population of Homo Sapiens went through a dramatic decline several tens of thousands of years ago ? such that the net human population on Earth may have been no more than a few hundred individuals. Under those circumstances genetic evolution of the species would happen extremely rapidly and it is much more likely that the influences of those times would have set our behavioural patterns, wiping out much of the influence of earlier times. Evolutionary psychologists also appear to be in denial of the fact that there has been the most dramatic and explosive increase in the rate at which human beings have evolved in their social context, and to see us as being cavemen in fast cars must be seriously missing something.
The work on memes and on gene-culture co-evolution is beginning to address the importance of social effects in moderating and modifying the way that we evolve. The emphasis of memetics on breaking down culture into its smallest elements and the suggestions of a belief amongst gene-culture co-evolutionists that they also would like to see culture in its component part form may be a consequence of trying to impose on memes a level of reductionism that they condemn when it is applied to genes by popular writers. Talking about the gene for a particular ability or disease or disability is far too simplistic since most of us have the genes in our body that could cause us to suffer from these problems. It is groups of genes and whether those genes are able to express what they code for that really matters. Talking about memes for individual elementary pieces of cultural information is also likely to be overly simplistic and probably should be resisted.
Sociology and Social Psychology
What is remarkable about all the above attempts to understand human behaviour and evolution is that what few have done in any significant way is actually ask the people living on this planet what they think really does motivate people and what it is they want to pass on to future generations. A great many of the 6.6 billion people on Earth at the moment are very interested to understand more of what we are doing here, what our life is all about, what is it we are trying to achieve. When one describes any of these above models to the typical intelligent layman there is barely a glimmer of recognition that they might have anything to do with their own experiences. They seem no more relevant to their own lives than quantum field theory or general relativity. This is something that should be worrying to practitioners in these fields. If you ask people what life is about, what is the point of it all, then you get very different answers indeed, perhaps much more along the lines written by Raymond Carver in his poem, Late Fragment, where he wrote:
"And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so? I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth."
Perhaps we should be paying more attention to the poets! Fortunately, there are researchers who do ask people about their behaviour and try to analyse their responses so as to reach some understanding of human drives and motivations. The main discipline is broadly known as sociology, the study of the social rules and processes that bind and separate people not simply as individuals, but as members of associations, groups, and institutions. As a subject, it started well with classical sociology theorists such as Emile Durkheim (Bordeaux), Max Weber (Munich) and Karl Marx being particularly influential. However the scientific method was always a minority interest in sociology partly because of the difficulties in coming up with theories of something as complicated as human behaviour. Today a great deal of sociology comes under the heading of ?social theory?. This approach encourages abstract speculation, the use of narratives and is sadly suspicious of any hint of objectivity. The distinction between modern sociology and economics is often indistinct with considerable overlap. It seems that almost any sociological research has political implications. It often feels as if the politics of the researchers combined with the need for political correctness hopelessly complicates the conclusions, if indeed any are drawn.
One branch of sociology, however, has been working doggedly to try to illuminate important aspects of human behaviour. Social psychology is defined by Susan Fiske in her highly readable book, Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology (2004), as ?the scientific attempt to understand and explain how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings?. The approach of the social psychologist is to focus on what happens to individuals in groups in contrast to the way that sociologists emphasise the behaviour of groups of people. Given that people are adapted to live with other people it is inevitable that human behaviour is a function of both the person and the environment. However their results suggest that the social effects of the people we interact with are of much greater importance than we might otherwise think. People generally overemphasise the importance of personality in explaining any particular action and underemphasise the social context. In a wonderful series of experiments many years ago researchers placed a dime (an American coin of relatively small value) in the return slot of public telephones which were invariably found by the next caller. When the caller left the phone box he or she would encounter a woman who then dropped a folder full of papers in front of the caller. The fraction of callers who would help the woman to pick up her papers changed from 4% (only one person in 25) if they had not found a coin moments earlier in the phone box, to 88% who helped if they had found a coin. The researchers, A. M. Isen and P.F. Levin (1972) inferred that the implied presence of someone who had left the coin in the phone box ? something of a small but significant value ? created a feeling in the caller of a social debt that influenced the behaviour of the individual. If you ask most people what effect finding a coin of very small value would have then I think almost no one would predict such an incredibly strong effect. We are all greatly biased to underestimate the influence of social situations upon us.
Susan Fiske has combined a large number of studies, including earlier work by Abraham Maslow and others, to show that there are probably five basic core motives or drives that underlie most human behaviour. These critically affect the way in which we function as social creatures and they have the power to make us feel more secure and enhance our survival in social groups. She argues convincingly that they provide an underlying unifying framework that helps us understand human behaviour. If these five components are present then our capacity to function in a social group and to feel successful and rewarded is maximised. The five core motives are belonging, understanding, controlling, enhancing self, and trusting others. It is the first one, belonging, that underlies the other four. There are many studies that show that having a close social tie to a group (which may be very small) has a major influence on mood, health, risk of suicide and many other factors. Not only does belonging help the individual but it also strengthens the group. The group becomes more effective if its members feel well integrated and valued, and being a valued member of the group helps an individual to survive both physically and psychologically.
The next two motives are more cognitive in nature, with understanding being more reflective and controlling more active. The importance of understanding one?s environment, both physically and socially helps the individual to predict what might happen in the case of uncertainty in the group context. We need to make sense of the world by understanding our position within a group by reaching an agreement as to one?s role and relationship with the group. It is a fundamental aspect of the division of labour that makes the group most effective and most robust in its ability to cope with external threats and challenges. The more active cognitive motive, controlling, is important because people need to feel competent and effective in dealing with their relationship with the group. A stressful situation can be made much worse if there is no information about what is happening. As soon as we know what we are dealing with we can start to get on with managing the problem. Cooperative behaviour requires both parties to be committed to working together. If each feels that they have useful active roles then each will feel much more engaged with the project. We all know that hospital patients who feel they are at the mercy of the medical staff do much less well than those who feel more involved with their own illness and engaged with the treatments being given. We all need to be in control to some degree. So we see that these two motives, understanding and controlling, are principally concerned with establishing an effective relationship with the group in terms of extracting information, being able to process it, believe it and act upon it. This explains the sense in which these motives are essentially cognitive in nature.
The final two motives are more concerned with one?s emotional connection with the group, although it is important to accept that the boundaries between all of these different motives are relatively ill-defined and diffuse. Of these, the fourth basic motive, self-enhancement, includes the maintenance of self-esteem as well as the possibilities of self-improvement. Again, these ideas are centrally important to the maintenance of an effect relationship with the group. An individual who suffers from low self-esteem is likely to feel at risk of ejection from the group or at risk of becoming more peripheral to the group. The ability to improve one?s self-esteem depends on the capacity an individual has to improve his or her value to the group making continued membership more likely. Our ability to enhance our value within the group makes it important that we can be sure that the group will respond reasonably predictably to our efforts. This requires trust, something that requires our confidence that the group will not react unreasonably under any particular circumstance. Trust is something that is essential for everyday life. Each day we trust motorists to continue to drive sensibly on the correct side of the road. Even when surrounded by media coverage of bombings, rape and murder we still continue to trust the people that we know to behave properly, to help us should something go wrong in our lives in just the way that we expect and hope we would be able to support them through their travails.
It is worth noting that much of the work supporting the idea that these are our principal social motives was carried out in the West where there is a much more individualistic culture than there is in Asian, African and South American cultures, for example. As a consequence the relative importance of each of these motives may be somewhat different in different cultures but there is no doubt that the overall framework within which we all function does seem to apply rather widely. In fact, even in Western cultures there are great differences in the extent to which different social, and particularly ethnic, groups function and a broader range of studies has in fact already been undertaken.
So What Do We Really Know about Human Behaviour and Evolution?
The overwhelming impression must be of a variety of substantial yet unconnected academic disciplines, all claiming to deal with achieving an understanding of human behaviour and evolution and yet each developing and evolving themselves without any apparent interest or understanding of the other. It is inconceivable that we could understand human behaviour without recognising that a great deal of what we think of as fundamentally human behavioural traits can be recognised in the animal kingdom. No one who has watched a herd of elephants, young and old, walking across the great open plains of Africa, content in one another?s company, with the young playing happily, can fail to be moved by what happens should they come across the skeleton of another elephant. Immediately all play ceases. There is a palpable change in mood. The oldest elephant gently picks up a leg bone and holds it near her head. She walks around slowly for a few minutes before carefully replacing the bone beside the corpse. The other elephants look on and then slowly gather together in the group and continue on their journey much more subdued. Other recent studies have made it clear how chimpanzees have cultural traditions such as tool use and grooming that are passed around within their social groups. Chimpanzees may not have great literature or music but when they learn a new technique of obtaining food, for example, they can pass that technique on to others. Killer whales have also recently demonstrated that new techniques for catching food are learned quickly by other members of the group. One killer whale learned how to regurgitate fish by spitting out onto the surface of the water. Gulls were then lured to the fish. Once several gulls have gathered, the whale leaps out of the water, catching a splendid mouthful of feathers and fish. Once one whale did this they were all at it in no time at all. These studies do not imply that chimpanzees or whales have the cultural sophistication or complexity of humans, but it is clear that we do not have a total monopoly on culture or society. There are many other aspects of human behaviour and social structure that we can understand with the help of studies of the animal kingdom. We can also benefit greatly by trying to understand the psychology of primitive groups to achieve some insights into the way that they differ from or are similar to us. The principles of genetics have revolutionised our understanding of science and are now revolutionising our lives. We cannot ignore them and the influence they undoubtedly have on human behaviour and evolution.
However, it is also true that evolutionists cannot expect to be taken seriously when they study social groups if they completely ignore the considerable amount of knowledge that has been gained about the behaviour of individuals in groups by social scientists over the years. There is, however, an arrogance of modern scientists implicit in studying primitive societies. The notion of the noble savage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (quoted earlier) is charming, and is present in a lot of excellent art. But to think of primitive society as being purer and simpler is also not just to project onto it a lack of sophistication: it is also to imply that their evolution has been inhibited in some way. The members of these primitive groups are likely to have the same range of intelligence and delicacy of feeling that we do ourselves. There is also a view implicit in the attitude of many evolutionary scientists that evolution really is a matter of our biogenes alone and that all behaviour is ultimately biogenetics. The way that society changes from generation to generation, a process that we might reasonably call evolution, is then thought of by scientists to be rather different and somewhat separate. Partly that attitude is because it is so widely realised that trying to merge sociology and evolutionary studies is potentially a massive piece of work. Some sociologists have already made some progress in looking at the way that social groups work and transmit ideas between them. Much of these are underpinned by an interest in political philosophy and the way that society is controlled and manipulated by the powers which, in their view, control it. We cannot, however, get away from the central fact that we are one human species with a history and with a future. As long as we have several barely interacting disciplines independently trying to explain the human condition then none is likely to be accepted much outside their own discipline.
The summaries above are necessarily rather selective and simplified. I have referred to texts that are accessible today and are readable by the non expert. Although in many ways the range and variety of work on human behaviour and evolution is bewildering, there is much we can learn. The study of memetics is encouraging because it shows some early signs of an appreciation that genetics and human sociology might have a connection. The social sciences can give us a great deal of insight into the way that humans live their lives, interact with family colleagues and society and what it is that humans have achieved. They are also greatly concerned about how we humans evolve and how our culture is propagated from generation to generation. We can see all around us that the evolution of society is proceeding at a dramatic, even accelerating pace. The size of our human population means that for practical purposes our biological, genetic evolution as a species has essentially ceased. Many mainstream genetic studies are therefore inevitably concerned with a history of human evolution rather than telling us much about its present state. Something is making us evolve, and making us evolve fast. Sociology is still some way from making a convincing connection with evolutionary studies, and evolutionary studies are largely ignorant of the work of sociologists. It may be that we can use our extensive knowledge of the realities of genetic evolution to help us gain new insights into the way that social evolution is taking place. This is what we shall try to address in the remainder of this book as we try to find a measure of consilience between these disparate academic disciplines.
Chapter 4
Towards a New Synthesis
It is clear that we have a vast amount of knowledge about many aspects of human behaviour and evolution. We have an extensive knowledge of Darwinian evolution and its application to the animal kingdom. We have a vast amount of detailed knowledge about the way that DNA is central to defining our human physiology and how our genetic inheritance can be understood to function in Darwinian terms. We also have the benefit of many different approaches towards an understanding of human evolution in recent times, as seen from the point of view of academic psychologists, biologists, palaeontologists and many others. There is also a lot to be learned from the social sciences, and particularly the field of social psychology. And yet we have no clear idea, quite simply, why we do things, why we should be motivated to do things the way we are and what it is that drives us forward as individuals, as members of families, small and large social groups. It is not that any or all previous approaches have got it wrong, nor is it the case that these approaches have nothing to tell us. It is simply that there have not been satisfactory attempts made to select the most compelling ideas from these different fields to create a coherent theory with the capacity to illuminate each of the constituent pools of our knowledge.
Attempting to find some common ground between the many evolutionary theories and what we have learned from the social sciences is extraordinarily difficult. We know that the topic of human behaviour and evolution is one of the most difficult and complex subjects we face today. The most casual observation of human behaviour shows just how complex it is and the appreciation that we have of the rate of our development as a species in recent times suggests that something remarkable is going on. We are not going to achieve an acceptable understanding by working to understand the ever-smaller component parts of the whole gamut of human behaviour and evolution. There are just too many component parts for this to be practicable. We do not even have a model that could be used to guide us to work out what the component parts actually are. We have to go back to basics and construct a model from the ground up. We must do this by looking at the subject at the broadest level to try to find out whether there are patterns that might guide future research. We need to search for the common ground between the different, apparently conflicting, areas of research to give us the first stumbling pointers as to where we might go next.
You may ask why this has not been done before, when we are so clearly floundering in our attempts to create a credible synthesis. It is not simply that the subject is hard. Much of the work already described has been achieved only after very great effort. Scientific research, if it is worth doing, is generally very difficult. What has happened is that the way scientific research is done is constrained both by the way it is funded and the way that scientific research has been carried out.
If we are to understand why there has not already been a serious attempt at achieving such a synthesis we need to understand more about the way that scientific research has been conducted over the last century and more. Two hundred years ago, it was possible for one individual to have a fairly good understanding of most branches of science. We see in books, written in those years, evidence that the authors were, certainly by modern standards, widely read. It was easier then, of course, because there was so much less to read. Books were expensive, few were written and few were sold. Nevertheless what was available was devoured avidly. Men and women were able to keep up with developments not just in their own country. They were often reasonably fluent in two or three other European languages, allowing them to read what was going on in other parts of Europe. New thinking in one area would have been illuminated by a good working knowledge of many other areas of science and philosophy. Gradually as knowledge of the physical world grew, we began to understand that often the answers to a scientific problem were complex and could only be addressed by breaking down the problem into smaller parts. This allowed each of those parts to be studied and, hopefully, understood in turn. As a method this works well provided the results from each individual study are ultimately fed back to the higher level. This is essential because the view of the problem that caused it to be broken up must have arisen from a fundamental lack of understanding about what was going on ? so the component parts that were chosen for detailed research may not have been the best ones to study. You cannot break up a subject into its constituent parts reliably unless you understand that subject in toto, and if you understand it there is not much point in breaking it into component parts. In practice, however, what usually happened was that each of the constituent parts that was being studied was itself found to be too difficult to understand and so was then broken itself into even smaller parts and then yet smaller parts so that all sight of the original problem was lost. Today, vast armies of researchers are working at the bottom of the deepest intellectual chasms, crawling along the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass with little knowledge and less interest in the view from the mountain tops. Sir Arthur Eddington, the eminent physicist understood this. He wrote in The Harvest of a Quiet Eye (A.L. Mackay), 1977 ?We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about ?and??.
Such an approach is further encouraged by the way that research is funded. Money has always been short for funding research, whether it is government funded research or research that takes place within commercial companies. If a young scientist wishes to be funded then he or she will be told plainly that it is essential to have a clear, well-defined research programme that can be completed in a relatively short timescale, possibly two to three years, with a good probability of a successful outcome and a near certainty of there being publishable results at the end. Funding agencies are reluctant to support longer?term open-ended projects with an ill-defined outcome, particularly if those projects are trying to look at the larger issues that confront a subject. Longer-term commitments are difficult to make because funding agencies themselves are usually uncertain of their future for more than a small number of years ahead. Projects that try to look at a synthesis across several disciplines are usually dismissed as being far too vague and ill-defined, both in their nature and their likely outcome. Funding agencies are extremely risk averse. I personally have never received grants to support truly innovative research in astronomical instrumentation, despite many applications. One only gets grants for relatively bland, unexciting, run-of-the-mill research. The net effect is that what is funded tends to be preferentially at the level of the smallest components of our knowledge, relatively unadventurous and with the quickest returns for those funding it. Much of scientific research is incremental. Robert Pirsig understood this. He wrote, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974): ?Traditional scientific method had always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It?s good for seeing where we have been?.
We can see this more clearly by looking at the nature of the new discoveries that have been made over the last century or more. In doing this we have to distinguish carefully between genuine scientific discoveries and technological progress. A genuine scientific discovery can be distinguished from other work by asking whether that discovery caused us to look at an old problem in a different way, in a completely new light. There are many examples of these, and Darwin?s theory of evolution, first published in 1859 is one such discovery. The ideas that underlie the theory of natural selection led to a revolution in scientific thinking in many fields in addition to biology. Other examples include Maxwell?s work on the relationship between electric and magnetic fields, the work by Planck on quantum theory that changed forever our view of energy, Einstein?s remarkable work on special and general relativity and the discovery of the structure and function of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1952 which we have already described. These were all discoveries which completely changed the way that scientists understood things of very broad importance.
In the second half of the 20th century, however, progress was much less dramatic in its impact. Progress here was much less a matter of fundamental discoveries and more a matter of technological improvements. Good examples here include the sequencing of the human genome, begun in 1990 and finished substantially by 2003. In this case it was decided to make a comprehensive analysis of the structure of the human genome initially by dividing the chromosomes into smaller fragments, which could be characterised, and then ordering them to correspond to their respective locations within each chromosome. The final outcome was a genome map that describes the order of the genes and other markers together with the spacing between them within the DNA sequence. The programme also included the design of software (particularly database) tools that gave researchers easy access to that entire human genome sequence so that it could act as a tool for their own research efforts. This was a massive task involving a very large number of researchers both in United States and in the United Kingdom. The information that has been generated by this work is undoubtedly of great importance in many areas. It is, however, the result of the relatively mechanical, repetitive business of simply breaking up the DNA fragments, making up large numbers of DNA sequencing gels and running those gels in automated machines. Finally, all the researcher has to do is to use a fabulous amount of computer time to synthesise the output sequences of each fragment into one complete sequence of human DNA.
Another example is in the field of computer technology. Every year there has been a substantial improvement in the processing speed of computers in parallel with a corresponding drop in the real cost of computing power. It is easy to forget that it is barely 25 years since the first personal computer sat on someone?s desk. Those early machines were from companies such as Apple, Sinclair and then, in 1981, the IBM PC. The prices of those computers then as now were in the region of $1000-2000 but the performance has changed beyond all recognition. The first Sinclair computer ran at 3.2MHz (these days a more typical figure is a thousand times faster at 3GHz). It was supplied with a standard 1KB memory whereas nowadays it is quite common for a computer to be supplied with a million times that amount of memory (1GB). The earliest PCs had no hard disk, and programmes could only be loaded slowly and with difficulty. Screens had several lines of text on them but the idea of the infinitely more sophisticated Windows-based operating systems were quite unthinkable because there was no way the computer power of those early machines could handle such activities. One of the most improbable predictions made about computers has, incredibly, come true. In 1965, Gordon E Moore, one of the founders of Intel, noticed that the number of components in an integrated circuit doubled roughly once a year. At the time he said this might go on for 10 years and would then stop. In fact, over 40 years later, it turns out that the processing power of computers doubles in around 18 months and there is no evidence that the limit of this is in sight. In some areas, the rate of progress might almost be accelerating. Every few months there is an announcement made that computer technology has finally reached its limits and a radical new approach is needed. Miraculously yet another solution crawls out of the woodwork to allow Moore?s Law to continue.
Computer development is something that is particularly well-suited to developments focusing on the smallest component parts. Within the electronics industry the most important thing that has to be done with any new component is specifying very clearly its interface (mechanical, electrical and thermal) and what sort of electrical signals (voltages, frequencies and waveforms) are needed to drive it. Electronics designers require that information to allow them to integrate that new component within their own subassembly. That subassembly in turn always has a well-documented interface specification so that designers who wish to use that subassembly in their own instrument can do so with relatively little difficulty. In this way computer systems have been able to bootstrap their performance year after year to give this astonishing development in performance. The power of computers has transformed our lives by providing us with easy and convenient and quick access to e-mail and the Internet. Without in any way trying to underplay the importance of these developments, what has happened is clearly technological development rather than an invention that has illuminated other aspects of science.
Names of Nobel prizewinners in almost any subject from the first half of the 20th century will be recognisable by many people and not just those who specialise in a particular subject. In the second half of the 20th century very few of the names will be familiar. The prize-winning work has been on a smaller and more specialist component of the subject. Part of this may be because there are simply fewer fundamental discoveries left to be made. Many of the discoveries made a century ago used remarkably simple apparatus. Major discoveries could be made on a much lower budget partly because salaries were low and equipment relatively inexpensive because it was all handmade. However, even today there certainly are areas of our understanding which are a long way from being solved and understood. These include, for example, the nature of the dark energy which is presently thought to be accelerating the expansion of our universe. But there is little evidence today of people trying to think carefully about the fundamental assumptions on which a broad range of current research is based. Researchers avoid addressing profitable lines of inquiry that would come from bringing together much of the knowledge we have of these component parts. What is missing is an appreciation of the importance of consilience.
The Importance of Consilience
What we need is for some scientists to devote their energies to taking a much broader view of their core subject and its relationship to others. The pressure on scientists these days to raise funds, sit on committees, run their departments and maintain a publication stream is so great that there is no time for such a luxury. As a consequence this role is increasingly being taken up by popular science writers who know that their readers will simply not be interested in the minutiae of a particular research field and instead will demand to know what it?s all about, what it all means and where is it going. Popular science writers need to be able to create a meaningful synthesis if their readers are to make any sense of the field and this is what I am trying to do here. They have to read much more widely and although they are no doubt less well informed about particular specialist areas they are still able to abstract what is going on over a much wider range than anyone actually working at the coalface of a particular topic. The importance of this approach has been articulated particularly well by E.O. Wilson in his remarkable book Consilience (1998). Consilience was defined by William Whewell in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences published in 1840 where he said that it occurs when a discovery using one set of facts coincides with another discovery made using a different set of facts. It was one of the things that made the years of the Enlightenment so extraordinarily productive in the arts, the sciences, economics and philosophy because it was simply the way that people in those days actually thought. It is something that is increasingly uncommon and with our ways of managing scientific discovery is becoming less and less likely to happen in the future.
If we are to make any sense of what is at the core of the human condition then we need to discover some way of finding that essential consilience across a range of disparate disciplines each of which has its own practitioners, each of which uses its own language and analytic techniques. The outcome is inevitably confusion and this confusion is what we have here. The current position with human behaviour and evolution was perhaps best summarised by E. O. Wilson in Consilience (1998) when he said:
Never - I do not think that is too strong a word - have social scientists been able to embed their narratives in the physical realities of human biology and psychology, even though it is surely there.... We know that virtually all of human behaviour is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature. What, in the final analysis, joined the deep, mostly genetic history of the species as a whole to the most recent cultural histories of its far-flung societies? It can be stated as a problem to be solved, the central problem of the social sciences and humanities, and simultaneously one of the great remaining problems of the natural sciences. At the present time no one has a solution.
Scientists appreciate that a lot of what they study is indeed extremely complex. In order to stop their heads hurting too much they find it much easier to work with a model or paradigm. The paradigm in this context (it has become a much misused word recently) can be thought of as a relatively short broad-brush story that covers the main features of the model. It provides a framework within which research continues. In his extraordinarily influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962: second edition in 1970), Thomas Kuhn said that scientific progress continues normally for much of the time using the techniques and ideas developed by others but occasionally undergoes a revisionary revolution that causes a shift in the paradigm and in some cases throws up a completely new paradigm to replace that previously used. Kuhn believed that scientists tend not to question the guiding theories that make up the paradigm?s framework they work within. Anomalies thrown up by their work tend to be ignored or explained away. Eventually a sufficient number of anomalies occur that leads to a crisis of confidence within the subject. The words of E. O. Wilson quoted above make it clear that there is now such a crisis in the study of human evolution and behaviour. What is proposed here is an attempt to resolve these anomalies by developing a new paradigm.
The Supergene Hypothesis
We have seen that our biological evolution as a species must have slowed to an imperceptible rate because there are just too many of us for this evolution to proceed at a significant speed. We have also seen that our social evolution as a species is progressing rapidly, at a rate incomparably faster than is now or was ever possible biologically. This is almost the only aspect of being human that can now evolve. Our evolution and behaviour are inextricably linked. Our speed of evolution requires a driving mechanism that is strong and highly directed along our evolutionary path. It is our search for this driver that concerns us now. If, for the moment, we put to one side our biogenes and think about everything else that makes us an individual then what we are trying to understand is how this ?everything else? actually evolves. There have been many attempts to define what it is that this ?everything else? actually is. Sometimes it has been called culture, though definitions of this are inconsistent. Margaret Mead (1959) defined culture has the ?systematic body of learned behaviour which is transmitted from parents to children?. Boyd and Richerson in Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985) define it as ?the transmission from one generation to the next, the teaching and imitation, of knowledge, values and other factors that influence behaviour?. Most definitions look for a clear route of transmission from generation to generation and some are quite restrictive about what may be included within the definition of ?culture?. In fact, discussions of cultural transmission tend to emphasise valuable pieces of information and ideas rather than the general detritus that makes up so much of what is in our minds. To separate out one class of information from another is to make a value judgment that cannot be sustained on the basis of what we know about human behaviour and its evolution.
There is a further problem with most concepts of ?culture? that academics at least subconsciously associate with the more serious and valuable components of our civilisation. It is in these that we see the greatest disparity between the culture of primitive tribes and modern Western society. If, however, we look at the day-to day elementary behaviour of individuals and social groups then there is much more similarity between them. The way that families and friends behave with one another it is remarkably consistent across all societies. I remember many years ago watching a television programme about a remote tribe in Central or South America. Many members of the tribe were sitting in a semicircle around a fire discussing something with great energy. One imagined some important aspect of their very primitive existence needed to be thrashed out. At this point the program stopped and rewound to show what we had seen, viewed from a different angle. It turned out that in a thatched hut was a colour television set and petrol generator. They were all watching Dallas, a popular soap opera set amongst the obscenely rich of the oil?producing part of Texas ? an environment about as alien from this primitive society that one could imagine. The program they were watching was being translated by one of the tribe into their own language and the tribe are now discussing the complexities of that episode. What was most astonishing was that these primitive tribes people had an excellent appreciation of the social dynamics and behavioural problems in this soap opera. The culture was about as alien as it could be but the behaviour and sociology of the situation was instantly recognisable to them. In The New Science (1725), the Italian philosopher, Giambattist Vico, wrote: ?uniform ideas originating among the entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth?. I think that if we are going to understand the fundamentals of human behaviour we need to understand it at this basic level because that is what the essence of our humanity is. It is the way that we behave at an instinctive level which unites the whole of humanity and which is of great importance. Behaviour, when confronted with the most important decisions, is affected and is inevitably complicated by the much wider consequences of such decisions .
We need to find an expression that covers absolutely everything that makes us the way we are in addition to what is coded in our biogenes. I believe that we can gain insight into the way that the ?everything else? works and evolves by recognising that it has gene-like properties and behaves in gene-like ways. The idea that culture might work in a way analogous to our biogenes was suggested by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976). He came up with the concept of a ?meme? to describe the fundamental element of culture. As discussed earlier, he suggested that our brains are infected by memes that struggle for ascendancy, and that those that are successful are able to propagate to other brains. The struggle between memes was an analogy with his view of the struggle between our biogenes for ascendancy.
A problem with Dawkins?s meme-orientated approach is the way that he and Blackmore use the language of ?a gene for? ? and now ?a meme for? ? that we discussed earlier. We have seen in Chapter 2 that although there are individual genes that are particularly associated with the absence or presence of a particular protein, it is normally the case that genes work together in a cooperative manner. The list of genes produced by the Human Genome Project is often described as the recipe book of life. This is quite incorrect, as we have seen earlier. The list of genes is no different, in cookery terms, from a list of ingredients ? indeed, a list that makes no mention of quantities. We would not get far with such a cookery book. Our biogenes work in a complex interaction with many other biogenes and other cellular components. The way these combinations of genes are expressed depends critically on the precise cellular environment in which they find themselves. We need to think of what goes on in our brains in a much less reductionist way than is suggested by memetics if we are to avoid making the same mistakes as those which compromise a lot of scientific progress today. Every tiny opinion, idea or memory we have, no matter how trivial, is built into a massively complex structure which has been wired as part of the 100 million million connections in our brain. Attempting to select any miniscule part to make it uniquely identifiable is simply missing the point. We may feel more comfortable taking a subject that is difficult to think about and breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces. It is tempting and often it works but in this case we have to resist this impulse and think about much larger structures in our brains and how they might interact with one another and with the brain structures of other individuals and other groups. Another problem with memetics is the view of the brain as being a relatively passive substrate within which memes battle for ascendancy.
Immortality is something that every animal species seeks. It is not, however, yet on offer. Each and every creature has a finite lifetime and ultimately each of us must die. All species pass on to future generations their biogenes and achieve an approximation to immortality that way. That approximation to immortality is aided by an evolutionary process that was first recognised by Darwin, a process of continually improving the organism?s adaptation to its environment. Humans can do this as well but our desire for immortality now goes much deeper than that and is no longer satisfied with Darwinian evolutionary timescales. We are much more than is represented by our biogenes. What is inside ourselves, contained within our brains and evolving continually throughout our lifetime makes each of us unique. Each of us is an incredible creation and the vast store of knowledge and experience that we have accumulated during our lifetime is very special. The biological imperatives that push for biological immortality also demand that immortality for what is in our minds. Our need to pass on as much as we can of everything else that makes us what we are over and above our biogenes is, I believe, what motivates us to behave the way we do. I have called the ?everything else? our supergenes because these mental constructs function in many ways analogous to the way our biogenes function. They are expressed differently depending on the social environment and may be propagated more or less effectively depending on the degree to which they are adapted to that social environment. It is the propagation of these supergenes that is of fundamental importance to us individually and collectively.
Some readers may find the concept of supergenes elusive and too poorly defined for their taste. We are used to thinking of other concepts in this manner which are difficult to identify, locate or quantify. We do not try to break into component parts the concepts of intelligence or beauty or creativity. We describe them in different ways so we feel quite comfortable not being able to identify their irreducible component parts. There is no prospect of us being able to extract the elementary parts of our supergene pool and put them into a gene-sequencing machine as we can do with our biogenes. Although there is no doubt that our biogenes are quite extraordinary in what they represent, the capacity of our supergenes to do so much more is even more remarkable. Over thousands of generations we have developed a way of evolving now that our evolution as a species has stalled biologically. What is evolving now is not what is in our biology. It is what is in our minds, and it is evolving at a very great rate.
The analogy between supergenes and biogenes is helpful but it is just an analogy and there are areas where there are marked differences between the two. For me the most important element of Darwinian theory is the way natural selection acts on the biogenes of each individual so that those best adapted to their physical environment are most likely to survive into later generations. We are social animals and our lives are substantially determined by our social environment. If we are successful within that social environment we progress in ways that we desire and toward goals that we value. As individuals we are defined by our physical appearance, a manifestation of our biogenes and our social appearance which is the manifestation of everything that is within our brains. Modern humans are much more affected by their social adaptation and their success comes from the way they express what is within their brains and the degree to which that expression is optimally adapted to their social environment. It is this analogy between the way that we are now selected for or against by our adaption to our social environment and the way that other creatures are selected for or against depending on their adaption to their physical environment that for me validates the phrase ourSupergenes.
Our supergene pool represents everything that we are that is not determined by our biogenes. Essentially it is a phrase that covers everything, no matter how trivial, that is contained in our brains, marked out by the extraordinarily complex network of neural interconnections. It is something which is continually evolving as a consequence of the multiple parallel processes going on inside our minds largely at a subconscious level. As social animals we interact all the time with others of our own species. It is as part of these interactions that our own supergene pool is continually being modified and updated as are the supergene pools of everyone around us. Our success as a species is almost certainly because of our use of language and the way that language has allowed us to take the division of labour to an extraordinary level. The way we work together in our complex society means that we must be, in some way, tuned into everything and everyone around us so that all the time we are exchanging tiny, elementary messages that are being processed in our brains. The evolutionary timescales on which our supergene pools work are therefore very short, indeed particularly when compared to the million year timescales of biogene evolution. It is this very short evolutionary timescale that has allowed our society to evolve as rapidly as it has, and as it will do in the future.
These elementary transactions between us are interactions between our supergene pools and therefore we can pass on parts of our own supergene pool to others no matter who they might be or what age they might be. As a mechanism for propagating elements of ourselves to others it is far reaching. Our biogenes may only be passed to our children and then only a few times in our lifetime. Our supergenes may be passed to anyone we have contact with. Elements that we absorb from others that allow us to adapt a better to our social environment will propagate in preference to those that diminish our adaptation. All the time our supergene pool is being progressively enhanced in the sense of its degree of social adaptation.
The clearest downside of the way that our supergenes work is that the genetic stability that biogenes have consequent on their much longer evolutionary timescales is much poorer for supergenes. It is easy for supergene patterns to develop that are adequately adapted within a group yet are poorly adapted to the broader society. This is basically how groups with extremist views come into being and we shall look at this in a later chapter.
As elements of our supergene pool are taken up by others, a tiny part of what we have learned through experience, or by synthesis in our own minds, is propagated to another. Those ideas will no longer be lost when we die. I believe that it is our need for a degree of immortality for some aspects of our supergene pool that is the driving force which provides a continuing pressure to improve our supergene pool and to propagate parts of it to others. We cannot escape from our physical and mortal bodies: death is inevitable, but as a species we have found a radical new way of enhancing our gene pool by adding a social dimension. Our biogenes are still important to us but their evolution has largely ceased. It is our supergenes that will take us forward into the distant future.
We are propagating our supergenes in competition with everyone else wishing to propagate their own supergenes just as we are propagating our biogenes in competition with others. Our sexual drives to reproduce biologically vary greatly from individual to individual and we should expect our social drives to propagate our supergenes will also vary greatly from individual to individual. In some there may be little evidence of this but in others, ambition and the drive to succeed may be highly visible. We may achieve this by cooperating with other individuals in a social group so that we can collectively propagate our supergenes. Each of us is trying to achieve some measure of success within our own lifetime, where each of us may define success in our own terms. We need to find a way of getting attention and a degree of control of our social circumstances so that we can increase our influence and thereby gain the power and other symbols of success within our society. As our power and influence increases so do our opportunities for successful propagation of our supergenes. Darwin?s extraordinarily successful theory of natural selection explains how animals that are better adapted to their environment survive preferentially so that they are more likely to pass on their biogenes to subsequent generations. What we humans want to pass on is as much as possible of what we are as humans ? social creatures that have achieved an understanding of so many things that we do not want to be lost when we die. Our achievements and our creations are much more important to us than our biogenes. You only need to ask your friends what they would like to continue after they have gone. If they have children they will be happy that their line continues but their main emphasis will be on some part of their achievements ? whether it is in the world outside the home or just the happiness and contentment that they have found within their society. We wish to be remembered for what we have achieved much more than our reproductive success. We erect monuments to the dead at least in part because we hope some monument will be raised to ourselves, however insignificant.
I am not trying to assert that we are all trying to achieve extremes of wealth, power or influence. Rather, my contention is that these are what set the sense of direction in which we want our supergene pool to evolve. Nor do we really expect to win the lottery or to be plucked from the crowd to run the country. We do want to improve our lot in life and to improve our status in the eyes of family, friends and colleagues. What matters to us is not the absolute levels of wealth, power and influence but, rather, what we feel we have in comparison to others. Indeed, several studies have indicated that happiness is a state in which you have slightly more resources (money, etc.) than your close friends and contacts. Too much more, and you become isolated from your friends and contacts. This often happens when individuals win the lottery, for example.
A significant part of our behaviour now is directed towards propagating these supergenes. Our behaviour is dominated by this imperative, and the appropriateness of that behaviour determines our fitness to propagate our supergenes in the competitive social environments in which we find ourselves. It is, in the most Darwinian way, the survival of the fittest, with natural selection now acting on our supergenes in the way it has acted on our biogenes for millions of years. We shall look next at how this concept can be developed in a way that illuminates human behaviour and perhaps gives some direction to understanding how human society might evolve in the future.
How Did Supergenes Arise?
What I think happened is that for millions of years our ancestors did indeed survive by Darwinian biological adaption to their varying environments, but at some stage we developed the capacity for language. The capacity to communicate and learn from others gave humans an extraordinary advantage over other species. We know from recent evidence that our climate has been quite changeable for many thousands of years on timescales much shorter than those Darwinian evolution can address. Human ability to manage these changes effectively has meant that we have survived in a variety of demanding and variable environments that many other species can no longer inhabit. Beyond that, however, language gave us the critical tool that allowed us to develop a much more complex society ? one where the division of labour allowed us to do whatever we did best within a social context and to benefit from the work of others doing what they in turn did best. The
biological inheritance that we had in that distant time, perhaps 40,000 years ago, when our social evolution started to dominate was much less important in constraining behaviour than evolutionary psychologists believe. There is good evidence that we had, at that time, a well-developed capacity for language since we were clearly working in social, cooperative groups. There is little convincing evidence that we had many of our behaviour patterns pre-programmed into our brains, over and above our innate capacity for language and cooperation encoded in our biogenes. I also believe that our brains were then, as they are now, phenomenal learning machines, ready to absorb any and every experience so as to improve our immediate adaptation to our environment. It may be that the key to understanding our adaptability is contained in those terrible events about 40,000 years ago that led to the near extinction of our species. The tiny numbers of individuals that survived must have been quite exceptionally adaptable, so that the evolutionary processes of natural selection at that point were working incredibly rapidly and effectively. In many ways these details of our ?starting point? are not central to this hypothesis. Since that starting point, whenever it might have been and whatever might have triggered it, I believe that we find ourselves now engaged in another, significantly enhanced, process of natural selection whereby those of us who are better adapted to our social environments find that we can pass on to others more of what we have achieved. If we are successful we can influence others and other groups so that our particular way of doing things survives by a mixture of cooperation and in competition with others. This is a competitive business, with each of us struggling at some level to succeed. The better we are adapted socially to the circumstances we find ourselves in, the greater social fitness we have and the more successful we will be within that society. It is as if we have expanded our biogene pool with additional gene-like characteristics so that we find ourselves engaged in a much more complex struggle for survival than experienced by most other animal species. It is this combination of our biogenes, together with this incredible enhancement, our supergenes, that makes us unique amongst the terrestrial animal kingdom.
These ideas are not intended to deny the importance of our biological inheritance but there is no doubt that increasingly we take steps to counteract any biological weaknesses that we might have, benefiting from the rapid advance in the medical sciences. However, we must accept that evolutionary models rooted exclusively or largely in our biological inheritance simply do not seem to work well enough. Our supergene pool is very substantial, with different subsets expressed in different social environments. Our success in each of those environments depends on how well we connect with them, just how well adapted we are to that social group and just how well we cooperate with them. There is a competitive component in our relationship with other humans to improve ourselves within each group we engage with, trying to increase our status so that we can influence others in the group. In this way our supergenes are propagated not just to subsequent generations but to others of our own or indeed of earlier generations.
Looking at the way our supergenes are established, developed and are propagated between individuals and groups will give us insights into the way we work in groups and in society in general. It will also let us develop models of how we can change behaviour patterns by managing and manipulating supergene pools.
The Life Cycle of the Supergene
In subsequent chapters I shall look at various aspects of human behaviour and evolution that may be better understood within the framework of the supergene hypothesis. First, it is helpful to think about where our supergenes come from, how they are developed and evolve and, in particular, how they are propagated.
A child is born with a complete set of biogenes but little in the way of supergenes. Its survival in a social world depends on it acquiring a comprehensive set of supergenes that will allow it to function successfully as an adult and pass on some of its supergenes to others. It is born programmed to survive and to seek some degree of its own immortality. It must struggle to succeed in competition with others within its peer group. The child starts by learning from its parents how to relate to them and others, and how to manipulate others, including its parents, in order to get whatever it needs, whether it is food, comfort or entertainment. Rapidly the young child?s supergene pool is being assembled from a mixture of learning from others and developing its own unique social strategies. The child develops strategies to achieve what it wants, understanding how other people can contribute to the well-being of the child and also realising that others are interested in the child and that the child has something to offer those with whom it comes into contact. Surprisingly early, children start to be influenced increasingly by other children and learn how to survive and succeed in children?s groups. Eventually their supergene interactions are dominated by peer group interactions and the influence of parents is relatively diminished. The child wants to become successful, and that success is measured by the child?s place within the children?s social groups. It does not want to become a successful member of the parent group because that is not a group it will ever have to struggle with for the ascendancy of its own supergenes. The child begins to understand that its successful membership of the group depends on just those elements social psychologists have found important in adult groups for the individual to feel comfortable and capable within their social environment. At some level any member of the group must be able to command the attention of the group. He or she needs to feel a sense of belonging to the group and be able to understand its values. The individual needs to trust the group and feel that the group trusts the individual. The individual can then begin to influence other members of the group and the group members can also start to influence the individual. We can look at a great variety of human behaviour and understand them in terms of individuals seeking attention and then using that attention to influence others. We choose our clothes and our manner of speaking so that we fit in with the group, and by fitting in better we will find ourselves more highly regarded by members of the group and therefore more effective within the group. We want others to change very slightly so that they become more like ourselves, to reflect our values and our way of seeing things and doing things. We want members of the group to do things the way we do them, to do things the way we approve of and not to do things we think are wrong. Everyone else in the group is trying to influence the others in just the same way. In many groups this process continues at a very subtle level, but if you start to look at a group and the way it functions you will soon understand how important this process is to the way people are with one another. We are significantly more keen to tell others about ourselves ? about what we have been doing and what our views are ? than we are to listen to others.
Nevertheless we are still open to the influence of others. We are always interested in approaches to any aspect of life, ideas and attitudes that complement our own. Our minds are constantly absorbing information from our environment and using that information to improve what is already in our mind. Much of this happens at a very simple, elementary level and yet it is nevertheless happening. We might admire what someone is wearing or the car they are driving or the way they have decorated the house. We may find their opinions interesting enough to make us reconsider our own on the matter. We all know from experience that if we have a discussion with someone about something then they seldom change their views significantly during the discussion. All we can hope for is that the next time they talk about it their views will be slightly more closely aligned to our own. We may also feel that by emulating someone or absorbing some part of their opinions that we acquire some degree of their status in society, however slight. What we are is a complex and subtle combination of what we have experienced in our lives. We may feel that we have original thoughts and indeed we do, and we have our own unique experiences but a great deal of what we are is an amalgam of a lifetime?s experience as social animals in a social environment. We enhance our own supergene pool from those of others, combining them differently and adding some of our own to create our own unique combination. If we are successful in creating a powerful and appealing supergene pool then we can propagate parts of that to others. Supergenes are exchanged more successfully if they are better adapted to the social situation in which they are expressed. Behaving badly or inappropriately can lead to others worsening their opinion of one, causing those supergenes to be resisted and indeed causing existing supergenes that may already have been accepted from a badly behaved individual to be discarded as well. If we feel we have gained a lot from someone we trust, finding that trust betrayed can cause us to re-evaluate much of what we have incorporated in our own supergene pool from that individual. If we are particularly successful and ambitious then we will find that we progress in the social hierarchy to positions within the group or to groups of increasing status where our opportunities to propagate our supergenes are greater. As we acquire more status we increase our influence on others and increase the amount of power at our disposal.
The General Characteristics of Supergenes
The concept of supergenes includes everything that we are that is not contained within our biogenes. It includes all the values that underlie our lives and our relationships with others. It includes the way we feel about ourselves, the way we relate to members of our family, our partners and our children. It includes our love of music and our appreciation of beauty. It includes the way we think and the way we feel, the way we present ourselves and the way we act, the way we drive a car and the way we use a computer, the way we smile and the way we cry. It includes our knowledge and our experience of the world. It includes our joys and our disappointments. It is everything that we feel ourselves to be. At some level we have an idea of our own identity, a sense of self, our character and personality. We feel that the way we are now, the place that we have reached within ourselves and within our family, our community and society at large is something that we value. We may not show these feelings, but without a sense of our own value at some level we simply could not function as sentient social creatures. Each of us knows instinctively that all these things that make up our personality in the broadest sense is something too precious simply to be lost when we die. We are driven to share with others what we are and what we know and understand by passing it on to our peers as well as to later generations. What we are seeking is a kind of immortality, without recourse to religion. What we can pass on to others is not our entire supergene pool but only various subsets that become expressed in particular environments, but each tiny transfer of some part of our supergenes happens millions of times in our lifetime and the cumulative transfer can be substantial.
A major difference between supergenes and biogenes is that, unlike our biogenes, our supergene pool can be added to and subtracted from by absorbing supergene components from others. Supergenes can be removed and replaced for example by simply learning to do something differently. Our supergenes can be expanded by a new experience such as reading a book or having a conversation with someone else. There is no analogue of this in biogenetics. Our biogene complement is established at conception and cannot change significantly throughout our lives. Our individual supergenes can evolve with time under external influences as we learn more, as we mature and as we think about things and begin to understand something differently. By continuingly refining our supergenes in this way we can dynamically improve our social adaptation, thereby increasing our ability to propagate parts of our own (now improved) supergene pool. Lucretius, the Roman poet and author of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe) wrote that ?Some groups increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life?.
Our biogenes are expressed very differently in different biological (cellular) environments. The cells in the retina of our eyes are very different from the cells in our liver. The DNA in the cells in these two locations is identical but the way that DNA is expressed is radically different. The situation is the same with our supergene pool, the sum total of everything contained in our minds. Each of us expresses a subset of our supergene pool in the presence of other people. We have certain subsets of supergenes that we express with our partners and with our families. Our way of behaving with them and relating to them is unique and would not be appropriate when relating to even very close friends. We then express different subsets of our supergene pool when dealing with friends. These subsets of supergenes may share many of the values of the subset we use with the family yet the combinations used will be subtly different. There are things, for example, we might discuss with a partner that we would never discuss with a close friend. There are details of our financial affairs we might prefer to keep from a friend and indeed from one?s children but perhaps not from a partner. At a dinner party with a group of friends again we will be working with yet further subsets of our supergene pool. We seem to have the ability within our brains to switch contexts fluently so that if a small child interrupts a dinner party with friends we can talk to the child and engage with his or her supergenes without compromising our engagement with the dinner party group or with the supergenes of the guests. This hierarchy in supergene subset management extends to all other groups such as work colleagues, clubs, professional organisations, etc., right up to the largest groups such as those which define one?s nationality. For each social environment we extract from our entire supergene pool a subset that is appropriate to that environment. Using the wrong supergene set in a particular situation (a social faux pas) can compromise the capacity of an individual to propagate any other supergenes successfully in that context.
One of the first psychologists to look at these issues was William James, brother of the novelist Henry James. William James clearly understood the way that we express a different part of our persona, essentially our supergenes. In his influential book, Multiple Selves (1890, page 294), he writes:
Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him and carry an image of him in their mind.................................................................................................................... but as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his ?tough? young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers as to the labourers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a division of the man into several selves; and this may be a discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere; or it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labour, as where one tender to the children is turned to the soldiers or prisoners under his command.
We are complicated creatures with a chameleon-like capacity to project a variable persona (supergene subset) depending on the circumstances we are dealing with. This persona will be affected by our position within the group, our status within the group, and what we are trying to achieve within the group. It will depend on what our ambitions are within the group and what ambitions we might have for the group in its relationship with the outside world. Because we belong to a group, we expect to be influenced by the group and we trust the group to give us a chance to influence it. Each member of the group is, at some level, competing with every other member for influence and for the chance to make the group so it better reflects his or her own views, ideals and attitudes. It is from the group that we get so much of what we are. Oscar Wilde wrote: ?Most people are other people. Their thoughts are somebody else?s opinions. Their lives are mimicry. Their passions a quotation?. Similarly, George Grant in 1959 said: ?We listen to others to discover what we ourselves believe?.
Everyone we meet is doing the same. When we interact with any individual or any group what we are doing is exchanging and comparing components of our supergene pools which each of us is prepared to express in that situation. Our principle, deeply subconscious motivation is to propagate as many components of our own supergene pool as we can so that some of the components of our supergenes become accepted and absorbed into the supergene pool of the people we are interacting with. We work continually to enhance the quality of our own supergene pool since this will improve our ability to propagate our own supergenes. This is the fundamental motivation that underlies supergene propagation. We want our supergenes to survive because they represent what we really are and what we have achieved in life. We can improve our chances of propagating our supergenes by gaining wealth and power and influence. Wealth and power and influence are inevitably our goals because they are seen as giving better opportunities for supergene propagation both in terms of the quantity and quality of opportunity. Increased wealth, power or influence are associated with improved life expectancy, further increasing the opportunities to propagate one?s supergenes.
Rich and powerful people always wish to be richer and more powerful. We can never have enough. Our brains are programmed to get used to almost anything and soon we want more. We always want more because that is the way we are driven. Without this drive always to do more and to do better the human race would have achieved very little indeed. Individuals who are rich and powerful and have influence have achieved their position often by working very hard for it. To wonder why they keep working hard at it because they already have so much is to miss the point that this drive for self improvement is so fundamental to the human condition that it is not attenuated by success. The struggle for this gradual, progressive improvement in status and therefore influence is ultimately the way that wealth and power is achieved. The extent to which the struggle succeeds depends on how well we match ambition to the opportunities available, the extent to which our supergene pool is expressed to give the maximum fitness to the social environment within which we compete for survival. Schopenhauer, the rather pessimistic German philosopher, wrote in 1819: ?Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself an individual, in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, erring; the desires of the will are limitless, it claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives rise to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its longings, set a goal to its infinite cravings, and fill the bottomless abyss of its heart.... I would certainly be inclined to express this slightly more lightheartedly that the message is clear.?
So the battle lines are drawn for the struggle that is a human life. To have any kind of immortality, we need to leave behind something of what we make of our lives. We learn how to survive and succeed in a competitive social environment. We struggle to gain influence over others by fair means or foul, and use the power that that influence confers to make others just a little bit more like ourselves. We manipulate our supergene pool by absorbing the supergenes from others that we think will improve us and express a subset of those supergenes to maximise our influence in any particular social context. Those supergenes are expressed in a way that makes them more likely to be absorbed by others and incorporated in their supergene pools. Each time this happens we have achieved some elementary immortality and it is this, repeated throughout our lives, that provides the sum total of our success or otherwise in leaving our mark on the world and on the evolution of our species.
In order to understand the importance of supergenes in our society we need to look carefully at the origins of our social structures both historically and how they are integrated within our brains as a consequence of our upbringing as children and young adults. This is what we will look at next.
Chapter 5
The Development and Behaviour of Homo Sapiens
Iam convinced that if we are to have any chance of developing an understanding of human behaviour we need to concentrate on the simplest aspects of it since those are much more likely to be universal to the human condition. I do not believe we will get anywhere by trying to understand the hunting rituals of primitive tribes in remote parts of Indonesia or the Amazon jungle. Rather, by asking ourselves to think more deeply about why we did something and then taking the role of the annoying child who responds to every explanation with ?but why??, will we start to understand the real reasons that we do something. It is essential to dig down beneath the obvious explanations such as ?because that?s what I like to do? to try to reach the fundamental bedrock of human behaviour. I am also convinced that actually we already do know within ourselves what is going on.
A technique used by physicists when trying to understand the relationship or interface of an object with its environment is to imagine an invisible surface such as a sphere around the object and then think about what it is that crosses the surface of that sphere. If we think about a single human person surrounded by this imaginary surface, we can list everything coming inwards and going outwards. We are interested in behaviour and so we will neglect food, air and water coming in through the surface and any excretions passing outwards. The individual inside the imaginary surface receives a wide variety of pieces of information from the external world in many forms. The individual also transmits many other pieces of information as a consequence of what is going on inside his or her mind. The brain is extraordinarily powerful and is continually processing the information coming into the brain which also holds the sum total of the individual?s experience and knowledge from a lifetime on the planet. The brain then controls the body of the individual and this causes rather different information to be transmitted back out again through this surrounding invisible surface. Unless you wish to invoke some supernatural, god-like influence that transcends this surrounding surface then this is all there is, a surface through which ingoing and outgoing messages are being passed. We continually experience our physical environment which has a significant effect on our behaviour. We also want to feel comfortable in the environment, partly so that we feel good about ourselves and partly because we want to be ready to meet other humans, also surrounded by their own all-enclosing invisible surfaces. In the presence of other humans the messages that are exchanged between us become more complicated. They include sounds such as language but they also include many other forms of communication such as body language. The presence of other humans does not eliminate the influence of the physical environment and it continues to be a significant player in modulating the form and nature of the messages that an individual gives and receives.
Let us try to think of some examples of the way we interact with our environment and with the people we meet. So let us start with getting out of bed this morning. When we begin the day we have to create for ourselves a comfortable identity within which we can function effectively. You would never simply get out of bed and walk out the door to get on with the day because you have to prepare yourself for everything that might happen to you. You most likely think about what today might hold and what you are going to be doing and possibly what the weather might be like. You make a decision about what to wear. You have chosen a dress or a tie from what was available. Why did you choose that dress this particular morning? Yes, I know you thought you would like to, but why? Yes, I?m sure you would look nice in it, but why did you think you would look nicer in that dress than another? You would have thought about the people you will meet, where you will meet them and what will be the purpose of those meetings. All meetings have a purpose even if it?s purely a social one, such as having lunch with a friend. Every meeting you go to has (or least it should have) something in it for you. You know that many of your clothes would be inappropriate for the day ahead because you would feel uncomfortable socially if they were not right. We all have a need to conform to some degree and yet to make sure that we stand out to an extent that is constructive (dressing thoughtfully indicates interest and concern in the people you will meet) and not destructive (wearing grubby jeans when meeting a group of good friends at a quality restaurant for lunch) since that might make you feel less comfortable in that environment. Of course, you may feel that you really need to stand out and so dress eccentrically, but that, again, will be done for the same reason ? to maximise your influence in the social situation that you will find yourself. Indeed it is interesting to think of the social dynamics involved in a lunch with good friends. Before you arrive you know that some of your friends are better listeners than others. Some are much more interested to tell you what they have been doing and to impress you about their successes since last you met. Others are better at balancing an interest in you with your interest in them. Someone who sits in silence will be felt not to be participating in a group and therefore not to be interested in the others. That will create a bad impression on the others because they will find they have no prospect of interacting with that individual, and they will be slightly less likely to invite the nonparticipant for the next lunch. Either way, individuals project a public face of what they feel within themselves. They are much less likely to tell you about things that could diminish your respect for them than they are to tell you things you might admire. It is not actually dishonesty, rather it is just that we are inclined to project the face we want others to see. We want to impress others, we want them to feel inclined to become a little bit more like ourselves. Within groups of friends these feelings and the social communications involved are very subtle, and all, more or less, want the group to continue much as it always has and be further strengthened by the meeting. That means its values need to be reinforced and the sharing of ideas and their enhancement is at the core of keeping the group active and vibrant. Everything we do involves, therefore, tiny exchanges of information, tiny messages sent from one individual to others. All the messages that we send originate within our minds and our success as a social creature depends on our capacity to match the messages we transmit with the environment we are in and the interests of the others who will receive those messages. It is the content of our minds that I call our supergene pool. Everything we transmit is an expression of some small subset of this supergene pool and everything we receive from others is a small subset of their supergene pools. We are continually intermixing supergenes from one another and the way we do this is to enhance continually the quality of our own supergene pool. All the time we are all using our evolving supergene pool to propagate our views, our ideas and our attitudes to others with the hope of influencing them to see things and do things in a way more similar to the way that we do them. In that way we are able to propagate ourselves and, infinitesimally, make others just slightly more like ourselves. This is how we may achieve a degree of immortality. The influence that we exert in a day or week may be tiny but over a lifetime, if we play our cards right, we can have a great deal of influence particularly if we have a personality driven to achieve.
Most groups are made up of individuals from disparate backgrounds. The same principles of social interaction apply but their manifestations will be rather different because of the more heterogeneous make-up of the group. For example, a group of colleagues meeting at work will generally be aware of the relative status of the individuals in the meeting, and that will affect the way each behaves. Each will want, to a greater or lesser extent, to leave his or her mark on the other members at the meeting. The most senior member will want to maintain and enhance his or her authority, and the most junior will want to improve his or her status by demonstrating a commitment to the goals of the group. The others will wish to feel that their position in the organisation is enhanced rather than diminished as a consequence of the meeting. During the meeting everyone present has a certain influence on everyone else and everyone present will be influenced by everyone else. The degree of influence may be large or slight but nevertheless it will be present. We all know that in social groups there are individuals who are inclined to sit relatively quietly, almost passively while others feel the need to dominate and impose their personalities on the proceedings. Each of us has a fairly good idea of where we fit into this spectrum of social energy of drive and ambition. This interchange between individuals, and interchange of supergenes, in every case can be understood as an attempt to get the receiver to become more like the transmitter. We want others to see things our way and to accept our views, attitudes, judgements and ways of doing things in preference to their own. The friction that occurs between individuals reflects the degree to which these supergene transmissions are being rebuffed. A successful chairman is one who ensures that everyone goes away with the impression that their ideas have been taken seriously by the group so that everyone feels to some degree that their influence has been increased, and their supergenes have been accepted if only slightly by others. In many groups the jostling for influence and power is overt. An extreme example is the way that a political party works with naked ambition being very much in evidence. In many other groups ambition is still present but expressed with more subtlety, and, of course, within any social group there is a wide spectrum of the degree of engagement of individual group members with the group.
We will next look at how it was that groups became so important to the success of our species. We will also look further at the way that groups work when we try to understand the way they develop in childhood and the way that we, as members of groups, learn to relate with others in the groups and work with them for our own advantage.
The Origins of Groups in Our Society
We will probably never know what it was that started Homo sapiens on the remarkable evolutionary journey that leads to where we are today. We do know from archaeological studies that the timescale on which significant physical evolution occurs in animals is typically measured in millions of years. An unusual and relatively rapid physiological evolution occurred in our ancestors starting about 1-2 million years ago. We do not know why this happened but it gave rise to a rapid increase in the volume of the human brain. Over that period it increased approximately fourfold in volume. It reached its present size within the last 100,000 years and may still be increasing. There is enough variability in the size of the human brain for us not be able to tell the difference. The feature widely believed to distinguish humans from all other creatures is their use of an extremely complicated and sophisticated language for communication. In many cases behavioural traits that are present in animals are much more pronounced in humans because of the complexity of our society and because of the complexity of our language. This complexity of our society can be frightening and many have felt that human behaviour is so complex that we cannot hope to understand it at all. Noam Chomsky wrote in 1978: ?As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human sciences are at a loss?. I am convinced, however, that by looking at how we function as social creatures we can make progress. Aristotle in Politics, over 2300 years ago understood that: ?A person who cannot live in society, or does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is either a beast or a god?, and Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning (1605), explained that: ?Man seeketh in society comfort, use and protection?. The clues we seek for what it is that makes us human are contained in these ideas about our relationship with society.
In thinking about how the first societies started to function, and by watching groups of animals interacting, we can see clearly the importance of communication as a mechanism that lets each member of the group establish his or her position, responsibilities to the group and the benefits that the individual expects to receive because of participating within the group. A great deal ? too much to detail here ? has been written about these behavioural patterns and the contracts that exist between individuals and the group, contracts that work in both directions. Our modern society is structured in essentially the same way. Each of us has a role, indeed many roles, that we fulfil. Each role is in practice an agreement between the individual and the particular group, where our contribution to the group, and the reward that we derive from that contribution, is agreed. In the great majority of cases this agreement is not spelled out in detail, except, for example, when we are employed by an organisation. In the West, when we start working for an organisation, it is usual to sign a relatively detailed legal agreement that sets out precisely our duties, our responsibilities to the organisation (the number of hours we work) and what our rewards (usually a salary, possibly a car, hopefully some holiday) and our rights (such as protection from unfair dismissal) are agreed to be. Such agreements are not usual within social groups such as families or friends, although membership of many clubs and societies is regulated by sets of rules agreed by individuals before joining. Our familiarity with families and friends means that we nevertheless understand the basis on which we all live and work together. Even within the family we know that there are certain ways of behaving that are acceptable and limits beyond which we cannot go without damaging the family structure and possibly causing our expulsion from the family group.
Although these arrangements are often represented as contracts with society, most of our lives are traditionally governed by the relationships we have with groups. However, as society has become more complex we spend an increasing amount of time away from our familiar groups. Under those circumstances, as well as when we are working within a broader group context, our behaviour is regulated by a framework of rules and regulations which we call our legal system. None of these things are particularly new. There is good evidence of this degree of social complexity including a legal framework in ancient times. Within the oldest known societies there is good evidence that there was also a very substantial division of labour. Division of labour cannot function within a society without the sort of effective contracts discussed above. The principal point about the division of labour is that an individual must make a decision that he or she does not devote all of his or her energies to the business of staying alive: finding food, finding shelter and generally surviving from one day to the next. By agreeing to devote one?s energies to something else, whether it is making pottery or bricks, or repairing motor cars or computers, we require in return that society will reward us with what we need in order to stay alive. In modern society we are paid a salary and we use that money to purchase food, clothing and shelter. In ancient societies they may not have used money but would certainly have relied on bartering the food, etc., that was needed for survival. In any society the division of labour will be something that can be refined and adjusted depending on the needs of the society and the value it places on the contribution of the individual. In an ancient society, should the demand for pottery increase, it may have been necessary for an individual to restrict activity to making drinking vessels while others made cooking pots. In our modern society a garage mechanic may be transferred to work on a different model of motorcar in response to increased sales of that model. All these arrangements which allow a fine tuning, an optimisation of the way different societies work, would be quite impossible without a language for communication. To try to run any significant part of our modern society ? or indeed of even the most ancient society ? without benefit of a sophisticated language is simply inconceivable. Lily Tomlin, the American actress and comedienne said: ?Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain?, but there may be more to it than that.
The need for an increasingly sophisticated language probably caused our brains to grow in size. We will never actually know that this was the case but we do not have anything much better to go on. Our use of language to express increasingly subtle ideas allowed a more complex division of labour which in turn allowed our society to expand remarkably quickly. The vast majority of people in the West and in many other parts of the world do not need to concern themselves with the everyday business of hunting for food. We also find that individuals are able to contribute to society expertise in an area in which they are skilled, and because of that skill each is able to achieve more both in terms of quantity and quality of what is done. By channelling all their energies into one skill area they are able to develop more advanced methods which again enhance their contribution to the common good. We rely on language to communicate to others that somebody skilled in a particular area does good work and may be able to help. Above all it is this ability to communicate the information that is being accumulated around the world which characterises modern human society. Relatively straightforward mechanical activities such as car maintenance do not need to be widely reported, but, for example, in scientific research and its application to medicine, the ability to disseminate new knowledge and understanding around the world has had a dramatic effect on medical practice.
What is almost even more impressive is the way that humans have used language to help us understand physiological conditions that can dramatically affect the quality and duration of life. By working together we have understood how these conditions can be managed and by communicating that information to sufferers and their carers, we have been able to compensate for the physiological weaknesses of individuals. Many of these physiological weaknesses are a consequence of genetic tendencies within the individuals that predispose them towards particular kinds of illness or disability which, with treatment, can be substantially corrected or kept in check. In both United Kingdom and United States there have been dramatic falls in the incidence of, and death from, heart disease. This has come from health education programmes that discourage smoking, improve diet, and increase the amount of exercise people take. In contrast, diabetes is a rapidly growing problem exacerbated by poor diet and a dramatic increase in the incidence of obesity. Nevertheless we know enough about the disease to be able to manage it through medication and lifestyle changes. Eventually health education programmes will start to affect ? and hopefully contain ? this epidemic.
Overcoming the Limitations of Our Biogenes
Our biogenes provide the template for the physiology of our bodies. None of these selections of genes, chosen at random from the genes of our parents, is perfect. Each of us has aspects of our physiological makeup that in principle could be improved had our selection of genes been somewhat different from what it actually was. I am someone who suffers from hay fever, an allergy brought on by pollens from trees (in my case) and grasses. This disease is properly known as seasonal allergic rhinitis, a widespread form of allergy affecting tens of millions of people around the world. During the hay fever season in England (June and July, typically) I am given to bouts of uncontrollable sneezing. There is some rather good evidence that hay fever is in fact a relatively modern ailment. Many other allergies have been known about since the earliest years. Perhaps the earliest report of an allergic disease is that of King Menses of Egypt, who was allergic to wasp stings and is thought to have died at some time between 3640 and 3300 BC. Another report from ancient times is that of Britannicus, the son of the Roman Emperor Claudius. He was allergic to horses and ?would develop a rash and his eyes swelled to the extent that he could not see where he was going? ? a serious problem if one had ambitions as a military leader on horseback, the normal career choice for the son of a Roman Emperor. The earliest reports of hay fever were of persistent summer colds and were published in the Lancet in the early years of the 19th century, and were originally more common in industrialised areas. Since then they have grown in incidence greatly. The reason for allergies such as hay fever and asthma is not yet understood.
Had I suffered from hay fever in ancient times it would probably have made survival on my own rather hard. It would be extremely difficult to sneak up on an unsuspecting woolly mammoth (or whatever my meal preference was that day) while sneezing away. Darwinian selection would certainly have made sure my particular combination of genes did not survive for long and would have been selected me out. Today there is no such risk of this, not just because the woolly mammoth is extinct, or because I no longer need to hunt my own food, but because we have developed medicine that can largely eliminate my allergic reaction. Antihistamines are available which counteract the allergic reaction produced by my body so that I can function entirely normally without sneezing at all. Medical developments have allowed me to compensate for some of my genetic inadequacies that would otherwise have substantially affected my prospects of being able to pass my genes to subsequent generations. There are many predispositions, with their origins at least in part genetic, and for which we are increasingly able to compensate for with appropriate medical treatment. Without treatment, there are many debilitating diseases that substantially reduce life expectancy. But with treatment, and with education of the at-risk groups, the potential damage of many non-adaptive examples of genetic inheritance can be minimised. It is another example of the way that we have used language to enable the division of labour, the division of labour that allows individuals to become expert in the biochemistry, pharmacology and medicine associated with disease, and then to transfer that knowledge to those members of society at risk, so that they might continue their own lives without too much undue concern about their health. Our success as a species in using communication to ensure that the knowledge and skills of individuals can benefit literally millions of others that one has never met is remarkable. The information explosion has many problems associated with it, but the benefits are extraordinary.
Possibly the most remarkable demonstration of the capacity of our species to take charge of our own evolution is to look at the way that life expectancy continues to increase. It is astonishing that in the United States the life expectancy of a newborn white male in 1900 was about 48 years whereas a century later it was about 75 years. For a newborn white female the figures were 51 years and 80 years respectively. For non-white males these figures are 32.5 and 68.5 years and for non-white females 35 and 75 years. These figures tell us that the life expectancy of whites have been increasing by approximately 0.28 years per year over the last century and for non-whites the figure is more like the 0.38 years per year over the last century. The larger rates of increase in life expectancy for non-whites in United States is because of their significantly better access to good nutrition and good medical care than a hundred years earlier. It is easy to dismiss these changes as being an example of the progress of medical science. It is not right, however, to exclude such progress from being a fundamental part of human evolution. It is not evolution in the biological, genetic sense but it is evolution in the sense that each of us is able to adapt more and more easily to our environment and therefore to be able to survive longer. It is unlikely that any other species that has been on this planet in the last 2 billion years has had such success in improving its life expectancy. For any species to manage its way of life so that life expectancy has increased by over 50% in a century is simply astonishing. In some European societies the improvement in life expectancy has been even greater, although generally starting from a lower base. In Europe, life expectancy is still increasing, while in the United States it appears to be starting to decline, principally because of the increasing effects of widespread obesity on life expectancy.
The Information Explosion
For tens of thousands of years mankind relied upon verbal communication to pass ideas and information of all sorts to others. We still use this form of communication today although it is inevitably limited in terms of the number of people that one can access at once. Almost more importantly, the accuracy with which that information can be passed is limited by the accuracy with which the speaker can recall the information, and the listener remember it. Once writing had been invented it became possible to record information which could then be passed to others without corruption. The importance of the written word was appreciated from the earliest times. It was adopted enthusiastically by the administrators and accountants who managed the resources ? always a good sign that something is worth doing.
The Royal Library of Alexandria was founded by Ptolomy II Soter and is believed to have contained somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000 papyrus scrolls. It was burnt to the ground in 47 BC by Julius Caesar (unintentionally, and he does not mention the fact in his memoirs). Julius Caesar was pursuing his rival Pompey when he found himself trapped in Alexandria by the Egyptian fleet. He decided to set fire to the fleet but the fire did not stop there. It jumped onto the dockside which was laden with flammable materials ready for export. It then rapidly spread onto the land and quickly engulfed the Great Library. We cannot imagine the wealth of information that was destroyed that night, particularly remembering that every scroll had been written by hand and represented the intellectual efforts of the greatest thinkers of most of the earliest civilisations in Europe and the Middle East as well as from the Indian subcontinent.
Since then, the development of printing in the 16th century allowed books and papers for the first time to be produced in reasonable quantities. Books were then expensive and therefore only available to the very rich. There was, however, a hunger for knowledge throughout Europe that meant that when a new book or pamphlet was published its contents became known very rapidly throughout the continent. In 1613, Galileo was asked by Cosimo de? Medici and his mother, the Grand Duchess Christina, to comment on the conflict between the Bible and the heliocentric doctrine that Galileo had previously published. His reply was the famous Letter to Grand Duchess Christina which circulated in manuscript form throughout Europe within only a few weeks. The downside of this wide circulation, of course, was that Galileo?s views came to the notice of the Catholic Church and this letter at least in part led to his having a spot of bother with the Inquisition a few years later. Gradually, printing processes became cheaper and bulk printing became easier. Books were printed in several languages and educated people had the potential to be exposed to a rapidly expanding range of attitudes, opinions and philosophies gathered from around Europe. Eventually newspapers were produced with a wide circulation that made information accessible much more cheaply and, most importantly, by people from a much wider social background.
It was electronic communication, however, that produced the most dramatic increase in the availability of information across the planet. The telegraph was a relatively slow method of communication but telephone and radio links greatly increased this in the first quarter of the 20th century. Broadcasting initially of radio and, particularly after the Second World War, television brought a wide range of information into the home. Within a few years we were able to learn about remote parts of the world and to understand more about other societies and different ideas from all over the planet. With the advent of low-cost computers and information transfer over telephone wires (initially at slow rates but now much faster) it is possible to access an astonishing amount of information held virtually anywhere on the planet. The access to information is no longer restricted to the rich and powerful but is often available to the poor in some of the most remote parts of the world. The most popular Internet search engine, Google, was being used 500 million times per day in late 2005. It then gave indexed access to just under two billion images and nearly 8 billion web pages. Electronic equivalents of conversations could take place with newsgroups, many on trivial subjects but many now an important forum for discussing topics and accessing the experience of specialists from around the world immediately that expertise is needed. A few days before writing this section I was contacted by engineer in Japan who had a problem with an electronic imager that he thought I might have come across. In fact, I did know about it and was able to reply to him within only a few minutes. Twenty years ago he would have spent several weeks sorting out the problem, using his time to work out something that had already been done. Nowadays, with Google and many other search engines, a complex search produces a response in well under one second. This book would have taken very much longer to write if every reference had to be checked on paper. Access to the Internet allowed information to be checked and cross checked in only a few moments. It also produced a vast amount of complementary information. The combination of the amount of data that is accessible and the speed with which it can be accessed has grown at a rate which is extraordinary. Twenty years ago e-mail was virtually unknown. Electronic communication was slow and unreliable and could be relied upon to give you information that you didn?t really want. What we have today is far from perfect, but it is an utterly remarkable achievement, and shows no sign of slowing in what it can do for us. Not only is it no longer necessary to hunt woolly mammoths for our survival, to provide food and a warm coat. Now we can probably arrange over the Internet for a plump woolly mammoth to be delivered, gift wrapped of course, directly to our homes.
What has also happened with the electronic information revolution is that it is now much easier to find or create groups of like-minded individuals. The groups may be virtual groups linked only by electronic means but the interactions between the members of that group can be as important as they are in real groups. Our society is increasingly mobile and relationships are much harder to maintain when people are apart. The widespread use of e-mail allows people to keep in contact in a way that was never possible before. A rather small number of us were ever enthusiastic or reliable letter writers. Vastly more are now able to maintain an e?mail correspondence, ensuring that the depth and quality of the relationship between individual and others is maintained and possibly enhanced. The knowledge that there are others out there who know about one and are concerned is a valuable source of support, a support that each of us needs now as never before with the increasing fluidity of modern society. We may no longer rely, as we once did, on the body language of someone physically present, if they are on the other side of the planet. Yet we are able to divine a lot about the way they describe things and express themselves even in a relatively short e-mail. Friendships can be maintained now in a very different way, a way that will persist even when disability or old age limit physical contact. The worst, most damaging human disease of all, since the beginning of time, is loneliness. We may well have developed something that is as effective in dealing with this disease as is the antihistamine spray I use for my hay fever.
The Origins of Language
If we are content to associate the growth in human brain size with the development of language, something that happened over the last million years, and the much shorter timescale over which societies appear to have become established, of possibly 40,000-100,000 years, then it is clear that virtually none of the developments discussed above may be attributed to the evolution of our biogenes. Other reasons for thinking this must be the case come from an understanding of the genetic complexity of humans when compared with that of other higher primates such as chimpanzees.
We have seen in earlier chapters that the size of the human genome is very large but that the number of individual genes in that genome is probably around 20,000. We have also seen evidence that the potential complexity coded in the human genome could be greater than this number might imply because of processes such as RNA editing and the complex interaction between multiple genes and the cellular environment of their expression. On the other side, however, there is the need for all the mechanisms that provide controls and balance and feedback so that the extraordinary complexity of our bodies is managed efficiently, irrespective of changes in environment, food intake and all the other influences we come under. Nevertheless when we look at the chimpanzee genome we find that the number of genes it contains is only slightly smaller than the number that humans possess. Again, the differences are uncertain but are probably in the region of 1 2% and certainly well under 1000 genes in total. When we compare human capacity for language and our ability to function in very dense and complicated societies it is inconceivable that a significant part of this could be attributed to the very slight difference in genetic makeup that there is between us and the higher primates. Much of our genome is taken up with the fundamental chemistry needed for creating living cells, and that is why we share half of our genes with the lowly banana. That does not make us half banana. However the need for the genetic recipe for so many basic physiological functions in our bodies means that relatively little can be left over to account for what it is that makes us humans different from other creatures. It certainly cannot account for our remarkable human brains.
Our brain is incredibly complicated. There are approximately 100,000 million cells in our brain, each of which is connected to approximately 1000 adjacent cells. Each of the 100 million million connections in our brain is essentially a very low power computer that passes electrical signals across each connection depending on the levels of electrical activity in nearby connections. To give some idea of the level of complexity in our brain, 100 million million connections is more than the total number of telephone calls ever made on this planet. This number of low-powered computers is contained within the brain of each and every one of us. There is no possibility that the structure of our brain could be encoded in our genome because there simply isn?t enough information capacity within the 20,000 genes or so that make up our genome. It is much more likely that what is present there is information relating to the way that groups of brain cells may be interconnected in order to undertake different kinds of processing. We can see quite easily the very complex structure into which nerve cells are organised within the eye and the optic nerve. The structure of other parts of the brain is much less easy to discern but nevertheless we do find recognisable structures that are common to everyone?s brain. Rather than give a description of the interconnections themselves, our genetic structure probably describes the algorithms for processing and leaves it to the developing brain to work out how these algorithms should be utilised and interconnected with other macro cells made up using different algorithms. There just isn?t enough information content in our genome to provide a more detailed blueprint for the structure of our brain. It is very likely that many of the structures inside our brains are developed over the first few years of life, and that what we are born with is an extraordinarily efficient machine for learning rather than being a machine preprogrammed to behave the way we do. It is when the child is very young that it is learning at its greatest rate, when its language skills are being established and when behaviour is being learned. We do know that the newborn child has a brain that is massively interconnected and contains more cells and interconnections than does the adult brain. The primary mechanism of learning is a process of disabling inappropriate interconnections so that the most effective ones are left intact. We can see this with the very young child trying to reach for something. His arm movements are jerky and unpredictable because many neurons are trying to activate the muscles in his arm. Remarkably quickly he learns to stabilise his arm so that the desired object can be reached. This training process is far too rapid for it to be possible by a process involving manufacturing connections between brain cells, so a disconnection strategy is essential for rapid learning. This is not unique to humans.
The Earliest Stages Of Human Development
At the moment of conception a single cell is created containing DNA selected at random from the cells of the parents. We have seen that in natural reproduction it is not possible to select for individual genes or groups of genes. The combined DNA with 100 million base pairs making up a total of 20,000 genes (plus a lot of other DNA of relatively unknown function, often rather pejoratively referred to as ?junk DNA?) establishes the genetic characteristics of the new child. That child will inherit some things that are good (in the sense that they improve the child?s potential for survival) and some things that are bad from each parent. Those characteristics of the parents in turn were inherited from the previous generation.
The genes that the child inherits may also have evolved in response to environmental pressures on humans. We saw in chapter 3 that lactose tolerance is largely absent in the majority of the adult population of the planet. However, in societies that have a long history of dairy farming, lactose tolerance can be very high, over 90%. This is believed to be an example of the way that the biogenes in our body have evolved in response to environmental pressures, in particular the availability of energy rich, high-quality fresh milk. The ability to digest milk and milk products is something that would have been a substantial advantage in terms of healthy survival. It is difficult to predict how this may evolve in future as people travel increasingly and intermix genetically. It is still the case, however, that the great majority of people live close to the place where they were born and so it may be many generations before this particular genetic trait becomes dominant or not. There is good evidence that other genetic changes have happened in relatively recent times. A recent review in Science (volume 309 page 235, 2005) by Michael Balter notes at least a dozen, mostly involved in improving immunity to specific diseases such as smallpox and cholera that grew in importance as towns and cities became larger and could spread more easily. However it is clear that these changes are very much on the margins of our genetic inheritance.
Once the child is conceived it starts to grow within the mother and is born nine months later. The first cell that will develop into the new baby contains the complete genetic blueprint for every detail of physical human development. It includes the sex of the child, skin, hair and eye colour, height and a great many other characteristics. The initial single cell rapidly grows and by the end of the first month the tiny foetus is approximately six millimetres long with the backbone already visible. The head at this stage is about half the total size of the embryo. The brain is developing rapidly, growing at approximately 250,000 brain cells per minute (a rate it will sustain until birth) and brainwaves can be recorded around 40 days after conception. By the end of eight weeks all body systems are in place and changes will be principally in the size and detail of the parts already formed.
During the third month the baby can be observed sleeping, awake and exercising energetically, turning its head, opening and closing its mouth and curling its toes. By the end of the fourth month the heart can be easily heard as it pumps 35 litres of blood each day. The food that the mother consumes is transported via the placenta and umbilical cord to the foetus. The appearance of the baby by this stage may be seen to be similar to its parents. In the fifth month, the foetus can be felt moving and stretching within the mother and experiments have shown that babies of this age will respond to sounds which are both too high and too low in frequency for adults to hear. The last three months are principally taken up with the baby growing to a stage where it should be able to cope with life on its own outside the mother. One cell has become 200 million cells weighing 6 billion times more than at fertilisation although of course it contains no more genetic detail than it did at conception. What it has also developed are the simplest beginnings of a social relationship with another person, its mother. For the first time we see the beginnings of the development of the supergenes of the child because from the earliest moments its goal of life must ultimately be to survive and to survive it must be, above everything else, a successful social creature.
Life in the Womb
What also happens during this period is that all 100,000 million brain cells that the baby is born with will be formed and the connections that might possibly be necessary for all basic life functions are put in place. What is also inevitable is that many processing circuits within the brain must also be assembled and this assembly process must be influenced significantly by the child?s experiences within the mother. It is quite wrong to think of life in the womb as being quiet and dark and peaceful, totally insulated from the outside world and any external experiences. The baby can respond and does respond to sound and light and pressure. The baby is awash with hormones and is greatly affected by the chemical structure of the mother?s body. It is interesting at least to think about the enormous complexity of the biochemical system that is a human body. It is always assumed that this new body is able to start functioning entirely on its own, using nothing but the genetic information in its genes, and developing quite autonomously. Remembering that Mother Nature seldom misses a trick: we might expect that the fully functioning biochemistry of the mother may be important in guiding the functioning of many of the biochemical systems in the baby?s body. Even simple machines need to be tuned to make them work properly. We should not be surprised if the developing foetus uses the successful and functioning chemistry of its mother as a template to tune its own developing biochemistry. The psychological state of the mother will be reflected in the hormonal balance of her bloodstream. We know that the baby can acquire some of the food preferences of the mother while still in the womb. The mother?s bloodstream and hormonal balance is intimately linked with the bloodstream and therefore the hormonal balance of the developing child. We can see quite clearly, therefore, that the child can inherit traits from the mother which are not genetic yet which will appear to be inherent in the child on the very day it is born. It may well be that some of the conditions that we attribute to genetic influences (nature) are at least in part acquired almost by infection-like processes from the mother. They might include, for example, a predisposition to take on the psychological characteristics of the mother, in so much as they are biochemically based ? and many are known to be. The influences on the child within the womb will affect the way that the earliest circuits of the brain of the child are constructed. It does, incidentally, affect what we ascribe to genetic influences as being all the influences on the baby before it is born. This may lead us to attribute incorrectly some aspects of behaviour and physiology that are not in fact included in the genes but are actually transmitted chemically from the mother. We now have a lot of evidence of the influences on the developing child while it is still in the womb. In their book, The Fetal Matrix: Evolution, Development and Disease (2005), Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson describe many ways in which the foetus is affected by its environment. Its growth is controlled so that it can still fit through the maternal birth canal of the mother irrespective of the father?s genes, which may be for a much larger child. The phenotype (essentially the actual manifestation of its genotype, or genetic makeup) of the foetus is also modified in response to a prediction of the environment it will find itself in once it is born. Factors such as climate and food availability have a significant influence on the developing child. Indeed there is considerable evidence that diseases such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes and heart disease are strongly associated with low birthweight, something that is established early on in pregnancy in response to the foetus?s environment. There are other more obvious interchanges between the foetus and the outside world. Although sounds from outside the mother will be somewhat muffled, the foetus will hear the mother perfectly clearly and plainly. Studies in India and United States of the response of the foetus to music make it clear that from the 24th week of pregnancy they respond when music is played. Indeed, young children will respond strongly to music that they have previously experienced in the womb, much more strongly than to unfamiliar music (Peter Hepper 1991). Likewise, Shetler (1989) reported that one third of foetal subjects he studied showed different reactions to tempo variations between faster and slower selections of music. This may be the earliest and most primitive musical response in utero. The relationship between a foetus and the mother is, therefore, much more than purely biological. At birth there will already have been a significant development of the baby?s supergene pool. This has been understood for a very long time. A tragic Hindu hero, Abhimanyu, is said to have learned the knowledge of entering the deadly and virtually impenetrable military formation known as a maze, while still within his mother?s womb, by overhearing his father explaining it to his mother, a knowledge that gave him great military power but ultimately led to his death since the explanation overheard was never completed.
Even if the new baby has no concept of self, or if the new baby is able to separate out its identity from that of its mother, its whole life has been intimately involved with its mother. The mother has transmitted both chemical and physical information about her reaction to various things and these interactions will have been communicated to the developing child and influenced it to some degree. The newborn baby has to establish a different sort of physical relationship with the mother, but many aspects of the rest of that relationship will already be present in an elementary form and will be built upon after birth. We can, perhaps, understand better from this just how substantial the social bond must be between mother and newborn baby and how, if that bond is broken, and mother and child are separated, what influence that must have on the developing child. because the mere fact that it is hard to articulate what that social bond must be, does not make it any less significant. The effect of, for example, adoption or the death of the mother at birth must be extraordinarily traumatic for the newborn baby and should not be underestimated just because the baby has no clear way of demonstrating what it is experiencing other than by crying.
The Newborn Child
The newborn child is not a blank slate, as some would like to believe, partly because of the various influences that the child has been exposed to while in the womb but also because there is good evidence that a significant part of our behaviour is inherited through our biological genes. There are many studies that have been made of identical twins raised together and identical twins raised apart. Many of the relatively complex behavioural traits that children and adults show are almost certainly inherited because they are seen in identical twins raised apart. Identical twins are formed at the very earliest stages of the development, when the new embryo divides into two. The two new embryos are identical genetically and have been separated before any division of function amongst the stem cells that make up the embryo has occurred. These two embryos must experience a virtually identical life in the womb, suffused by the same chemicals and hormones from the mother and exposed to virtually identical experiences. If they are separated at birth then any characteristics that they have in common must be due either to their biogenetic inheritance or characteristics acquired when they shared the womb. The generally accepted view is that only a small part of the behavioural characteristics of a child would have been developed after conception but within the womb, although there is increasing evidence that the foetus?s experiences before birth really do have a considerable influence on behaviour and may indeed suggest that the balance between what is inherited in behaviour and what is not may be more biased towards nurture than nature. An interesting yet ethically problematic in vitro fertilisation experiment would be to implant identical twin embryos into different mothers. That would allow us to study what part of the characteristics of the newborn baby was due to its developmental environment and what was due to its genetics. However at present most people believe that if we look broadly at behaviour and behavioural characteristics the evidence is that the influence of genetics and the influence of the environment within which a child is raised are of comparable importance.
The newborn child starts to grow in an environment determined almost exclusively by its parents, but as soon as it is born it learns to work within and control its social environment. It must start by depending on others for all its needs, whether they be food, comfort or emotional support, but it quickly learns to ask for what it wants. There is a rapid development of the senses and of the capacity of the baby to control its limbs. The focus of most written descriptions of this stage of development is often on the mechanical, physical achievements of the child. What also happens, and is fascinating to watch, is the way that the new child absorbs information and experiences from its environment. If it is going to be successful it must manage its social environment as a matter of the highest priority. The brain of the child is working hard as information blotting paper, soaking up everything it can learn about its environment. Initially the baby is a relatively passive individual depending on experiences coming to it. But in no time at all the new baby starts to want to manipulate its environment partly to see what happens and partly to make things happen the way it wants. For the first time we see the child beginning to exert its influence on the people around it. It is likely that a baby is genetically programmed to make the best of its social experiences from the earliest days. The better integrated it is with its social environment the more likely it is to get the food, comfort or emotional support it wants. It has to develop coordination between its limbs and its eyes which are well formed and see really quite well even at birth. Earlier ideas that children could not see properly when born turned out not to appreciate that the eye of the newborn child focuses only a few centimetres in front of its face since all it needs to see and recognise at that stage in its life is the face of its mother. Every experience helps to programme the brain of the child and the experiences of those first few months undoubtedly lay down a great part of the mental framework within which the child will develop.
The young baby will learn at a phenomenal rate from its parents and from any other person it comes into contact with. It learns to feed itself and to walk and at about the same time begins to use the language it learns from its parents. In order to survive it must be able to communicate effectively with anybody it meets and so language is right at the top of its developmental priority list. It must establish the neural networks within its brain that are necessary for processing and managing language, for learning new words and grammatical structures. There is little doubt that children can recognise much more language than they are able to use, and they understand language really quite well long before they speak it. It is much harder to manipulate the tongue and the voice box to produce coherent sounds than it is to listen to what is going on. The child must develop the capacity to extract meaningful information from streams of words that will help it thrive in this incredibly complex environment. It also develops many skills which are going to be important once its life really starts to kick in and the quality of its supergene pool starts to have a significant influence on its development as a social animal. Very young children can classify items long before they can articulate what they are doing and even before they have a concept of what that particular thing might be. Adults have three crude ways of labelling individuals: gender, age and race. Babies know two of them (gender and age) by the end of their first year. The concept of race is much more complex and the distinction more difficult since it is often wrapped up in questions of ?them or us? which are more difficult for a young child to appreciate. We saw in the first chapter how critical it is that the young child starts to learn how to simplify and categorise the vast complexity of experience to which it is exposed. It must learn to reduce as many of its experiences as possible into a form that it can accommodate easily. Using labels and categories is a critical technique for simplifying complex input information streams so that the brain can manage what is going on. Many studies have shown that, at a surprisingly early age, children are able to categorise dogs as distinct from cats, then labradors compared with poodles, then golden labradors compared with yellow labradors. Almost everything is a member of one category or another and the capacity to buttonhole any experience or any individual quickly and efficiently is critical to our survival in our complex society. We must also develop strategies for self-categorisation. We have many categories that only become effective when there is a knowledge of an alternative such as if we find ourselves in the presence of people who are not in that category. Arthur Miller said in 1995: ?If there wasn?t any anti-semitism, I wouldn?t think of myself as Jewish?. It is of no importance to be Scottish if you never come across a non-Scot. It is, however, essential to learn enough about oneself to be able to work out how to compare yourself with others in social groups because that is the only way you have of establishing your membership of and relationships with a social group.
The Social Life of the Developing Child
Surprisingly early in the life of the child it starts to have an understanding of its position in its limited society. As it grows it will increasingly come across other individuals, some of whom may also be babies like itself. Children are always completely fascinated by other children. It is always entertaining to observe children and adults mixing with other children and adults. Even the most interesting, attractive, colourful adults are of absolutely no interest whatever to young children. They focus all their attention on other children, particularly those that are slightly older than themselves. Children need to learn from other children just slightly older than themselves, because these are the people who will make up the child peer group. It is with these people that the child is going to have to compete in the struggle for social survival and the ascendancy of its own supergenes. From its first contacts with other children it will start to put together social strategies for success and start to add to its own burgeoning supergene pool what it experiences from others. From the earliest ages we can see the influence of peer pressure on child behaviour. The best way to get children to eat something they say they do not like is to put them in a group of slightly older children who do like it. In no time at all they will discover that they do, after all, like it, just because the older children around them do. Children realise at the deepest level that it is these other people of their own age with whom they are going to share the adult world. It is these children that are going to have to be related to and ultimately to cooperate and compete with for their position in society. It is important for a developing child to be socialised by having experience of other children of different ages as playmates. The very young child has all its standards of behaviour set for it by its parents and the family environment. As soon as the child starts to mix with others of its own age outside the immediate family circle then the way it behaves begins to be affected and influenced by others. It has always been understood that animals need to struggle for biological survival from the earliest days for the chance to reproduce and therefore propagate their biogenes. With humans that struggle is now principally a struggle for social survival and the chance to propagate one?s supergenes. The central importance of that need to propagate one?s supergenes is why the earliest years are so important in a child?s life.
As the child grows and spends an increasing amount of time with its peers it is inevitable that its development will be increasingly affected by the standards and behaviour of its peer group. Its behaviour will inevitably be influenced by the peer group and the child may well behave rather differently with the peer group than it does with its own parents. Already we see that the child?s supergene pool is being expressed differently in the presence of parents than it is in the presence of the peer group. All of them will have relatively similar behavioural standards because the likelihood is that this peer group will be composed of children from families of similar social and economic background. The net effect is that the behaviour that comes from the peer group initially will reflect quite closely acceptable standards for the average parent of that group. As the peer group becomes more established, its behaviour patterns evolve as external influences start to make themselves felt. Gradually they will experiment with behaviour patterns they have observed in other groups, behaviour patterns that parents might disapprove of rather strongly.
As the child grows the peer group will become increasingly important in defining the acceptable behaviour standards within that group. Children will behave rather differently at home than they do with the peer group but is also likely that some of the attitudes and behaviour patterns that the child expresses in the presence of its peers start to manifest themselves when the child is at home. What we see is that the child?s supergene pool is differently expressed depending on its environment. The supergenes that can be expressed at home may be a source of ridicule amongst a peer group, while the supergenes expressed with the peer group may well be quite unacceptable in the home environment. The child will understand that its position in the peer group is important. It needs to find a niche within the group that it fits into satisfactorily so that the child is comfortable within the group and has a role to play. It needs to belong to the group and understand its role within the group. It needs to be confident and comfortable enough with the group to feel it can command enough attention in order to exert significant influence on the group so that it can work within the group to develop its own supergenes. This will in turn strengthen its capacity to work with other social groups with which it comes into contact. With any group there is inevitably a social structure. Groups where everyone is equal simply do not exist. Alan Bennett wrote in his play Getting On (1972): ?We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn?t obey the rules?. A hierarchical social structure will quickly be formed with each individual finding their niche within the group. One might be a leader, one can be an organiser and another the joker. One might be thought of as being more sporty and another of being more bookish. The position occupied by boys and girls will be different because each inevitably has somewhat different characteristics and therefore will find somewhat different niches within the group. Some will be shy by nature and others outgoing, and each and every aspect of their personality will contribute in establishing the niche within the social group that that individual will occupy. The niche chosen by a child ? or indeed by an adult in an adult group ? allows it to establish an identity, a presence within the group and position from which it can command the degree of attention it needs to allow it to exert some influence on other members of the group. Children may be members of more than one social group and their relationship with different groups may be very different indeed. Very different supergenes will be expressed in different groups. Children that are shy and diffident when with one group hanging around town may be totally different when with a group organised around an interest in music if that child has real musical talent. It all depends on the balance between the individuals who make up that group. It is the balance that establishes the characteristics of the niche occupied by the child, and each child, as with each adult, can occupy many different and apparently almost inconsistent social niches in the world.
The Nurture Assumption
It is important to appreciate the balance of influence that exists between parents and the peer group of child. Judith Rich Harris, in her excellent and readable book, The Nurture Assumption (1998), turns a fresh eye on many of the assumptions that we make about child rearing. The nurture assumption is the previously unquestioned belief that what makes children turn out the way they do, aside from their genes, is mainly the way their parents bring them up. This assumption is something that is extraordinarily deeply embedded in our culture and fundamental to everything that we are told we should do when rearing children. It is this assumption that allows us to blame so many problems that we have, as adults and as a society, on the way we were raised as children. Although in some areas she may slightly overstate the case a great deal of what she says chimes well with the experience of most parents. Her work also helps us gain considerable insight into the way individuals develop their supergene pool.
As a young researcher concerned with the psychology of the developing child, Judith Rich Harris realised that many of the underlying assumptions that were accepted about childrearing in modern society basically did not make sense. She noticed that young children of immigrant parents who spoke English poorly and with a strong foreign accent and who also looked foreign, not just in the way they dressed but in their body language and the way they dealt with social situations, in no time at all spoke English indistinguishable from that of other children in the area and even looked the same as the locals. They looked the same because they had taken on the body language used by their peers rather than that they brought with them from their immigrant backgrounds. They had also developed ways of expressing themselves that were very similar to those used by their peers. They had absorbed effectively the supergenes of their peer group and were using them to establish their social position in this new society. Judith Rich Harris also realised that things could be learned from another extraordinary social experiment that has been going on for at least 200 years and which today would never be passed by an ethics committee. In these experiments in England (called the English Public School System which of course is the name the English give to private schools), the children (particularly the male children) are taken away from their family at an age as young as seven and educated at boarding schools without any contact with their natural parents outside vacations. These children are often from wealthy homes so that even when they are at home they are often raised by nannies. Their parents, and particularly their fathers, often have surprisingly little contact with their sons and yet these children turn out to be indistinguishable from their fathers in their appearance and their bearing and general behaviour. So much for the importance of parental rearing! What matters in fact is the social group that the children find themselves in. It is from those groups that they derive their behaviour and it is within these groups that they develop and refine their supergene pool. Their peer group is made up of other boys also plucked from their parental homes, so all are from a relatively similar social background.
There were other reasons why Judith Rich Harris felt that the importance of parental influence was traditionally exaggerated while the importance of peer group influence had been downplayed. As was said above there is now a lot of evidence that about half of the variation in human behaviour can be attributed to the biogenetic inheritance that each of us has and the other half therefore must be attributed to the upbringing of child, however that comes about. It is important not to confuse the appearance of a child with its behaviour. Virtually all of the physical resemblance between parents and child must be attributed to genetic inheritance, but appearances can deceive. The genetic variabilities inevitably mean that different children of the same parents need to be raised using rather different strategies. They are different and need different handling. Yet there are lots of uncertainties in this outcome and in particular there are uncertainties as to where behavioural patterns arise. Is it the case that nice children get cuddled a lot or is it that cuddling children makes them nice? Does beating a child make it nasty or is it the case that nasty children are simply more likely to be beaten?
Many of the conclusions about the balance between genetics and upbringing come from studies of identical twins either raised together or raised apart. There are also behavioural studies of children in different families which suggest that children reared in the same home are statistically less similar to one another than children raised in different homes. Such an effect is consistent with the need for each child to establish a behavioural niche within the family group. Children need to differentiate themselves from the average and choose a niche that is their own and therefore more likely to be different from the other children in the family than not. It is not easy to research attitudes of parents and children with any reliability. There have been a number of studies which have found that if you give questionnaires to parents and teenagers independently about the parents? childrearing methods, the correlation between the results from the two groups is virtually nil, effectively invalidating such surveys of either parents or of children on their own. What all these studies make us realise is that the way we are is a consequence of the groups and societies within which we grow and develop.
Growing up with Peer Groups
Parents are aware of the importance of the peer group particularly when a child becomes part of a peer group that the parents disapprove of. Phrases such as she has got in with a bad lot say it all. Parents understand that this can be damaging to the child and try to compensate by criticising the group and ridiculing its behaviour and standards. Nevertheless, if the child feels accepted by the group and manages to establish a comfortable niche within the group then that acceptance is valued. The child then increasingly behaves in a way that is consistent with some sort of average behaviour of the members of the group even if that behaviour would not be approved of by the parents. The child accepts the supergenes that are shared by the group and may start to express part of his or her supergene pool in conjunction with these group supergenes; this can lead to problems at home. Parents quickly discover that their children have secret lives and that children are well able to manage what information they allow to be passed back to their parents. Children may choose the quiet life at home by suppressing any of the unacceptable face of the group?s supergenes when they are at home. However, rebellion amongst children is not completely unknown and the knowledge that they have the power that comes from exercising unacceptable supergenes is attractive because of the reaction it gets in an environment where the child may feel its supergenes are little valued otherwise. Children soon realise the parent?s attitude to the new peer group and act to minimise the potential influence that the parents might have on the relationship between the child and the peer group. The culture of the peer group is brought back into the family but the culture of the family affects the peer group only indirectly and only relatively weakly. Parents are much more likely to be able to manipulate the child?s supergene pool if they make it clear that they are prepared to at least consider some of those supergenes from the group. However trying to suppress them or modify them must be done with the greatest of delicacy if the impression of their rejection is to be avoided.
Many parents find it difficult to accept that they have so much less influence on the development of their children than is normally attributed to them by society. However, the pressures on children to be successful in our complex modern society are intense, and it is success in that society that really matters to them. At best we can enjoy watching them launching onto a new life. The Lebanese poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet in 1923 while living in United States:
"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life?s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth."
What does not come over in Judith Rich Harris?s book is that the quality of the relationship between the parents and the child will have an effect on the way that the child chooses and connects with its peer group, and then finds a niche in the group. Parents continually in conflict with their child, where communications with the child tend to be confrontational, are more likely to find that the child will seek peer group involvement more rapidly and be less critical in selecting a peer group with which to engage than other children. Parents who have a solid, more relaxed and more flexible relationship with their children are more likely to be able to talk to their children about the peer group and its dynamics at an early stage of the child?s involvement with the group. This can help the child greatly in assessing the group and so help the child to find and establish a niche within the group. Children from a generally more supportive background tend to establish more senior positions within their peer groups. Nevertheless, either way, once the child is in a group, that group will start to exert a rather substantial influence on the developing child. Even at this stage, however, the parents are not without influence. But they must remember that they are now only one of the influences in their child?s life and no longer (if it ever was possible) can they lay down the law without question. Parents can and indeed should maintain clearly articulated boundaries within the family environment which they can justify to themselves and justify to their children. Even if the children do not like those boundaries, possibly because other parents do things differently, provided they are not too unreasonable and are handled consistently then they will, hopefully, be respected.
The involvement of developing children in social groups is critical to their development into successful members of the adult world. Jane Goodall, working in Tanzania, observed that young chimpanzees play with the young of other species, such as baboons, rather than stay in an adult-only group. Infant chimpanzees have also been observed playing with infant humans. We also know from studies of monkeys by Margaret and Harry Harlow that it is critical that monkeys are raised with other young monkeys even in the absence of adults, if they are to develop into normal adults themselves. Without this they become seriously disturbed in their social behaviour, unable to relate properly to others, and switch between aggressiveness, indifference and extreme fearfulness in an unpredictable manner. This is also seen with human children. Anna Freud in An Experiment in Group Upbringing (1951) observed a group of six children aged between three and four years who survived a Nazi concentration camp. They lost their parents soon after they were born. No adult took particular responsibility for them so they had to survive by their own wits. As a group they were extremely hostile towards adults. But towards one another their behaviour was exemplary and extraordinarily considerate. Forty years later the children were leading normal lives despite this terrible past. The social group they had developed had provided the stability and mutual support that let them survive quite unimaginable conditions.
The descriptions above focus on single peer groups but in reality children quite quickly find themselves involved in several social groups involving children of different ages. They might be groups related to a sporting activity such as football or dance that involve children with a relatively wide range of ages but all with a shared interest. Some might be involved in community groups such as the Boy Scouts, or in church-based groups. In each of these groups the child establishes a position that reflects its own capabilities, its own interests and above all its own personality. A child that is naturally shy and retiring is unlikely to become the leader of a Boy Scout group yet may be exceptional as a footballer. The position that the child occupies in these two groups is then quite different and the satisfaction of the child with those positions will no doubt affect how much time is spent with each group. It is also the case that the niches that a particular child occupies within the groups will lead to rather different social personae (in essence the way they express their supergenes) in each group. It is quite common for parents to remark that they hardly recognise their child when observing the child in a group environment, particularly when the child does not know that the parent is watching. It shows that personality is variable to a considerable extent since the expression of one?s supergenes depends critically on the environment within which they are expressed.
The integration of the developing child to various social groups is critical to its long-term survival as an adult. Almost everything we do as humans involves interacting with other people. Some of us greatly enjoy these social connections and actively seek them out while others try to minimi se their contact with others. Our environment is almost exclusively group based and it is within this environment that each of us must struggle for survival and ultimately for success. Our achievements and everything we might be proud of only mean anything in a group context. Achievements that are completely unknown, unrecognised and unacknowledged by any others are less satisfactory and rewarding. It is interesting to think about how much you would actually do if you were guaranteed that you would never have a chance to share those things with anybody or indeed ever see anyone else for the rest of your life ? if you had no chance of passing on any of your supergenes in the future. I suspect that many of the things we do would be difficult to sustain under these conditions. Life on a desert island might provide an interesting interlude for self-improvement but the hope of ultimately being returned to social life would be enough to keep one going on. The most severe punishment in prison is solitary confinement where all social contact of any sort is eliminated. Success as a human being depends on success at propagating one?s values, attitudes and opinions to others.
The first groups that modern urban children often belong to are playgroups where most of the children are of much the same age. In our modern, urban society children increasingly only have access to groups where there is a small range of ages. This is a major change compared with the society of only 50 years ago. In those days children played with other children who lived nearby and these groups included children of different ages. This provided a broader range of niches within the group for newer, younger members. The position and status in the group of the older children would be more secure and not threatened by the younger members. They also have the ability more effectively to discourage the more extreme forms of inappropriate behaviour by the youngest children who most recently joined the group. We may view such a group as having a typical behaviour that is rather extreme, but it is the average behaviour of that group that becomes their reference point. Young children coming into the group would enter at the bottom of the hierarchy of the group and as they grew up they would move to a position of more seniority. This meant that each child experienced occupying a range of niches as the group evolved. In our modern urban society children tend to stay in groups that are often closely linked with the original playgroup that they started in. As it is now so much easier to travel even moderate distances to places that offer prestructured groups such as playgroups with an explicitly narrow age range, it is now the exception rather than the rule for a peer group to cover a wide range of ages. This is not true, however, in a rural environment where there are many fewer children and therefore any group inevitably includes a much wider age range. This narrowness in age dispersion is a consequence of urban living and improving communications. It is somewhat worrying that the lack of contact in western urban societies of children with other children of rather different ages is becoming quite uncommon. Narrow age range groups are much more likely to suffer from less balanced, more extreme behaviour patterns. An individual can establish a central position in a group when it is formed by behaving eccentrically or extremely in a way that would not be possible when an individual joins an existing group. As schools get larger, year groups tend to stick together and if it were not for siblings there would be little contact between age cohorts. Indeed parents these days would probably not want their children to mix with significantly older children who might introduce them to smoking, drinking and drugs at a much earlier stage. My own personal and therefore somewhat selective impression, having raised a couple of children, is that the more opportunity a child has had for involvement in different peer groups and, in particular, peer groups covering a wide range of ages and interests, the more mature the child becomes and the easier it is for the child ultimately to make the transition to adult society.
How We Relate to Groups
Our relationship with groups is extremely complex, but it is something that is critical to our success as a human being. There is good evidence that the human brain deals with social relationships in two rather different ways. One component deals with one-to-one (dyadic) relationships and the other deals with group relationships. Attitudes in these two kinds of relationships may be quite contradictory. One-to-one relationships involve pleasure in one another?s company, love, dependency, etc., and generally lead to relatively moderate modification of behaviour by either party. Our relationships with groups take longer to develop and are more flexible and often more complex. When a new member joins a group then he or she must modify his or her behaviour rather rapidly to remain compatible and consistent with the group. Failure to conform initially may mean that the new member acquires unnecessarily low status within the group or indeed may even be expelled from it. We are driven at a very basic level by the need to belong to groups and so we will go to great lengths to conform and so be accepted by a group. We do this by modifying our behaviour in the presence of the group, the way we act and the way we express ourselves, in short how we project our supergenes in the group. Group pressures are extremely important because they define the average behaviour of the group members. About this average, however, there is still the variance that arises from each of us needing to find a niche within the group, and a niche almost by definition cannot be that of the group average. If the group average is much more extreme then new members are quickly radicalised and adopt a new, more extreme behaviour. The general framework of the children?s group starts by being some kind of average of the standards and behaviour patterns of the parents of the group members. Within a children?s group the pecking order that is established is less of a dominance structure and more of a structure based on who gets paid the most attention. Status comes from friendship with older, more mature children. The less popular children generally have lower self-esteem, something which tends to stick for life. Low status in a peer group that lasts for a long time can leave permanent scars on the personality of the child. The individuals that are higher up in the attention structure are the innovators and leaders while those lower in the structure are the followers. Many peer groups today involved children with a narrow range of ages. The establishment of high or low status within such a group tends to happen rapidly and somewhat arbitrarily. The child that is fifteen minutes late for its first day at the new playgroup can find itself marginalised. Because there is a static group membership, the status achieved initially may persist for a surprisingly long time. Many adult insecurities can be traced back to childhood experiences with their most formative child peer groups. The sociologist Anne-Marie Ambert asked first year undergraduate students about their childhood experiences that above all else made them unhappy. Only 9% referred to problems with their parents whereas 37% described instances when they felt they had been badly treated by their peers. She concludes that peer abuse is a problem that is serious yet is substantially ignored in our society. Indeed many of us are aware of unhappiness with our own treatment or the treatment of others within the social groups we have encountered as adults, and sometimes the treatment is indeed abusive. Many of us have come across colleagues who are given to bullying and vindictive, arbitrary decision-making that others in the group seem powerless to resist. Peer abuse is difficult to resist because resistance often leads to the individual being ejected from the group ? something we all have the strongest urge to avoid. Remaining part of the group and belonging to the group is something that is the most fundamental core motive, as we have seen from studies by social psychologists. We must stick with the group at all costs if we are to survive. This is one of the fundamental reasons why people go along with group decisions and attitudes even if they are completely at variance with their own personal feelings about something. Many experiments both with child and adult groups have shown that individuals will make a decision that they know is simply wrong because others in the group have already made that wrong decision, and to go against it would be to go against the group. A study by Asch in 1956 asked group members which of a series of lines drawn on paper were the closest in size. If the clear majority of members of the group have already decided incorrectly then the last member will go along with that decision remarkably frequently, even if it is quite plainly wrong.
The influence of the peer group is remarkably pervasive. For example, children from immigrant families integrate well into local communities and absorb the behavioural standards and patterns of their peers. Certain aspects of family life are of little importance to peer groups so that the traditional family behaviour in that area persists. An excellent example of this is in cookery, something that seldom makes it to the top of the agenda of children?s peer groups. The traditional cooking methods and tastes are unaffected by the peer group and so they persist much more effectively. However the influences on children are dominated increasingly by peer groups and peer group values as the child gets older. Children?s peer groups provide an opportunity to make mistakes and to learn about working within group structures in a broader sense. The goal of the child is not to become a successful adult; it is to become a successful child by being a successful member of the children?s peer group. The dynamics of what goes on within the group are complex, with each individual trying to gain attention and position within the group. That combination of attention and position is what sets the level of influence that the individual can have on the group. Within the group the leaders are important because they can exert a substantial influence on the group norms and get members to adopt the behaviour patterns that they feel are proper. The leaders only need to be able to influence a few of the members for a new idea to take hold. Holding a relatively high status position within the group offers the potential to modify the norms and aspirations of the group to better reflect the views of that high status individual. As a consequence there is a continual jockeying for positions of influence within the group. The leaders are also able to define the membership of the group and have considerable influence on the consequent direction of the group. Being leader of a group provides a unique opportunity to propagate the supergenes of the leader more powerfully and more effectively than is otherwise possible. One of the problems of the group is that it is inclined to suppress any characteristics or behaviour that are deemed by the group to be extreme. This is desirable if a child is unusually aggressive. But if a child is particularly clever, for example, then he or she may be perceived as being inadequately rebellious against the authority of parents and teachers and too accepting of the standards. However it does seem that peer pressure is not so much pressure to conform as pressure to do those things which are most likely to confirm and support the identity of the group.
Group Influences on Children
A series of studies described by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption (1998, page 212ff) have confirmed the extraordinary importance of the group in affecting behaviour. It is widely known, for example, that children whose parents divorce do significantly less well than those of parents that stay together, even if the parents stay together unhappily or if the relationship is abusive. This is traditionally attributed to the lack of a father figure or of a stable home environment. In fact the evidence for this is rather slight. When parents divorce it is inevitable that money becomes much tighter. It is common for the mother who is invariably awarded custody of the children to have to make economic changes and this often means moving physically to a poorer area of town. When the children move they find themselves thrown into different peer groups with different standards and different levels of expectation of themselves. Inevitably they join a peer group with lower aspirational levels than the ones they came from. Nevertheless they do join and become fully integrated relatively quickly with the new local peer groups. If you then look at the incidence of problem behaviour such as teen pregnancies, school dropouts, arrests for minor offences, etc., then you find that the children that have moved from a better-off environment are indeed showing more signs of these problems than the peers they left behind. However, they do not show any more signs of these problems than other members of their new peer group. They are behaving like members of the new peer group with all that entails. The lower achievements of the children of divorced parents are greatly affected by peer group standards. It is also the case that the incidence of problem behaviour where the mother and children stay in the same home, and therefore where the children remain with the same peer group, is not significantly different from other children in the same peer groups who do not have divorced parents.
The stereotypes that the group has of itself can be difficult to overcome, and can affect individuals in a worryingly pervasive way. A series of interesting studies by social psychologist Claude Steele in 1997 showed that if you precede a general intelligence test of a group of teenagers by asking them to state their race then that single question causes black teenagers to do quite significantly worse in the test than if the question is simply not asked. For many black Americans, the low expectations that their peer groups have is fundamental to their relatively poor performance at school and as adults. But even within that group we can see that it need not be like that. There is a small subset of black Americans, for example, who are the children and grandchildren of Jamaican immigrants. For some reason, no doubt associated with the expectations of their parents and grandparents, Jamaicans are remarkable academic achievers much in the way of the children of Jewish immigrants one generation earlier. Colin Powell, a former US Foreign Secretary, was such a child who has achieved high office.
When a new group is formed it takes on a life of its own and the members of the group start to evolve their own behaviour patterns in response to a variety of influences. These influences include choices made by the members but they will be particularly affected by the influence of other groups with which they come into contact. Very often this contact leads to conflict. The earliest form of conflict is, of course, with the parent group. The children?s group is trying to create its own identity and so its members get upset with the parents if they try to get too close to the children?s group by wearing, for example, inappropriately young clothes. They also interact and conflict with other groups, quickly establishing the concept of ?us and them? and identifying reasons for hating members of the other group. Focusing the negative feelings of the group externally helps to pull the group together and improve group identity. The stronger the group is, the more it is able to achieve, and the more it is able to propagate its own values ? some of its supergenes. Focusing on the common enemy can often remove attention from other more personal problems. Both during the Second World War in Britain, and more recently in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the incidence of mental illness in the population was substantially reduced below its level both before and after those periods. Groups generally are much more cohesive and work better when subjected to external pressures and threats.
Adult Group Structures
Throughout childhood and into the teenage years, association with peer groups is of central importance to our progress towards adulthood. Many of the groups, however, will evaporate around the time that we leave school and move on to jobs or tertiary training. Very often these changes involve moving geographically and progressively losing contact with friends and acquaintances. New friendships and alliances need to be made in the new environment, but the experience that one has had as a member of several teenage peer groups will undoubtedly influence the way that future relationships are made and will influence the choice of groups to which one might belong. Some adult groups are similar in many respects to childhood peer groups, while others are rather different in having a much less confrontational or competitive ethos. Most of the characteristics, good and bad, of childhood peer groups can be found in adult peer groups.
Like children, adults have a complicated relationship with society. The way that we project ourselves ? the subset of our supergenes that gets expressed ? depends very much on whom we are with and our relationships with them. A different subset of our supergenes will be projected depending on whether we are with members of our family, with friends or at a meeting at work. The image we project on vacation will be markedly different from our image perceived by colleagues at work. Each of us belongs to a number of social groups. Our role within each may be very different. In some we will be content with our status and influence within the group, doing what is necessary to maintain that position but not striving towards greater importance within it. At the same time in other groups we may be much more active in trying to progress and increase our influence on the group, what it stands for and what it is trying to achieve. Individuals in a leadership role have a great deal of power to affect what other members of the group do and think. By manipulating the group they can increase their own power and impose their own views and attitudes on others. Leaders can use the group through its less senior members to propagate outside the group, both to individuals and to other groups, their own priorities and opinions. The higher up the social hierarchy each of us moves the better the chance we have of making people change so that in some way they reflect our own views and attitudes more closely than before. Struggles between groups have the potential of us being able to infect even larger numbers with our own views and attitudes and eventually at the top we find that national leaders may have enormous influence and can affect the way that millions think. Examples such as Nelson Mandela and Adolf Hitler show just how influential one individual can be. The experience of South Africa under Nelson Mandela in coming to terms with a brutal and violent past without settling old scores has been surprising and remarkable. The supergenes of one man have had an astonishing degree of influence, an influence incomparably greater than anything that might happen with his biogenes. By deflecting the historical legacy of the country and focusing the energies of the emergent South Africa towards the future, he has helped its progress and development enormously. His supergenes have been taken up around the world by many millions of people.
We cannot, however, just simply expect to be able to influence others. While all this is going on, others are trying to influence us and are trying to have their own views and attitudes modify those that we already have. It is probably not in our interest simply to blindly resist these influences since they may be views that are attractive to us. If they are we should be prepared to incorporate them within our own worldview. All the time we are subjected to great numbers of these influences and our own views are continually being checked, re-considered and compared with what we are experiencing and then possibly updated and improved. All these views and attitudes are continually struggling for ascendancy. Only those best fitted to the social environment in which they are expressed survive and propagate. The analogy with the way that biogenes struggle in the battle that is natural selection becomes clear when we look at the way that our supergenes are struggling for ascendancy in our society, a society dominated by group structures.
In order to understand what it is that defines our position in society as an adult we need to try to articulate much more clearly what it is that we are trying to achieve through our lives. The Darwinian, biological view of human evolution and behaviour is that we are animals just like chimpanzees or elephants or mice. We struggle for survival through the obstacle race that is provided for us by the process of natural selection. Provided our genes are well enough adapted to our environment, we manage to reach sexual maturity and are then able to reproduce and have offspring of our own. Again, if we are strong enough and successful enough, we will be able to raise our children so that they can take our place, provided the selection of biogenes that they have inherited are good enough to let them do so.
It is difficult to square this biological view with what each of us knows of ourselves and the way we are motivated. We have seen above how our childhood has formed us into adults whose behaviour and abilities are a subtle combination of our biogenetic inheritance and of the way we are raised by our parents and socialised by our peers. Not many of us seriously consider the genetic fitness of potential partners that we might meet. We choose our friends as adults to be people we feel comfortable with, people whose values and standards broadly speaking match our own. We are principally influenced by all the things that makes an individual what he or she actually is and put little weight on biological fitness considerations. There are certain physiological parameters that make someone more or less attractive to us and these preferences may have a biologically genetic origin but few of us humans end up choosing a partner purely on the basis of physical appearance. Indeed most of us would fear that such a relationship was much less likely to succeed, and relationships based on shared values and standards are the ones we expect to last best. Furthermore it is these shared values that we particularly wish to pass on to future generations and in general the importance of the shared biogenes is much less. Given that the deficiencies in our biogenes can now be managed increasingly by progress in medical science there is even less reason to worry about biological fitness than in the past. Our approach to life in many ways is to try to find ways of sharing our values and ideals with others, not just in subsequent generations but with friends and colleagues and others of any generation. It is this part of what we are that is evolving now, it is this part of the struggle for survival both in cooperation and in competition with others. It is the social part of what we are that has not just complemented our biological inheritance but enhanced it enormously to make us capable of evolving incomparably faster than any other species on the planet.
Unfortunately, although we need to work within groups it is not uncommon for our relationship with the group to be far from ideal. It may provide us with a mechanism for influencing others that we desire deeply but we may find ourselves in a group that has been subverted by other members. Adult group structures can be complicated and dangerous things and we will look in the next chapter at some of the ways that group dynamics develop and work, and can become much more complicated than the relatively benign descriptions given above.
Chapter 6
Supergene Transactions
In this chapter I want to look in much more detail at what the manifestations of supergene interactions and transactions are between people, how supergenes are transmitted and received by individuals and the role of groups in providing a focus for supergene transactions. Later we will look at a number of specific aspects of human behaviour that can, I believe, be accounted for more compellingly than by other current explanations.
The Human Need For Supergenes
Let us start with the fundamental component of all human behaviour, one individual adult person. This individual is much more than a fully functioning biological animal. He or she is also an extremely complex individual because of the extraordinary detail of what is stored in his or her mind. There are some aspects of behaviour that have been coded into the biogenes of the individual but the great majority of what is in a person?s head has been learned from others. The fully formed adult human will already know a great deal about dealing with other people. He or she will be familiar with the complex culture of the society in which they have been brought up and understand many aspects of the way it works, the rules and norms that individuals within that society subscribe to, in short every aspect of how to behave in order to survive and succeed in that society. To appreciate the subtlety and incredible complexity of the way we behave the reader is referred to Kate Fox?s book Watching the English, a book that makes one wonder whether any anthropological study of an alien tribe in a distant land can ever do more than scratch the surface. Each of us has a personality, a general picture of ourselves, our appearance, our abilities, our tastes, our fears and joys and everything else that makes us up. In fact we have really two personalities, one that is our internal personality that really describes the way that we see ourselves and the second an external personality that we project to the outside world and which we wear around us as a degree of protection so that our internal personality is insulated from the physical world.
What is it that actually matters to people? If we ask people to think about the inevitability that one day they will die the great majority respond rather defensively. Rather than worry about death they tend to focus much more about what they want to achieve in life, their aspirations and their goals. It is interesting that so many respond to questions of their own death by reflecting on what they want to make of their own life and how they see that as an associated endpoint. In his book The Denial of Death, Becker (1973) claimed that no matter how well we try to disguise it most of us fear death even though it is natural and ever present. A fear of death is essential to survival as an animal: self-preservation must be a core instinct and it is this fear that keeps us safe in the jungle. More recently, Pyszczynski, Greenberg and Solomon have developed what they call their Terror Management Theory that tries to account for the different mechanisms we use to let us cope with the threat of death. Every culture offers a variety of religions all of which guarantee immortality for one?s eternal soul even for those who behave badly (they are consigned to some kind of hell). The better behaved are promised a heavenly paradise for eternity.
The reality is that death is inevitable and many, including those describing themselves as having religious beliefs, have a suspicion that religious guarantees may not be things we can depend on as individuals. We need to find another mechanism to allow us to survive beyond our death. We regard what is in our minds as being the most important thing to us and that is what we want to survive after death above everything else. If some of it is to survive then we need to find some other human minds to whom we can pass those aspects of our experience, knowledge and wisdom of the world that we deem most important. There is no other way for any of us to achieve immortality. We have to find some way of propagating aspects of ourselves, subsets of our supergene pool. In different social circumstances different subsets of our supergene pool are expressed and others are suppressed. The process of transmission of supergenes to others is interconnected with the process of receiving supergenes that others have transmitted. We do not simply wish to propagate what is in our minds. Rather, we want to make sure that the content of our minds is as ideal as it can be because this is going to maximise our subsequent capacity for propagating our own supergenes. Every opportunity that we have to improve our supergene pool will be taken and every opportunity that we have to propagate parts of our current total gene pool we must also seize.
Are we all driven to propagate our supergenes to the same degree? Different individuals have different degrees of sex drive, the urge to propagate our biogenes. In exactly the same way, each of us will be inclined to engage in supergene interchanges to a greater or lesser extent depending on our personalities. Outward going ambitious people are much more likely to participate while introverted, shy individuals will be much less likely to seek the social connections that this needs. Whatever our own inclinations, supergene transactions require the presence of another individual as a minimum. We live in a competitive world. We propagate our supergenes in competition with others also trying to propagate their supergenes. If ours are less well suited to the current social environment than we are going to find it much harder to be successful. The better we are adapted to our environment the more likely it is that we will be able to propagate our supergenes and more likely for them to survive in others so that, in turn, they may be propagated yet further.
Passing Supergenes To Others
So how is this propagation of parts of our supergene pool actually going to happen? As a minimum we need to have another human with whom we can communicate, someone with whom we share a basic language, to allow us to exchange information about ourselves and about our beliefs. Most of these interactions will take place in groups. Some of these groups will be ones that we feel a psychological involvement with which could be either positive (in the sense that we are more inclined to behave in the way that members of that group do) or negative (in the opposite sense). Kelly (1952) has called these ?reference groups? to distinguish them from membership groups to which we are connected by some external criteria such as ?I am an astronomer?. Groups may be very large (Chelsea Football Supporters Club or a national group such as ?Scottish?) or much smaller (your book club) and all have their own separate and different identities, priorities and dynamics.
We can get some idea about the way that groups work by thinking of a specific example. Imagine that we have attended a party where we met two other people for the first time whom we thought interesting enough to want to meet again. We agreed that we would, indeed, get together for an evening. We shall also simplify this example by assuming that there is nothing sexual about this grouping (although no doubt some psychologists would say that was a contradiction in terms), and also that there did not appear to be any connection related in any way to our work or families. Let us think about how that first meeting would go.
It is not, of course, the first meeting. Already there is the history of what happened at the party and what we talked about. Even there, the first moves to establish the credentials of the group were being made. We started by trying to find out more about one another in order that we could get some basic understanding of what sort of person they were, their tastes, their backgrounds, what sort of books they read, films they watched, their political inclinations and all the things that allow us to pigeonhole one another. This is an essential first step because each of us is far too complicated to be evaluated with a completely open mind, without a reference framework. We know from experience that people with certain tastes or political inclinations are ones that we will get on with better. I generally find I have little in common with people who like hunting and are enthusiastic supporters of the death penalty. No doubt these generalisations (usually called prejudices) mean that I have missed a number of potentially rewarding acquaintances, but we have to make judgments on the information available. We gather a variety of defining parameters for anyone we meet that will determine the framework within which we start to interact. In this case the party provided the initial filtering opportunity and so at our second meeting we are past that and can start to relate on a somewhat more incisive level.
What is it that makes us most comfortable in a social group? In order for a group experience to be satisfactory, social psychologists tell us that there are several parameters that indicate how well the group is working and how comfortable each of us feels within the group. They tell us that we have to feel that we belong to the group and that we understand what it is the group is for. We need to be able to command our share of attention within the group because without attention no one will listen to us and we will not be able to project our supergenes towards the other members of the group. The group has to offer us a chance to improve ourselves in the broadest sense and, for it to be effective, above all we must feel trusted by the group and able to trust other members of the group. In practice any group tends towards providing these various components although they may not all reach the same level of success. As a consequence, our initial conversations are very much directed towards establishing these connections and these conditions so that we all feel comfortable within the group.
We will probably approach this second meeting with some degree of nervousness. If it is to go well we need to make some effort with our appearance and project ourselves as best we can on the basis of our limited knowledge of the others, and in the manner we think will be best received. We want to make a good impression. By honouring the group or meeting with this extra effort we demonstrate that we want the group to succeed and that we think well of it. It is also the case that we want to be able to establish a position in the group that fully reflects our potential. As we talk, we move from the phase of trying to establish our position within the group towards a point where we can interchange ideas about anything that seems important at the time. We might talk about books we have read or films we have seen or music we have enjoyed. Talking about these things with energy can enthuse others to read a book or listen to that music and perhaps enjoy it in the way that we did. We will have said what it was about the book or the music that we particularly liked and what it meant to us and perhaps other things it reminds us of. Gradually we find ourselves passing a little part of our mind to others. In the same way elementary ideas, feelings and attitudes of the others in the group are being passed to us. The more confident we feel about the other members of the group and more likely we are to treat their ideas and tastes and views seriously. We do not absorb them and make them our own immediately. Supergenes do not simply pass into our brains uncritically. Our minds are extremely complicated. A new idea has to be merged with everything that is already present in our mind and any merging will depend on many factors including its compatibility with what is already there. We will assess whether we think that the transmitter is someone whose opinion we should trust. Is she someone who is inclined to exaggerate her opinion? Where did her opinion come from? Did she really read that book or did she just read a short paragraph of a review in the newspaper? All these questions and our instinctive response to them give the incoming idea a quality rating which will inform our subsequent way of dealing with the new idea. We may not be able to do much about it immediately. If it is a piece of music that we would like to hear it may be days or weeks before we have the chance to find that piece and listen to it. That experience will then be combined with the other information we have already about it from our friend and eventually we will update our own views about music in general as well as updating our opinion of our friend (it really was a rather lovely piece of music and makes me think she has excellent taste in such matters or perhaps you would feel it was a remarkably trashy novel and I cannot imagine how anyone thought it worth the time).
Do we only exchange supergenes in these set piece group situations? In fact, all the time we are exchanging pieces of information with others. We are always open to the possibility of improving and updating and refining our own supergene pool by learning from others and other groups. That improvement of our supergene pool will, in turn, make it easier for us to propagate our supergenes in future. You might see someone on the street attractively dressed and think ?doesn?t she look gorgeous! I really must lose some more weight?. You have received messages about her body language, the way she looks and dresses, her background both social and economic and many other difficult to quantify components. You have felt some admiration for her and that perhaps you would like to be a little more like her. You then realise that with your figure you would be hard-pressed to carry off those clothes as well as she did, reminding you that perhaps a little less weight might be a good idea. A more complicated combination of supergenes might be transferred if I visited a laboratory recently fitted out by a colleague with new equipment. I might hear from him about new instruments or ways of organising a laboratory that I had never thought about and realise that I could do something with my own laboratory to make it more efficient and easy to use. This is an example of a more complicated interaction where there will have been many supergene transactions going on in both directions which may, indeed, have had some impact on my colleague, but certainly had impact on me. I could see the new ideas and process them in conjunction with my existing experience and knowledge of my own requirements and see how changes can be realised in my own laboratory.
Often these supergene pool subsets are extremely small and unimportant, such as noticing a pair of shoes that someone is wearing in the street and thinking they looked the sort of shoes I might like to buy. At the other extreme, an example of major supergene pool re-engineering might arise if I read a book which expressed a whole range of ideas that I was vaguely familiar with in a radically new and exciting way. I have indeed read such books and talked to people and come away with a feeling of having experienced an internal revolution in my own mind. I think of the book by E. O. Wilson entitled Consilience as an excellent example here. Such an experience can lead to a substantial reassessment of significant parts of our supergene pool. However even this experience actually comprised a large number of small supergene transactions each of which was judged on its own merits but in combination developed a power of its own.
Interchanging Supergenes Successfully
What are the simplest groups of supergenes we deal with? No matter where we are, we are receiving tiny elementary messages from our environment and from any other people with whom we come into contact. We feel the wind in our hair, the smell of the newly mown grass and the warmth of the Sun on our skin. All our senses are giving us information which is adding to the store contained inside our brain. Much of it will be forgotten almost as soon as it is experienced. We are also emitting similar tiny, elementary messages to anyone or anything able to receive them. A bird sitting on a fence will notice if you look at it for more than a few seconds and perhaps fly off if there is a degree of uncertainty about your intentions towards the bird. More complex messages may be being transmitted to other humans should they be in range. All the time there is a continual flux in both directions of these elementary tokens of information which our brains have to decide how to process. Most will go into short-term memory if they are consciously registered at all. Others may be processed more substantially.
The more substantial supergene exchanges comprise multiple elementary transactions of varying complexity. These elementary transactions are the essence of supergene transfer between two individuals. We want to improve the quality of our supergene pool so that it can be best matched to the social environment in which we find ourselves. This will give us an advantage in trying to propagate our supergenes because we will find that we are better adapted to the social environment. A potential supergene transfer is taken in by the brain and assessed on a variety of criteria that eventually leads to a decision to reject the new supergene transfer, accept it in its entirety or, most usually, process it further into a form that makes it acceptable and compatible with our existing gene pool. There are a number of important conditions that need to be satisfied before an incoming supergene transaction is absorbed, even in part, by the receiver. First, the transmitter must have our attention. Unless the individual transmitting supergenes are being allowed some degree of access to our minds then, unsurprisingly, not much communication will happen. Secondly the source of the supergene packet has to be trusted by the receiver. Trust is a fundamental and essential part of any interaction. If the transmitter is known to the receiver and trusted to be reliable then that makes a successful supergene transfer much more likely. Trust does not, however, have to be established directly. We are much more likely to pay attention to the ideas of an individual who is trusted than those of a complete stranger. We are also much more likely to accept supergenes if we know that the same supergenes have already been accepted by our peers. We are much more likely to accept recommendations for books, recipes or restaurants from someone we know and trust. If you want to hire a good builder or painter you will greatly prefer to rely on word of mouth over an advertisement in a free newspaper. All the time we seek evidence of quality in the supergene sets we receive.
In general, however, the transmitter may be either partially trusted or unknown. Our instinctive attitude is to be relatively trusting of strangers, rather surprisingly, even in our complex and confusing world. In these cases, we need to look for other information about the transmitter to help us decide whether any of these incoming supergenes are to have any chance of being absorbed. For example, the transmitter may be someone who is powerful or wealthy or charismatic. These labels of status including power, wealth, charisma, influence, physical attractiveness, surroundings, manner of dress and bearings and many other ciphers that indicate the transmitter already has aspects of his or her character or personality (supergenes) that we find attractive and therefore are more likely to want to incorporate elements of this individual?s supergene pool into our own supergene pool. As a consequence, such a successful person is more likely to be someone whose supergenes should be treated more seriously. An interesting variation on the conventional way of transmitting and receiving supergenes and the importance of trust arises when we think of the role of talk show hosts. The role of the host is to help with the communication of the supergenes of the guest to the audience by moderating what the guest says and giving those supergenes a degree of approval before they are passed to the audience. An individual such as Michael Parkinson who projects an appealing type of personality and whose judgement has often been seen to be reliable provides a powerful interface between sometimes quirky and eccentric guests and the audience who might otherwise be much less inclined to trust the guest. Another example is the evangelical preacher figure that is seen more often on American television channels. They come over as aspirational figures set in an aspirational background, surrounded by loving friends, speaking powerfully to large adoring audiences. Clearly trusted deeply by thousands, how could we resist sending a substantial donation?
This is why we are greatly influenced by the status of individuals and also by the environment in which we find them. By contrast, a transmitter who has a history of transmitting unreliable supergenes or behaving in an untrustworthy manner is likely to have any future supergene transmission taken much less seriously because that essential trust has been compromised. Trust is something that is built up gradually but the breaking of trust is something that we are inclined to see in a black and white manner. Broken trust is slow to repair, much slower than the building of the original degree of trust.
What do we have to think about when transmitting supergenes? When transmitting supergenes to others the same considerations apply in that we have to be careful to manage the environment in which the transaction occurs in order to maximise the likelihood of our supergenes being accepted by the receiver. In practice, the transmitted set of supergenes needs to be projected onto the receiver?s supergene pool space. As with all things that happen with the human brain, this processing is done in a rather rapid, fairly general way, with only a moderate degree of detail being examined. Subsequent processing by the receiver?s brain will determine the extent to which these incoming supergene elements will be accepted or otherwise. We will see later, when we look at the techniques of the advertising industry, that it is possible to bypass these security barriers under certain circumstances.
The importance of trust is paramount. We need to do everything necessary to assure the target of our transmission that we are indeed trustworthy and that what we are transmitting to them is packaged in a way that maximises the likelihood of our transmitted supergene packet being incorporated into the receiver?s supergene pool. Depending on who we are talking to we know whether they will be open to more or less radical ideas, what their taste is (conservative or adventurous) and any history that we have of dealing with them in the past and how that might compromise the way we package some of our supergenes which we send. We tailor our communications with them to have the effect that we plan, consciously or subconsciously. We can change context rapidly. For example, there are many intelligent, thinking, liberated men who are members of clubs that refuse to admit women, something that they might have great difficulty to justify to themselves or their friends away from the club. Very often we need to handle a supergene set transmission at relatively short notice and have to rely on snap judgements. We are astonishingly good at summing up what we think of an individual within just a few seconds a meeting them or seeing them. Our survival in the distant past undoubtedly depended on this ability. Many of the signals that we give off and they give off (body language, in the broadest sense) are used to establish the credentials of a potential transmitter and it is within that context that we decide to what extent we might absorb supergenes from another individual. A great deal of all this goes on at a subconscious level but our instinctive understanding of how these things work guides us as to how it all should be handled. When talking to an individual or in a group situation we are very good at knowing what is appropriate and what is not and what we should do or not to in order to have the effect we desire. We are open all the time to the verbal and, often more importantly, non verbal signals from the group and these are used in conjunction with our experience to moderate and modulate the way that we express ourselves and to manage the non-verbal signals that we in turn are sending back to the group. Every time we simply talk to someone we are exchanging information and colouring what we say to reflect our own judgment, our own values in a way that will imperceptibly (we hope) affect the judgment and values of the person we are talking to. This is how supergenes are propagated: not as a massive shift but as single grains of sand, gradually building a mountain.
When thinking about supergene transactions we should not forget that one of the most important processes that is going on is within our own brains. We have a vast store of knowledge and experience and wisdom in our brains. Supergenes that are ultimately accepted and incorporated into our supergene pool are only incorporated after a considerable amount of processing. We will see later that there are strategies that can be used to bypass a lot of the filtering that goes on and these are used widely by the advertising industry. However, a great deal of what we have inside our minds is a consequence of us thinking about things both consciously and subconsciously and constructing ideas and attitudes and strategies, etc., from the components contained in our brains. The view of evolutionary psychologists is that we are largely at the mercy of a vast number of biologically encoded behaviour modules so that we have remarkably little to do with the way that we actually behave. Social psychologists, in contrast, believe that the evidence suggests strongly that what is going on within the human mind and is being created within it is of fundamental and overarching importance to the way that we behave. As I have argued earlier this seems much more consistent with the way we humans actually seem to act, not under the whim of forces outside our control but engaged fully in every aspect of our lives and of our destinies.
Why Groups Are Critical For Supergene Transfers
I have often described the propagation of supergenes as being the consequence of any competitive struggle in a difficult environment. Our relationships with groups is, however, much more cooperative so the competition is of a different nature. We still want to exchange supergenes with other members of the group but here the supergenes we share with them let us work together to propagate them to other groups. If one member of the group finds itself in a different environment the knowledge that certain supergenes are widely shared by others helps the self?confidence of the individual. That, in turn, can improve the credibility and propagation potential of those supergene sets. Cooperation within the group therefore makes competition outside the group more effective.
Most of us are involved in many different kinds of groups with different functions. At the simplest level we have the family group and the groups of friends that we know. There are social groups such as being the member of a football or golfing club as well as groups involved with one?s work. Every group has its own way of working, its own dynamic and structure and what it is that each of the members gets from it. When thinking of groups we must think not simply of the sort of groups that meet, for example, at work to discuss sales and marketing. We must think of the people we work with on a day-to-day basis and casual acquaintances that we may see only occasionally. I have also emphasised that I am not trying to understand how groups make decisions or carry out the day-to-day aspects of their job. I am much more concerned with understanding what is the framework upon which groups and society are actually constructed, what are the rules of the game that underpin everything we do. I will leave it to the social psychologists to try to unscramble the many aspects of the way we work in groups: this is not something I wish to address here although I do think that these ideas help to illuminate various aspects of human behaviour at these higher levels.
Most groups are inevitably less ideal than they might be and so our enthusiasm for the group will be affected. Nevertheless we cannot be too fussy because we must make the best of what opportunities are there to propagate our supergenes. Within any group most people are trying to increase their influence over other members of the group. Inevitably this involves an element of competition, often rather poorly disguised. They may do this by the way they dress and conduct themselves. They may take on roles within the group that make their continued presence within the group more important for the maintenance of the group. They may help to improve the perception of the group externally. We want other members of the group to become slightly more impressed by ourselves and our achievements. It must all be done with great subtlety because too brazen an approach can be counterproductive. If group members feel you have something worthwhile to offer then they will give you the attention you need. However, even amongst close friends it is surprising how much people want to talk about themselves rather than hearing about you. Many of us will have been on a trip that was important or exciting and which our friends knew was important to us. On our return some of our friends are interested to hear of our experiences but a surprising number ask about it as briefly as possible and then proceed to tell us about the trivia of their lives while we have been away. They feel a need to dominate and control the attention space in the group, a space that cannot be occupied by too many people. If others spend too much time propagating their supergenes we will not have the opportunity to propagate ours.
In other groups where there is more to be gained or lost by being successful in the group then the interactions and clashes can be more clearly seen. Social groups with a well-defined hierarchy behave rather differently. If we think of a golf club then we have a group that includes members of long-standing who may have a position of influence and status within the management of the club that younger members may aspire to. New members are often only admitted having passed through some kind of vetting procedure which may be important at one level but is often an excuse for demonstrating the importance and power of those deciding who to admit. They do not want to lose power or influence themselves. The new member will often throw himself with energy and enthusiasm into the affairs of the club so as to absorb rapidly the supergenes that are shared by other members of the club. They will be particularly keen to resist additional new members who have the potential to dilute their own supergenes. It is often the case that those most recently admitted to a society or club are the most enthusiastic defenders of the traditions of the club.
We often see a more overt struggle for power when we think of meetings of committees at work. In social groups the members are usually much more tuned to the supergenes of other members because they are part of a group out of choice and presumably most of the members are relatively like-minded. This is the essence of a reference group. At work or business meetings we often find ourselves dealing with individuals with whom we have much less in common and this also means that their supergenes are probably more significantly different from ours. Even in these membership groups supergene interactions are very important. It is also the case that advancement within a work group can have other benefits such as promotion or an increase in salary so that success in these groups is much more immediately important than it might be in a social group which is happy to work on much longer timescales in order simply to maintain the status quo. Sometimes here we can see fairly naked ambition at work while members jostle for power and influence and we can also see that sometimes such an approach is counterproductive. Quickly other members of the group begin to understand how each individual works and the extent to which the image they project is borne out by the reality of their performance. Such committees usually have clearly defined tasks to carry out and decisions to make and follow up. How these decisions are arrived at is not something that will concern us here as it is very much the province of the social psychologist. However what interests us more is the impressions that individuals make on one other and how members of this group wish to emulate others and to what extent. It is also interesting to look at the management style of the individual or individuals who are highest in seniority and how they handle the meeting. They need to make sure that the other members of the group will continue to be influenced principally by them, their attitudes and beliefs, and their wishes about how things should be done. In short they want to make sure other members of the committee not only do what they are supposed to do but that they do it in the way the chair would do it if he had the time. The chair is effectively propagating his or her supergenes under a circumstance where the more junior members of the meeting really do have to pay attention and follow the chair?s instructions. Hopefully this is all done very subtly but we have all come across managers who take a much more aggressive, bullying approach to the whole business of organising a group of workers.
We have already seen that in order for supergenes to be propagated an individual transmitter needs to have the attention of the receiver if the transfer is to be effective. A sad fact of life is that if you shout at someone you tend to get much more attention. A recent study (Williams and Mattingley, Current Biology, vol. 16) of the responses of both men and women to anger showed that angry men get noticed more than if other emotions are shown. This can easily get taken to greater extremes when individuals start to shout and harangue and bully at meetings, and this sort of manager is sadly not uncommon. Other members of the group are cowed into suppressing any expression of their own supergenes so that the bullying manager has the maximum opportunity to propagate his and insist that things be done his way.
Very often we need to handle a supergene set transmission at relatively short notice and have to rely on snap judgements. It is fascinating to watch the gestures of people in a meeting. You can work out very quickly who agrees with whom by watching how they sit, whether their arms are crossed or clasped behind their heads. An individual championing one point of view can make a change in the way he or she sits and just notice how many others follow them within a few minutes. Individuals are essentially signalling their preparedness or otherwise to accept the views of a particular speaker, thereby modifying slightly their own supergene pool.
The Drive for Power and Influence
This raises questions about the darker side of the way that social groups work. Within some groups it can be a difficult and competitive struggle to gain ascendancy in any way. Those who have achieved a position of seniority become concerned that more junior people may try to usurp their positions. There are many strategies for making that less likely. In most societies class or caste structures are used to reduce and control social mobility. Within clubs or societies there may be different levels of membership, each representing a hurdle to be crossed by the aspiring young member. These mechanisms ensure that the influence of the more senior members is preserved for as long as it can be. Other strategies include making rules that require a long apprenticeship before any degree of seniority is achieved. A different approach, favoured by the churches, is to promise a splendid afterlife in return for an acceptance of a lack of advancement in this life. The Christian Bible says that ?The meek shall inherit the earth?, something that history suggests will involve a long wait. Another aspect of the way that individuals work in groups is that some members use less pleasant methods to acquire and maintain power. DrAnthony Clare, the psychiatrist, wrote in 1989: ?Apart from the occasional saint, it is difficult for people who have the smallest amount of power to be nice?. Nevertheless, the acquisition of power (the ultimate aphrodisiac, according to Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State) is something that many strive for to a greater or lesser degree. The descriptions that I have given above, of the way that individuals struggle for ascendancy within a group suggests that the fitter the individual then the more successful he or she will be. In general that is how things work. However there are behavioural strategies which can overwhelm any simple test of fitness. At an elementary level, I remember a woman who regularly resorted to tears in committee meetings in order to get her way. The other (male) members of the committee did not know how to handle this and so in order to keep the group together in some sense they were inclined to give in to her (relatively unreasonable, in my opinion) demands. Another example is the style of management or leadership that some people use. There is a strategy that is essentially a kind of bullying which involves shouting and making unreasonable demands of individuals. Others often find this sort of behaviour difficult and, in their uncertainty as to what to do, they sometimes make decisions and agree to do things that they would otherwise not accept. There is, in fact, an advantage in this approach because if it is used carefully it can consolidate the position of the leader. In other groups, there may be a wariness about an individual who is prone to temper or violent outbursts. The fear felt by other members of the group allow that individual to get away with acquiring and keeping an inappropriately senior position in the group, provided that the individual uses these threats carefully. Indeed the risk of violent or extreme behaviour by a leader is often the reason that they became a leader. Samuel Goldwyn, the film director, famously said: ?I don?t want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs?. There are many examples of individuals who achieved a position of power because of their blatant disregard for the niceties of social behaviour. It is a depressing fact of life, more generally, that those who have risen to a position of power and influence in the larger world are more often than not rather unpleasant individuals. It is that unpleasantness which has allowed them to progress. Despite what evolutionary psychologists believe, it seems that violence and, in its most extreme form, murder may not always be maladaptive after all. If you are of a despotic nature, killing anyone who threatens your grip on power is an excellent way of maintaining your position. Machiavelli wrote about this in The Prince (1532) in which he said: ?if an injury has to be done to a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared?. Generally, the best strategy for getting ahead is to be as nasty as you can get away with. Sadly, evil does seem to be adaptive.
Supergene Flexibility: Context Switching
When we mix with different groups it is inevitable that supergene subsets that are expressed will be different depending on the nature of the group and its interests. The supergene subset that is appropriate, we feel, when dealing with a bus conductor will be different from the subset that will be active when we visit a doctor. We have a complex pool of supergenes from which to choose and are able to switch context rapidly depending on the social environment in which we find ourselves. This is true of everyone we meet. We are all interacting while using a particular supergene subset but we are able to reconfigure those subsets dynamically and quite dramatically. They may even be reconfigured during the interaction as new information comes to us about the people we are dealing with. We would all expect our attitude to change if the rather unprepossessing individual with whom we are talking turns out to be a Nobel prizewinner. The language we use to address the chairman of the committee is rather different from that used to address its newest member. In a subtle way our persona, and therefore our responses, change from moment to moment. At work we can be quite different from the way we are at home. It is often surprising to see a work colleague we thought we knew well in a totally different environment such as on vacation or in a completely non-work context. We can also understand better that people might have a ?secret? life, such as when a devoted family man turns out to have a couple of gorgeous mistresses on the side. It is a mechanism that, in an extreme case, makes it possible for a torturer in a police state still to be a good family man, and tender and caring towards children and animals.
Interactions with people we see relatively infrequently or with whom we spend little time all have their influence on our supergene pool, no matter how slight. We may not be aware of anything significant but all these tiny interactions do have an effect. We can see this when we take a holiday overseas and find ourselves in a foreign city surrounded by people of a very different background. At first the impression is disorientating until we start to understand the body language of the locals, how they interact with one another and generally how the whole place works. Within a few days we have been able to assimilate a whole range of social strategies that allow us to feel much more comfortable in this environment. We need to have this capacity to evolve socially on incredibly short timescales if we are to be effective and survive in rapidly changing environments. Our supergenes allow evolution to happen on these remarkably rapid timescales, something that biogenes cannot manage. The hippopotamus would not be able to survive long in Antarctica and this may well be why so many species had been extinguished at various times in the history of the planet, as volcanism and meteor strikes caused step changes in climatic conditions. They simply could not change quickly enough to survive.
How Our Supergenes Are Acquired
When we choose a partner we are influenced by many considerations including background, race, religion and social class. In order to establish a relationship which has the potential to last we need to find a reasonable match between ourselves and our partner. That match is determined by our supergenes. Our supergenes do not need to be identical, they simply need to be compatible so that individuals from a very similar background (for example work colleagues) may find that their shared experience helps them to feel their supergenes match and indeed part of them will do. Others may prefer a partner whose supergene set is complementary to one?s own, bringing to the relationship a different yet appealing set of experiences and attitudes which have the potential to broaden the supergene sets of each partner. It is also possible that an individual may be attracted by a potential partner and feel that he or she can be persuaded to reform significantly his or her supergenes under one?s own influence, so allowing one?s own supergenes to be propagated. This is not uncommon. We all know examples of men and women who marry, almost against their better judgement, in the hope that they can change and reform the behaviour of the new partner. Not surprisingly, that usually fails because the target of this change programme has his or her own supergene pool which will certainly try to resist this. Using threats or bribes such as the withdrawal of sexual favours will not work in the long-term. Only by working to gradually restructure the supergene set surrounding the unacceptable behaviour is any progress likely to be made. As with most medical treatment, it is much more important to treat the underlying cause than the symptoms. Better still, avoid such marriages altogether!
Despite all this, successful partnerships are established and children conceived. The human brain has an innate capacity that comes from its biogenes for working with supergenes. We realise that as soon as brain functions start to develop within the foetus it is inevitable that supergene constructs are also created. I have argued strongly that the biochemical influences of the mother on the developing child are important. We have also seen that the foetus is aware of things going on around it. It can hear what its mother is saying and can respond to music being played in its vicinity. It is with good reason that expectant mothers often talk to their babies before they are born. Life in the womb is not at all the quiet, soothing idyll, bathed in the warm amniotic fluid, half awake, half asleep that one might imagine from baby books or television programmes. The reality is very different. Every time your mother moves you move as well. Your mother runs or walks upstairs and you jiggle up and down until she gets there. You hear the noise of a car she is driving and you hear (muffled but quite audible) the conversation she has with others. If she becomes angry and expresses that anger you will hear that in her voice and feel it in your shared blood chemistry. You will not know what it means at this stage but you will surely understand and have a feeling for the emotions of your mother which will be different from anyone else you will ever meet. Because of these influences it is inconceivable that the child could be born without any social awareness at all. At the least it has established a very strong bond with the mother and her chemistry and all the other subtle communications between mother and child provide the framework for that bond. The supergene set with which a newborn child finds itself is inevitably limited and simple, exactly in parallel with the way its physical capabilities are limited and simple. But many of the earliest things it learns are not simply to do with the mechanics of staying alive but are also critical to the creation of a standalone supergene pool for the child. The early influence of the parents is clearly critical but, in no time at all, any other information or experience the child can absorb from its surroundings is incorporated into that developing supergene pool. What is also surprising is to realise how quickly the behavioural characteristics of the child, which are the expression of its supergene pool, start to get involved and absorbed into the supergene pools of those around it including its siblings, its parents and anyone else who comes into contact with the child. Children quickly discover how to best manipulate the people they come into contact with, initially for elementary requirements such as food, water and a clean nappy. Long before it can walk or speak, however, it can make sure that it is brought the toys it wishes, that it will be positioned so it can see what is going on, etc.
The way that animal species parent is something that has not changed for millions of years and yet we can see in our own society that parenting is changing all the time. In modern Britain the majority stay in school up to age 18 whereas 50 years ago the school leaving age was 15, the age at which one?s working life began. The length of time our children spend at school has increased considerably, principally because there is so much more that they need to learn in order to be able to survive effectively in the adult world. They also need to develop an increasingly subtle understanding of how to work within their peer groups and within society as a whole. Parenting generally is something that is very traumatic for the modern parent, particularly with the first child. Very little parenting seems to be instinctive, despite what is written. It may be that if we were actually left on a desert island it would work out fine. However, in the information age, surrounded by so much apparently good advice, we become unable to let our most basic instincts have full rein. The net effect is that we turn to books and to the advice of others if we are fortunate enough to know parents who have gone through the stage we are so worried about. Even under these circumstances we find that parenting strategies are often dictated by currently popular books on child rearing. Although these books are usually written with a magisterial authority it is remarkable that their advice changes so rapidly from generation to generation. Whether we should feed the newborn infant every four hours without question or only when the child cries, or only when it fits in with our own schedule is something that changes surprisingly frequently as being the recommended way to handle baby. Our supergenes in this respect are being greatly influenced by these books and because all the other young parents are reading the same books they all come to believe that that strategy is the right one. Grandparents saying that they used to do things differently simply confirm the worst prejudices about such hopelessly old people.
Parenting provides the critical interface between the child?s supergenes and biogenes. The blind trust that the newborn child has for its mother is something that is important to moderate progressively as the child develops because that kind of trust would be far too dangerous in the big bad world. Parents help the child understand how to relate to other individuals and how to participate in group activities. The early experiences the child has of a stable family environment with clear boundaries that it understands are critical for the happy development of the child. If the parents behave in an untrustworthy way the child can be affected for life. The survival of the child in the world is affected critically by the success or otherwise of its parents in raising it properly in its earliest years. If we think what it is that makes up our supergenes then we can see that what is being passed to the next generation by the parents is being absorbed by the child, reformulated and integrated with the child?s experiences of life and then passed back to the parents. Any parent will tell you how much they have learned about what it is to be a child, what is of importance to the younger generation and also what they have learned about themselves as a result of raising a child. As the child grows, its supergene set becomes substantial enough and strong enough that the influence of the parents is reduced to only one of the many influences exerted upon it. New experiences come increasingly from influences outside the family and in particular the peer groups with which the child is engaged. As these are novel experiences and ideas they are propagated back to the parents only if the child feels that the parent?s supergenes are reasonably open to the ideas and attitudes it is developing, that the parents are open to the possibility of absorbing supergenes from the children. Giving children the clear message that you are open to their supergene pool is one of the best ways to ensure close contact with the child as it grows. Your child is driven by the same things that drive you. He or she wants to gain influence and propagate his or her supergenes to others including you as a parent. A home environment that is inclined towards dogmatism or a dictatorial attitude towards the child will make that child less willing to share its experiences with the parents. Parents that give their child the idea that they are contemptuous to a greater or lesser extent of the supergene pool of the child will find they alienate it so that communication with the child progressively breaks down. The parents anyway will find it ineffective to challenge the child in a destructive way because the child knows that those ideas are not just his own but shared by many in his peer group. If the parents wish to work with those new ideas constructively they must find a way to help the child understand how the new ideas may or may not be compatible with other views (other aspects of the child?s supergene pool) that the child already has.
In this way, the child gradually develops a somewhat imprecise copy of the supergenes of its parents, a copy much less accurate than the copy that it has inherited of the biogenes of its parents. It also adds to its own collection of supergenes consequent on the influence of people other than its parents. The child is particularly interested in learning by watching and interacting with other children, particularly those that are just slightly older than itself. Understanding the dynamics of one?s peer group is essential for one?s own survival because we need to understand how to relate to people of our own generation. We need to understand how we absorb the supergenes of our peers and how we transmit some of our own supergenes to them.
How Our Supergenes Evolve and Supergene Stability
The evolution of our supergenes is something that has been going on since the first humans started to spend time with one another. Each generation has built on the supergenes it was passed by its parents and by others during its childhood and teenage years. Each has added many other supergene influences from all sorts of sources. The complement of supergenes that an individual holds is being revised and updated continually in response to the wide variety of external stimuli and experiences to which we are all exposed. We are very changed by our experiences. In many ways we are more similar to our friends now than we are to the way we were ourselves half a lifetime ago. Elderly people who are unwilling or unable to evolve socially with the rest of society will increasingly find themselves alienated from it and rejected as having little to offer mainstream society. If we ever give up on trying to keep up with this explosive social evolution we will find ourselves left on the sidelines of life.
Everything that affects us in any way subtly changes the balance within our supergene pool. The tragic deaths in the World Trade Centre or the conflicts in the Middle East, or watching a squirrel eating a walnut in the garden all have their effects on our supergene pool. Other supergenes may gradually fade away with time. Many of our parents and grandparents? generation were greatly affected by the Second World War. The hatred between nations generated by that conflict was passed to children born during and soon after the war, but children born a generation later were much less exposed to those particular supergenes and now, two generations after the end of that war, there is a much weaker residue of views which, though once held widely, are now unacceptable. Our supergenes have evolved again as we as individuals and as a society have moved on. The flexibility inherent in the concept of supergenes allows us to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances and to put to one side very great injustices, very great challenges to our survival.
This mechanism for sharing and propagating supergenes is perhaps one thousand times more efficient and more rapid than anything that biogenes can manage. The slower rate of biogene evolution is probably one of the reasons it has been so successful in getting us to where we are as animals which function remarkably well in so many ways. The difficulty with anything that evolves very rapidly is that a gene group, whether it is biological or social, can mutate into a state that is quite harmful for the organism. If several gene generations can pass before that group of genes is eliminated by natural selection then it is possible that the organism would have difficulty in getting back to a stable and effective state where it works well. By making sure that evolution is very slow and natural selection based not on individual genes but on a full complement of genes, the whole process of biological evolution is extremely stable against many external influences. The downside is that if the environment changes rapidly then evolution may not allow an organism to evolve quickly enough to be able to cope with the changed environment. This is essentially why mass extinctions occur. Some natural catastrophe ? whether it is volcanic or a giant asteroid striking the earth ? causes a major glitch in the world climate that changes the availability of certain kinds of food. The catastrophic event changes global temperatures in a way that many creatures cannot handle. Had evolution happened so they could accommodate the changed climate more rapidly then these creatures might have survived and be with us today. There is little doubt that the biogenetic evolutionary strategy that is so widely used on the planet actually works rather well and is likely optimised for terrestrial conditions. In the way that genetic traits are selected in response to natural pressures it is likely that these evolutionary strategies were also so selected.
By contrast, supergenes can evolve on very short timescales. Peace-loving farmers who would not hurt anyone can change overnight if, for example, their country is attacked. In a negligible period of time these farmers can become soldiers prepared to destroy the enemy and then, equally quickly, return to their peaceable existence on the farm. Other farmers can change their behaviour radically if, for example, there is a drought or if there are other extreme climatic conditions. They modify their behaviour so that there will always be some yield of food. If their behaviour took even a few years to evolve then they and their families would starve to death. There are other examples of rapid evolution of our supergenes. Sometimes we will read a book that completely changes our understanding of some significant area of interest, and that part of our supergene set is affected for ever. It is this capacity we have for managing rapid supergene evolution that underlies the speed of social evolution we see today. Without it, a young man coming from the most isolated and lonely Scottish island directly to the claustrophobic intensity of London simply could not survive. And yet people come from all over the world and manage these cultural conditions with apparent equanimity. It helps enormously that human nature is so remarkably homogeneous across the planet, but the flexibility inherent in our supergene constructs is also extraordinarily important.
Given how quickly supergenes can evolve, it is possible for individuals and groups to develop behaviour patterns that ultimately harm them. Harmful supergenes can be developed very quickly but the process by which they are selected out by society generally acts on even longer timescales. For example, a group of teenagers may decide that is cool to play ?chicken?, where individuals run across a busy road in front of passing vehicles with a minimum safety margin. The sociology of teenage groups guarantees that group members want to gain status and influence within the group so that their supergenes achieve some ascendancy. That status and influence is enhanced by whoever cuts things finest, but, of course, eventually, serious injury will occur. The group has accepted the supergenes that encourage and value playing ?chicken? too rapidly and too uncritically. It is therefore being played without adequate thought for the consequences. Ultimately the supergenes of one member of that group will cease being propagated anywhere. The existence of a social group of any sort implies that the shared supergenes of the members had given the group the stability to find a niche in the wider society. Just because a group exists does not imply that its values are optimal or even desirable. The group provides a more stable foundation within which its members can work than would be possible if they were outside it. There are many examples of groups who are bound together by shared values and a way of doing things that gives the group stability and integrity and yet which is based on behaviour patterns that are very damaging to the rest of society. A good example here is the structure of organised crime in Italy. Groups such as the Mafia use a range of rituals and traditions that punish the breaking of loyalty to the group in the harshest possible way. The leaders of such groups gain the necessary power and influence to undertake criminal activities that many members might prefer not to carry out but they have constructed the group rituals to make it almost impossible to leave. The group, therefore, is highly stable even though what it is trying to achieve is harmful for the rest of society. Another example of disastrous behaviour patterns in a social group comes from the South Fore peoples in Papua New Guinea. An epidemic of a disease called kuru was found to be due to their custom eating the brains on the death of an individual. Kuru is a degenerative brain disease rather similar to variant CJD, and equally fatal. With education this disease has now been largely eradicated on the island though it came close to eliminating the tribe entirely.
The size of a group is important in stabilising behaviour. The average supergene set expressed by members of the group will marginalise the expression of more extreme supergenes by a member. Suppose, at a parent-teacher meeting, one individual present makes a crude racist remark. There may well be a sharp collective intake of breath that makes it clear that such a remark was out of place and should not be repeated within that social environment. The same remark, however, made amongst the group of racists could equally well produce a cheer and general approval. It all depends on the environment within which that supergene set was expressed. This mechanism is also important in making sure that new ideas that lead to new supergene constructs are subjected to a critical environment consisting of other supergene sets. For a new idea to be accepted it has to be formulated within a context that is acceptable to others in the group. Ideas that are too adventurous or go too far beyond the current spectrum of the mean supergene pool of the group will be rejected. Less extreme ideas are more likely to be incorporated by the group. This is an important way of making sure that supergenes evolve more gradually than they might do otherwise by ensuring that peer review occurs. Exactly the same sort of thing happens with biogenes. Should a genetic error occur in the DNA of the cell causing it to grow abnormally then often this is recognised by neighbouring cells as being aberrant and that cell is attacked by the white blood cells whose job it is to kill invading alien cells. What this also means in the context of supergenes, of course, is that radical ideas will inevitably be rejected by many just because they are radical. If they are perceived by the group as challenging the integrity of the supergene pools of the other members of the group to a degree that they might cause damage or upset the social structure within the group then they are likely to be rejected.
Any social group needs to have an image of itself, of what its standards are and of what it is trying to achieve. External challenges need to be resisted if they threaten the integrity of the group. Radically new ideas need, therefore, to be introduced gradually so that the group does not feel threatened and, indeed, so that it has time to allow its supergenes to evolve through a variety of states to the same endpoint. This is something many scientists appreciate: you can be too radical by coming up with ideas that are simply too different from the accepted view to be absorbed and accepted in one gulp. Novel ideas have to be novel but they do have to be timely. The approach has to be softly, softly. It is this fundamental instinct for stability, to maintain the integrity of the group, that can work against scientific progress where some branch of research is simply not going anywhere. Thomas Kuhn recognised this when he realised that converting mainstream scientific groups to a radically new view was not something that worked easily. He wrote to his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that ?[Individuals who break through by inventing a new paradigm are] almost always...either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change....These are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them?. They have to be people outside the group because they do not share the right supergenes with the existing members of the group and so the approach cannot rely on supergene evolution to create revolution.
In this chapter we have looked at the way that supergenes work in the broadest sense. We have looked at the way we acquire them and refine them and the conditions necessary for successful transmission between individuals both on their own and in the context of groups. The next chapter will explore several aspects of human behaviour that have proved difficult to understand with conventional behavioural models. We will try to see whether we can achieve a better understanding by looking at them from the point of view of supergene pools and supergene dynamics.
Chapter 7
Supergenes and Human Behaviour
In the last chapter we looked at the way that individuals relate and work in groups in order to influence others around them. For each of us this ability to have influence on others, to try to make the people we meet just a little bit more like ourselves, is the fundamental motivating force that affects each of us. In this chapter we will look at the way this manifests itself in different aspects of the way that humans behave, particularly in groups and in the wider society. It is this public side of the way that supergenes interact that concerns us next.
Finding a Group Niche in our Broader Society
Once a hierarchy in a social group such as a golf club is established then that structure is relatively stable unless there is some reason for change. It is likely that there will be some continual jostling for position within the group but generally the group is principally affected by external pressures. On the inside, the group will try to propagate its own shared supergenes by establishing an identity and a public persona with which its members can identify. The members will be able to associate themselves with this identity and so gain status and, hopefully, enhanced influence outside the group. It must be on its guard against any potential threat to the group. In the simplest form of an external threat, a new individual may wish to join the group. In general, provided the individual subscribes to the values of the group then he or she will be permitted to join. The newcomer will not usually be able to join on a whim. There will be some barrier established to make sure that the newcomer really does want to join (this might be an upfront joining fee for a golf club or it may be some ritualised joining process such as a vetting committee or waiting list (to make the group seem even more desirable) or the need to be proposed by existing members of the book group. The group will generally be rather wary of a potential joiner who is thought to have an agenda that might be too revolutionary in respect of the values and goals of the group. Even though change often is the best way to re-energise a group it must not be forgotten that change perceived as too radical is an attack, a criticism of the supergenes of the group. The instinctive reaction of the group is to resist any rapid change because it threatens the supergenes of every member of the group potentially. This is what each of us knows instinctively ? that if we wish to change the way a group functions, we have
to approach that with care and subtlety. The approach of the bull in the china shop will not work. It will be disruptive in a harmful way and the group will identify the individual causing the harm as attacking the supergenes of the group and the disruptive individual will become the focus of the dissatisfactions of the group. The net effect is that the group will be even more entrenched in its opposition to the new ideas and even less likely to address the dissatisfactions to which they related.
Social groups may be affected by competition from other social groups. If the group is to be successful it must manage its external image so that it continues to be seen as stable and strong and so that it can manage any attacks on the group. In this context an attack on the supergenes of the group may come from another group that shares some of the supergenes. This might have the effect of reducing the opportunity of the members of the first group from propagating their own supergenes. When two groups find they have many interests in common they may find they are competing for the same new members and the same social space in which each wants to exert its power and influence. When this happens the groups change by modifying their supergene complement so that they are able to differentiate themselves more easily. This is analogous with what happens in the bird kingdom where species evolve to occupy non-competing niches in the environment where each can survive alongside the other. Two competing groups that are trying to make themselves more attractive to new members will change their image to give themselves a more unique identity so that their opportunities to propagate their supergenes are undiminished. These differences are often exaggerated by the groups so as to emphasise their differences and allow them to maintain a clear and distinct identity. Indeed it is often the case that groups that are remarkably similar are the ones that have the most vitriolic attitude to one another. Examples here include the British and the French, and Sunni and Shia Muslims. Exactly the same thing happens within small groups such as a family. The members of a family group each have to establish a niche within it. In order to make each member as valuable as possible to the family, individuals take on roles that differentiate themselves as much as possible from other members of the family. Many research studies show that non-identical twins brought up in the same family are more different from one another than they are from other children in the same area and of similar social background to whom they are not related. Each has modified their individual supergene pool slightly to maximise their individuality and therefore their own chances and opportunities for propagating their own supergenes. This happens in just the same way with almost any groupings in society that find they have overlapping interests. Significant efforts are made to ensure that each can be differentiated easily from the other. Each puts considerable effort into establishing and maintaining its own well-defined social niche and corresponding supergene pool in our larger society.
Reinforcing Group Identities
Social groups are fundamentally cooperative enterprises with members who share a significant range of supergenes. Finding another individual or group of individuals that share some of our supergenes is not only reaffirming but represents an important opportunity to propagate those supergenes with renewed vigour. Relatively quiet and unassuming individuals are able to develop comfortable niches within the group where they are more likely to be able to express their ideas and views and thoughts and have them taken up by others than would be possible outside the group. Having such supergenes adopted by the group allows them to be propagated beyond the group much more effectively. This is the essential reason social groups work so well, and why essentially all groups are bound by common interests and common social values. We can each have other interests and social values that are not expressed significantly within one group that may be relevant to a different group. Belonging to a group enhances one?s potential for supergene propagation but it is also more difficult for an individual to stand up against the group?s supergenes without seeming antisocial, eccentric and potentially dangerous to the group with its consequent risk of ejection. However, having other members of the group check out one?s ideas allows them to be tested in a non-threatening environment and refined and improved or rejected. In this way again one?s supergene pool is being improved by the interaction with the group. We all have friends or colleagues who have a variety of wacky ideas. Occasionally they produce something quite brilliant and so on balance their contribution is important and positive.
The membership of small groups is easily managed since each member knows every other one. Larger groups may have difficulty in identifying who is, and who is not, a member of the group. The easiest way to do this is to provide a label that indicates shared supergenes. This might be a uniform as with the public services and army or it might be the wearing of the football colours of the team one supports. Other organisations such as the Masons or the Catholic Church might share eccentric rituals and groups that wish to encourage members may find that they are attracted by the complexity of the rituals that others may find that positively unattractive to a degree that it can generate hostility from outside the group.
It is important for any group to work to retain its identity and position in society. It does this in many ways. Entry to the group may be made more difficult and lengthy for aspiring members. A lengthy application and approval procedure or the need for an apprenticeship can increase the value placed on membership by others outside the group who are then more likely to be impressed by its status and therefore more likely to accept some of the supergenes that the group represents. Once admitted, views can change. Groucho Marx said: ?I wouldn?t want to belong to any club who would have me as a member?. Within the organisation mechanisms can often be found which are intended to stabilise the group should there be challenges to its authority and position. Internal structures are developed to ensure that any changes in the way the group operates have to be agreed by particular subcommittees. The group will also have mechanisms to resist any internal challenges from new members or others with radical ideas. Depending on the way the group works this can be successful in providing a degree of stability or it can be harmful by stopping the group evolving in parallel with the rest of society. For example, groups that become dominated by their most elderly members can find that the younger members become disengaged from the group and even be inclined to establish other groups. This is a significant problem in Britain within the Muslim community where the young feel quite alienated from the official Muslim organisations in the country which, as a consequence, have relatively little influence on this important part of young, urban, British society.
Sometimes these groups are very diffuse and yet they still have a surprisingly strong group identity. A good example here is the (possibly rather large) group of people engaged in an academic research discipline. Such a discipline tends to have a range of underlying accepted truths that inform current research programmes and those planned for the future. An interesting situation arises when there is a significant breakthrough made by a younger researcher who may not be integrated significantly within the existing power structure and hierarchy of the discipline. If the breakthrough is seen as a natural extension of the knowledge base that underpins the research group then it is welcomed because it clearly enhances the position of that discipline and its members and reaffirms their belief that they are the right and proper people to determine its future direction. Their supergenes are reinforced by this new research. However, if a breakthrough occurs that is much more radical and suggests that the approach taken traditionally is fundamentally flawed then the reaction from the senior members of the discipline can be surprisingly hostile even if it is fairly clear that the breakthrough is indeed important and will lead to a significant development of the subject. A radical breakthrough at variance with the traditional view of the subject can be perceived as an attack on the values (the supergene pool) of the group. Inevitably, it responds in exactly the same way that an organism would respond to an attack from outside. Ranks are closed, funds are denied to the radical researcher, and he can find himself or herself marginalised within the community. Organisations, even those apparently working exclusively for the discovery of truth and the enhancement of knowledge, have a rather limited capacity for change if it implies that their supergenes have been seriously out of alignment with reality. A radical restructuring of the supergenes of the group would call into question the established hierarchical structure and the position of those who are seen to be the leaders of thought within that discipline. The net effect is to appreciate that new ideas can come along before their time and cause a worrying combination of misunderstanding and resentment even if they are fundamentally sound. It is not enough to be brilliant, because to be successful funding is required, and acquiring funding calls for a cautious, graduated approach to those who hold the purse strings. To be successful, the young researcher must look for a way to match his or her supergenes to those of the discipline. A common ground must be found that allows the new discoveries to be projected onto the prevailing patterns that make up the supergene pool of group. This approach makes the researcher a more acceptable member of that group, and indeed, by making the new work appear to be a natural extension of what had gone before, the threat to the supergene pool of the discipline is minimised. This makes the work more likely to be accepted and therefore funded. As in most parts of life the approach must be softly, softly if it is to succeed. It is for this reason that revolutions in science are often made by people who do not depend on these funding routes and also by the youngest people who have yet to work out that this is how things actually work in practice. If they are lucky they get away with it, but quite often resentment lingers on and obscurity beckons.
The Importance of Trust in Politics and Public Life
One of the big advantages that advertisers have over individuals is that they can build on a successful reputation or they can reinvent themselves if they have developed a mediocre reputation or if they want to project an entirely new image. Although politicians believe (and are encouraged to believe by their spin doctors) that their policies can be sold in ways that are not that different from the ways used to sell soap powders there is a fundamental difference. Politicians find it hard to reinvent themselves convincingly because the public do not forget as quickly as politicians might like. As a consequence they must be more careful about not compromising the basic brand (themselves) that they are trying to sell. We have seen some extraordinary examples of how not to do this in recent years. The fundamental attribute that must underline any individual in front of the public is trust. People have a surprising capacity for trusting people in the absence of any contradictory information. They watch carefully how an individual behaves to maintain that trust. In its simplest form, trust depends on doing what you said you would do, by avoiding lying and generally behaving in a way that people would find acceptable in a friend. Behaving in a way that people find unacceptable causes that trust to be eroded. Trust is something that is built up gradually over a period of time but it can be lost quickly. In Britain, for example, there has been for culture at the highest levels of government that believes that, in former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson?s famous phrase, ?a week is a long time in politics?. This leads to a view that almost anything can be said or done because it will be forgotten about in no time by the media who are well known to have a pathologically short attention span. As long as politicians are talking about things of importance only to politicians and to the media then this may well work. The difficulty arises when it starts to impinge on the broader public in the way that it did, for example, on the run-up to the second Gulf War. A correspondent of the BBC claimed (correctly as it turned out), on one early morning radio programme, that a dossier describing the reasons for going to war had been ?sexed up? following pressure from 10 Downing Street. Several committees were formed to investigate what had happened and a number of senior executives as well as the correspondent were forced to resign. However, for several reasons, the committees involved did not command the respect and trust of the population, and now the great majority of the British public are convinced that they were duped by the government and taken to war in Iraq for no good reason. Tony Blair continues to argue that he was right but his arguments are made in the way that barristers address a courtroom (he is a barrister by training). We are all familiar with courtroom arguments from television programmes, and we have been taught to distrust them. Although Tony Blair?s government had many remarkable successes and the British economy is, at the time of writing, in extremely good shape, Tony Blair will go down in history as leader who broke the trust of a nation by taking it to war under false pretences and then not admitting to it. The impression that political allegiances may be sold to the highest bidder in the media world and that the opinions of the public are of such little importance (a demonstration by over a million people before the Iraq war was barely acknowledged by politicians) inevitably alienates a large part of the public who feel powerless to influence life in the country and therefore feel disinclined to take any part in its political life. The membership of political parties in Britain is in rapid decline and the atmosphere of optimism and trust that were so prevalent in the early years of Blair?s government has been irretrievably lost. The new leader will find it hard to build that trust and will require careful distancing from the discredited ways of the recent past.
There are many reasons that trust is centrally important in our dealings with people. Our society is at its most effective if we can deal quickly and efficiently with whatever arises. If every time we needed another individual?s involvement we had to establish a binding agreement or contract that was enforceable then everything would take an agonisingly long time. Trust allows us to predict the response and actions of someone we know. We have, in ourselves, an impression of an individual or group built up over time and based on our experiences and that of others. Some of my colleagues can be trusted to do what they say they will quickly and efficiently while others procrastinate and may never get around to doing it. When I deal with them I know whom I can trust. The garage to which I take my car is much less expensive than the main dealer but I know from experience that they do a good job and I trust them not to take advantage of my ignorance of motorcars. My life is infinitely more productive if I deal with people I trust and avoid those I suspect may be less reliable.
Trust that has been broken is something that can be restored but only by making it clear that mistakes are acknowledged, and they are apologised for, and one is persuaded that trust is again justified. In this way an individual or organisation can begin to re-establish that trust which is essential if others are to begin to feel that the supergenes of the individual are those we wish to be associated with and therefore, in the case of a politician, that the individual is someone for whom we are prepared to vote. A partner who has been discovered having an affair will never be trusted again as he or she once was. Trust is a highly perishable commodity with a short shelf life and is at the core of the way that we deal with one another. In the words of Sharon Stone, the film actress, ?the most important thing in life is sincerity ? if you can fake that you?re made?.
Bad Behaviour and Evil Are Adaptive
We have talked of groups as cooperative assemblies of individuals who come together with a common purpose. The presence of the group allows the members to share and reaffirm their values and other aspects of their supergene pool, helping them to confirm what it is that brought them together in the first place. Members of the group take on the various niche roles within it so each has a more unique contribution to the common goals of the group. The leader of the group inevitably has a greater degree of power and the ability to influence what the group does. We might like to hope that the leader will always work in cooperation and collaboration with the other members of the group so that the evolution of the group is in a direction that most are happy to subscribe to. The reality is that in many cases the leader will want to exert a disproportionate influence on the group, to impose his supergenes in preference to those of other members. Leaders have a variety of tactics at their disposal. They may shout at people or become angry or aggressive in the presence of dissent or perhaps threaten members with some kind of sanction. At every stage the leader can gain influence by behaving in a more extreme manner. It is possible for him or her to develop arbitrary and extreme strategies such as apparently losing control or being casually abusive or even violent. In social groups it may be possible for members who do not like this behaviour to leave but sometimes the threat that an attempt to leave will trigger the extreme behaviour is enough to keep members within the group even if they really do not like it. Other groups may be structured so that survival outside the group becomes very difficult, perhaps because the remaining group members fear the capacity of the leaver to compromise the security of the group. This might happen if one is the member of a political party in a one-party state, or criminal organisation such as a drug syndicate or the Mafia. Individuals can find themselves trapped in a cycle of disapproval of what the organisation stands for yet not daring to resist its policies and, by not apparently disagreeing with those policies, being perceived as approving of them. Under these circumstances leaders can develop very high degrees of power and the ability to impose their wills and influence on the group to an extraordinary degree. There are always individuals in such a group who seek to gain influence by slavishly carrying out the instructions of the leader. This was something well understood by Machiavelli in his writings. There are many examples in recent years of individuals using coercive behaviour in order to acquire positions of absolute power in their societies. We think of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia. Saddam Hussein had been an interrogator and torturer for the Ba?ath party in the 1960s so was well used to violent techniques. In 1979 he called a meeting of the party shortly after his succession as President and read out a list of names, asking them to step outside. One of the highest ranking members of the Revolutionary Command, a leading Shi?ite member of the Command, the head of the trade unions, and about 20 others were then personally killed by Hussein and his lieutenants. It is believed that has many as 400 other army officers, senior members of his party and many non-party faithful were rounded up and killed. It totally consolidated Hussein?s grip on power in Iraq. By using his lieutenants to carry out these executions he made it very clear to them just what would happen if they stepped out of line in turn. Brutal but effective. All these leaders went on to use their power to influence the way that people think and act throughout their regions to reflect as closely as possible the supergene pool of these dictators. In each of these countries the personality cult of the dictator was all-pervading.
These are some of the worst examples of individuals behaving badly in order to achieve positions from which they could propagate their supergenes as widely as possible. It is frequently possible, however, to enhance the degree of influence one has by behaving in a more extreme manner. The laws and conventions of society set limits on the most extreme behaviour but there is a vast grey area where most people would judge behaviour to be bad but not bad enough for legal action or social sanction. Broadly speaking behaving badly as a strategy for acquiring more influence and power works very well indeed. In short, if you can get away with it, extreme behaviour is adaptive because it increases our opportunities to propagate our supergenes. It is only our legal systems and particularly our religious groups that try to tell us otherwise. The reality is quite different. The Just may sleep well at night but the others seem to have much more fun in the waking hours, according to Woody Allen.
Why Are Abusive Relationships so Common?
When we think of ?an abusive relationship? we may well think of the stereotypical battered wife accepting, almost condoning, the repeated violence visited upon her. Abuse of this sort is extremely serious. Both abuser and abused may have been brought up in an environment in which abuse was common. It indicates deep-seated psychological problems that require significant therapeutic treatment. Abuse in relationships at a lower level is much more common. Often the abuse is not even physical but emotional, with lasting effects on self-esteem and with significant psychological repercussions. It may simply be the way that one partner continually denigrates the other or engages in some other controlling behaviour reflecting a power struggle in the relationship. Our supergene pool is of central importance to each of us. The relationship we have with our partner is inevitably based on a substantially shared supergene pool. Although disagreements are inevitable, in lasting relationships the partners will be much more inclined to defend the other against any external criticism because criticism of one implies criticism of the other. The integrity of our supergene pool must be maintained at all costs and so we perhaps may be better able to understand why abused individuals persist in staying with their abusive partners since the abuse is something they share. Partner abuse is, of course, much more complex than this but there is a significant degree of collusion in many cases, something that is more understandable in the context of supergenetic explanations.
Child abuse is also a consequence of the importance we place on our supergene pool. As the child grows and develops independence, some parents are unwilling to let go. In most cases this leads at worst to an uneasy atmosphere in the family household but in some cases parents become physically or emotionally abusive towards the child. The parent wants to impose his or her supergenes in the same way he or she has already imposed her biogenes on the child. Parents have a position of physical and emotional power over children so we should not be surprised that some parents exercise this to an extreme. In cases of child sexual abuse by the father, it is surprisingly common for the mother to deny any knowledge of what is going on despite the clear signs. The importance of supergene preservation may explain why this kind of thing happens. To admit that such behaviour has occurred causes damage not just to the accused but also to the supergene pool of the accuser and the supergene pool of the family. It may be much easier to turn a blind eye rather than risk the destruction of everything that the parents feel they have built up over the years. The family is a social group to which every member belongs more closely than to any other group. We feel much stronger as a member of the group than we do as an individual and so are greatly inclined to preserve the group even under challenging circumstances. As we have seen already, when trying to understand human behaviour it is easy to underestimate the importance of the social context, the power of the group and overestimate the importance of the individual.
The Enigma That Is Altruism
An organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms at some cost to itself. The costs and benefits of altruistic behaviour are traditionally counted in animal studies in terms of reproductive fitness ? essentially, the predicted number of offspring. Darwin realised that the existence of altruism in nature seemed very odd and was apparently incompatible with his theory. Natural selection would make us expect that animals would behave so as to increase their own chances of survival and reproduction but not those of others. Altruistic behaviour reduces one?s own fitness and therefore should be selected out. Models of population genetics have managed to explain altruism in animals by considering whether the reduced likelihood of reproductive success caused by altruism is more than balanced by the increased chance of survival of the shared biogenes of the group. In this way, the biogenes of the group have an increased chance of being propagated. As E. O. Wilson puts it in Consilience, ?the individual pays, his genes and tribe gain, altruism spreads?. There are many kinds of altruistic behaviour such as reciprocal altruism in animals that one can understand as a mechanism for ensuring the biogenes of the species rather than those of the individual survive and propagate. This may make sense in a biological context but is difficult to make sense of in the human context. To make a significant sacrifice or to put oneself in mortal danger in order to help an individual that one has no biological or social link with is quite extraordinary and has defied explanation. Attempts to do so have often involved game theoretical approaches and the view that it is all part of tit-for tat behaviour in that when we do something altruistic we are doing it because ultimately we expect that favour to be returned. Such a view is deeply unconvincing, ignoring as it does, the fact that we humans are emotional creatures and can feel pity, empathy and embarrassment in a wide range of situations. Mark Twain in his book Following the Equator (1897) said: ?Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to?. It really is quite extraordinary that one of the most powerful human emotions is altruism. Most of the religions of the world place a high moral value on altruism. For example, altruism occupies a central position in the teachings of Jesus as well as being of great importance in Buddhism. We are amazed at the number of people who are prepared, often at a moment?s notice, to place themselves in mortal danger in order to save the lives of complete strangers. Altruistic behaviour is so widespread that we are daily warned against it. Announcements on aircraft insist that in the case of cabin loss of pressure you must put on your own oxygen mask before trying to help others. The announcement actually assumes that in a situation of considerable danger and uncertainty your instincts will be as much to help your neighbour who you may never have seen before, at considerable risk to yourself. It is very difficult to explain this sort of human behaviour when such actions can never benefit or increase the likelihood of successful propagation of one?s biogenes. There may well be an important part of altruistic behaviour that arises from an empathetic engagement with the other individual who needs help although scientists in our modern world, where every cost needs to be counted and accounted for, increasingly ignore the possibility of finer feelings being important in such things. However, I have argued that humans are now significantly more interested in propagating their supergenes than their biological ones, and that this is a core driving force of humanity. Altruistic acts undoubtedly influence the direct beneficiary of the act, but they are also observed by others. All who witness altruistic acts, and all who hear about such acts third hand, are influenced substantially, so the supergenes of the person acting altruistically propagate very widely.
How might we show that supergene propagation might play a central role in encouraging altruistic actions? Imagine an altruistic act that takes place at great cost to one individual and yet can never be witnessed or reported by anyone. Nobody will ever hear about this act of altruism. Under these conditions, would your altruistic instinct be stronger or weaker? If we imagine a situation where the individual cannot communicate his gratitude to anyone is that likely to reduce the human urge to behave altruistically? I believe that these circumstances would significantly reduce the probability of an altruistic act. Descriptions of acts of selflessness in the Gospels often seem almost to emphasise excessively the presence of witnesses to the acts and this tends to confirm that altruism is motivated substantially by the subconscious desire to propagate our supergenes.
An individual who behaves altruistically is generally seen to do so and as a result he or she gains greatly in status amongst those who know of it. Furthermore an altruistic act is likely to be known about by a much wider range of people than just those who witnessed the event. One of the great British hero figures of about a hundred years ago is Titus Oates, a member of the ill-fated British expedition led by Robert Scott to the South Pole in 1911. Scott?s expedition suffered from a number of mistakes in the planning but was affected particularly by weather so cold that their sledges would not slide over the snow. They reached the South Pole only to discover they had been beaten by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Dejected, and on the return journey, a 1000 kilometre walk, lack of food and further atrocious weather slowed the expedition, and gradually, members of the team were lost. When they were only 200 kilometres from their base, and only a few kilometres from a cache of food they camped again. Titus Oates knew he could go no further and urged the others to go on but they refused. On the morning of March 17, 1912 he left the tent, saying ?I am just going outside, and may be some time?. He did not return, and the others never found him. He had realised that he was unable to go on, and rather than slow down his companions, he chose to walk out to his death. The others went on but eventually were caught in a terrible storm and camped for the last time. The tent was found nine months later with their bodies inside with the diaries of their terrible experiences. In it, Titus Oates had written ?Myself, I dislike Scott intensely and would chuck the whole thing if it were not that we are a British expedition.... [Scott] is not straight, it is himself first, the rest nowhere.?. Despite that, he did something that would be potentially extremely beneficial to Scott.
Although Titus Oates and all his companions died his story has lived on and indeed his actions that terrible night have been absorbed in some ways into what it is to be British. The net effect is that the supergenes of Titus Oates have been propagated more widely and more effectively than they could ever have been had he lived. This is not to suggest in any way that what Titus Oates did that night was in any way deliberate but he was one of an incredibly close group of people on the expedition and the altruistic instinct here may well have been to save others at one?s own biological expense but not at the expense of the loss of one?s supergenes. It is undoubtedly the case that people who act altruistically are thought of particularly highly in almost all human societies and altruistic behaviour is a surprisingly common human trait, surprising in the sense that it happens at all. Feeling that one has a responsibility to the social group is important. Knowing and trusting that the surviving members of one?s social group will continue to propagate one?s own supergenes more strongly because of one?s altruistic behaviour may well be an important reason that altruism exists to the extent that it does. Such actions do not have their import in reinforcing altruistic urges. Rather they strengthen social ties between the extended society that identifies with the act and will be more inclined to propagate those particular supergenes more strongly.
Supergene Propagation for the Childless
We have already seen that the development of the child is greatly affected by people other than his or her parents. Other adults can also contribute substantially to the process of rearing children that are not their own. Many of us remember some adult outside the family, possibly a teacher, possibly a friend of the family or relative that had a defining influence on the way we think about things or the way that we do things. Such a person may have influenced our choice of career or given us a love of books. Talking to a number of colleagues in the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge a few days before writing this I was astonished at how many had come into astronomy because of the influence of one key teacher at their school. The effect of a good charismatic teacher in motivating a class of children can be quite remarkable. Not only have they significantly affected the supergenes of their pupils, those pupils will then go on to propagate those same values that they have come to appreciate to others of their own generation as well as to future generations. The capacity that such an individual has for propagating his or her own supergenes is very great indeed. And this brings us to one of the most interesting aspects of the supergene model in that we can see how individuals who do not have children can have as much influence on the evolution of society as those who do. In particular we have seen earlier that although parents have a critical role in launching their child into the world, a great deal of the way a child turns out comes from peer group influences including friends of similar age, the friends of their siblings, experiences at school, etc. The child can be influenced just as much by a childless adult as by any parent. We can understand, therefore, that people who choose to remain single or choose not have children or who are past childbearing age or who are homosexual can all contribute as much to the evolution of our society as those people who do have children. The propagation of our biogenes is no longer of any great importance because those biogenes are not really evolving on a significant timescale, certainly in comparison with our supergenes. We can work with the biogenes of others because what really matters is not their biogenes but their supergenes to which we all have access. If virtually all human evolution today is contained within the evolution of our supergenes then that is where the action is and that is where any of these childless individuals can contribute and influence things with equal if not greater effect. It is also the case, of course, that the influence of a parent is no longer limited to its own children as it is in the case with biogenes. Each of us know of parents of friends of our children that have a disproportionate influence because they are charismatic or are simply better at communicating with children. They are consequently propagating their supergenes widely in a way that is inconceivable with biogenes. It also makes sense of another unique feature of the human animal. Unlike any other known mammal, the human female has a menopause, a time beyond which she is not fertile and cannot have children. From a biological evolutionary perspective this is not too easy to understand because her biogenes can no longer be propagated. The traditional view is that she continues to help with the raising of her grandchildren. Viewed within the context of supergenes, fertility turns out to be relatively unimportant since an infertile woman can exert as much influence on the propagation of supergenes as she could if she was fertile.
The realisation that non-childbearing individuals can propagate their supergenes just as effectively as childbearing individuals can give us some insight into the changing role of the elderly in society. Even in relatively recent times, our supergenes had been evolving much more slowly than they do today so that the values of one generation differ only slightly from those of the previous generation. This meant that the experiences and values of the elderly were not so different from those of later generations. The much faster pace of social change at the beginning of the 21 st century means that our supergenes are now evolving faster than ever. This accelerating rate of change together with increased life expectancy possibly puts many elderly people far enough out of touch so that their capacity to contribute knowledge and experience to later generations is compromised. Their apparent lack of connection to the real world will make children and grandchildren less likely to maintain contact or to engage them in their lives. It makes it even more important therefore for each of us to remain in touch with modern developments as we age if we are to have a reasonable prospect of being valued by younger generations and by the broader society. We need to keep up with the modern world so that our supergene set maintains a good resonance with people in succeeding generations. Indeed as long as we feel that we can have some influence on the people around us then that is easy to maintain. The younger generations will not accept our elderly supergenes unless they are compatible with the supergenes of much younger people. The interchange of supergenes within society is so complex and so rapid that if you find yourself with an inconsistent and incompatible set of supergenes you will simply not be able to engage in those parts of society with which you have no compatibility. The value of elderly people in society need not continue to decline. The elderly must be prepared to work with the supergenes of the younger generations if they want to have any influence. It is the supergene pools of the young that are evolving most substantially and that are central to what is happening in our society. It is not simply that the whole thing is inappropriately biased towards a youth culture. The coming generation defines the leading edge of our social evolution, that is where the action is. It is not enough to offer a piece of good advice if that advice only makes sense in a context that is redundant. We must keep in touch with the evolution of society, no matter how rapidly it progresses, if we wish to survive and be valued, and if we wish to be happy in our old age. Once we feel no one is interested in our supergenes then our reason for living is extinguished. It is at this point of disconnection from the modern world that middle-aged people turn into elderly people. Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet wrote in 1952
?Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the night?.
You have been warned!
Extreme Strategies for Supergene Propagation
We have seen how we all work to enhance our supergene pool by engaging in groups that give the best opportunity to propagate our own supergenes and to enhance our own supergene pool by absorbing desirable supergenes from others. This struggle for evolutionary success depends on the fitness of these supergenes in the sense of how well they match the social environment they find themselves in. However there is a relatively small number of individuals who use a very different strategy for success where they strive for exceptional levels of success that give them a much wider opportunity to propagate their supergenes. Examples here include professional athletes and performers such as actors and actresses and pop stars. Most athletes, aspiring actors and pop stars are going to get almost nowhere in those professions but only a very, very few will become real stars. The risk of failure is great but the rewards of success are enormous. An individual who wins gold medals at the Olympics or who stars in a London West End play or whose record tops the hit parade will immediately find that the influence he or she exerts is enormous. The opportunities for propagating one?s supergenes under these circumstances are vast and indeed it is this ability to influence and be recognised and be sought after that is as much the motivation for these people as the income they might derive from it. Indeed in amateur athletics there can be little other reward for doing something that is potentially so damaging to one?s body (being an international-level athlete seriously reduces one?s life expectancy because of the physiological damage done by extreme training regimes).
It is a hole-in-one strategy that, like most gambles, will not come off. However for a small number the rewards are massive and the influence they have on society is very great. The achievement of celebrity status gives enormous opportunities for social advancement in terms of power and influence. The opinions of celebrities of all sorts are quoted in newspapers and on television, no matter how banal the opinions may be. Political leaders seek them out to benefit from the publicity (yet another word for chance to propagate one?s supergenes) that such a meeting generates.
Heroism and the Suicide Bomber
We have already discussed the way that nearly all religions value greatly all acts of selflessness and altruism. They create an atmosphere in society that encourages us to make sacrifices for the greater good. The sacrifices can be miniscule, such as forgoing the chance of the last helping of meringue at dinner or giving up one?s seat on the train for an elderly disabled person. From there we have a spectrum of increasing levels of sacrifice right up to individuals who give their lives for an altruistic purpose. In wartime people are asked to make great sacrifices for the good of the nation. Even when confronted with a mission where survival is unlikely, willing volunteers can still be found. As with other acts of altruism these acts of heroism are difficult to justify from the point of view of Darwinian biological evolution theory. However when viewed as an opportunity to propagate one?s supergenes they may make very much more sense. People volunteer for such missions, I believe, because by becoming heroes their supergenes survive long after their biogenes have gone. Many people visit war cemeteries and attend military memorial services. Family members whose sons have died in war are enormously proud of them and revere their memories. As a child brought up in the years following the Second World War, I heard many stories about British heroes from that war. The great bravery of these people is something we all admired and aspired to and as a consequence their exploits were known very widely indeed.
When trying to understand Islamic suicide bombers we are inclined to focus on the victims and the arbitrary way in which they are selected. The perpetrators are invariably described as terrorists, and indeed they do spread terror wherever they go but such labels are simplistic and superficial. We also have great difficulty understanding why young men and women with their entire life ahead of them should carry out such a dreadful and final act. What we tend to neglect is the social context in which they are operating. They invariably come from social groups that feel unfairly discriminated against, and have a pervading sense of hopelessness about their condition and that of their families and the community. Their religion promises martyrs a permanent place in heaven, with death no more than the opening of a door into a life where they will have the highest status. Within their society successful suicide bombers are revered, not just by their peers but by people from their parents group. Mothers say ?My son is dead. I am so proud?. In their communities their pictures appear on posters and shrines are built in their memory. Their families gain enormous kudos and status within their society. The net effect is that the supergenes of the suicide bomber become propagated very effectively and efficiently, in a way that the possibly less successful, highly impressionable young person could not otherwise achieve. Suicide bombers are not typical members of the community but individuals in their formative years, so they are highly impressionable. They can be radicalised and persuaded that they can achieve immortality, and from the experience of their own society, this is entirely believable.
Indeed, their selection of soft targets suggests that these are fundamentally not especially courageous individuals. Attacks on civilians never command the respect in society that successful attacks on, for example, an occupying military power would. Yet we see, time after time, a thoughtless randomness in the choice of target that does little to further their cause. But this extraordinary behaviour is easier to understand if we realise that their cause is more focused on the society from which they come, than the society they attack, because that is where their supergenes are propagated. Indeed, there may have been a subconscious appreciation of how this works that accounts for the Israeli strategy of destroying whole blocks of houses in which the family of a suicide bomber lived. In that way they could cause some serious damage to the supergenes of the bomber. To our modern tastes this seems disproportionate. In historical times, however, it was much more common to attack the enemy and then to destroy all those who had any contact with the enemy, razing the towns and villages from which the enemy came to the ground so that any echo of the enemy?s supergenes were utterly eliminated.
Why Adoption Is Relatively Unsuccessful
The age distribution of children given up for adoption is something that has changed substantially over the last 50 years with the advance of birth control and the availability of abortions. There are now many fewer children given up at birth and many more are adopted because of problems their parents have with bringing up a child so that they are brought into care and then ultimately adopted. Although it is the case that the earlier a child is given up for adoption the more likely that there will be successful outcome, adoption is generally much less successful than most people imagine. Even children given up at birth do significantly less well than children brought up by the same parents that gave them up for adoption. In the United States adoptions are running at a rate of over 100,000 per annum. The children are adopted by relatives in about half the cases and by unrelated individuals in the other half. The view that, with neonate adoptions, a child may simply be passed over from the birth mother to an adoptive mother with little serious problem as far as the child concerned is very far from the truth. Adoption can be a very traumatic for the child (and indeed for the mother) even when it is done at birth. On average children who are adopted are brought up in a better social class than that into which they were born and so they do well and are successful in socio-economic terms. But in terms of the emotional and psychological development of the child things are much less satisfactory. Nancy Newton in her excellent book The Primal Wound (1993) emphasises that the bonding of mother and child is a continuous physiological, psychological and spiritual event which starts early on, within the womb. The separation of mother and child that is an inevitable part of the birth process is rapidly healed if mother and child are reunited and their relationship is re-established and grows. If, however, the child is adopted and the separation persists for whatever reason then the bonds that are broken cause considerable problems as the child grows. Often adoptees suffer from significant behaviour problems irrespective of whether the adoptive family is dysfunctional or not. It does not matter whether children are adopted at birth or later: the problems are much the same. Interestingly, premature babies that are placed in incubators for a significant length of time even if ultimately reunited with their biological mothers also experience the trauma of being abandoned and often display similar behavioural problems in later life, even after account is taken of the physiological problems that cause them to be placed in incubators in the first place. Donald Winnicott, the paediatrician and psychoanalyst, goes as far as saying there is no such thing as a baby but only a mother/baby unit which is the core. The physical separation at birth is relatively less important because mother and baby remain psychologically and emotionally as well connected as ever. He believes that the earliest bond between mother and baby instils in the baby a sense of well-being and wholeness which is essential to the healthy emotional development of the child. At birth both feel grief. After birth, the two parts of the broken plate fit together and so the relationship between mother and child can be restored. If the child, however, is adopted, the fit between these two parts is wrong and cannot simply be repaired. The supergenes of the child have to be reassembled in a way inconsistent with what has already developed.
What is happening here can, perhaps, be understood better within the context of supergenes. In the adoption process, the supergenes of the child developed while the baby was growing in the womb, and supergenes that are closely compatible with those of the mother are broken. The organism that the child is ? a combination of the biogenes which will not be harmed by this process, and the supergenes ? are then transplanted into a different environment where the supergenes of the adoptive parents no longer match those of the child. We would not expect a human physiological organ transplant to work without very careful tissue matching. Organ rejection happens relatively rapidly. With adopted children we are trying to manage a social transplant which, if it is done without similarly careful supergene tissue matching, lead to the ?transplant? being rejected. As with all matters to do with supergenes this rejection is much less clear-cut than with an organ rejection. Nevertheless it happens and these rejections manifest themselves in many ways. The tendency in adoptions is for the child to be brought up in a better social class than its biological parents and so the children appear to do well in socio-economic terms. However the reaction of an adopted child meeting its natural mother is occasionally surprising and remarkable. The adopted child who seeks out its natural parents occasionally finds sometimes that it really ?clicks? with the natural mother. Margaret Morrell, working in New Zealand, has described a child of a Maori mother and white father who looked completely white and was adopted and brought up by white parents. The child knew nothing of its Maori ancestry and when, eventually, as an adult, the child sought out her birth mother, her resonance with the Maori culture was astonishing. She immediately recognised bonds that had been broken at birth, supergenes that were still there inside her very core. This is another example of what actually is built up between a baby and the mother in the nine months before birth. The importance of this period is too great to be ignored.
Nevertheless what happens in the majority of cases is that the supergenes of the child evolve away from those it developed with its natural mother. Other supergenes are absorbed and its own experiences and relationships and influences of the adoptive parents eventually start to become incorporated. The net effect is that the majority of adopted children who contact their birth mother do not feel an instant bond, and most of these relationships between adopted children and their birth mothers are abandoned within a few years. The expectation of both the children and the birth mothers that their biological connection will be overwhelmingly strong is often not fulfilled. We relate principally through our supergenes and these may have some component inherited from the birth mother but often there is little that is left. Our appreciation of the importance of supergenes to human individuals might also give us some guidance as to how adoptive parents should be chosen. At present the emphasis is on ensuring that the adoptive parents can provide financially for the adopted child and that it will be cared for in a loving way. There is a tendency for adopted children to be moved out of the social level in which their natural parents existed, and placed into a wealthier environment. What these ideas on the importance of supergenes would suggest is that it is much more important to find an environment in which the adoptive parents share as many of the same values as the natural parents so that the child will feel that its own supergenes are much easier to manage and match with its new adopted parents.
The Failure of Acquisitions and Mergers
It is surprising how seldom the merger between businesses or the acquisition of another business fail to produce the benefits expected. Similarly it is often the case that merging research groups is much less successful than hoped. The motivation behind combining two or more businesses or organisations is usually because of the perceived synergy between them and the potential advantages to the shareholders of the economies that come from rationalising several, possibly competing, product lines or research teams. What usually happens is that one of the companies or research organisations is dominant and the merger turns out to be principally the process whereby the management structures of the dominant organisation are used to replace those of the junior partners of the merger. Financial systems are integrated, as are design, marketing, manufacturing and other divisions. All this sounds perfectly fine so why does it succeed so infrequently? Not surprisingly it is because little attention is given to managing the supergenes of the employees and of the social groups that already exist in both the dominant and the junior partners. A description of the integration procedure that looked at what was happening from the point of view of the supergene components of the merger would give a rather different perspective.
What happens in such a merger is that the social values represented by the supergenes of the dominant company are being imposed on to the junior companies. The fact that the junior companies are themselves made up of social groups that have worked effectively to such an extent that the dominant partner wishes to merge with them should be seen as a complement to what they have achieved. In practice however the merger will be perceived as being not simply a takeover but an obliteration of everything that they have worked for and achieved up to that moment of merger. They are being asked to discard the supergenes and the social constructs that define the framework within which they have worked for many years. These are then replaced with alien supergene sets. We would not expect an organ transplant to work without a very high degree of matching between the biogenes and we should not be surprised that what is being attempted socially (and we must never forget that these mergers are principally social occurrences) is not going to work.
A successful merger therefore depends on creating a new organisation with new social constructs and not by taking one of the old sets and superimposing them unthinkingly on the others. New teams have to be built only after the old teams are helped to come to terms with what is happening and feel that what they have achieved is going to be used constructively into the future. They must feel that the way forward for the organisation is a valid and acceptable way forward for the team members in each of the organisations concerned. The old supergene constructs will be replaced rapidly if the combined group has a chance of establishing different niche roles in the usual way in which new groups become established. Imposing roles on an organisation without any concept of justice or fitness produces a group that is out of balance and where members of the group are resentful of the way it is structured. Remember that social psychologists have told us that an important motivation is belonging to a group that offers a chance for progress and development. Individuals from the dominant organisation must make sure that considerable effort is made to absorb as extensively as possible the supergenes of the original organisations into what is being created. But it is also important to address the supergene pool of the dominant organisation because there is a degree to which it is being implied that the dominant organisation was not doing enough and needed to merge to be successful. The supergenes and the social constructs of the dominant organisation must also be addressed in a similar way. Only if that is done does the merger have a chance of becoming successful.
There are similar effects that can be seen in the way that companies evolve with time. Particularly in the high technology area the lifetime of a successful company can be fairly limited. Even the best companies find it difficult to keep up with evolving technology and the biggest threat to a high-tech company is when a smaller younger organisation comes up with a new approach to the market, perhaps with lower cost technology. The response of the older company is usually to try to emulate the newer one but finds often that the way the older company works is very different from the way it needs to work if it is to be competitive in the alien environment of the new technology. Reorganising the company structures often does not work because the social constructs within that company are simply not appropriate for the new way of working. If this is to be successful then a better approach is to select a small number of capable and innovative individuals to establish a completely independent division, physically distinct and preferably remote from the parent, so that ultimately a new organisation with a completely new set of social constructs (supergene sets represented by working practices, approach to lunch breaks and vacation, after-work socialising, etc.) can be established. Such a core division can then start to accrete other individuals from the original company who are then able to absorb the new set of supergenes relatively painlessly and understand that the progress of the new division is being built partly on what they have achieved in the past but principally on what they are going to achieve together in the future.
Chapter 8
Supergenes in the Big Bad World
In the last chapter we looked at the way that a number of aspects of difficult to explain human behaviour may be understood more easily by looking at human behaviour in the light of the supergene hypothesis. There are other aspects of the way that human society functions on a larger scale that need to be looked at from the same perspective to see to what extent we can understand better why they work the way they do and also to appreciate the degree of influence that they have on our lives.
The Role of Churches in Society
The way our societies have religion woven through them so ubiquitously shows that they fulfil some fundamental human need that is not satisfied otherwise. Modern western urban thought is inclined to dismiss religion to the margins of intellectual debate as being irrelevant in this day and age. Some social scientists were inclined to dismiss religion as being a product of ignorance. Anthony Wallace, the anthropologist, wrote in 1966: ?the evolutionary future of religion is extinction. Belief in supernatural beings and in supernatural forces that affect nature without obeying nature?s laws will erode and become only an interesting historical memory?. Yet religious belief in the world has become ever more widespread. To ignore what we can learn about the human condition from the widespread enthusiasm for religion is to make a big mistake. Even those who are avowedly agnostic or atheistic admit to there being a spiritual dimension to their lives. Religion addresses broader needs than simply acknowledging the importance of spirituality in our lives.
Scott Atran, a psychologist and cognitive anthropologist, believes that religion arose not because it served any firm purpose but because the human mind is inclined to believe in the supernatural. As social creatures we have to deal with other humans and evaluate their intentions towards us and to others. He believes that this makes us more inclined to see intention and agency where none exists, making it unwise to walk under ladders and helpful to divine the patterns of lines in the palm of our hands. Even the most level-headed are inclined to have at least some instinctive belief in the supernatural. Luis Bunuel, the film director once said: ?I am still an atheist, thank God?.
When we look at the many religions around the world we find a number of aspects that are common to all. First, they provide a fairly straightforward social code to guide everyday behaviour. The rules that they embody are those necessary for a stable society to function so that most members of that society feel valued and content with their position in it. Most religions encourage their adherents to accept the status quo, to feel that they should be happy with their lot in life. They offer a reward for following the precepts of the religion or a punishment for behaving badly in life. Above all, they offer immortality, something that at some level we all crave. The immortality they offer is not, of course, for our bodies, but for our souls. The concept of a soul is something that we can identify with that part of our supergene pool that we value and has a more spiritual dimension, the part we want to live on after death. If we have behaved well, then life after death will be in heaven or some wonderful paradise. If we behave badly then we are off to hell, or somewhere fairly unpleasant, for eternity. Traditionally, religious leaders are especially trusted because of the sacrifices they make in order to follow their religions. They may remain celibate or live a life of relative poverty, devoting their efforts to the least fortunate members of society and to those with problems, in trouble and in need of help. The way the religious leaders are trusted by the community is an important part of the success of churches because no organisation, religious or otherwise, can be much better than the sum of its leaders. As with any organisation, trust can be lost if behaviour is revealed that is inconsistent with the supergenes that the church projects, as has happened to the Catholic Church in several countries following the revelation of widespread paedophilia.
I have argued throughout this book that we are driven by a need to achieve a degree of immortality. This is one of the fundamental offerings common to all religions. They also offer a recipe for social stability and a mechanism to stabilise groups so that members inclined to seek after power and wealth are discouraged if this is done at the expense of others. Indeed, they encourage the view that selflessness, letting others advance while they do not, is worthy and will be rewarded. The ritual associated with most religions also offers a connection between our life on earth which Thomas Hobbes described in Leviathan (1651) as ?solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short? and the spiritual world to which we all aspire. Today life may not be as beastly as it was in Hobbes?s day but many find it deeply lacking in spirituality. Spirituality is difficult to define but the word encapsulates our feelings of belonging to a much greater whole, and ideas of religious awe and reverence even if we do not feel ourselves religious. It certainly reflects our personal experience. We know we are complex beings yet we often have little opportunity to explore or express it. This complexity is a consequence of the extraordinary structures in our minds which cover so many things. Even those who would have the greatest difficulty articulating what it is they feel can respond as strongly as anyone on seeing a wonderful sunset or hearing a beautiful piece of music. Religion can provide a structure that lets us connect everyday life with our feelings of spirituality and thereby help to make our supergene pool seem that bit more complete.
For some, religion can offer an additional form of support. We have all had times when the backlog of paperwork, unpaid bills, problems at work, difficulties with family, work needing done on the house, etc., start to overwhelm us. Mostly we simply work through it and eventually catch up with things and feel better. However, some never catch up and find it difficult to cope with the continual pressures of life that are flooding in with demands on energies and time, flooding in with new supergenes that cannot be processed quickly enough. These pressures can lead to psychological problems and nervous breakdown. Religions can be viewed as offering the troubled individual a complete and internally consistent set of supergenes to replace the complicated and confusing mess that some individuals find too hard to manage. By turning one?s back on an unsatisfactory past, life becomes much simpler and more straightforward. The troubled individual often describes him or herself as having been ?reborn?. Religions offer specific instructions how to cope with the principal challenges of everyday life. The package includes a straightforward and guaranteed future, and membership of a well-focused, inclusive group made up of others who believe as you do. Many of the written sources that underlie a religion are phrased ambiguously so that individuals may project their own experiences onto them and be happy when they seem particularly appropriate to them. In the end, immortality is guaranteed. The whole package is very seductive and attractive because it simplifies so much of life. The fact that the arguments that underpin every religion may be circular but fundamentally unprovable turns out to be little impediment to their acceptance by many people. There are many aspects of human existence with which one has to come to terms including death and what might follow it. Many of us feel in some way that we should be able to restore contact with friends and relatives who have already died when we in our turn die. Even if we believe, as I do, that death is the end and there is nothing to follow it, that belief may cause a hollowness, the emptiness of looking into the abyss. My rational mind believes something that my more spiritual supergenes would rather not think: that there is a time limit to their ability to propagate themselves that is non-negotiable. What happens to us when we die and ?what it will be like? is something that eventually we all think about. It takes a lot of courage to believe that everything ends when we die, that there is no life after death and that we shall never meet our parents or our children or our friends ever again. Religions provide a framework by providing answers that are otherwise very difficult to address. They do this in a way that covers up and denies what each of us will ultimately confront. In his book, The God Delusion (2006), Richard Dawkins gives a vast range of compelling reasons why people should not believe in a God. However if there is to be any genuine progress in helping people to move away from their dependency on religion it is important to address this basic human need for something to take its place. It is not enough, as Dawkins does, to harangue his audience. They need to be persuaded that other beliefs are going to resonate with their needs at least as well as do the churches they attend now. Those that wish to enable this move have to work much harder to articulate what is on offer, and make it accessible to all.
One of the reasons that religions are perceived as being important and successful groups is that they emphasise belonging and trust. In a world where society can seem increasingly fragmented, insecure and threatening, religious groups can prove very attractive. These groups are easy to identify and provide many points of contact with the individual that are easy to manage. Their inherent self-consistency is one of their great strengths but is also one of their great weaknesses. Their principal stories are unprovable, a weakness that allows others to reinterpret and reinvent other stories as being part of that same religion. If others wish to, they can use these claims to distort the image of the religion in a way that makes it more extremist. This is why we have fundamentalist Christian sects so extreme in their views that it is difficult to imagine Jesus would ever consider becoming a member. There are similar extreme Islamic sects as there are on the fringes of almost all mainstream religions. Religious or ethnic fanatics, whether they are Born Again Evangelical Christians, Tamil Tigers or Islamic Fundamentalists are sometimes rather troubled people who find that religion gives them the opportunity to separate themselves from their complicated and unsatisfactory past. They are able to find a calmer, less cluttered yet more complete set of supergenes by discarding the greater part of their overwhelmingly complex supergene pool for one with a clear-cut set of beliefs and behaviour patterns. Their leaders then find themselves in a position where they can gather unto themselves substantial amounts of power under the guise of leading these extremist sects. These groups emphasise the way in which their members belong to a strong and successful group by acts of proselytising and other high profile activities. The power of the group is remarkable. With the right kind of charismatic leader the group can be made to do almost anything. One of the most extreme examples is the People?s Temple, founded by the Reverend Jim Jones in 1957. Jim Jones had visions of an impending nuclear attack. He established a dream community in the jungle of Guyana in South America named Jonestown and, as he was the reincarnation of both John Lennon and Jesus, he persuaded 914 of his followers to drink cyanide. Those who resisted or tried to escape into the jungle were shot. And this kind of behaviour is not restricted to modern Western communities. In Vietnam in 1993, 53 hill tribe villagers living 300 km north-west of Hanoi led by a blind man called Ca Van Liem, committed suicide using primitive weapons with the promise of going to Paradise.
For many, the church provides a strong, centred group with a social focus under conditions where many of the divides of wealth, class, ethnicity and gender are relaxed. In societies that emphasise the individual, as in the United States, the churches are possibly more popular because people in that country tend to lead a more isolated life. Churches also provide an attractive powerbase for an aspiring leader. It is depressing to see religious leaders expressing views and encouraging actions by their adherents which are directed more towards the maintenance or expansion of their influence rather than the advancement of the religious heritage of their church. Our understanding of supergene dynamics perhaps should not make this surprising. Historically the
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