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Chapter Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
How often have we asked "why did he ever do that?" when someone behaves oddly? Scientists are strangely reluctant to even address such questions. The prevailing view of human behaviour is that we behave the way we do because that is how our ancestors were programmed to behave a couple of million years ago on the grass plains of Africa. Modern human behaviour is then interpreted as a consequence of our struggle with an inheritance poorly matched to the modern world. The Human Genome Project has shown that this simply cannot work: there is not enough spare capacity in our DNA for this to happen. Genetically we are far too similar to chimpanzees. Our difficulty in making sense of human behaviour is that it is so complex that scientists inevitably draw conclusions based on their own relatively narrow scientific experience. Our brains defend us brilliantly from reality because reality is much too rich and complex for us to be able to cope with the sounds and sights of the world around us. Our brain protects us from this information overload so we should not be surprised that scientists view behaviour largely in the context of their own rather narrow background. As a scientist with experience of many branches of modern science from astronomy through to protein and DNA analysis, I decided that, as a relative outsider, I might be able to make some progress where others, working too close at the coalface, could not see the larger-scale patterns that link these apparently disparate subjects, those areas of human evolution and behaviour which are explained at present rather unconvincingly.
As a biological species we have been extraordinarily successful in evolving dramatically faster than any other creature on the planet. Darwinian natural selection is far too slow to have contributed significantly to our recent extraordinary evolution. Something else has happened as a consequence of human behaviour and human desires to succeed. Biologists believe that human striving leads to more opportunities to reproduce and pass on one's biological genes. But are we really interested only in producing children? Why are men not queuing up to restock sperm banks? If you talk to people about what they want to survive them is not just their offspring. Of much greater importance is for each of us to feel that we are leaving behind some part of what we have made of our lives so that those achievements survive. We seek a degree of immortality for what is in our minds and we do this by struggling for influence, the opportunity to make others just a little bit more like ourselves. The better we are matched to our social environment, the more likely we are to have these opportunities. A process of social natural selection is at work and it is these social analogues of our biological genes which I call our SuperGenes that are being selected for in humans predominantly. They are the total of everything that is in our minds, and it is what is now the essence of what is now evolving humans. Our biological evolution has virtually ceased but our evolution as a species continues at an ever gathering pace. Half of our biological genes are propagated exclusively to our children and then only a few times in our lifetime but our supergenes are propagated in a myriad of different ways to anyone and everyone that we come into contact with. It is no longer necessary to have children in order to have a substantial influence on the world. Our ideas and attitudes may be propagated to and from anyone and everyone, including childless or homosexual individuals. We can all propagate our supergenes just as effectively as anyone else and thereby contribute to society and its evolution as powerfully as anyone else. It is this drive to propagate our supergenes that now underpins much of human behaviour.
This chapter essentially sets out a framework for the approach I take in the rest of the book, to make the reader comfortable with some new ideas, and making the reader comfortable with the idea that an outsider should be writing this work.
Chapter 2: How Did We Get to Be like This?
My quest starts with a study of the great amount of knowledge we have of animal evolution and the timescales over which it happens. The work of Darwin has helped enormously in making this clear. Our biological inheritance encoded in our DNA evolves very slowly indeed and the larger the population, the slower the evolution. Animals evolve on timescales of many millions of years yet we humans have evolved on timescales of many thousands of years, a thousand times faster than animals, from our apelike ancestors to the internet age with telescopes in space looking back to the most distant galaxies in the universe. If we scale the age of our planet to one year then all modern human evolution has happened in the last five minutes before midnight on December 31, and our rate of evolution is almost certainly increasing. Archaeological evidence shows that this explosive evolution started with the creation of the earliest societies and we can trace their growth to where we are now surprisingly well. We know of their intellectual sophistication because of their art such as cave paintings they have left behind. Our evolution started slowly but has gathered pace in more recent times and it is now clear that it is still increasing today.
Chapter 3: Modern Ideas of Human Evolution and Behaviour
Human behaviour has fascinated people from the beginning, and the essentials of how we behave have not changed too greatly. Ancient Greek plays still have a remarkable resonance in the 21st century. Scientific attempts to explain human behaviour have been much less successful. We are intelligent individuals and when a scientist gives an explanation of something that we are very familiar with that simply does not resonate with our experience we have every reason to worry that it is flawed fundamentally. Studies of animals are interesting but are they relevant given just how different we humans are from other animals? We are conditioned by most religions to view ourselves as being little different from the animals whereas in reality, although we share many of their biological mechanisms, as social creatures we are utterly different. Attitudes to models of human behaviour were further complicated in the 1970s and 1980s by the nature versus nurture debate that became so deeply distorted by the need for political correctness. Evolutionary psychology, the current most popular view of human behaviour, and which sees most of our behavioural patterns as being inherited through our biological genes, is crumbling since studies of the human genome make it clear there is simply not enough additional DNA to account for our complex behaviour when we compare ourselves to our nearest primate relatives. There is sadly little contact between the approaches of biologists and psychologists on one hand and sociologists on the other. Both are trying to explain human behaviour and yet there is virtually no connection across the divide. Only the social psychologists have made useful progress, and they show strongly that our behaviour is affected much more by our social environment that most would think. It is this interconnection between different research disciplines that we must seek.
Chapter 4: Towards a New Synthesis
The pressures on modern scientists to deliver interesting results on short timescales makes it inevitable that little time is devoted to looking at the larger picture. This is something that is increasingly left to the science writer. We need to find a consillience between many disparate research disciplines including biology, genetics and evolutionary studies, psychology, behavioural studies, sociology etc. This may seem a daunting task but by trying to understand the underlying foundations of each area we can put together a rather different model that combines compellingly what we know of human behaviour and what we know of human evolution.
A degree of immortality is something we would all like to achieve but is simply not on offer. Religions all guarantee us immortality if we behave ourselves during our lifetimes. They only offer immortality for what is inside ourselves (our souls) and I argue that this is because it is what is in our minds that we really want to live on after we die. It is that urge for immortality for what is in our brains that is the underlying motivating force for human behaviour. It is that force that is driving our evolution as we all try to achieve a degree of influence over those around us so that we can make others think and behave just a little bit more like ourselves. In each and every different social environment we express a different aspect of our personality that is best matched to that social environment. The better adapted we are to that environment the greater will be our opportunities to influence others within it. The higher our status within that social group the greater will be that influence. In the same way that each of us has a different level of sexual drive we also have highly variable levels of ambition. Nevertheless all of us seek a social existence in which we feel comfortable and integrated so that we have some influence on the people we meet. I review the considerable evidence that supports this view that human evolution and human society are inextricably linked.
Chapter 5: The Development and Behaviour of Homo Sapiens
Every tiny thing we do influences the way we feel about ourselves, and how we project ourselves to those around us. Once you start to watch how other people do things, how the clothes they have chosen and the way they conduct themselves are all designed to maximise their influence or impact on others you will soon appreciate that this view applies to almost everything else that people do. We are driven to improve ourselves so that we become progressively more successful in the various social environments within which we operate. That success gives us better opportunities to influence others and to be influenced by them so that we continue to be improved ourselves, closing the loop. Everything we do is dominated by our need for social success. The way individuals conduct themselves at meetings or when simply walking down the street are all designed with this ever present subconscious goal.
We are social creatures and have been from the earliest times for which we have evidence. Archaeologists tell us how important social structures were in the earliest settlements and how very quickly hierarchical social structures were developed in the first cities. Although we have no hard evidence it is broadly accepted that this was only possible because of our development of language capable of great subtlety. Then as now, there were enormous adaptive benefits in working in social groups where labour was divided and skills could be developed within a community setting. Very quickly we took charge of our own evolution with extraordinary success. The limitations imposed by our biological genes have been bypassed with extraordinary efficiency, in a way no other species has managed even over tens of millions of years.
There is more evidence of how important to each of us is our social position in the world from studies of the way children develop. Most parents overestimate their influence on children and underestimate the importance of childrens’ learning from peer groups. It is these peer groups within which children have to learn to function. We can best understand the development of the child within a social context and see that our success from quite early years depends on how well and how rapidly we can adapt to the current social environment around us. I look at what we know about the sociology of child rearing, where the driving influences come from, and how the modern child has a very different experience from his or her grandparents, for example.
Chapter 6: Supergene Transactions
How do our supergenes develop, how do we improve them, and how do we propagate parts of our supergene pool to others? We continually receive and transmit messages, both verbal and non-verbal (such as body language) from and to other individuals and groups we come into contact with. Every message we receive has the potential to change us. We filter and process these messages to see how well they match our current supergene pool, the contents of our mind at that time. Messages from trusted individuals or groups are much more likely to be accepted and incorporated into our minds, to enhance our supergene pool, but we are open to any new ideas in principle.
Individuals in positions of power and influence can force their ideas and attitudes on others as they have much more attention paid to them but also because they can impose their wishes on others in a more forceful way to a greater or lesser extent. There is a continuous spectrum of increasing influence that comes from the exertion of power over others. Success in our society is often achieved by behaving badly. Sadly, bad behaviour is highly adaptive: it maximises our opportunities to propagate our supergenes and that is why bad behaviour in the broadest sense is so very widespread. It is bad behaviour in many ways that has accelerated our evolutionary growth as a species.
The supergene pool in our minds can evolve very rapidly and that is one of the main reasons for its success as an evolutionary dynamo. Animals evolve biologically on very long timescales and often cannot survive significant climatic or environmental changes. Humans can change their behaviour radically, essentially immediately, if that is what is required. This allows us to react to changes in the environment in which we find ourselves. This is the core reason for the speed and efficiency of human evolution. In this chapter I look rather broadly at how we interact with others and with groups, and why group membership is so important for us all.
Chapter 7: SuperGenes and Human Behaviour
We are at our most effective working in groups. The way that groups work together and with other groups is a critical aspect of human behaviour, many aspects of which we can understand more easily within a supergene context. By understanding our social environment, and the influences of other members of groups on us and therefore on our ability to propagate our supergenes we gain valuable insights into otherwise difficult to understand behaviour such as altruism, heroism, suicide bombers and terrorism.
The evolutionary strategy that humans have adopted, where the propagation of our supergenes to others is the fundamental subconscious driving force makes it clear that childless individuals including homosexuals and postmenopausal women all to have as much capacity to succeed and propagate themselves (their supergene pools) as any other individual who has children. It allows us to understand much better the contribution of such people to the evolution of our species even though their biological genes will never be propagated.
I also look at several examples of the damage that can be caused if social groups are disrupted and dispersed. Adoption is often relatively unsatisfactory and we can see better why the merger of companies or research groups is frequently unsuccessful since not enough attention is generally paid to the importance of merging disparate supergene pools.
Chapter 8: SuperGenes in the Big Bad World
Although it is fashionable in intellectual circles to dismiss religion as being little more than the opium of the masses, we cannot ignore what it tells us about the human condition and how that fits with these ideas about human behaviour. Their principal selling point, immortality for our souls in return for good behaviour on earth, is common to virtually every religion. It emphasises the importance that we place on a degree of continuity for what is in our minds after we have died. Even the most hardened atheist has a spiritual side, and this spirituality must inform any understanding of human behaviour.
There are several examples given in this chapter of the way we can understand human behaviour on the large-scale such as racism and nationalism. One group which understands the way our minds work really rather well are those engaged in propaganda (now called public relations) and advertising. They have developed a range of mechanisms of accessing our supergene pool efficiently and directly, playing on our inability and unwillingness to think to carefully about incoming messages under conditions when we are distracted or are led to believe that the messages are coming from a reliable source. It is frightening how easily we can be manipulated and how so often we are simply unaware that it is happening. Their techniques demonstrate a deep and subtle understanding of many of the principles of the supergene paradigm. I give several examples of how these techniques work, and we see that their resonance with these ideas of the primacy of supergenes in our evolutionary strategy is strong.
Chapter 9: Our Remarkable SuperGenes
We humans really are quite extraordinary. We may be much like animals in many ways but our brains are quite remarkable. We developed language and society and within that a strategy that allows us to evolve dramatically faster than any other species on the planet. The way we behave is what makes this possible and the way we behave can only be understood properly in that context. Everything we are in our minds is what we are trying to propagate to others with whom we come into contact in any way at all. These are our supergenes. These are what will survive us and will be passed and reformed and reworked as our species continues to evolve at an ever-increasing rate. No matter who you are or what you do, you can and will contribute to human evolution. Your contribution may be small or large but each of your grains of evolutionary sand will gradually build a more and more impressive human mountain. Perhaps by reading to the end of this book your supergene pool will have been significantly influenced by what is in my supergene pool and you will help to propagate these ideas to many others. If you do, then I am grateful for your contribution to that splendid cause!
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