The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture (first 3rd of vol 1, 2010)

The Evolutionary Review art, science, cultureVOLUME I

PUBLISHED BY STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY

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The Evolutionary Review

EDITORS

Alice Andrews, State University of New York at New PaltzJoseph Carroll, University of Missouri at St. Louis

EDITORIAL BOARD

David P. Barash, University of WashingtonBrian Boyd, University of Auckland, New ZealandDavid Buss, University of Texas at AustinAnne Campbell, Durham University, UKSimon Baron-Cohen, Cambridge University, UKHelena Cronin, London School of Economics, UKCarl N. Degler, Stanford University emeritusEllen Dissanayake, University of WashingtonDenis Dutton, University of Canterbury, New ZealandDylan Evans, University College Cork, IrelandHelen Fisher, Rutgers UniversityRobin Fox, Rutgers UniversityJustin R. Garcia, Binghamton UniversityGlenn Geher, State University of New York at New PaltzJonathan Gottschall, Washington and Jefferson CollegeTorben Grodal, University of Copenhagen, DenmarkGeoffrey Harpham, National Humanities CenterTim Horvath, Chester College of New EnglandSarah Blaffer Hrdy, University of California at DavisJohn A. Johnson, Pennsylvania State University at DuBoisSatoshi Kanazawa, London School of Economics, UKScott Barry Kaufman, New York UniversityDaniel Kruger, University of MichiganGeoffrey F. Miller, University of New Mexico at AlbuquerqueJeff Miller, State University of New York at New PaltzSteven Peterson, Pennsylvania State University at HarrisburgSteven Pinker, Harvard UniversityJohn Price, Oxford University, UKDaniel Rancour-Laferriere, University of California at DavisGad Saad, Concordia University, CanadaDavid Livingstone Smith, University of New EnglandMurray Smith, University of Kent, UKH. D. Steklis, Rutgers University emeritusLionel Tiger, Rutgers UniversityGriet Vandermassen, Ghent University, BelgiumJohn van Wyhe, Christ’s College, Cambridge, UK David Sloan Wilson, Binghamton University

EDITORIAL POLICY

The Evolutionary Review (TER) provides a forum for evolutionary cri-tiques in all the fi elds of the arts, human sciences, and culture: essays and reviews on fi lm, fi ction, theater, visual art, music, dance, and popu-lar culture; essays and reviews of books, articles, and theories related to evolution and evolutionary psychology; and essays and reviews on sci-ence, society, and the environment. Essays in TER implicitly affi rm E. O. Wilson’s vision of “consilience,” that is, the unity of knowledge. They also give evidence that an evolutionary perspective can yield a richer, more complete understanding of the world and ourselves. Criteria for selecting essays include depth and seriousness in evolutionary thinking, imaginative force, and excellence of style. Potential contributors should establish a distinct, individual point of view, avoiding academese and neutral summary. The editors value incisiveness and clarity, energy, wit and humor, vivid language and striking imagery, tonal nuance, and a knack for engaging the interest of readers. For submission guidelines, see www.evolutionaryreview.com. Manuscripts and editorial correspondence should be addressed to [email protected].

The Evolutionary Review is published by State University of New York Press, Albany. Subscriptions are available through SUNY Press, 194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210, www.sunypress.edu.

The Evolutionary Review is copyrighted © 2010 State University of New York. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatso-ever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Cover image: David Augustus Hart. Argot, 2009. Evolutionary Generative Abstract Art (blot).

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Contents VOLUME I

1 Editors’ Introductions Alice Andrews, Joseph Carroll

Evolutionary Theory and Cultural Trends6 What Is Copernican? A Few Common Barriers to Darwinian Thinking about the Mind Jiro Tanaka

13 Learning from the Immune System about Evolutionary Psychology David Sloan Wilson

18 When Biological Evolution and Social Revolution Clash: Peter Swirski Skinner’s Behaviorist Utopia

24 Facebook or Lonesome No More Craig T. Palmer, Alex Newsome, Kelsey Proud, Kathryn Coe

30 Ins and Outs: An Evolutionary Approach to Fashion Leslie Heywood, Justin R. Garcia

36 1859: Darwin, Mill, and Drake Kevin Scott Baldwin

39 Challenging Evolutionary Metaphors of Survival: Todd O. Williams Morris’ News from Nowhere

42 Commemorating Charles Darwin John van Wyhe

Reviews

48 The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton Joseph Carroll

55 The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness by Harold Fromm Francisco Ayala

59 Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique by Michael S. Gazzaniga Harold Fromm

62 War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires by Peter Turchin Carl N. Degler

Sight and Sound

64 Tracking Musical Chills Ellen Dissanayake

69 Woman as Erotic Object in Mainstream Cinema: Griet Vandermassen A Darwinian Inquiry into the Male Gaze

76 Clichés Worth Singing: Narrative Commonplaces in Opera Brett Cooke

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Reviews

82 Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle Dylan Evans

84 Poetics of Cinema by David Bordwell, and Embodied Visions: Daniel Barratt Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film by Torben Grodal

On Stories

88 First Do Not Bore: Earning and Sharing Attention in Contemporary Literary Fiction Tim Horvath

97 On the Origin of Comics: New York Double-take Brian Boyd

112 The Horror! The Horror! Mathias Clasen

120 Darkly Darwinian Parables: Ian McEwan and The Comfort of Strangers Charles Duncan

Reviews

125 The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer by Jonathan Gottschall Robin Headlam Wells

128 Reading Edith Wharton through a Darwinian Lens: Evolutionary Blakey Vermeule Biological Issues in Her Fiction by Judith P. Saunders

131 On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction by Brian Boyd Gordon Burghardt

135 Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution by Marcus Nordlund Robin Fox

138 This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson José Angel Garcia Landa

141 Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Michael Austin Biological Components of Fiction by William Flesch

143 Literature, Science, and a New Humanities by Jonathan Gottschall David Michelson

147 Interdisciplinary Essays on Darwinism in Hispanic Literature and Film: Ervin Nieves The Intersection of Science and the Humanities edited by Jerry Hoeg and Kevin S. Larsen

150 About the Cover David Augustus Hart

152 Contributors

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1alice andrews

Editor’s Introduction

ALICE ANDREWS I am delighted to introduce the inaugural issue of The Evolutionary Review. TER was born out of the online journal I created back in 2003, Entelechy: Mind & Culture. Entelechy published biologically informed poetry, fi ction, essays, visual art, and book reviews; its mission was to bridge two separate divides—the humanities and the sciences, and academia and popular culture. But Entelechy was so broad in scope that it made me dizzy. After fi ve years and nine issues, my passion and energy for it waned, so I decided to call it quits. Still, it had provided a forum that was unlike any other, and I felt a little guilty about abandoning it. If I were going to regain my ardor for something like it again, I thought, it would have to be something more focused; something that fi lled an empty evolutionary niche—something that was needed.

What that was, it seemed to me, was a forum for commentary that examined all of life through an evolutionary lens. A vehicle for what I call “evolutionary imagination.”1 Where could a good Darwinian literary theorist publish a review? Where could an evolutionary psychologist or anthropologist wax poetic or biological about Facebook? And what about fi lm? When I watch a movie, I watch it as an evolutionist. For years I have had my psychology students write papers critiquing fi lms from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. How I longed (and still long) to read a review of Wall-E or Little Miss Sunshine—or any fi lm—by a brilliant evolutionary psychologist. (See this volume for one such review by Dylan Evans.) I began to characterize the project as Evolution and Human Behavior meets The New York Review of Books, meets maybe, The New Yorker. But the project had two obvious problems. One, it wanted to cross disciplinary boundaries seldom crossed before, and two, the evolutionary model when applied to human affairs is cause for suspicion by many in academia. I lucked out with the new executive director of SUNY Press, Gary Dunham. Without risk-taking, rebel visionaries such as Gary, we don’t get an evolutionary review; we don’t get a forum for applying evolution-ary principles to art and culture.

But there are other more subtle reasons why such a venture might be feared. Despite their tame and somewhat namby-pamby appearances, the disci-plines of critical/literary theory and aesthetics are serious business! Authoritative value judgments actually have the potential to shape and infl uence reproductive

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2 the evolutionary review

strategies and choices, that is, sexual selection. This is why, in my view, we sometimes get excited and furious over defending a fi lm, painting, or book. We come alive when interpreting, defending, judging, and assigning value or mer-it to aesthetic cultural products, because these judgments are really, in the end, battles; and not just battles of wit and ego, but blood and gene battles—for what and who survives. Not so namby-pamby.

Michelle Scalise Sugiyama writes that “stories consist largely of representations of the human social environment,” and she argues that “these representations can be used to infl uence the behavior of others (consider, e.g., rumor, pro-paganda, public relations, advertising)” (403). For Sugiyama, storytelling is a social exchange where “the benefi t to the listener is information about his or her environment,” and the benefi t to the storyteller is behavior from the listener that serves the storyteller’s interests. But we can expand on this. It isn’t just the storyteller and listener who benefi t: transmitters, promoters, and detractors of stories also ben-efi t. So publisher, editor, and critic all have much more at stake (in terms of fi tness, i.e., in terms of their genes) than we usually imagine. Now just replace “story” with all the “narratives” in this volume.

Review means “to see again,” and what TER offers is a chance to do that—to “see again” in a new and fresh way, based on a simple, yet elegant 150-year-old theory (fi rmly established as science) that is still rejected by a majority of people in the United States and much of the world. In the academic and intellectual world, too, adopting an evolution-ary perspective on art and culture is often highly suspect. Many social scientists are critical of applying evolution-ary theory to the human mind and human affairs for fear that its implications support racist and sexist ideology. And within a historical context, they have every right to fear this. But many evolutionary thinkers—Peter Singer, David Sloan Wilson, Geoffrey Miller, Helena Cronin, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Steven Pinker, and E. O. Wilson, to name just a few—have shown us that evolutionary theory can indeed be applied to human affairs with sensitivity to human diversity, commitment to social justice, and an intelligent responsiveness to the challenges of a deteriorating environment. We still need C. Wright

Mill’s “sociological imagination,” but we need to locate it within a kind of imagination that has a richer and deeper explanatory power—the evolutionary imagination.

An evolutionary imagination could move us into new worlds, helping us to develop novel environments that make the most of our evolved psychologies. It could, for example, provide us with information crucial to success in setting up smaller, more closely knit, more sustainable communi-ties. The evolutionary feminist, Helena Cronin, captured this kind of evolutionary imagination a decade ago when she explained that while there is a human nature, “the behavior that it generates is richly varied. Our evolved minds are designed to help us to react appropriately to the different environments that we fi nd ourselves in. It is thanks to our genetic endowment, not in spite of it, that we can gener-ate our rich behavioral repertoire. Change the environment and you change the behavior. So an understanding of the evolved psychology of our species—of our motivations and desires—is vital for political action; we need to know which aspects of our environment have to be altered in order to achieve the desired ends. The task, then, is to understand human nature, not to change it.” (47)

To be sure, without the kind of insight an evolution-ary perspective offers us, it will be close to impossible to meet the social, political, and ecological challenges we now face. But an evolutionary imagination is more, still: it also encompasses a poet contemplating a worm, a reader sitting down to imagine the ideas in this volume, and an evolution-ist reviewing a fi lm. TER provides the space for it all.

It is hard for me to contain my excitement about TER. I am not the only one who watched Slumdog Millionaire through the lens of natural and sexual selection, nor the only one who thinks about Facebook in terms of our ancestors. There actually is an audience for such evolutionary critiques, and it’s clear to me that this audience will grow. Indeed, it is our hope that TER may some day not only speak to those who take an evolutionary lens to our art and cultural prod-ucts, but to those who don’t yet know of the sharp focus the lens has, nor of its uses, virtues, and many pleasures.

The Evolutionary Review could not have evolved as it has without the symbiotic efforts of my brilliant co-editor, Joe Carroll, whose evolutionary imagination is


3alice andrews

unparalleled. For friendship and support during the mak-ing of this fi rst issue, special thanks to contributors Dylan Evans, Justin Garcia, Leslie Heywood, Tim Horvath, Jiro Tanaka, and David Sloan Wilson. And to noncontributor friends and family: Sophie Andrews, Simon Baron-Cohen, Art Bennett, Charlie Brover, Kay Brover, Nicole Burman, Victoria Coleman, Denise Deagan, Glenn Geher, Megan James-Lopez, Rick Lange, Jeff Miller, Christopher Porpora, David Livingstone Smith, and Jason Stern. And to members of the Editorial Board for their encouragement, inspiration, and feedback—with special gratitude to Brian Boyd, Ellen Dissanayake, Jonathan Gottschall, John A. Johnson, and Steven Pinker. And fi nally, much appreciation to David Augustus Hart for creating Argot just for TER, and to everyone at SUNY Press—especially Gary Dunham and Laurie Searl.

DEDICATION

This fi rst issue is dedicated to Jim Andrews (the father of my beautiful and wisdom-fi lled daughter), who didn’t live long enough to see this, but who was the fi rst to hear

me utter the words “The Evolutionary Review: Art, Sci-ence, and Culture” not very long ago. Jim, I think you’d be proud. —AA

REFERENCES

Cronin, Helena. “Interview with Helena Cronin.” The Philosophers’ Magazine 11 2000: 46–48.

Kanazawa, Satoshi. “The Evolutionary Psychological Imagination: Why You Can’t Get a Date on a Saturday Night and Why Most Suicide Bombers are Muslim.” Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology 1 (2007): 7–17.

Scalise Sugiyama, Michelle. “The Origin of Narrative: Storyteller Bias as a Fitness-enhancing Strategy.” Human Nature 7 (1996): 403–425.

NOTE

1. Satoshi Kanazawa has proposed the term evolutionary psy-chological imagination. “The evolutionary psychological imagination gives you a different perspective on world events, on ‘history,’ by linking it to our ‘biography’. It allows us to see the universality of human nature, and how our ‘personal troubles’ are the same everywhere. And many of the ‘public issues,’ not only in our own society but in every society, are intimately linked to the personal troubles of people like us” (15).


4 the evolutionary review

Editor’s Introduction

JOSEPH CARROLL Over the past several years, “literary Darwinism,” evolutionary aesthetics, and evolutionary cultural theory have expanded and fl ourished, displaying their vitality in numerous articles and books, and gaining ever-increasing visibil-ity not just in academic journals but in newspapers and magazines aimed at the educated lay public. The evolutionists seek to integrate knowledge in the humanities with causal explanations in the evolutionary human sciences. They delineate universal features of an evolved human nature but also give close attention to the way human nature manifests itself differently in differ-ent cultural contexts. They trace out the relations between specifi c biocultural confi gurations and the particularities of form and quality in individual works of art. In this way, they aim at offering comprehensive explanatory critiques. Contributors to this fi eld include both evolutionary scientists and scholars in the humanities. These two groups are about equally represented in three recent anthologies: The Literary Animal (Gottschall and Wilson), Human Nature: Fact and Fiction (Headlam Wells and McFadden), and Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (Boyd, Gottschall, and Carroll). In explanatory aims and interdisciplin-ary scope, The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, and Culture follows the pattern set by these previous collections. In style and manner, though, TER aims at something rather different.

Most of the writers contributing to this fi rst volume of TER are academ-ics. That is, they hold positions in universities. But Alice Andrews and I did not want this to be an “academic” publication. In its most derogatory usage, the word academic means writing that is plodding, crabbed, jargonized, dull, and ultimately trivial. The essays in the anthologies mentioned above display no such defects. But even in its more respectful connotations, the word academic suggests writing oriented to specialized professional audiences highly tolerant of routine recitations, dry facts, neutral or conventional authorial personas, an impersonal manner, and prose that is merely effi cient—not aesthetically pleas-ing, not expressive or evocative, not, in itself, enjoyable to read. Many of our readers, like our writers, will no doubt have academic appointments. Even so, we determined that we would make pleasure for the reader one of the chief desiderata for contributions to TER. We wanted critical refl ections that would charm the imagination with wit, humor, and invention, and we wanted prose


that would please the tongue and tickle the ear, satisfying a lust for language that is sinuous, vivid, sharp, and clear.

TER is designed to create a specifi cally evolutionary space for what Matthew Arnold calls “criticism,” that is, “a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake” (268). If evolutionary biology offers a true and comprehensive theory of human nature, minds trained in evolutionary thinking should be free to play across the whole fi eld of human concerns, taking pleasure in discovering explanatory linkages but delighting, too, in the subjective, personal qual-ity of their experience.

Alice Andrews had the original idea for this journal. My readiness to join her in the venture can be illuminated by a passage I wrote a couple of years ago, before I knew of her plans for the journal. After giving an overview of evolutionary studies in the arts, I had projected a possible future in which the virtues of the scientifi c and humanistic disciplines would be united:

Who knows? Perhaps in ten or twenty years, looking back, cultural historians will be deny-ing that the humanities and the evolutionary social sciences were ever in any way at odds with one another. The integration of historical scholarship with a knowledge of human uni-versals will have become standard equipment in literary study. Humanistic expertise in manipu-lating cultural fi gurations will have fl owed into a smooth and harmonious stream with Darwin-ian fi ndings on the elemental features of human nature. Humanistic sensitivity to the fi ne shades of tone and style in literary works will have blended seamlessly with a rigorous empirical analysis of cognitive mechanisms, and a facility in writing elegantly nuanced prose will mingle happily with the severe logic of a quantitative methodology. Scholars and scientists occupied with literary study will balance with easy grace between the impersonal, objective scrutiny of science and a passionate humanistic responsive-ness. All of this is possible, and it is worth work-ing toward. Any of it that we can realize will be a gain for ourselves and a contribution to the sum of human understanding. (135)

While envisioning this harmonious integration of critical powers, I was thinking abstractly about the cognitive faculties in themselves. I was not thinking of practical ways of producing a venue for the kind of writing that would fulfi ll this vision. Alice had the practical vision—the idea of a “review” that would take in the full scope of subjects covered by other high-quality intellectual reviews and by good magazines that give serious attention to politics, sci-ence, the environment, culture, and the arts.

Alice and I both knew many evolutionists with lively, cultivated minds; we saw that quite a few humanists have acquired a sophisticated understanding of human evolution-ary biology; and we saw too that evolutionary social scientists have become increasingly alert to the peculiarly “human” character of “human nature”—recognizing that culture has a truly exceptional importance for this one species.

The time, then, seemed right. Even fi ve years ago, such a journal might not have been possible. This fi rst vol-ume splendidly demonstrates that evolutionary cultural cri-tique can be wide-ranging, powerful, and subtle. Moreover, we anticipate that the essays in this volume will stimulate critical creativity latent in the minds of other scholars and scientists. A vast territory lies open here for exploration, and the pool of potential explorers has no visible limits. Alice and I have been delighted and often surprised by the contributions to this fi rst volume. We look forward with confi dence to many more such pleasant surprises.

REFERENCES

Arnold, Matthew. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Lectures and Essays in Criticism. Vol. 3 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962; 258–85.

Boyd, Brian, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, eds. Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. New York: Columbia UP, forth-coming.

Carroll, Joseph. “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study.” Style 42 (2008): 103–35.

Gottschall, Jonathan, and David Sloan Wilson, eds. The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2005

Headlam Wells, Robin, and Johnjoe McFadden, eds. Human Nature: Fact and Fiction. London: Continuum, 2006.

5joseph carroll


What Is Copernican?

A Few Common Barriers to Darwinian Thinking About the Mind

JIRO TANAKA Sigmund Freud was on to something, and its implications were so unsettling that we have yet to come to terms with it—even now. It wasn’t the Oedipus complex, or even his interpretation of dreams. It wasn’t the absurd doctrine of penis envy, or his decidedly patriarchal view of female sexuality. All of these things give us an excuse to reject him out of hand, but in so doing we fail to appreciate his genuine contribution to the history of science. Though Freud did not invent the idea of the unconscious, his was the fi rst modern, systematic attempt to grapple with, and elevate the signifi cance of, unconscious mental processes. “Modern psychology,” writes Timothy Wilson, “owes Freud a large debt for his willingness to look beyond the narrow corridor of consciousness” (4). Something lies beyond the realm of our conscious desires, beliefs, and inten-tions. Something escapes our intuitive explanations of why we act as we do, or why the people around us act as they do. But the unconscious that Freud brought to light was, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, still “human, all too human.” His chief insight was that the conscious self is not the prime mover of its actions, but the array of concepts that Freud marshaled to articulate that “something else” in the mind fell short of capturing the truly inhuman forces that must have shaped minds like ours.

In a now famous passage from the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanaly-sis, Freud (rather immodestly) places himself alongside Copernicus and Dar-win as the great debunkers of our species-centrism: “Human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time, which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind” (284–85). Ironically, Freud himself failed to make the connection between Freud and Darwin; when he ventured into evolutionary terrain, it was only to adopt a rather uncritical

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form of Lamarckism. To be fair, however, the sciences that could have bridged natural selection and the unconscious were themselves in their infancy in the early years of the twentieth century. A century of evolutionary and molecular biology, as well as recent advances in neuroimaging, have not told us all we need to know, but they have fl eshed out a broad Darwinian context within which researchers now generate plausible hypotheses. One surprising consequence of recent evolutionary approaches to human psychology has been a renewed interest in the unconscious mind (Tallis; T. Wilson).

In Freud’s brief history of science, it is always the de-centering act that constitutes great scientifi c revolutions. But we are now in a position to tell the story a bit differently. A curious paradox runs, like a bright red thread, through the tapestry of current evolutionary thought. Quite possibly, the psychological traits that allowed us to survive in groups are also the very tendencies that thwart our understanding of some fundamental principles of Darwinian evolution. One such principle, often overlooked, is the idea that evolution occurs at the population level, not at the level of individu-als. Evolutionary trends are most clearly visible when we

Figure 1: From Harmonia Macrocosmia, by Andreas Cellarius, 1661.Used with permission of the Linda Hall Library, Kansas City, Missouri

7jiro tanaka



consider the frequency distributions of genotypes (or the phenotypes they yield) in large populations. But we don’t think in “frequencies” in our daily lives. We think in terms of the personalities, beliefs, intentions, and desires of those closest to us, and then we generalize to larger groups. Evo-lutionists call this kind of thinking (or aspects of it) “folk psychology”—the amalgam of intuitions we have about the mental essences that we interpret as driving human behav-ior. The paradox is that our talent for dealing in shadowy essences may itself be the adaptation, the result of eons of low-cost changes to the mammalian brain. Humans are highly social, even by primate standards, such that our sur-vival in early environments depended on inclusion in groups and coordination with them. The working assumption is that much of what we consider human is inextricably tied to our hypersociality: language, symbolic representation, complex social emotions, and most likely the instincts that allow us to predict the behavior of other humans (Cheney and Seyfarth; Deacon; de Waal).

Our ancestral sociality endowed us with a hair-trigger when it comes to detecting intentions, even where there are none. When confronted with impersonal processes, we pre-fer to see design, purpose, and agency. Even a malefi cent will is preferable to no will at all. Evolutionary theorists have long been aware of this bias, not least of all because of the general tendency to personalize the meanings of technical terms such as selection, adaptation, and fi tness. Following a classic study by Jones and Nisbett, social psychologists have produced a robust body of literature on the condi-tions under which we attribute behavior to dispositional causes (personality, character) or to circumstances beyond one’s control. In a recent statistical meta-analysis of this literature, Bertram Malle suggests that the asymmetry in our causal attributions might be self-serving. Whatever the case might be, it is clear that we are ineluctably invested in the intentional map of our social landscapes. My admittedly speculative hypothesis is that this cognitive bias also predis-poses us to certain narratives about evolution. In particular, it drives current popular misconceptions about genes, the role of culture, ecological fl exibility, and the implications of evolutionary claims about the mind.

Two specifi c and related fallacies originate in and reinforce the “Ptolemaic” worldview about human social life, to continue Freud’s astronomical analogy. First, our tendency to personalize general statements about human behavior can keep us from seeing broad patterns at the population level. We tend not to think in frequencies, and do so only with practice. The curves that reveal population trends rely on large sets of data not previously available to humans, and only available today to those of us with the time and motivation to look. This lesson is standard fare in introductions to statistics and the social sciences. But when we hear that a trait is “evolved,” the default tendency is to assume that the trait must therefore extend to all members of the species (Nettle, “Why”). The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr called this “typological thought” or “essential-ism,” in contradistinction to population thinking—the sine qua non of Darwinism. We have all been party to some version of typological thinking, particularly when the situ-ation is adversarial, or when we are protecting our own interests. Confronted with a statistical trend, we search for a counterexample: “Well, I have this friend who doesn’t do that . . .” or “I don’t do that!” To argue in this manner is to imply that the trend must hold for all instances in order for it to be valid; one counterexample is suffi cient to dispel the entire notion. But that is absurd (Saad). Any given popu-lation—be it of fruit fl ies, hunter–gatherers, or American basinet players under the age of forty—contains variation, even in categories for which we would expect them to be homogeneous. Not only is variation not inimical to the existence of evolved traits; it is an integral component of evolution by natural selection. In fact, Darwin expended considerable effort in The Origin of Species articulating his concept of variation, without which the mechanism of natural selection makes little sense.

The second error—let’s call it the deterministic fal-lacy—abounds in both popular and academic writing about evolutionary themes. If a trait is evolved, then it is genetic and must therefore be “hard-wired,” such that all behaviors stemming from that trait are determined and fi xed. (Other common fallacies lie beyond the scope of this article but are worth mentioning: the perception that if something


9jiro tanaka

is evolved, it is “natural” and therefore desirable; or the notion that evolution signifi es progress and advancement.) My point is that we are motivated in a certain way to commit the deterministic fallacy. When impersonal, popula-tion-level analyses threaten our intentionality-driven, agen-tic interpretations of the world, we reach for the catchall concept of determinism—an easily identifi able but pro-foundly simple-minded adversary. In our current academic culture, biological determinism is the straw man du jour, having snatched the crown away from behaviorism. How do we free ourselves from this trope of modern thought, this prejudice that Darwinian lenses reveal only our most rigid and calcifi ed features? Consider the following. Many of our psychological tendencies and preferences are evolved and unconscious, yet their outcomes are not determined, nor are they purely “genetic.” Many of these tendencies are also culturally mediated (and unconscious), yet they are still the product of our evolved, primate neuroendocrine systems. If either of these seems contradictory, it is because we are still under the sway of that old binary schema of metaphysical dualism: either culture or biology, freedom or automation, either spirit or the machine.

The academic culture wars of a generation ago did not help matters. Like all battles between entrenched camps, the debate created the false impression that there exist only two mutually exclusive possibilities: either we are free to construct the social order in which we live, or we are bound by genes and biology. In response to social constructivism, which implied that our minds are like Lockean blank slates, scientifi cally minded scholars emphasized universal and innate human traits. That was unfortunate, because eighteenth-cen-tury epistemology comes with its own weighty baggage—in particular, classical notions of mechanistic determinism that predate the advent of molecular genetics and the probabi-listic worldview of quantum mechanics. The latter, with its formalized expressions of probability, is far better suited to understanding the population-level phenomena with which Darwinian biology routinely contends. Be that as it may, the centuries-old battle line was drawn again, reinforcing the notion that universality and innateness are synonymous with absolute fi xity. The picture that has since emerged is

more subtle, and likely closer to the truth. The underlying, universal architecture of the human mind both enables and requires culturally variable content, such as language, for its operation. (A computer cannot run without its software applications, which are diverse and variable.) One version of this idea is what Alan Fiske calls complementarity. “The evolved proclivities and cultural paradigms are complemen-tary: both are necessary but neither is suffi cient to permit complex social coordination” (76).

Our preference for seeing intentionality, even in nature, makes the eighteenth-century antinomy and its modern reincarnation seem intuitive and obvious. Invari-ably, the current reception of evolutionary approaches to the mind recalls some version of this choice between two irreconcilable possibilities. Sharon Begley’s appraisal of evo-lutionary psychology in a recent issue of Newsweek is worth mentioning here, not only because of the periodical’s wide readership, but because the author’s arguments echo senti-ments still prevalent among humanists and many social sci-entists. From this point of view, the story is that behavioral ecology (read: fl exibility) succeeded and supplanted evolu-tionary psychology (genetic fi xity): “Where, then, does the fall of evolutionary psychology leave the idea of human nature? Behavioral ecology replaces it with ‘it depends’—that is, the core of human nature is variability and fl exibility, the capacity to mold behavior to the social and physical demands of the environment.” Respondents have already corrected many of the mistakes in Begley’s representation of evolutionary thought: behavioral ecology did not post-date evolutionary psychology as a fi eld, and the debate between them stems more from a disagreement over ultimate and proximate causation (D. S. Wilson); ecological fl exibility is not the opposite of genetic encoding since genes are highly responsive to environmental cues (Myers; Nettle, “Beyond”); and evolutionary psychology does not discover only rigid and infl exible behavior (Saad). Finally, Dan Sperber exhorts his colleagues to “ignore Newsweek’s attack, but not the rea-sons why it occurs.”

If I am right, these reasons are not limited to the twists and turns of the fi ckle romance between evolution-ary psychology and the public media. Rather, humans are



profl igate in attributing human meaning to behaviors that ultimately stem from inhuman processes; our cognitive biases lead us to prefer the Ptolemaic sphere of intentional causal-ity and personalized agency. Hence, the subtitle of Begley’s piece: “the fault, dear Darwin, lies with us”—us, the willing and complicit prime movers of human inequity. What folk psychologists lack, and scientists possess in abundance, is not intelligence but forbearance: the ability to stop themselves (most of the time) before leaping to the conclusion they desperately want or need to believe. Reminders about sci-entifi c fact will do little to dissuade anyone if there is insuf-fi cient motivation for them to stop seeking confi rmation of deeply held beliefs. Both evolutionary thought and social constructivism share the naïve faith, bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, that simply revealing the fallacy or construct will dispel the illusion. Early in his career, Freud crafted his own version of this lingering tactic—the idea that bring-ing repressed experiences and traumas into the light of day would loosen their hold on us. But “philosophy,” according to Etienne Gilson’s famous adage, “always buries its under-taker,” and the same can be said of human metaphysics: we cannot simply enlighten our way out of it, particularly if the system of human-centered meanings serves an individual well in his or her social and professional context.

The adaptive unconscious at which evolutionary psy-chology aims is profoundly Copernican. According to its canonical formulation, we are at best aware of the proxi-mate reasons for our actions, such as sexual attraction, hunger, desire for social status, and the instincts to avoid danger or to care for one’s progeny (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby). But we are not aware of why or how these instincts maximized our chances for survival and reproduction in the ancient environment. We do not subjectively experience the ultimate cause of these instincts. Thus, one of the key features of evolutionary psychology is the notion that adaptation to an earlier environment leaves us susceptible to different kinds of dangers in modern civilization; the classic example is our taste for sweet and fatty foods. Unfortunately, the institutional polemic against social constructivism has elicited a rhetorical overemphasis on fi xity in the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA). It should be clear by now that what was “fi xed”—either in the EEA or likely much earlier in

our phylogeny—was precisely fl exibility in many domains of behavior. The caveat here is that proximately evoked fl ex-ibility is not arbitrary, unconstrained, or intentional. Daniel Nettle provides a clear account of signifi cant fi ndings on this topic (“Beyond”). In societies with severe food restriction, people on average prefer mates with larger bodies; in affl u-ent, industrialized societies, the preference is for thinness. “If resources are going to be in continuous supply, it optimizes reproductive success to prefer a small body for oneself and one’s mate.” Conversely, “fat reserves have a crucial advantage if the fl ow of resources is likely to be intermittent, since they permit the buffering of shortage” (228). Note that the explanation is not deterministic, since the subjective preference in no way guarantees the outcome of courtship. Any num-ber of factors can outweigh the ecologically cued preference, including religious beliefs and cultural norms.

Dramatic fl exibility should not be surprising, given that gene expression is highly sensitive to environmental cues. (Even the fruit fl y, with only four pairs of chromosomes, exhibits a wide range of behaviors depending on ecological context.) What is alienating is the fact that such fl exibility does not leave us in control. There is little evidence to sug-gest that an organism’s sensitivity to its environment requires conscious processing. In fact, such awareness would be too biologically costly. Consciousness of all the mechanisms that allow us to breathe, see, and walk would overwhelm us; it is likely that what we call “consciousness” is an effect of a much larger set of nonconscious processes, not the other way around (Gigerenzer; T. Wilson). This may be an easy pill to swallow when applied to the beating of our hearts, but what about the subjective experiences that run deepest in our life-world? What about love, attraction, jealousy, or anger? Here too, the mind’s eye has a giant blind spot when it comes to seeing why we feel as we do, why we perceive our social worlds as we do—and ultimately, why we narrate our lives as we do, both to others and to ourselves. This view threatens our self-conceptions and is most likely what elicits the cry of “determinism!” What a cold, inhuman world it is, in which something as base as hunger can infl uence our perception of beauty, all without our conscious knowledge.

The likelihood that ultimate causes are not available to consciousness has led many evolutionary psychologists


11jiro tanaka

to gravitate toward epiphenomenalism, the stance that we can study psychology without reference to consciousness or the feeling of subjective experience (Cosmides and Tooby). That de-centering act is and remains crucial to the project of explaining the human mind. But productive challenges to evolutionary psychology’s methodological tenets have come from the fi eld loosely known as affective neuroscience, or the study of feelings and emotions. Evolutionary psychology is given to top–down, a priori reasoning about specialized modules, often without reference to the bottom–up, empiri-cal view of neurobiology. This neglect sometimes results in an overemphasis on psychological evolution after the emergence of anatomically modern humans. It is probable, however, that the foundations of our basic emotions—and possibly even some of our higher, social emotions—were laid long before the Pleistocene (Panksepp; Panksepp and Panksepp 113). Just as Lyell’s concept of deep geological time facilitated Darwin’s greatest insights, the current etho-logical view of affect has opened the door to the deep time of human emotion.

In recent decades, we have learned that certain emo-tions may underlie our basic reasoning and decision-making processes (Damasio, Descartes’ Error; “A Second Chance”). Unfortunately, the very word emotion evokes the extremes of hysteria and histrionics, which in turn appears to validate the rigid dichotomy between reason and emotion. We should remember Wittgenstein’s point that our language often leads us into philosophical blind alleys; viewed through “the eyes of evolution,” our linguistic categories and demarcations may turn out to be highly artifi cial. Damasio’s fi ndings about the ventromedial prefrontal cortex represented a watershed for the science of affect, but the work has only just begun. The long-term dividend is that a more robust developmental picture of the prefrontal cortex (and its connections to deeper regions) may aid in revising our metaphysical notions of intentional-ity, free will, and conscious experience. Should neuroscience and the evolutionary social sciences ever approach some-thing resembling consensus on these issues, we would feel the ground shift, particularly in jurisprudence and ethics. Perhaps it would even usher in a new kind of humanism. In the interim, my hope is that we might overcome some of the barriers discussed here, but by incorporating and biologizing

the very things that evolutionary psychology has done with-out: the causal role, however marginal, of subjective awareness, the possibility of qualitative judgment, the feeling of lived life. The point is not to restore the Ptolemaic, human-centered way of seeing things, but to reconstitute it from the outside in, much as the Copernican (and eventually, Galilean) explana-tion helped us to understand why the stars appear to move as they do from our earthbound perspective.

Oscar Wilde wrote that the nineteenth-century dislike of romanticism was like the rage of Caliban at not seeing his own face in a mirror. Our twenty-fi rst century dislike of Darwinian psychology is essentially the same perplexity and revulsion. In this context, it is worth remembering that the romantic imagination was a wellspring for Freud. Not the pastoral romanticism of Wordsworth or the mysticism of Blake, but the supernatural horrors of E. T. A. Hoffman and Poe, both of whom hinted at dark chambers in the mind. Above all, Freud’s project had an affi nity with the romantic quest for origins that culminated in Schliemann’s excava-tion of Troy. In short, it is no coincidence that archaeology is the central, recurring metaphor of psychoanalysis. The tools of today’s excavation of the mind are different, but more importantly, our map of what must lie beneath the surface has changed. We can mark this shift by replacing the metaphors of archaeology with those of geology. We can talk about how abrupt cataclysms, in concert with the slow accretions of prodigious, tectonic lumbering left their indelible traces on this, our animal life.

Finally, there is a Darwinian response to the hackneyed thought experiment that an infi nite number of chimpanzees typing away in infi nite time will eventually write Hamlet. A less than infi nite assortment of bipedal hominids split off from a not-quite infi nite group of chimp-like australopithecines, and then another quite fi nite band of less hairy primates split off from the fi rst motley crew of bipeds. And in a very fi nite amount of time, these primates did write Hamlet. They also built pyramids, a Sistine Chapel, a Great Wall, and counted among themselves a Mozart, a Darwin, an Einstein, and all the rest. Whatever the constraints of evolution by natural selec-tion, they evidently enable a great deal of ingenuity. And lest we forget, they also enable misdeeds of breathtaking brutality: our typing primates enslave and rape one other with startling



frequency, and they possess a talent for murdering each other in large-scale confl icts over tangible resources and abstract ideas alike. It is this combination of talents, for creation and destruction, that must be explained. The only question is whether seeing the world as they see it, through the lens of human metaphysics, is suffi cient for such an explanation. A more prudent course would be to take stock of the geologi-cal and inhuman, yet still quite mundane forces that shaped minds like theirs, and then show how that shaping could make the world appear to them as it does—as a whirling carnival full of guilt and shame, jealousy, betrayal, pride, lust, love, joy, and transcendence. The initial inhuman part is necessary, diffi cult, and arduous. But it would ultimately be the true Copernican turn in our science of the human.

REFERENCES

Barkow, Jerome H., Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

Begley, Sharon. “Why Do We Rape, Kill, and Sleep Around? The Fault, Dear Darwin, Lies Not in Our Ancestors, but in Ourselves.” Newsweek 29 June 2009: n. pag. Web. 20 June 2009.

Cheney, Dorothy L., and Robert M Seyfarth. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2007.

Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions.” Handbook of Emotions. 2nd ed. Ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones. New York: Guilford, 2000. 91–115.

Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994.

———. “A Second Chance for Emotion.” Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion. Ed. Richard D. Lane and Lynn Nadel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 12–23.

Deacon, Terrence W. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York, London: W. W. Norton, 1997.

de Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.

Fiske, Alan. “Complementarity Theory: Why Human Social Capacities Evolved to Require Cultural Complements.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 4.1 (2000): 76–94.

Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 1916–1917, Lecture 18: “Fixation to Traumas—the Unconscious.”

The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 16. Ed. James Strachey et al. London: The Hogart Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74.

Gigerenzer, Gerd. Gut feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. New York: Viking Press, 2007.

Jones, E.E., and Richard E. Nisbett. The Actor and the Observer: Divergent Perceptions of the Causes of Behavior. New York: The General Learning Press, 1971.

Malle, Bertram F. “The Actor-Observer Asymmetry in Attribution. A (Surprising) Meta-Analysis.” Psychological Bulletin 132 (2006): 895–919.

Mayr, Ernst. One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991.

Myers, P. Z. “Sharon Begley, How Could You?” Science Blogs: Pharyngula, January 22, 2009. http://scienceblogs.com/ pharyngula/2009/01/sharon_begley_how_could_ you.php

Nettle, Daniel. “Beyond Nature versus Culture: Cultural Variation as an Evolved Characteristic.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (2009): 223–240.

———. “Why Is Evolution so Hard to Understand?” Unpublished lecture, UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture, Los Angeles, CA, 23 Feb., 2009. Video available at http://www.bec.ucla.edu/BECSpeakerSeries.htm

Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

———, and Jules B. Panksepp. “Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology.” Evolution and Cognition 6 (2000): 108–31.

Saad, Gad. “The Never-Ending Misconceptions about Evolutionary Psychology.” Psychology Today: Homo Consumericus blog, 22 June, 2009. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ homo-consumericus/200906/the-never-ending-misconceptions-about-evolutionary-psychology

Sperber, Dan. “Evolutionary Psychology Under Attack.” International Culture and Cognition Institute, 23 June, 2009. Blog entry. http://www.cognitionandculture.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=471:evolutionary-psychology-under-attack&catid=29:dan&Itemid=34

Tallis, Frank. Hidden Minds: A History of the Unconscious. New York: Arcade, 2002.

Wilson, David Sloan. “Evolutionary Psychology and the Public Media: Rekindling the Romance.” Huffi ngton Post, 25 June 2009. http://www.huffi ngtonpost.com/david-sloan-wilson/evolutionary-psychology-a_b_220545.html

Wilson, Timothy D. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002


13david sloan wilson

Learning from the Immune System about Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology (EP) has come a long way since its inception as a recognized discipline in the late 1980s. Science is supposed to progress, but some kinds of progress are easier to acknowledge than others. Ideas that initially appeared central sometimes must be amended for a fi eld as a whole to move forward. And when those ideas are amended, it can be hard for those who originally championed them to acknowledge that they were in some sense wrong and their critics were in some sense right.

Opposing the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) helped EP get established as a recognized movement. For EP to move forward, though, we now need a new paradigm that combines elements of EP and the SSSM. The mammalian immune system provides a model for the new paradigm.

DEFINING EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

It is important to distinguish EP as a whole fi eld from particular positions within the fi eld. EP is straightforwardly defi ned as the study of psychology from an evolutionary perspective. A particular position is that brains are massively modular and must be to solve the problems of survival and repro-duction in any particular environment. This particular position might be right or wrong, but its truth or falsity does not alter the defi nition of the fi eld as a whole.

A problem occurs when the term Evolutionary Psychology becomes asso-ciated with a particular position within the fi eld. The fortunes of the entire fi eld then appear to rise and fall with the fortunes of the particular position and critics of the position are impelled to avoid using the term, even though they are manifestly studying psychology from an evolutionary perspective. This problem has plagued the fi eld of EP, which became associated with the posi-tion articulated by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (1992) and impelled other people who fully qualify as evolutionary psychologists to avoid using the term. It is essential to rectify this problem by reclaiming the term EP for the fi eld as a whole, so that the changing fortunes of particular positions can be properly seen as a form of progress.

DAVID SLOAN WILSON



MASSIVE MODULARITY AND THE SSSM

According to Tooby and Cosmides (“Psychological Founda-tions of Culture” and elsewhere), all species are confronted with many problems impacting survival and reproduction. Each problem requires a separate cognitive solution. Brains therefore consist of many specialized “modules” for address-ing specifi c problems. Metaphorically, they are like a Swiss army knife with different tools for different tasks, or like a jukebox that plays many records depending on which button is pushed. In the jukebox metaphor, each record is a cognitive adaptation that evolved by genetic evolution to solve a particular adaptive problem such as cheater detec-tion, and the buttons are environmental stimuli that cause a given module to be expressed. A third metaphor is com-puter software designed for specialized purposes, such as tax preparation software, which requires substantial environmen-tal input and information processing to calculate the taxes of any particular person, but can’t do anything else.

All of these metaphors convey an interesting and seemingly paradoxical concept of rigid fl exibility. Swiss army knives, jukeboxes, and specialized software are all fl exible, but in a way that is rigidly prescribed, beyond which they become useless. Insofar as cognitive modules evolve by genetic evolution, they are designed to work well in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) and can tragically misfi re in other environments, a problem that only subsequent genetic evolution can solve. Thus, humans do not necessarily behave adaptively in their current environ-ments. To explain current human behavior, we must ask how the psychological mechanisms generating the behavior functioned in the relevant EEA.

All of this is in contrast to the Standard Social Science Model, which emphasizes the open-ended capacity of indi-viduals and cultures to change over short time scales. Meta-phors representing the SSSM include the venerable blank slate, on which anything can be written, and a computer that can be used for a great variety of specifi c purposes. A blank slate conveys an image of both simplicity and open-ended fl exibility. A computer is much more complex than a blank slate but retains its open-ended fl exibility. Thus, the main problem with the SSSM, according to Tooby and Cos-

mides, is the claim that people and societies have virtually unlimited potential in what they can become over time scales that are short compared with genetic evolution.

B.F. SKINNER—EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGIST

Against this background, it is interesting to revisit the work of B.F. Skinner and the tradition of behaviorism that stands at the center of the SSSM. In his infl uential paper titled “Selection by Consequences,” Skinner explicitly described operant conditioning as an adaptation that evolved by genetic evolution and an evolutionary process in its own right. Organisms are genetically endowed with a variety of psychological “reinforcers” that cause them to select among behaviors that are initially undirected. This fast-paced process of “blind variation and selective retention,” as social psy-chologist Donald Campbell famously phrased it, leads to the evolution of behaviors that are biologically adaptive on aver-age, albeit with numerous exceptions. For example, Skinner famously showed that pigeons placed on a random reinforce-ment schedule would develop “superstitious” behaviors that they acquired on the basis of spurious initial correlations.

In a taped conversation between Skinner and E.O. Wilson that has become the basis of a recent book (Naour), Skinner complained that he had been left out of the sociobiology movement. In part, he had himself to blame by claiming too much for operant conditioning and by refusing to open the “black box” of psychological mechanisms that transform environmental input into behav-ioral output. Nevertheless, in a more moderate form and accompanied by the detailed study of proximate mecha-nisms, Skinner’s position is fully reasonable from an evolu-tionary perspective. Moreover, even though the tradition of behaviorism lost infl uence as the broad fi eld of psychology became more mechanistic, it has remained central in the applied behavioral sciences. In other words, “selection by consequences” has proven to be an essential tool for profes-sionals who actually accomplish behavioral change at scales both small (e.g., individual therapy; Hayes) and large (e.g., nationwide reduction of problem behaviors such as smok-ing; Biglan; Embry).



In retrospect, the massive modularity position of Tooby and Cosmides suffers from the same kind of extrem-ism as Skinner’s version of behaviorism. When it comes to the human capacity for open-ended change over short time scales, Skinner claimed too much and Tooby and Cosmides claimed too little. The truth lies somewhere in between. Progress for EP as a discipline requires a careful exploration of the middle ground.

LEARNING FROM THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

As we search for metaphors and analogies to explore the middle ground, the mammalian immune system has much to offer. It is an elaborate set of mechanisms that evolved by genetic evolution to protect the organism from parasites and diseases. The mechanisms are mind-bogglingly com-plex and many of them are highly specialized—like the psychological modules described by Tooby and Cosmides. Yet, the centerpiece of the mammalian immune system is an open-ended process of antibody evolution that can rapidly adapt to current disease environments—like the open-ended learning described by Skinner. If these two positions can be combined for the immune system, then perhaps they can be combined in a similar way for our behavioral adaptations.

• Sompayrac provides an elegant overview of the immune system for the nonspecialist. Here I summarize a few insights relevant to establishing a new paradigm for evo-lutionary psychology.

• Immunologists distinguish between the “innate” and “adaptive” components of the immune system, which roughly correspond to the Tooby/Cosmides and Skinner positions for EP.

• The adaptive component of the immune system was added to the innate component over evolutionary time, does not substitute for it, and relies extensively on it to operate, as described in more detail below. By analogy, Skinner’s claim that operant conditioning largely replaces instinctive behaviors is highly implausible.

• There is no way to understand either the innate or adap-tive components of the immune system without a detailed understanding of the proximate mechanisms. Skinner’s reliance on input–output functions and refusal to look inside the “black box” of the brain is absurd from an immunological perspective.

• Tooby and Cosmides attempted to make a strong theo-retical argument that domain general learning is impos-sible in principle. This position is also absurd from an immunological perspective. The adaptive component of the immune system demonstrates the existence of what Calvin (“The Brain”; A Brain) and Plotkin term a Dar-win machine: A fast-paced process of evolution, built by the slow-paced process of genetic evolution. Darwin machines, by defi nition, are capable of adapting organ-isms to their environments over much shorter time scales than genetic evolution. By analogy, this means that when an evolutionary psychologist attempts to explain a giv-en human behavior, it is not necessarily appropriate to look for a specialized mechanism that evolved by genetic evolution in the distant past. The behavior might be a product of psychological and cultural processes that count as evolutionary and operate over faster time scales. The concept of the EEA is still relevant, but the time scale of the EEA for Darwin machines is much shorter than the time scale of the EEA for genetic evolution.

• The adaptive component of the immune system includes historical and nonadaptive aspects inherent in all evolu-tionary processes. When different people are exposed to the same disease, they usually evolve different antibodies because antibody diversity is so great that many antibodies can bind to a given antigen and the ones that are amplifi ed in any particular individual are largely a matter of chance. To pick an analogous example for human behavior, Ostrom has studied how human groups solve the “tragedy of the commons” problem for irrigation systems in traditional cul-tures around the world (and see Poteet and Ostrom). Even within a single culture, there can be dozens of groups faced with the same basic problem of coordinating water use in an equitable fashion. It turns out that they have arrived at multiple solutions that do the same job in different ways,



similar to different antibodies that fi ght the same disease. More generally, the study of genetic evolution goes beyond the narrow study of adaptations, and the same applies to the study of Darwin machines.

• The adaptive component of the immune system does not entirely solve the environmental mismatch problem. Sompayrac compares the adaptive immune system to the quarterback of a football team, who is totally reliant on the rest of the team to function. The “rest of the team” is the innate component of the immune system, which is not open-ended and can tragically misfi re in novel environments. For example, intestinal worms were evi-dently such a constant part of the genetic EEA that the mammalian immune system “relies” on their presence to form appropriate antibodies. When they are removed, as in modern hygienic human environments, the immune system reacts to inappropriate antigens, resulting in ail-ments such as asthma, hay fever, and irritable bowel syn-drome (Jackson et al.). The adaptive immune system is incapable of solving this particular problem because it was not designed to be fl exible in this particular way. For this particular case, it is appropriate to explain the current day behavior (e.g., asthma) in terms of the genetic EEA (e.g., a mismatch between current and ancient environments).

WHY IT MATTERS

The nascent discipline of Evolutionary Psychology became associated with the massive modularity thesis of Tooby and Cosmides in the early 1990s, largely on the basis of their long theoretical essay in The Adapted Mind (Barkow et al.) and other chapters in this infl uential volume that refl ected the same theme. I happened to organize the Human Behav-ior and Evolution Society meeting in 1993 and made a point of showcasing the issues. My own talk (“Adaptive Genetic Variation”; see also Wilson, “Evolutionary Social Constructivism”) was a critique of their view and was fol-lowed by a response from John Tooby. During the public discussion and private conversations, I got the impression that EP was being set apart from the SSSM in part to attract attention to a bold new discipline, including impor-

tant aspects of human psychology that were not already being considered as part of the SSSM.

If so, then it was a classic case of a strategy with short-term benefi ts and long-term costs. The goal of EP is to provide a complete explanation of psychology from an evolutionary perspective, not to provide a counterweight to other positions that are also legitimate. Moreover, if the SSSM stands for anything, it is the human capacity for open-ended change over time scales shorter than genetic evolution. By creating a strong polarity between EP and the SSSM, the position articulated by Tooby and Cosmides appeared to deny the human capacity for open-ended change. Moreover, this is not just a misunderstanding, but also a legitimate criticism insofar as the massive modularity thesis ignores the behavioral equiv-alent of the adaptive component of the immune system.

It is important to stress that other approaches to human psychology from an evolutionary perspective did not make this mistake. I already mentioned fi gures such as B.F. Skinner, Donald Campbell, William Calvin, and Henry Plotkin, who conceptualize the human capacity for open-ended change as both a product of genetic evolution and an evolutionary process in its own right. The formal study of human cul-tural evolution antedates the massive modularity thesis and is increasingly occupying center stage in the current litera-ture (e.g., Boyd and Richerson; Henrich et al.; Richerson and Boyd). Thus, a major part of the problem has been the restriction of the term Evolutionary Psychology to a particular position, rather than to the fi eld as a whole.

At the same time, it is not my purpose to criticize the position associated with Tooby and Cosmides in every respect. The human mind is not just a jukebox, but nei-ther is it just a blank slate. The immune system provides a comprehensive guide to how these two positions can be combined for human behavioral adaptations, no less than adaptations to parasites and diseases.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Anthony Biglan and Dennis Embry, who represent the fi eld of Prevention Science, for helping me to appreciate the evolutionary relevance of B.F. Skinner and the tradition of behaviorism.



REFERENCES

Barkow, Jerome, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Biglan, A. (1995). Changing Cultural Practices: A Contextual Framework for Intervention Research. Oakland, CA: Context Press, 1995.

Boyd, Robert, and Peter J. Richerson. Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Calvin, W. H. “The Brain as a Darwin Machine.” Nature 330 (1987): 33–34.

Calvin, W. H. A Brain for All Seasons. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.

Campbell, T. D. “Blind Variation and Selective Retention in Creative Thought and Other Knowledge Processes.” Psychological Review 67 (1960): 380–400.

Embry, D. D. “Community-based Prevention Using Simple, Low-cost, Evidence-based Kernels and Behavior Vaccines.” Journal of Community Psychology 32 (2004): 575–91.

Hayes, S. C. “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Relational Frame Theory and the Third Wave of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.” Behavior Therapy 35 (2004): 639–65.

Henrich, J., Boyd, R., and Richerson, P. J. “Five Misunderstandings about Cultural Evolution.” Human Nature 19 (2008): 119–37.

Jackson, J. A., Friberg, I. M., Little, S., and Bradley, J. E. “Review Series on Helminths, Immune Modulation and the Hygiene Hypothesis: Immunity against Helminths and Immunological Phenomena in Modern Human Populations: Coevolutionary Legacies?” Immunology 126 (2008): 18–27.

Naour, P. E.O. Wilson and B.F.Skinner: A Dialogue between Sociobiology and Radical Behaviorism. New York: Springer, 2009.

Ostrom, E. Crafting Institutions for Self-Governing Irrigation Systems. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1992.

Plotkin, Henry. Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.

Poteet, A. R., and E. Ostrom. “Fifteen Years of Empirical Research on Collective Action in Natural Resource Management: Struggling to Build Large-N Databases Based on Qualitative Research.” World Development 36 (2007): 176–95.

Richerson, Peter J., and Richard Boyd. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.

Skinner, B. F. “Selection by Consequences.” Science 213 (1981): 501–04.

Sompayrac, L. M. How the Immune System Works. 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, Blackwell, 2008.

Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. “The Psychological Foundations of Culture.” The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Ed. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 19–136.

Wilson, D. S. “Adaptive Genetic Variation and Human Evolutionary Psychology.” Ethology and Sociobiology 15 (1994): 219–35.

———. “Evolutionary Social Constructivism.” The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Eds. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2005. 20–37.


When Biological Evolution and Social Revolution Clash

Skinner’s Behaviorist Utopia

When the most infl uential utopia of the twentieth century appeared in book-stores in 1948, it was greeted with howls of derision. The reviewers wasted no time fl aying B.F. Skinner and his behaviorist prescription for a good life. The Journal of Philosophy denounced Walden Two as horrible and predicted that behaviorist conditioning would produce contented, nonpolitical robots. The Philosophical Review ratcheted up the rhetoric, putting Skinner on a par with the Nazis. “Sadistic, fascistic,” fulminated the usually restrained New York Review of Books (Poore, 6).

More than two decades later, Ayn Rand’s attack on Skinner and his 1971 exposition of the behavioral creed, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, was hardly less hysterical. “Boris Karloff ’s embodiment of Frankenstein’s monster” (137), was how she summed up the study widely interpreted as a nonfi ctional version of Walden Two. Visceral in its disdain, her denunciation typifi ed the political, scientifi c and cultural heavyweights who rallied against Skinner’s utopia: Spiro Agnew, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Mead, Carl Rogers, Joseph Wood Crutch, Stephen Jay Gould. All across the political spectrum, from right to left, reactive outrage against Skinner unifi ed the intellectual world.

What was it in Walden Two that sent everyone screaming murder? The plot, such as it is, opens in the offi ce of Professor Burris, senior psychologist and one-time fellow graduate student of a brilliant maverick, E.T. Frazier. In walk two freshly demobbed GIs who are fascinated by rumors of Frazier’s experimental community and ask Burris to help them get to it. In no time a party of six embark on a short trip to Walden Two: Burris, the two young men, their girlfriends, and a fellow academic, Professor Castle from the philosophy department. With Frazier as their guide, they stay in the commune for a few days, following the arch behaviorist’s tirades punctuated by remarks from the querulous Castle.

The academics putz around, try their hand at physical labor, meet some of the Waldenites, sample the cafeteria food, absorb the rudiments of the social, political, and cultural life in the compound, and debate the pros and cons of social engineering with Frazier. In the end, Castle and one of the young couples return to the outside world, while the other GI and his girl settle at

PETER SWIRSKI



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the Walden Two farm. And Burris? Having seen the light, the psychology professor fi res off a “take your university and shove it” letter of resignation and, liberated by this action, rejoins the community. There, encouraged by Frazier, he writes down the account of the visit, which turns out to be the text of the novel.

Crucially, what sets Walden Two apart from other uto-pias is not so much the vision of the good life, but the sci-ence behind it. My analysis of the science behind Skinner’s vision is far from limited, however, to a specifi c novel or even a specifi c set of behaviorist postulates. The evidence I marshal here pertains, in other words, not just to Walden Two but to any and all forms of social engineering, whether in fi ction or in real life. Evolution reaches far too deep into the human psyche to be neglected when it comes to construct-ing—or just modeling—a better society. Understanding the role that natural selection plays in shaping human nature is the key to understanding any social system, and thus to designing a better one. To the extent that it clashes with evolved adaptive behaviors, operant conditioning cannot be effective in the sense that Skinner envisioned. Innate adap-tive mechanisms limit the scope and effi cacy of any effort to improve human nature and society.

The most salient point on which Skinner fi nds himself at loggerheads with evolution is the reproductive investment in one’s offspring. At Walden Two children are separated from parents as part of behavioral conditioning. Parents no longer need children for economic security; children are free to play with other children to their hearts’ content; and the community is said to function as a large family. Skinner thus asserts, “Blood ties would then be a minor issue” (xi). Would they?

Toward the end of Walden Two, Burris—and with him Burrhus Skinner—actually concedes that the family has a biological basis. Yet, he continues, “aside from the role of physical resemblance, I could not see that hereditary con-nections could have any real bearing upon the relations between men. A ‘sense of family’ was clearly dependent upon culture, for it varied in all degrees among cultures” (291).

In degrees, maybe, but not in kind. The entire evo-lutionary paradigm hinges, in fact, on blood ties. Genetic

success means the propagation not only of one’s own genes but also those of blood relatives, adjusted for the degree of kinship and investment of one’s resources. Not surprisingly, family members with the strongest hereditary links typi-cally top this genetic “to help” list. This is not at all to say that genetic relatedness explains all forms of altruism or social cooperation, any more than it explains the violent feuds that sometimes bedevil family groups. From neglectful mothers to abusive fathers, there is much evidence point-ing away from genetic determinism. But the evidence for biological foundations of sundry aspects of family life is overwhelming.

Psychological propensities such as pair bonding, parental investment, or sexual jealousy evolved to regulate behavior with a view to hiking the odds of successful repro-duction. One striking aspect of this adaptive behavior is highlighted by J.B. Watson’s famous injunction for parents to avoid baby talk. First, the bond with one’s offspring—evi-denced in this case by verbal behavior—must be instinc-tive and universal to have provoked this blanket call on parents to stop it. Second, given that baby talk (Motherese) is instinctive and universal, any such conditioning will only be partially or superfi cially successful.

And it is. Although males are somewhat less demon-strative than females, and the Japanese less than the Western-ers, baby talk—technically, infant-directed speech—manifests itself irrespective of sex, culture, or actual parenthood. (And indeed, Japanese culture is famous for its baby talk, and Japa-nese lovers use baby talk more than Western lovers do.) The linguistic features of Motherese are easy to spot from watch-ing anyone “coo” to a baby. Exaggerated pitch contours, sing-song musicality, vowel elongation, enunciation (hyper-articulation), slower tempo, simplifi ed syntax and repetition have been observed in all cultures under study—so much so that Motherese is now recognized as a sublanguage.

Separating offspring from parents is always possible (look no further than Sophie’s Choice), but only at the price of psychic damage and cries of protest from our ancestral heritage. Parental investment is wired into our species and it is not for the taking (or leaving). Social engineering in the USSR, which was to replace the family as the locus of social affi liation with love for the Soviet state, proved an



abysmal failure. Admittedly, such indoctrination was partially successful, especially when grafted onto the tsarist ideology of Mother Russia. Denunciations of parents by children, though never as common as state propaganda alleged, sug-gest that in some individuals blood ties could indeed be suppressed (although not without feelings of guilt, regret, and psychological trauma). But, historically, the absorption of the Russian family into the Soviet state was only skin deep.

The primacy of the parent–child bond was reaffi rmed by decades-long communal experience in Israel. In their classic study of three generations of women kibbutzim, the anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Joseph Shepher report how, notwithstanding the tenets of communal rearing and the zealous ideological commitment to implement them, the banished behaviors returned through the back door. Kibbutz mothers fi rst revolted by insisting that their own children live with them, then took political control by outvoting the behavioral codes that mandated communal rearing. The utopian experiment in erasing the primeval relationship between parent and child crumbled into dust.

The same pattern is mirrored in every culture and every social experiment, including the best-known Ameri-can commune of Twin Oaks. Here, no matter how com-mitted to the behaviorist ideals, members actually left the commune rather than be separated from their children. “When I left Twin Oaks, it was because of Maya,” as one mother explains. “I just wanted to be able to teach my kids more what I believed, and wanted to stop pretending that it wasn’t important to me.” Another member recalls that prior to the birth of his daughter he ardently agreed with com-munal parenting. After all, shrugged the father-to-be, indi-vidual parenthood was just a mix of genes. “I can’t believe any of it anymore,” he shakes his head in recollection. “I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.” (All the quotations in this paragraph are from Kuhlmann, 105.)

So much for Walden Two and the alleged triumph of social engineering over parental investment.

Next to parenthood, the most fundamental behavior in the service of the selfi sh gene is sex. What would evo-lutionary science predict in this regard? Despite the “free love” ethic among the Twin Oaks communards—many of

whom were fl ower children—pair bonding should reassert itself when the novelty of sexual liberation wore off. This is exactly what happened, with pairings, whether of a boy-friend–girlfriend type or formal marriages, routinely emerg-ing in the absence of any conventional norms of sexual behavior or pair bonding. As Hilke Kuhlman reports, “a lot of them got married, and are still married and have children” (113).

To Frazier’s assertions that the family is the frailest of modern institutions, the proper answer, therefore, is that it is neither modern nor frail. Kinship and social affi liation have always been the warp and woof of society, regulating the intensity of our attachments—and our willingness to extend ourselves and our resources—to people around us. Although in times of affl uence behaviors do look some-what more utopian, times of need invariably bring out the universal hierarchy: family fi rst, then friends, then the tribe. Tellingly, when Kat Kinkade deplores the mess of govern-ing the Waldenite community at Twin Oaks, she deplores “people wanting decisions to go a certain way because how it affects them or their families or their friends” (Kuhl-man, 182).

Human beings naturally evolve power hierarchies, no matter what the utopian handbook preaches about egalitari-anism. Here nothing beats the statement from Ian Murrey, cofounder of the Canadian Waldenite community, Head-lands. Refl ecting on years of strife before its demise, Mur-rey is unrepentantly frank: call the planners “a Board of Directors and be done with the bullshit” (Kuhlman, 119). While sharing living space with family, humans are also inherently territorial. Richard Graham insists that his leav-ing Twin Oaks had nothing to do with communal policy. But he felt a deep need that could not be accommodated within it: “I wanted private space. I had my own bedroom, but I just wanted more physical space around me that I didn’t have to share” (175).

Evolution strikes back in other ways. Consider the problem of cheaters or, in the evolutionary lexicon, free-riders. Bronislaw Malinowski’s functional study of Trobri-and islanders provides an iconic picture of the transcultural universality of free-rider behavior: “Whenever the native


21peter swirski

can evade his obligations without the loss of prestige, or without the prospective loss of gain, he does so, exactly as a civilised business man would do” (30). Ethnographic evi-dence stretching from the USSR to its satellites proves that parasitic behavior is ineradicable even in environments most heavily saturated with ideology. Evolutionary game theory predicts, in fact, that free-riders will arise in all societies, no matter how highly motivated by Skinnerian tenets.

Rationally, it makes perfect sense for individuals to mooch off the system. They get all the benefi ts while exploiting the willingness of others to abide by the code. Frazier may spout the utopian bromides: “The really intel-ligent man doesn’t want to feel that his work is being done by anyone else” (50). Yet, contrary to this idealism, not all intelligent people desire to do menial service work like cleaning, waiting on tables or collecting garbage. Frazier completely overlooks the fact that many intelligent people would rather leave the unpleasant or hard jobs to someone else, while enjoying the benefi ts. Free riders are anything but dumb—they might be antisocial and exploitative, but they are usually clever.

The best benchmark for evaluating this part of Skin-ner’s design is again the experimental data. Here, the experi-ence of the Twin Oakers is unequivocal. One of the central problems with the labor-credit system, whereby everyone was to truthfully report their preferences for different types of work, was conscious and repeated manipulation. Many would fi nd fault with the work performance of their fellow workers, while hard workers would feel underappreciated. In fact, complaints about unscrupulous community mem-bers who gave far from their best were routine, mirroring the statewide communist experiments in post-World War II eastern Europe or Africa.

The verdict from the laboratory and from history books is overwhelming. Try to engineer social behavior without factoring in this part of the evolutionary bed-rock of human motivations, and you’re bound to fail. Even Kinkade, one of the most ardent believers in the Skin-nerian system, has come to appreciate this: “Cooperation and group reinforcement alone just won’t do” to eliminate cheating (Kuhlman, 126). In fact, she condemns the utopia

of the labor-credit system—indeed, any honor system—in an explicit reference to Walden Two.

Castle challenged Frazier on this very point. Castle said, “You’ve taken the mainspring out of the watch.” And Frazier replied, “That is an experimental question, Mr. Castle, and you have the wrong answer.” Or something of that sort. I was absolutely delighted with this when I fi rst read it. But at this point I’m prepared to say: “It’s an experimental question, Mr. Castle, and you’re right.”

According to Skinner human beings can be engi-neered out of another form of adaptive behavior: gossiping. At the farm no one is said to exhibit any interest in talking about the gamut of personal affairs, from love to sex to the ever-fl uid rankings on the communal power-and-sta-tus stock exchange. “It’s part of the Walden Two Code to avoid gossip about personal ties” (130), pontifi cates Frazier. In reality, as Brian Boyd explains in On the Origin of Sto-ries, we are by nature incorrigible gossips. Contrary to his own party line, even Skinner agrees. Overhearing a group of Waldenites chat about the affairs of the community, he writes: “Their conversation was a sort of non-malignant gossip” (198).

The evolutionary sciences document what we intui-tively know, namely that human beings have an innate hunger for strategic social information, for we reap ben-efi ts when we can understand the complexity of our social groups. Who is allied with whom? Who is sleeping with whom? Who is up and coming? Who is it prudent to avoid? Call it sharing, comparing notes, touching base, keeping up to speed, or staying in the loop. But gossip is a major social glue and a major weapon, and thus a major form of adaptive behavior for such a highly social primate as homo.

Another point where behaviorist engineering clashes with evolution is envy and jealousy. Mrs. Nash, the nurse of about twenty years old, was not raised at the farm. Strad-dling the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, the fi rst twelve years of her life were spent in the United States at large.



Yet, having joined the community, Mrs. Nash no longer knows what jealousy and envy are. Incredibly, she does not even recognize the terms.

In a moment fi ve or six children came running into the playrooms and were soon using the lava-tory and dressing themselves. Mrs. Nash explained that they were being taken on a picnic.

“What about the children who don’t go?” said Castle.

Mrs. Nash was puzzled.“Jealousy. Envy,” Castle elaborated. “Don’t

the children who stay home ever feel unhappy about it?”

“I don’t understand,” said Mrs. Nash. (91)

The scene exposes serious design problems of Skin-ner’s putative society. Whether raised outside the farm or not, people would never forget what jealousy and envy are quite simply because they are adaptive emotions wired into human nature. Like it or not, both crouch inside our genes, waiting to be triggered by appropriate social context. Insofar as the Waldenites are said to visit nearby towns, watch mov-ies and otherwise partake in the life of the country, they could not make sense of the behavioral economy of people in the street or on the screen without understanding such fundamental emotions as envy or jealousy.

Theory of mind (ToM), one of the foundational ele-ments of evolutionary psychology, makes this clear. ToM refers to our astonishing and astonishingly successful ability to read people’s minds—more precisely to read minds off behavioral and linguistic cues, often provided for that pur-pose. ToM requires a continuous projection of intentional-ity onto other speakers and “actors” in our social contacts. Such mind reading is an innate, universal and indispensable component of our “folk” psychology by means of which we attribute mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions) to other beings, and have mental states attributed to us.

ToM, in short, is a process of hypothesis formation about one another’s states of mind to make sense of one another’s intentions and behavior; it’s about recognizing purposes and goals—whether in real life or in fi ctional

narratives—within a framework of human behavior. It is in this very sense that Waldenites could not at all interact successfully with the world outside if their social-interac-tive equipment was so deformed. They would be social and emotional cripples.

Much as it might be desirable to rid ourselves of cer-tain emotions, it is not possible. Emotions mesh indissolubly with cognition and physiology, forming a control system for body and mind, and thus forming the core of our evolu-tionary being. Far from being subservient or secondary to cognition, emotions funnel and etch experiences, and are thus indispensable to learning and surviving. “We don’t need them any longer in our struggle for existence,” proclaims Frazier. “We all know that emotions are useless” (92), concurs Castle. So there you go. Billions of years of evolution, tens of millions of mammalian evolution, several millions of primate evolution, less than two million of human evolution, and suddenly overnight you can improve on the nature’s software by getting rid of “useless” emotional subprograms.

Jealousy, writes Skinner, “has served its purpose in the evolution of man; we’ve no further use for it” (93). Wrong. The adaptive effects of jealousy were well known even in his time and, in the year Walden Two came out, psychologist Boris Sokoloff summed up the research on the matter: “Jealousy is not only inbred in human nature, but it is the most basic, all-pervasive emotion which touches man in all aspects of all human relationships” (18). Indeed, together with romantic love, it is one of the ingredients of the emotional cement that keeps pairs bonded. It keeps the male attentive to the female even during pregnancy or after birth. It makes the female alert to her partner’s roving eye. Ask yourself: Have either of these functions lost their adaptive utility?

Hardly, documents David Buss in The Dangerous Pas-sion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex. Jealousy is “a supremely important passion that helped our ancestors, and most likely continues to help us today, to cope with a host of real reproductive threats” (5). It fi res up the emo-tional boiler, which drives us to confront rivals who make designs on our partner. It motivates us to increase surveil-lance in the face of a threat of the partner straying. And it communicates emotional commitment both to potential


23peter swirski

competitors and to the partner, gluing the relationship from the inside. In short, jealousy is an adaptive solution to a raft of sexual, reproductive, and social behaviors our forefathers and foremothers faced—though sometimes a tragically vio-lent one.

Like jealousy, envy is an adaptive behavior linked to status seeking, group ranking and social domination. It is an effective coping strategy evolved to motivate us to do better in social situations involving hierarchy and domina-tion—that is, in virtually all of them. Humans are inveterate status seekers, because keeping up with the Joneses is a trait inherited with our mothers’ milk. Take the standard expres-sion of envy: material status. Rationally, once you have a warm cave, a few skins to plump the bed, and a roast on the fi re, you should not care what happens next door. Frazier may exclaim: “We don’t go for personal rivalry; individuals are seldom compared” (117). But we do. We go for personal rivalry and compare ourselves to others, because doing so is in our socially adaptive genes which like to measure domi-nation and success not in absolute, but in relative terms.

In another evolutionary blunder, Skinner asserts: “the very nature of the struggle to survive cannot give birth to a noncompetitive intelligence” (280). Not so. Theories of reciprocal altruism are rooted precisely in the selfi sh, sur-vival-of-the-inclusively-fi ttest calculus by which evolution operates on populations. Although we are predisposed to competition, territoriality, status seeking and domination, we are also remarkably “groupish” (as opposed to selfi sh) and inclined to band together and trade with benefi ts to all. Matter of fact, the price for being in the tribe where we get along is antagonism to other tribes, in a classic “them or us” pattern sadly borne out by history.

It would be easy to go on, but the point is clear. To the extent they cannot be overridden, adaptive human behaviors must inform any design for a better society. My foregoing analysis is thus not a criticism of a particular behaviorist design, but an effort to establish a baseline for evaluating any and all forms of social engineering.

When it comes to Walden Two, some of the counterev-idence is so obvious, it beggars belief to see a great scientist fail to pay heed. Some is more subtle. But the underlying message is the same. Evolutionary currents course through

our veins, and social engineers who would try to bend them to their will—or who are merely ignorant of the degree to which we are children of our genetic ancestors—are in for a rude awakening.

REFERENCES

Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge. MA: Harvard UP, 2009.

Buss, David M. The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex. New York: Free Press, 2000.

Kuhlmann, Hilke. Living Walden Two: B.F. Skinner’s Behaviorist Utopia and Experimental Communes. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2005.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Crime and Custom in Savage Society: An Anthropological Study of Savagery. 1926. Littlefi eld: Adams, 1966.

Poore, Charles. “Tour of an Almost Perfect Utopia.” New York Times Book Review, 13 June 1948, 6.

Rand, Ayn. Philosophy: Who Needs It? New York: Signet, 1984.Skinner, B.F. Walden Two. 1948. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005.


Facebook or Lonesome No More

Chris claims to be in a relationship with you, do you want to confi rm?—Message on a Facebook login page.

“We were made for a world that has mostly disappeared,” writes Lee Cronk, an evolutionary cultural anthropologist. In that vanished world, “all activities were enmeshed in webs of kinship.” Although Facebook is the product of a modern social environment profoundly different from the social environments in which the human brain evolved, it may nevertheless fulfi ll our ancient needs. We evolved within a web of relatives; the vast majority of our interactions were with only a small number of these relatives (150 at most, according to Robin Dunbar). Our ancestors’ day-to-day lives were so “enmeshed” with these relatives that individuals knew more about everyone else in their social world than many people in modern societies know about anyone else. This difference between past and current social environments is crucial to understanding Facebook from an evolutionary perspective. Many of the unique aspects of the human brain evolved primarily to deal with our ancestors’ social environment—the networks of other people in which our lives were entwined. In our modern, literate, urban, lives, Facebook offers a form of social networking that extends the face-to-face networking for which our brains evolved. Some but not all of the people who interact on Facebook also interact face-to-face. Facebook is thus not a “virtual” social environment where our evolved psychological mechanisms are expressed. It is an integral part of the current “real world” social environment.

“Although behavior cannot be expected to be adaptive in modern Western societies, paradoxically, the least natural environments may sometimes provide the best evidence about human nature” (Symons). Just as the high consump-tion of candy and soda in modern societies provides evidence for an evolved preference for sweet ripe fruit among our ancestors, and the consumption of pornography provides evidence for an evolved male preference for a variety of sexual partners, Facebook provides overwhelming evidence for an evolved desire to form and manage social relationships. Far from being a pale relative of other evolved desires, our preoccupation with our social relationships may be responsible for many of our evolved psychological mechanisms. Coopera-tive social relationships, “while precious, are fragile, and must be continuously encouraged and protected” (Steadman and Palmer). Furthermore, while our evolved appetites for food and sex are at least temporarily satiated, there probably

CRAIG T. PALMERALEX NEWSOMEKELSEY PROUDKATHRYN COE



25craig t. palmer, alex newsome, kelsey proud, kathryn coe

was constant selection to form ever more social relationships in the environments of our ancestors. There was always an advantage to having one more person be friendly toward us. Thus, today our brains fi nd a notifi cation that we have a new “friend” on Facebook “sweet,” regardless of how many hundreds, or thousands, of such “friends” we already have. Every positive social exchange on Facebook activates our reward center; Facebook is for dopamine lovers.

COMPULSION AND EXCESS

Like sugar and pornography, Facebook interacts so strongly with our evolved mechanisms that it can lead to levels of consumption excessive enough to be accounted an addic-tion. Although non-users might snicker at the notion of “Facebook addiction,” periodically receiving a “notifi ca-tion” that someone is trying to communicate with you can clearly stimulate our brains in powerful ways. When these triggers are greater than those received in the face-to-face world, some Facebook users forgo actual life expe-riences and obligations in favor of those assumed in their virtual hub. A University of Kansas professor, Nancy Baym, is doing research on the details of relationships forged on social networking sites and determining their signifi cance, depth, and potential:

Different people have different reasons for com-pulsive Facebook use. . . . But I think it comes down to the fact that there’s a continuous drib-ble—there’s always something new—so every time you go something has changed; somebody has updated their status; someone has sent you a request; someone has posted an item. So it’s a continuous link of hanging out in the halls with your friends between classes or hanging around the water cooler at the offi ce.

For students, this compulsive use can mean a drop in class attendance and even a drop in grades. Students often say, only half-jokingly, that they are “majoring in Facebook” and minoring in whatever course of study they’re actually following. According to one study, “College students who

use Facebook spend less time studying and have lower grade point averages than students who have not signed up for the social networking website,” although other studies have questioned this fi nding (Ohio State).

“FACEBOOK HAS STOLEN MY PRIVACY!”

In our evolutionary past, predicting and controlling who received our communications, or found out about our behavior, was always a crucial part of human existence. Being able to keep an event or conversation private would have been of great value, but such privacy would have often been both diffi cult to fi nd and risky to assume. Selection would have favored individuals adept at the whisper, the covert head nod, and the covering of one’s tracks. In con-trast, people in modern societies are often blind to nearly all of the behaviors that make up the lives of people they pass by and interact with during the course of a day. As a result, privacy, and even anonymity, is often taken for granted. Thus, when a college-aged Facebook user lament-ed, “Facebook has stolen my privacy,” she was mistakenly regarding this loss of privacy as a theft of some fundamental right that humans had always enjoyed.

The problems associated with privacy on Facebook are very real. The Internet holds caches of information, eas-ily pulled up by any search engine or concentrated query. These caches of information can come back to haunt Face-book users many years after their initial posting, and may even effect their relationships and opportunities. Facebook’s new potential to spread information, and the human desire to know things about others, often combines to form a complicated web of actions that can land the picture of a student streaking at a party or engaged in underage drink-ing right into the lap, or rather, screen, of their superior’s superior in the workplace twenty years from now. We’ve yet to see just how severe the effects of poor Facebook pro-fi le management can be, but already, colleges use Facebook profi les in the admissions process; the Greek system uses it in their recruitment processes; and employers use it when hiring new employees.

The good news is that while many of the users of Facebook have never lived in a social world without privacy



and anonymity, they have inherited brains from their ances-tors designed to deal with a social world lacking in privacy. Although there is a learning curve adjusting to the new environment of Facebook, evolution has provided us with brains designed to whisper and arrange secret rendezvous on the Savannah, and these skills are now being adapted to navigate the intricate “privacy settings” through which Facebook users have come to control who can view dif-ferent areas of their profi les.

The reduced privacy accompanying Facebook may also have the potentially positive effect of reducing digi-tal deception on Facebook. Humans have probably always been aware of the potential benefi ts of deception, and the ease with which lying words and images can be used on Facebook can make the temptation to deceive overwhelm-ing. That same ease of transmission also provides a remedy for deceit. The veracity of nearly all information can be quickly checked by messaging “friends” who know the person sending false information, or has a “friend” who does.

IN THE BEGINNING

The origin story of Facebook starts similarly to many other American “creation myths” of the past half-century. The beginnings of Facebook took place in creator Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room. There is some debate about the original inspiration for the project, but from the source itself at Facebook.com, the original devel-opment, fi rst titled “The Facebook,” was started by Zuck-erberg and co-creators Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin in 2004, and had only one million users as of December that year. As of April 2009, Zucker-berg claims that the user count stands at more than 200 million. Facebook is available in more than fi fty different languages, and the site claims that seventy percent of users are outside the United States. Other social networking sites exist—MySpace for instance—but Facebook is unique in uniformly presenting each person’s profi le in a standardized way while at the same time providing a framework for the communication of individuality.

Facebook’s origin as a mode of communication designed for college students is crucial to understanding how it has been used. Given that it originated among a population at the peak age of competition for mates, it is not surprising that much of its use has been directly or indi-rectly related to the initiation, development, and denoue-ment of sexual and romantic relationships (as well as being oriented toward such related aspects of the college world as parties, sports, and Greek life). As the college students who were the original users of Facebook enter the “real world” (or at least graduate school), Facebook will likely refl ect these changes.

RELATIONSHIPS: “IT’S NOT OFFICIAL UNTIL IT’S FACEBOOK OFFICIAL!”

In our evolutionary past, the creation of a mating rela-tionship was almost certainly accomplished through spe-cifi c rituals passed down from common ancestors and thus known to all members of the same social environment. The absence of such universally understood rituals in modern societies—apart from marriage ceremonies—often makes the creation of mating relationship risky and fi lled with uncertainty and mistrust. Not only are total strangers often involved, but there is also a lack of mutually known “steps” to negotiate a gradual path from just met stranger to roman-tic partner. Enter Facebook.

Pat just met Chris through their fi rst interaction on another online community unrelated to dating. Both ini-tially sense there might be some potential romantic interest, but when Pat “friends” Chris an implicit, and thus low risk, communication of such interest transpires. Excited, but a bit wary from past experience, Chris immediately messages other “friends” who might know Pat, and then scans over Pat’s profi le information while waiting for the responses. The “references” come back positive, and Pat’s profi le indi-cates they have similar interests, taste in music, and ambitious stances on life. “This could be fun!” Pat thinks. But then Pat panics: “Did I leave that picture of myself up as my profi le picture?” Pat stews, “Oh man, I better go change it before Chris sees!” Hurriedly picking out a more fl attering picture,



Pat quickly changes it, and then scans the rest of the profi le looking for other things that might be deemed undesirable. Then Pat realizes that Chris has almost certainly looked at this information already, and probably performed a back-ground check through mutual “friends.” Thus, Pat accepts Chris’s friend request and, after a few more Facebook com-munications, they start going places together.

In traditional cultures the successful initiation of a relationship was publicly announced through well-known rituals, ranging from the simple to the complex. In con-trast, Pat and Chris don’t even know what to call their time spent together; and carefully avoid the outdated, and thus ambiguous, word “date.” Once again, Facebook fi lls the void left by the demise of traditional rites of passage by formally announcing such relationships; not only to the public at large, but often to the participants themselves. “A relationship isn’t offi cial until it is Facebook offi cial.” In the relationship between Pat and Chris, the elevation to offi cial status occurred when the following message popped up on Pat’s Facebook login page: “Chris claims to be in a relationship with you, do you want to confi rm?” followed by a place to click “yes” or “no.” Faced with such a com-mitment, Pat quickly texts friends for advice, and then clicks yes, making the relationship “Facebook offi cial.”

Whether on the landscapes of our evolutionary past, or on current college campuses, the public announcement of a relationship activates multiple evolved psychological mechanisms involved in jealousy, mate guarding, and gos-sip. Much of the power of Facebook in these interactions comes from a combination of its communicative speed, its use of both words and visual images, and its overlap with the real world.

After about two years of being together with Chris, Pat received a message from a good friend that said, “You better check Chris’s profi le.” Things had not been going great the last few months, and Pat knew what the message meant. Sure enough, when Pat pulled up Chris’s profi le, there it was as plain as day, the status proclaimed “single.” It wasn’t so much the end of the relationship, nor even the cold effi ciency with which the news had been sent, that hurt the worst. It was knowing that the end of the relation-

ship had been received by the entire world (or at least the vast majority of the world that mattered) before Pat heard it. Of course, even on Facebook relationships seldom come to a complete end that quickly, and the next week saw a number of messages fl y back and forth before Pat fi nally sent the “last straw” message that ended their interaction. Of course it also took several months for the “friends” of both Pat and Chris to choose sides and redesign their own Facebook social worlds accordingly.

THE AGING FACE OF FACEBOOK

Thus far we have described Facebook as a landscape popu-lated only by college students spontaneously created out of primordial dust. Although many college-aged Facebook users may wish they had this world all to themselves, that simply isn’t the case. Lurking in the shadows of the Facebook world, there is something potentially even more frighten-ing than a disapproving future employer. To most college students the mere thought of having a parent invade their world of Facebook is enough to produce anxiety attacks and nightmares. Messages such as “Help! My mother just friended me!” are becoming more numerous as more par-ents use Facebook to communicate with their offspring, unaware of, or indifferent to, the confl ict it presents. Of course, this experience often speeds up the process through which college students learn how to manage Facebook pri-vacy and deploy strategic forms of deceit.

Facebook is graying. Parents who started using Face-book to invade the privacy of their sons and daughters at college are now increasingly using it to expand and manage their own social networks. Stressful high school reunions can be replaced with selective communication with only those former classmates one wishes to remember, and pho-tos of children, and even grandchildren, are springing up all over Facebook like daisies in a spring meadow (often to the further chagrin of college-aged users). Simultane-ously the original users of Facebook are now graduating and starting families at a rate that will dramatically increase over the next few years.



It is impossible to know how Facebook will respond to these changes, and the future of Facebook also surely will be infl uenced by still newer forms of technology that can only be guessed at. Our prediction is that the benefi ts of a nearly exclusively college-aged form of communication relatively unencumbered by parental surveillance will lead either to Facebook splintering into multiple Facebooks, at least one of which will be focused on college students, or to the functional equivalent of multiple independent com-munication systems. Perhaps the larger question is: What will human existence be like in the social environments created by all of the advances in communication technology that are sure to come in the next generation? And that brings us back to the question: “What is the nature of human relationships?”

LONESOME NO MORE?

Since the past is the only guide we have to the future, it may be useful to realize that Facebook is actually not the fi rst attempt to use computers to create new social environ-ments. Indeed, Facebook isn’t even the fi rst attempt to use computers to transform our modern anonymous impersonal environments, where feelings of loneliness and isolation are often the price we pay for our privacy, into social environ-ments more like those of our ancestors when humans were truly interconnected with the other humans in their social world. More than thirty years ago, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a fi ctional novel, entitled “Slapstick or Lonesome No More!” about a character named Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain. Dr. Swain runs for president on the promise to reduce the sterile isolation of modern society by using the comput-ers of the federal government to assign everyone a new middle name and number, thus recreating clans (i.e., kin-ship networks) like those of our ancestors where everyone is obligated to help fellow clan members.

We mention this earlier attempt at computer driven social engineering because it may be useful to consider the obvious fl aw of Dr. Swain’s plan when contemplating the long-term consequences of Facebook. Vonnegut was cor-rect, our ancestors really did identify kin through shared

descent names, and our ancestors really did form altruistic and meaningful social relationships with those kin. Von-negut’s genius is in showing us the absurdity of thinking that the mere commonality of names would reproduce such relationships, when in reality the relationships among kin were fostered by traditions encouraging such things as self-less altruism toward kin. Without these traditions, recreating the shared names could at best create only a faint shadow of the human relationships of the past.

Is the notion that Facebook creates meaningful rela-tionships worthy of being described by the word “friend” any less absurd than the attempt of Dr. Swain to create clans of individuals all obligated to help one another simply by having a computer assign them the middle name of Daf-fodil? Writing in the Guardian, Tom Hodgkinson provides his answer with exceptional clarity:

I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” But hang on. Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relation-ships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub? And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them lit-tle ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Perhaps, however, an evolutionary perspective can help us put a better face on Facebook. Every few years, many of us wrench our social relations apart by relocating our fami-



lies and ourselves. Moving across a continent or half way around the world—out of reach of any frequent face-to-face contact—takes just a few hours on an airplane. Facebook allows us maintain relationships that this increasing mobil-ity would otherwise tear asunder Where a cross-country move once spelled an end to even the strongest friendships, Facebook now increases the odds that people will “stay in touch,” fi guratively, through the keys of their laptop or blackberry. Although modern as modern can be, Facebook can thus restore the lifelong relationships experienced by our most ancient ancestors. A barrier to real social contact, or a lifeline to lifelong relationships? We leave readers to form their own answers, and if they are so inclined, to help forge the social worlds future generations will inhabit.

REFERENCES

Baym, Nancy. “In the Age of Facebook, Researcher Plumbs Shifting Online Relationships.” PhysOrg.com—Science News, Technology, Physics, Nanotechnology, Space Science, Earth Science, Medicine. 2009. 30 March 2009. http://www.physorg.com/news157612692.html.

Cronk, Lee. That Complex Whole: Culture and the Evolution of Human Behavior. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999.

Doshi, Nisa, and Bex Walton. “A Big Birthday, Big Brains and the Link between Facebook and Mormon Great Trek Parties.” 2009. 11 July 2009 <http://www.plos.org/cms/node/443>.

Dunbar, Robin. “Evolution of the Monogamous Brain,” Talk presented at Darwin’s Birthday Party. Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication: How Brains Evolved. 11 Feb. 2009, Center for Ecology and Evolution, University College of London.

Hodgkinson, Tom. 2008. “With Friends Like These . . .” guardian.co.uk. 2009. 7 July 2009 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/tech-nology/2008/jan/14/facebook>.

Ohio State University. “Facebook Use Linked to Lower Grades in College.” ScienceDaily 14. 2009. 15 July 2009 <http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/ 090413180538.htm>.

Steadman, Lyle B., and Craig T. Palmer. The Supernatural and Natural Selection: The Evolution of Religion. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008.

Symons, Donald. The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slapstick or Lonesome No More! New York: Delacorte, 1976.


Ins and Outs

An Evolutionary Approach to Fashion

Fashion, like evolution, involves innovation and conservation, variation and retention. “Innovation and tradition are both integral parts of fashion,” says David Kasuga, creative design director of Premiere Fabrics (personal interview, 2 June 2009). Kasuga has designed for companies such as Oscar de la Renta, Liz Claiborne, and Brooks Brothers.

Fashion as a defi nition implies trends, newness and often innovation. Much like in the technology sector, in fashion, there is a con-stant need for innovation and newness. This need is driven by the consumer’s desire for performance, comfort, durability and added value products. Tradition plays an important part of fashion and in fact, tradition can be a fashion trend in itself, sometimes referred to as “Retro.” Often times there is a fusion between tradition and innovation, traditional clothing designs using innovative fabrications and fi nishing applications.

An evolutionary, biocultural approach to fashion can illuminate the ten-sion Kasuga describes. Far from being a purely social phenomenon (though it is also social), fashion engages our evolved, biological dispositions. A fully explanatory analysis necessarily looks at the interaction effects between culture and biology, not at one or the other in isolation. There has been a call for this kind of integrated approach for some time. Unfortunately, in actual ana-lytic practice methodologies that have produced independently rich fi ndings still tend to favor one axis or the other, rather than examining the interplay between them.

NO “BLANK SLATES”: AN EMBODIED EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH

Humans are intelligent social animals. We have evolved cognitive mechanisms that enable us to choose appropriate group members: “Choosing from among the possibilities for social interaction represents a critical class of adaptive prob-

LESLIE HEYWOOD JUSTIN R. GARCIA



31leslie heywood, justin r. garcia

lems, and natural selection would, therefore, have favored cognitive mechanisms designed to make good decisions about an individual’s social interactions and social interac-tants” (Kurzban and Neuberg, 653). We tend to seek out others who have something to offer, such as prestige, status, or resources. Cues that signal trustworthiness and coopera-tion particularly contribute to our interaction preferences (656). But how are these cues of trustworthiness and coop-eration expressed? Fashion can signal desirable qualities such as prestige, cultural capital, and status, which often accrue to the innovator, those who stand out and originate the trends. On the other hand, the willingness to comply with the latest fashions could signify trustworthiness, conformity, and will-ingness to cooperate. Paradoxically, the very ephemerality of fashion may actually signify consistency and willingness to follow whatever trend, and thereby conformity with group norms. Following fashion can signal both that a persona has the resources to expend on fashion and also that he or she is more trustworthy and cooperative than those who don’t follow, as long as the trend isn’t too radical. The fashionable clearly have the fi nancial ability to purchase new items, are socially attuned to social interests, and are willing to put the time and energy into meeting norms.

Social groups require signs of commitment and often require tattoos and other forms of body modifi cation as signs of this commitment. If a stranger exhibits signs that are familiar, he or she is more likely to be accepted (Kurzban and Neuberg, 657). Tattoos are coming back into fashion, but only for certain social groups. For most social groups in our culture, fashion offers the readiest visual index of social conformity.

Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White distinguish prestige processes in human history from dominance hier-archies, arguing that each has evolved for different rea-sons and under different evolutionary pressures. Prestige is important as a mechanism for the social transmission of knowledge, and facilitates the “info-copying” (direct learn-ing from others instead of having to learn everything on one’s own, a much slower process) of prestigious models by others. Human evolution depended on the development of adaptive mechanisms for social learning that occurred when “natural selection favored social learners who could

evaluate potential models and copy the most successful among them . . . once common, these dispositions created, at the group, distributions of deference that new entrants may adaptively exploit to decide who to begin copying. This generated a preference for models who seem gener-ally ‘popular’ ” (165). The followers of fashion are doing much more than acceding to superfi cial sartorial trends. They are participating in a time-honored human tradition that enabled our species to survive and fl ourish, seeking out models to copy in order to successfully negotiate social context and group membership.

Fashion, then, no matter how contemporary and trendy, provides a medium for group dynamics—ancient, evolved forms of human behavior. As Chai, Earl, and Potts put it, “people consume to communicate, and there is much more to communicate by being up with fashions than merely one’s income or wealth. If the way that we adapt to new fashions signals something about our compe-tences and how we see the world, it thereby helps social coordination” (192).

So much for the general theory. And a particular instance? Something big, splashy, and important that will test these ideas and illustrate them? Social dynamics, potently mixed with gender, and sexuality, were on full display in the spring 2009 season of American Idol.

TRADITION AND NOVELTY, SPRING 2009: THE CASE OF AMERICAN IDOL

American Idol Season 8 was widely seen as “reinvigorating” the Idol franchise, which was getting repetitive and losing viewers and ratings—losing its share of cultural attention, in other words. As Boyd explains, “in a system designed to secure attention, habituation (the loss of attention through the persistence or repetition of a stimulus) encourages inno-vation. Since repeating exactly the same thing over and over guarantees it will lose its impact, art faces a consistent pressure for novelty” (122). American Idol Season 8 responded to that pressure, and it did so through the presence of a single contestant, the glam-rock, musically versatile Elvis/Bowie look-alike named Adam Lambert. Adam, a twenty-seven-year-old Jewish Californian, had a musical theater



background, and had performed in productions from the age of 10. In innumerable Internet postings related to the show, he was pronounced “too theatrical” even as it was acknowledged how well he could sing. Charismatic and mesmerizing, Adam drew attention to himself in a way no other contestant even approximated: in spring 2009, Adam Lambert was fashion.

Hailed by the media as the leading contender for the American Idol title almost from the beginning of the season, one of the biggest questions surrounding the media buzz was whether Adam was gay, or why, since everyone assumed he was (bolstered in part by Internet photos that showed him performing in full drag and kissing men), he wasn’t saying. This fueled speculation about whether an openly gay contestant could win the title of “American Idol,” and whether the show’s producers wouldn’t let him say. When Adam fi nished as the runner-up to Kris Allen, a twenty-three-year-old newlywed Christian missionary from Arkansas, whose basic singer-songwriter persona was said by many to be handsome but boring and indistinguish-

able from many others, there was an outcry about rigged voting, homophobia, and America “not being ready” for a gay Idol.

Was Lambert’s defeat the result of his “costly signal-ing,” of his willingness, as Mark Harris put it in an Enter-tainment Weekly cover story, to sing “ ‘I’m gonna give you every inch of my love’ while wearing skintight pants and green-glitter guyliner”? (27). Harris thought so, although he’s probably using a different defi nition of “costly” than the evolutionary defi nition—a high fi tness level demon-strated by the availability of free time and resources that you can put into attracting mates because you’ve got the basics covered. “Maybe it’s still too costly to say who you are,” Harris wrote. “It’s certainly costly not to. Does he feel he can’t? Does the show feel he shouldn’t?” (27). If one combines the evolutionary defi nition of “costly” with the sense of the term Harris uses here—“cost” in the sense of loss, taking something away—we arrive at a biocultural standpoint or lens through which to interpret the “Idol” goings-on of spring 2009.

Recall that from an evolutionary perspective, models for social learning are given high importance and status, precipitating negative reactions “when those with discrep-ant norms have the potential to be models for subsequent social learners within the group” (Kurzban and Neuberg,

Figure 1. Adam Lambert.Used with permission from Michael Becker/Fox.

Figure 2. Kris Allen.Used with permission from Michael Becker/Fox.



663). Given its visibility and cultural capital, a program such as American Idol, with its millions of viewers (40 million for the fi nale), might be perceived as a potential venue for role models. Adam’s loss in the fi nal may have been at least partially an effect of residual ingroup–outgroup mechanisms in the statistical aggregate of the population that voted for the winner, said to have encompassed 100 million votes.

Those voting no on Adam might have had reserva-tions about his value as a role model for young people. Fur-thermore, Henrich and Gil-White discuss the requirement for prestigious individuals to humble themselves in relation to their followers, and perhaps Adam’s “theatricality” was seen as a refusal to do so. “Some high-status humans,” they write, “display subdominant ethology (deep bows, bringing one’s hands to the center of the body, lowering the head, and generally appearing bashful). . . . Self-deprecation is also common in prestige: those receiving applause and awards will publicly ‘doubt’ their worthiness and attribute the ges-ture more to client generosity than personal prowess” (179). Although Adam was consistently seen to be generous and self-deprecating in interviews, this was often read as a sign of his particular show business professionalism (and therefore not genuine); his performances were regarded as anything but self-deprecating. As Harris put it, “Idol stars are supposed to be blank slates, ‘relatable’ folk with extraordinary talent whom we elect in an orderly fashion and elevate to success. Meet Adam Lambert. Adam has messed that all up. Adam is nobody’s idea of a blank slate. Adam is a surprise.”

Adam is a surprise that can be read in evolution-ary terms in the context of an artistic public performance that involved fashion as a central part of the performance “package,” whereas the winner, Kris Allen, was explicitly presented as anti-fashion and “blank” and “natural” rather than “theatrical.” That Adam was already fully formed as a performer went against the Idol expectation of “making” contestants into one.

Consider the contrast between two interviews with the 2009 Idol fi nalists, appearing on Live With Regis and Kelly—one of the top-rated syndicated daytime talk shows. Allen arrived to his interview dressed in nondescript jeans, white Chucks, and a white T-shirt with an open, short-sleeved brown shirt over it, whose only embellishment was

a minimal form of an epaulet on each shoulder. The fi rst question Regis asked him was whether he was surprised when he won. Clearly constructing him as “the natural,” the narrative that emerged from the questioning emphasized that Kris was a self-taught musician who learned to play guitar in his backyard, and that his Idol quest was largely unplanned, “a road trip, we were just going to have fun . . . I never actually thought about winning.” “You’re so down to earth,” Kelly gushed, a comment made repeatedly throughout the season about Kris (“modest twenty-three-year-old Arkansas nature” another frequent descriptor). The interview then turned to his philanthropy and missionary work in Burma, Mozam-bique, South Africa, Spain, and Thailand.

By contrast, Adam arrived to his interview dressed in polished gray boots, tight jeans, a white shirt, skinny black tie, and black jacket. Regis’s fi rst comment introduced Adam as “one of the most glamorous Idols ever,” and the fi rst thing he said after he had walked on the stage was “look at Adam Lambert!” and, when the applause died down, “oh, boy, this is show business you know” (gesturing toward Adam). The interview then proceeded to chronicle Adam’s experience in musical theater from the age of ten, and Adam had to forcefully turn the conversation away from the theater con-versations to emphasize that he had also had a rock band. When the conversation turned to the “phenom” (Regis’s word) that Adam had become, Kelly said “I don’t think anyone has ever achieved sort of the level of stardom on that American Idol stage that you have . . . you have tapped into something that people were hungry for, looking for.”

Adam then articulated the ritual of self-deprecation that Henrich and Gil-White say is obligatory for those in status positions: “I think if you go into it with the perspec-tive that ‘this is a platform, an opportunity . . . ’ if you go in and just focus on performing your best and competing with yourself and not with the other competitors it can really be a great experience.” Kelly then asked Adam what his biggest style infl uence is (note there was no parallel question for Kris), and he mentioned Alexander McQueen and his love of nice clothes and nice things, to which Regis said “but this is all part of the package, Adam, right? The way you dress, the jewelry?” Adam continued Regis’s thought: “the nails, the eyeliner. . . .” Kelly mentioned that



Adam’s fans are called “Glamberts,” and then they trotted out a Regis & Kelly “style icon”—an older man with Adam hair, nails, and makeup, who came out fl ouncing and waving his nails, a parody of a drag queen. Jokingly invoking what Kurzban and Neuberg would refer to as the exclusionary mechanisms often employed for ingroup dynamics, especially in the face of someone in a position of infl uence who evokes different norms, Kelly said “we really should have warned the viewers at home to put your children out of the room.” Adam laughed, seeming sincerely good-natured about it.

If Adam made America want to “put their children out of the room,” this surely wasn’t evident in the amount of interest in him. However, Kelly’s comment points to the ways Adam does diverge from aggregate ingroup norms, even as people, through their embrace of him, also seem to be “hungry” for divergence themselves. Yet it is also clear in the swirl of cultural narratives surrounding the show that someone who diverges as Adam does is seen as constructed, artifi cial, “unnatural,” whereas the normative Kris is seen as “natural,” unconstructed, and “down to earth.”

A representative sampling of posts regarding the Idol fi nale from the Rolling Stone website showed a distinct pre-occupation with the idea that Kris was “natural,” Adam “fake.” Here are a few, which most clearly articulate what is repeated in many others:

kris allen defi nitely deserved to win. His per-sonality on stage was real, not to mention emo-tional. Adams was all fake, fake, fake, scream, fake. He belongs on broadway. Kris allen won’t end up like other superstars. Adam would have ended up having to go to rehab or something. Adam is no good. KRIS ALLEN IS!

Isn’t this a bit like the Presidential results? The man who had the most inherent integrity, grace and dignity as well as tremendous com-petence, skill and gifts won. Not the loudest or showiest. Both are very talented, fortunate artists. we were lucky to have such performances by such special people. Kris, however did not have to force his talent theatrically. It just is!!!!!

Count me in as one who has grown TIRED of Lambert. Too much self-indulgent drama. If he wins, it’ll be because of the over-hyped popularity, and I predict he won’t have a long music career. He’ll end up back on Broad-way, where he belongs. I’ll take substance over style any day.

As much as some of the blogs refl ected this preference for tradition, aka “substance,” there were an equal or larger number of posts that refl ected the opposite. On the same blog as the entries above, for instance, a representative sam-pling includes:

As soon as I heard Adam for the fi rst time, I think we all knew he would be in the fi nals. He is so vastly superior to any of the other performers this season that it soon became, for me, about what Adam was gonna do this week. Oh and for those who say how amazing Kris is, my god, I have heard millions just like him! At the end of the day he is just a boy with a guitar. I’ve hung around a lot of musicians and seen many guys who can sing better than Kris and are more creative too. So okay if Adam is not your cup of coffee but dammit, Kris is not anything special. lol Sweet kid though.

No worries Adam Fans . . . just wait and see who emerges as a Super Star in the years ahead. Yes Adam will surpass Kris in the long run . . . why? Because he is a Better Performer, Singer and Creative Artist. . . . The ingredients needed to be a Super Star and Adam has it all by far . . .”

Kris doesn’t have anything unique. There’s tons of singers out there who sound just like him. Why do people want to hear the same crap all the time? Adam deserved to win. Yes, he likes to “scream,” but at least it sounds good, and that doesn’t mean that he can’t sing. His singing is beautiful. The louder notes make the songs more exciting. Kris is boring and def-



initely not as talented as Adam. Kris is only “alright.” There’s nothing incredible about him or his vocals.

The blog participants here were lining up on the side of conserved older forms and novel variations, between tradition and innovation. Evolution as a process revolves around both tradition and innovation, sustaining and con-serving successful variations.

Boyd explains this dynamic through his explication of the concept “attention”: “art’s effects on human minds depends on its power to compel attention” (392). This was a power Adam exhibited from the beginning, compelling an attention so sustained it rejuvenated the entire Ameri-can Idol franchise. Attention is crucial because “humans have a uniquely intense motivation and capacity to share attention—and this proclivity has recently been proposed as the key factor in the singular development of human intelligence and culture” (394). Those who attract atten-tion facilitate change, and change is basic to the evolution-ary process. What once is “style,” threatening, different, can become what is “substance,” what actually is, if it is selected for. As Boyd writes,

we all see the status that attention confers, [and we all have] an innate capacity for imitation. One of our main cues for social learning is “imi-tate the successful.” We also have a strong dispo-sition to conformism, which enables us to learn from what others have discovered and to operate within a cohesive group: our other heuristic is “imitate the most common.” A new individual initiative therefore can become fi rst a model, then a fashion, then a tradition, and eventually even a jealously enforced norm. (112)

Humans are evolutionarily marked as innovators and conformists, and this confl ict helps explain season 8 of American Idol and all the interest it precipitated. Our social learning was being stimulated on the one hand by the cue of “imitate the successful,” as Adam’s success and singing prowess were noted from the beginning of the season. On

the other hand, the code of “imitate the most common” was activated by the comfort of Kris’s familiar-feeling, “natu-ral” presence as well. Adam was innovative in ways that were clearly attractive, but also threatening. Fashion is at once an opportunity for self-expression and an expression of conformity, and the way it is interpreted has more to do with the norms it either challenges or reinforces. An evolutionary approach to fashion shows how its functions and our responses to it are the product of both biology and culture, the expression of evolved mechanisms for group behavior, for artistic production, and basic social processes that allow us either to identify with others or to display our individuality.

Note: a longer version of this article will appear in L.L. Heywood and J.R. Garcia, “Mirrors, InGroups, and Cogni-tive Play: An Evolutionary Take on Fashion,” in Feminism, Fashion, and Flair: Confronting Hegemony With Style, edited by Shira Tarrant and Marjorie Jolles (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming).

REFERENCES

Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009.

Chai, A., P. Earl, and J. Potts. “Fashion, Growth, and Welfare: An Evolutionary Approach.” The Evolution of Consumption. Ed. M. Bianchi. Bingley, U.K.: Emerald, 2007. 187–207.

Harris, M. “Adam Lambert: Shaking Up ‘Idol.’ ” Entertainment Weekly 1047, 15 May 2009, 25–27.

Henrich, J., and F. Gil-White. “The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefi ts of Cultural Transmission.” Evolution and Human Behavior 22 (2001): 165–96.

Kurzban, R. and S. Neuberg. “Managing Ingroup and Outgroup Relationships.” The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Ed. David Buss. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005: 653–75.


1859

Darwin, Mill, and Drake

WHAT’S IN A YEAR?

There is no magic signifi cance in a year, but big events have major con-sequences, and big events that occur contemporaneously have consequences likely to intertwine over the course of time. The year 1776 produced both the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Bourgeois democracy and capitalism—how could a historian resist speculative refl ection? Louis Masur identifi es 1831 as a tipping point in the run-up to the American Civil War (1831: Year of Eclipse). Bernard DeVoto identifi es 1846 as key point in the settling of the West Coast and Southwest (The Year of Decision, 1846). I’m going to play this game, too. My year is 1859.

1859 1.0

At least three big things happened in 1859. Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. John Stuart Mill published On Liberty. And Edwin Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania. Events of this magnitude cannot help but pro-duce interactions.

The Origin evokes the idea that life is hard and competitive—nature red in tooth and claw, survival of the fi ttest (the phrases are from Tennyson and Spencer, but Darwin takes the credit, and the blame). But The Origin isn’t just about competition. Darwin also illuminates the unity and connectedness of life through deep history and the economy of nature—what we now call “ecol-ogy.” Mill warns against the “nanny state” and the “tyranny of the majority.” Perhaps the best-known sentence from On Liberty is this: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” However, there is more to On Liberty than individualism. Mill also articulates the “harm principle”—do what you like so long as you do no harm. When Drake discovered oil at a depth of only sixty-nine feet near Titusville, Pennsylvania, he launched the American petroleum industry.

KEVIN SCOTTBALDWIN



37kevin scott baldwin

A seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap energy intertwined with competition and individualism to domi-nate the imagination of the previous century. As we enter the twenty-fi rst century, we face the end of the age of oil and the strong probability that global warming will affect all life on Earth. If we can wean ourselves from the oil-fueled conceit that we are the only important species on the planet, and the only one exempt from natural laws, Darwin’s ecological insights can help us broaden the harm principle to include other species. If we choose the right set of metaphors to guide our lives, our descendants might have a chance to see the bicentennial and even tricenten-nial of 1859.

Drake’s monster is a modern Prometheus-on-steroids. Consider the incredible energy density of oil. A single barrel of oil (forty-two gallons) contains the energy-equivalent of about 25,000 hours of human labor. If this is too abstract, consider that a gallon of gasoline contains the energy equivalent of two hundred to fi ve hundred hours of human labor. Ponder this the next time you fi ll your gas tank and contemplate how high gas prices could go! Moreover, oil doesn’t just provide a portable, concentrated form of energy. It provides the chemical feedstock for many items that we consider essential. Look around your house or offi ce and visually subtract items that are made of plastic or vinyl. You may suddenly imagine yourself sitting on the fl oor naked in an empty room.

Viewed from the perspective of fi n de siècle America, the lessons of 1859 are that life is a struggle, energy is cheap and abundant, and the pursuit of individuality and freedom are paramount. Every region will have its special instances exemplifying this vision. I live in farm country in northern Illinois. In my mind, nothing encapsulates the American Vision so much as the International CXT. Billed as “The World’s Largest Production Pick-up Truck,” the CXT is basically a four-door semitractor cab with a pickup bed stuck on the back. It debuted in 2003 (the same year the United States invaded Iraq), weighs more than seven tons, has a 310 hp turbo diesel that develops 950 ft.lbs. of torque, gets seven to ten miles per gallon and was marketed as “a monster truck unmatched in capability, size, and identity.

Now the CXT is used for a huge billboard giving the owner the biggest statement on the road (Lake City Commercial Trucks).”

We can certainly do without large, ostentatious vehi-cles, but we cannot do without food. The artifi cial fertilizers that have enabled huge increases in agricultural productivity are made with fossil fuels. Modern tractors require large inputs of diesel fuel. Currently, in North America, every calorie of food produced requires about ten calories of fos-sil fuel input.

Fossil fuels are essentially concentrated, stored sunlight that was deposited during the Carboniferous Period over millions of years. In the past 150 years, we have burned through about half of it. In the next thirty years, we shall probably consume the other half. The discovery and har-nessing of fossil fuels have been like winning the greatest lottery in the history of the world. Misinterpreting our good luck as evidence of our near divinity, we have been like a spendthrift heir liquidating a trust fund while crediting him-self with the fruits of his “hard work” and “cleverness.”

Oil is getting harder to fi nd. Drake found it at sixty-nine feet. Today the average well depth is about one mile, and the deepest are 7.5 miles. It is also getting harder to extract. Energy Returned on Energy Invested dropped from one hundred to one in 1930 to thirty to one by 1970, and may be as low as eleven in the United States today. Duncan (6) posits that with the end of oil human population will rapidly drop to about two billion by the year 2050.

As a civilization and a species, we are being wedged between two events of our own making: the end of oil and global climate change. Even if the newly thawed Arctic were found to contain untold volumes of oil, using it to continue on the path we are on would force atmospheric CO

2 further into the planetary danger zone while only

managing to forestall the end of oil just a bit longer.

1859 2.0: DARWIN RECONSIDERED

Darwin’s sketch of the diversifi cation of species signifi es that all living organisms are related to one another. Just at the moment Darwin showed us how we fi t into the scheme



of things, Drake gave us the energy and material wealth to deny it. Mill supplied the ideological justifi cation for using that energy. But we can also use Mill in charting a different path into the future. “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” (14). “Others” need not be limited to human beings. Thomas Hardy grasped this implication of Darwin’s vision. In a letter of 1910, he remarks, “Few people seem to perceive that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of species is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of rightness, the application of what has been called ‘the Golden Rule’ from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole of the animal kingdom” (“Public Voice” 311). Hardy also recognized the extent to which Darwin’s vision displaced humans from the center of the universe:

Let me enjoy the earth no less Because the all-enacting Might That fashioned forth its loveliness Had other aims than my delight.

Using Hardy’s interpretation of Darwin, we can defi ne our responsibilities to include other species and even ecosystems. We grant rights to corporations. Why not grant them to other living creatures and the emergent systems on which we truly depend?

Whitman remarks, “We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return.” As we transition to the world after oil, humans will once again be subjected to the reali-ties of Malthus and Darwin. The next fi fty years are likely to be as tumultuous as any in history. Success will require unprecedented cooperation with members of our own spe-cies as we reach out to reestablish connections and coopera-tion with the natural world. The 150th anniversary of 1859 offers much to think about.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank Rob Hale and the 19th Century Studies Program at Monmouth College for soliciting the talk that

was the genesis of this paper, which began life as a piece on Darwin and Drake. Simon Cordery encouraged me to include Mill’s timely contribution and Hannah Schell clari-fi ed some of Mill’s philosophy for me.

REFERENCES

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray, 1859.

DeVoto, Bernard. The Year of Decision, 1846. New York: Little, Brown, 1942.

Duncan, Richard C. “The Olduvai Theory: Energy, Population, and Industrial Civilization.” The Social Contract. Winter (2005–2006).

Hardy, Thomas. “Let me enjoy.” Cornhill and Putna’s Magazines. April, 1909.

Hardy, Thomas. Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose. Ed., Michael Millgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

CXT Garage, 2009. Lake City Commercial Trucks International. 22 June 2009 <http://mycxt.com/internationalcxt.html>.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays. Ed. John Gray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Masur, Louis, P. 1831: Year of Eclipse. New York: Hill and Wang. 2002.

Spencer, Herbert. Principles of Biology. New York: D. Appleton, 1864–67.

Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam A.H.H., Canto 56.Whitman, Walt. “We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d.” Leaves of

Grass. Self-published, 1867.


39todd o. williams

Challenging Evolutionary Metaphors of Survival

Morris’s News from Nowhere

When in 1890, William Morris published x News from Nowhere, his vision of a socialist utopia, neither he nor anyone else could have imagined the eco-nomic and technological complexity of today’s world or the severity of the ecological challenges we face. He recognized the exploitative character of the global industrial economy but never imagined the scale of exploitation that could be achieved by more modern forms of transportation and communica-tion. He was repelled by industrial pollution on an aesthetic level, but did not foresee global climate change and its potentially apocalyptic consequences. He was unenthusiastic about the technological advances that in his day drove the industrial system, with all of its destructive social and ecological side effects, but he could not envision the information technology that might give us our best chance for sustainable energy in the twenty-fi rst century. Despite these predictive limitations in Morris’s vision, News from Nowhere is still well worth our attention. It offers permanent, universal insights into the adaptive value of both imagination and cooperation.

Evolutionists in both the human sciences and the humanities have made a case for the adaptive function of the human imagination. Some argue that we use the imagination to simulate experiences and assess alternative scenarios so as to make adaptively better decisions (Pinker; Scalise Sugiyama; Tooby and Cosmides; Wilson). Now, emotions play a major role in making decisions (Damasio), and a compelling narrative usually engages our emotional absorption in the experi-ences of a protagonist. Morris’s protagonist, William Guest, awakens in England in the year 2102. In following his fi rst-person narrative, we share his sense of contrast between that future world and the industrialized capitalist world he has left behind. We share his exuberant delight in the natural beauty he sees and the happiness of the people he meets. We enter imaginatively into his disgust and outrage at the poverty, class exploitation, pollution, and ugliness of his actual world, and we sense the similarity between the evils in his world and ours. When Guest’s vision ends—it was, after all, only a vision—we feel with him a deep sadness at the injustice and stupidity of the actual world, and we share his hope for a better future that we could ourselves help create. Because it encourages us to envision our own ideal society and not to settle for the world as it is, Morris’s narrative is a testament to the value of human imagination.

TODD O. WILLIAMS



George Lakoff argues for the need to revise meta-phors of evolution based on self-interest and competition (201–05). Such metaphors dominated the economic and social theories of the nineteenth century and still serve to support aggression in foreign policy and the inequalities of a free-market economy. Because Morris envisions human survival in terms of cooperation and empathy rather than competition and self-interest, News from Nowhere can help us revise the metaphors that have dominated our thinking about evolution.

In the society of the future, Guest is told, “it is a point of honour with us not to be self-centered” (92). The citizens of Morris’ utopia mock the common phrases of a misappropriated Darwinism. In their idiom, a “struggle for life” is translated as “the struggle for slave’s rations on one side, and for a bouncing share of the slave-holders’ privilege on the other” (97). As to ”human nature,” they ask whether we mean, “the human nature of paupers, of slaves, of slave-holders,” or “the human nature of wealthy freemen?” (118). From the perspective adopted in this new world, understanding human nature in terms of competi-tion and dominance seems absurd. Individualism has been replaced by a habit of cooperation, “a habit of acting on the whole for the best” (112). This is the “new spirit of the time” (158). Humanity fi nds joy in life, communion with others, and communion with nature. The past “competitive spur to exertion” (159) has been replaced by a sense of shared purpose in working for the betterment of society as a whole. There are still reactionaries in this new world. Guest meets with an old man who insists that those from Guest’s past society “are brisker and more alive,” because they “have not wholly got rid of competition” (174). But Guest cor-rects him. “You wouldn’t talk so if you had any idea of our life. . . . Most people are thoroughly unhappy; here, to me at least, most people seem thoroughly happy” (176).

“What is truly unique about human evolution,” as E. O. Wilson observes, is that “a large part of the envi-ronment” shaping that evolution “has been cultural” (166). Human beings have the unique capacity to evolve culturally, as well as biologically. Biological evolution works through random variation and selective retention. Cultural evolution, in contrast, comes under the infl uence of human preferences,

values, and intentions. The society Morris envisions enjoys clean water, safe and plentiful food, and abundant forests. The citizens of this future England thrive physically and mentally. Human adaptation, Morris suggests, is not just about mem-bers of a species competing with each other. It is about a whole species adapting to an environment, and then, with increasing powers of goal-oriented endeavor, actually creat-ing that environment. An individual’s competitive advantage over other humans would be of little use on a planet with an unlivable climate or with no source of food.

Unlike most utopian narratives of the fi n de siè-cle, News from Nowhere envisions a pastoral utopia, not a mechanical or technological utopia. Certainly, the world that Morris envisions will differ from what a sustainable twenty-fi rst-century society will look like, but the inhabit-ants of Nowhere have the right attitude toward nature. To describe this new attitude, Morris uses the metaphor of England as a “garden” (105). The Thames runs clean and clear with thick forests around its banks. Houses are built modestly with plenty of surrounding space. Each home has its own garden. Plants, fi sh, and birds fl ourish in diverse abundance. Humans have a true sense of stewardship, so that nature is “bettered and not worsened by contact with mankind” (159). Morris’s futuristic compatriots share a “passionate love of the Earth” (225).

In the twenty-fi rst century, we do now fi nally rec-ognize the need to envision a new and more sustainable future. We understand that our survival as a species depends on this vision. News from Nowhere can help us consider new paradigms and adopt new metaphors. It can help us envision what a sustainable future might look like. By envi-sioning what is ideal, we can begin to work toward what is possible. If Morris could not have imagined the com-plexity of the issues we now face, he nonetheless allows us to imagine a society not obsessed with possessions and wealth—a society in which human relations are not based on economic exchange and in which we have achieved a sustainable relationship with nature. If we allow ourselves to be seduced by Morris’s fantasy, we can the more easily imagine ourselves citizens in a world with a common sense of purpose, ready to do what must be done if the human race is to have any future at all.


41todd o. williams

REFERENCES

Damasio, Antonio R. Descarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam’s, 1994.

Lakoff, George. The Political Mind. New York: Viking, 2008.Morris, William. News from Nowhere and Other Writings. Ed. Clive

Wilmer. New York: Penguin, 2004.Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton,

1997.

Scalise Sugiyama, Michelle. “Reverse-Engineering Narrative: Evi-dence of Special Design.” The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2005. 177–96.

Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts.” SubStance 30 (2001): 6–27.

Wilson, E. O. Consilience. New York: Knopf, 1999.


The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture (first 3rd of vol 1, 2010)

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