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IN GODS IMAGE?
The Natural History of Intelligence and Ethics
Gerhard Meisenberg
Contents
Introduction
vii
17
35
63
81
Origins
103
125
157
173
10
199
11
233
12
255
13
Ideologology
281
14
299
15
325
Notes
347
References
367
Introduction
As an evolutionary biologist, I have learned over the years
that most people do not want to see themselves as lumbering
robots programmed to ensure the survival of their genes. I
dont think they will want to see themselves as digital computers either.
(John Maynard Smith)1
In this book I argue that you and I are lumbering robots and digital
(or possibly analog) computers, and poorly constructed ones to
boot. This is how scientists see human beings: the imperfect products
of 3 billion years of evolution, given their present-day form not by
the divine engineer but by the mindless, wasteful and cruel process of
natural selection. This process programmed feelings and desires into
our brains, and it made us loath to see ourselves as soulless robots
and computers. To the human mind, a soulless existence is tantamount to death.
Yet this is not a book about the soul. It is about the robots
reexes and the computers programs, describing the human condition the way an anthropologist from Mars would explain it to his
people. It is above all about the shortcomings of these reexes and
programs, and the deviance and stupidity they impose on our existence. Far from being an end product and far from being perfect, we
are a transitional entity in the history of life, evolved from apes and
amoebas and still evolving today.
My rst claim is that the evolutionary process has left us with a
system of intelligent reasoning that is little more than a bundle of
cognitive reexes. There is a set of reexes for thinking about the
inanimate world and a different set of reexes for thinking about
people. This cognitive toolkit produces predictable errors of reasoning and judgment, especially when we try to understand ourselves
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In Gods Image?
and other people. This is because our social instincts did not evolve
for the benet of objective knowledge, but to give us an edge in the
perennial struggle for sex and money, food and mates. It is the
reason why we have so much trouble thinking of people as robots or
computers.
Thinking about people depends on cognitive reexes, and we use
intelligent reasoning only when we really have to. Most of the time
we are better off that way because our reasoning ability is so limited
that any pocket calculator outsmarts us in terms of abstract information-processing ability. The only complex skills we are good at are
those that our ancestors needed for survival and that have therefore
been selected in the evolutionary game: the ability to walk without
falling over, language, face recognition, and the like. The rst four
chapters are concerned with our cognitive reexes and the limitations
of our reasoning system in other words, our stupidity.
My second claim is that our moral intuitions about right and
wrong are merely a bundle of instinctive responses to standard social
situations that we apply knee-jerkingly. They include feelings of
guilt, shame and compassion, inhibitory controls on the four Fs
(feeding, eeing, ghting and reproduction), in-group solidarity,
conformity and obedience, and intuitions about deservingness and
entitlements. These emotions and thinking routines evolved not to
guarantee human welfare, but to promote the survival of the genes
that have programmed them into our brains.
Chapters 5 to 10 explore the natural history of social behavior and
moral intuitions. We see that there is a close correspondence between
the social behavior of group-living primates, the customs of simple
human societies, and the political values that people endorse today.
Whether we are dealing with social interactions in a chimpanzee
colony, religious injunctions, the programs of social reformers or the
moral systems concocted by our philosophers, the imprint of Mother
Nature is stark, unmistakable and often pernicious.
But there is more to human existence than the hard-wiring
wrought by Mother Nature. The kind of society in which we grow up
shapes our experiences, and our experiences shape the ways we think
and act. The ways we think and act make us change our societies,
and this in turn changes our experiences and the ways we think and
act. This muddle of feedback loops produces cultural evolution. In
other words: history.
And this brings us to my third and most obnoxious claim: that
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Introduction
biological and cultural evolution interact in predictable ways. To
begin with, our evolved human nature constrains both the types of
society we can construct and our behavioral, emotional and cognitive responses to the cultural conditions we have created. These
cultural conditions even change the course of our biological evolution, not immediately but on a timescale of centuries to millennia.
This requires an explanation. The gene pool doesnt change much
over the millennia as long as the species lives under the natural
conditions to which it has been adapted by mutation and selection
over thousands of generations. But our conditions of life are far
from natural. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors
had to do without doctors and hospitals, teachers and jailers,
supermarkets and condoms. Every one of these innovations is
changing the gene pool by way of natural or not-so-natural genetic
selection. In short, abilities and character traits that were once
adaptive in the evolutionary game no longer are so today, while
others are becoming important only now.
Chapters 11 to 15 describe the geneculture coevolution that has
taken place in past societies and that is continuing now in the
(post)modern world. Large-scale historical patterns can be explained
that way, for example the rise of Christian Europe over the past
millennium, and the decline of the Muslim Middle East.
And what is the conclusion? In brief, the conclusion is that all or
nearly all modern societies will self-destruct during the third millennium. They will end on the rubbish heap of history, together with
the ancient Greek, Roman and Arab civilizations. This outcome is a
consequence of the value systems that humans adopt in response to
civilized conditions of life. These responses are predictable and
universal. They are predictable from our cognitive biases and decits, and from the structure of our moral instincts. And they are
universal because all human races are similar in their genetic
heritage.
Not everyone will agree with all my premises and conclusions, but
I am not offering a new dogma. Science can only offer a description
of the human condition that seems to be the closest approximation
to the real thing, given the knowledge available at this point in time.
When visiting the archipelago of knowledge, we must never forget
that we are sailing on the ocean of ignorance.
At some points I will give advice to certain kinds of people, such as
politicians, rapists and feminist genetic engineers. You will have to
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In Gods Image?
judge the merits of these proposals for yourself. However, this is a
book about how people are and what they do, not how they ought to
be or what they ought to do. People have endless difculty with this
distinction. This is because the human brain is not made for the
generation of objective knowledge. It is designed to use information
as a guide for action but thats part of my story already.
1
The Doors of Perception
Psychology could turn out to be like physics its regularities explainable by a few deep, elegant, inexorable laws
or psychology could turn out to be utterly lacking in laws in
which case the only way to study or expound psychology
would be the novelists way.
(Noam Chomsky)
I think only a humanities professor at MIT could be so
oblivious of the third interesting possibility: psychology
could turn out to be like engineering.1
(Marvin Minsky)
When Minsky opined that psychology is like engineering, he may
have had classical engineering in mind: constructing a thinking
machine, complete with desires, feelings, and self-reection. But to
understand the natural variety of thought, feelings and all the rest,
we depend on reverse engineering: examining the human mind the
way we would examine a crash-landed UFO, trying to gure out
what it was made for and how its components work together to fulll
the UFOs mission.
The proper starting point for this endeavor is the brain, for it is
the brain that perceives the world, imparts meaning to it and
produces action. This chapter looks at the rst of these processes: the
perception of the world and the construction of what we call
reality.
In Gods Image?
Places in the brain
Man ought to know that from the brain and the brain only arise
our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests as well as our sorrows,
pains, griefs, and tears. (Hippocrates, The Sacred Disease)
Would you still exist if your brain died and was replaced by a
transplant? Or would you rather see your body dead, with your brain
living on in someone elses body? The idea is simple: mental activity
is brain activity. If we could generate a complete description of a
brains activity at any one point in time, we would have a complete
description of the persons mental activity.
When presented on a platter, a human brain looks anything but
intellectual: 3 pounds of softish, greasy tissue, the size of the liver
and three times the size of the heart, unhealthy to eat because of its
high cholesterol content. Its convoluted surface is formed by a sheet
of gray matter 3 to 4 millimeters deep. This is the cerebral cortex, our
thinking cap. Under the cortex is white matter, with gray structures
of all shapes and sizes embedded in it. The gray matter consists of
cell bodies, and the white matter consists of their processes, the nerve
bers or axons.
Even the unmicroscoped eye can see dozens of gray patches in the
depths of the brain, and the microscopic structure is outright confusing. Even the cerebral cortex is actually a patchwork of many
little areas, each having its own connections with other parts of the
brain. This complexity does not bode well for theories that view the
brain as an all-round information processor. It looks more like a
design where each part is assigned its own task.
Neurons are the building blocks of the brain, much as silicon chips
are the building blocks of a computer. There are 100 billion of them
in the brain, more than ten times the number of people on Earth.
The average neuron forms more than 1,000 synapses tiny cellcell
contacts with other neurons; 100 trillion synapses thats a lot of
computing power!
The cerebral hemispheres present a labyrinth of folds and ssures
that vary from person to person (Figure 1.1). Brains are as different
as faces. But the larger ssures are present in everyone, and they
divide the brain into four lobes: frontal, parietal, temporal and
occipital. The frontal lobe organizes the motor output, and the
others analyze sensory input.
2
The back ends of the frontal lobes form the motor cortex, and
right behind the motor cortex, in the parietal lobes, is the cortex for
bodily sensations; touch, pain, and body position. Information
about body position and ongoing movements is needed for motor
coordination, and the brain applies a save wire principle by placing
somatic sensation and movement next to each other. Each hemisphere handles movement and sensation from the opposite side of
the body. Therefore left-sided strokes paralyze the right side of the
body and right-sided strokes paralyze the left side.
Children like to ask: Why did nobody ever construct a real robot
like the ones in science ction movies, one that can walk like a
human being? The answer is that walking requires too much computing power, far more than multiplying six-digit numbers or
remembering the sequence of 3 billion base pairs of DNA. For us,
however, walking is easier. This is because for millions of years those
of our ancestors who couldnt do math survived, but those who
couldnt walk died. Also face recognition, voice recognition and
speech are easy for us but difcult for robots because our ancestors
couldnt do without these special skills.
Vision is our most impressive sensory system. Our species has been
grounded for a few million years, but we still have the exquisite
3
In Gods Image?
vision that our primate ancestors evolved to navigate in the trees.
Visual signals are sent to the occipital lobes in the back of the head
and are then processed into neighboring regions of the temporal and
parietal lobes.
The auditory cortex in the temporal lobes is linked to the language
cortex, which also includes areas of the frontal lobe next to the part
of the motor strip that controls mouth and throat movements. In
most people, the left hemisphere is in charge of language. Therefore
left-sided but not right-sided strokes lead to speech disorders.
Other parts of the cortex are concerned with thinking, memory
and emotion. Actually, emotions are created in the deep structures of
the brain. These ancient circuits are unconscious, but they send
messages into the cortex much as the retina sends messages into the
cortex. The messages from the retina are perceived as visual images,
and the messages from the emotion circuits are perceived as feelings.
There are three sources of conscious experience altogether: perceptions from the senses, feelings from subcortical emotion circuits, and
memories.
Grandmother cells
. . . all of our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions, or,
in other words . . . it is impossible for us to think of anything,
which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or
internal senses. (David Hume, 1748)2
The contents of our consciousness are internal representations, or
working models, of the world. They are built from perceptions,
either directly or indirectly through memory, and acquire their
meaning from the emotions that we attach to them. Thinking is the
process of manipulating these mental models. Thus, there can be no
thought without perception.
Vision is our most important sense. Messages from each half of
the visual eld are carried to the opposite side of the brain. Therefore
each half-brain concerns itself not only with the opposite side of the
body, but also with the opposite side of the outside world. The rst
cortical station is the primary visual cortex, also known as area V1.
V1 is somewhat like a screen on which the retinal image is projected,
with each cell responding to illumination of a tiny spot on the retina.
4
In Gods Image?
Other patients can no longer recognize facial expressions although
they can discriminate faces. There are also reports of a farmer who
could still recognize familiar people although he could no longer
distinguish his cows, and another farmer who could recognize his
cows but not his friends.4 These cases show that the brain has special
places for letters and faces, cows and people. Half jokingly, it has
been proposed that there are grandmother cells, which become
active only when you see your grandmother.
The face cells seem to be hard-wired. They have been found even
in baby monkeys, and human infants can distinguish face from nonface almost immediately after birth. In one case, an infant developed
lasting prosopagnosia after early damage to the face-selective areas
of the cortex.
Face processing is prewired because faces have intrinsic biological
meaning, but what about letters, numbers and written words? Unlike
face recognition, reading is a recent invention. Therefore the brain
circuitry for reading cannot be an evolved feature of the brain. And
yet, the brains of literate people contain letter-responsive cells and
others that respond to numbers. These cells are simply shapeselective cells that became ne-tuned by external input.5
If the brain has different places for color, faces, shape and motion,
how can it keep the right attributes together? When watching a white
mouse with pink ears eating a hole-riddled, yellow Swiss cheese, why
dont we perceive a pink cheese with white ears eating a hole-riddled
yellow mouse instead? This is called the binding problem. Could it be
that somewhere in the brain the information from all the processing
units is reunited to produce an integrated image? Damage to this
place would cause total blindness in the presence of an intact V1.
No such place has ever been found. Most likely the visual system
solves the binding problem by analyzing each object separately, one
at a time, with binding somehow effected by the simultaneous
activity of the processing units. This implies that, unnoticed by the
viewer, attentional shifts take place many times every second. The
cognitive system then assembles a panoramic view of the world from
successive snapshots glued together by short-term memory, almost
like a real movie.
Experiments like the one in Figure 1.2 show that attentional shifts
from one object to another occur 25 to 40 times every second. This
has to happen unconsciously because we can process only ve to
eight conscious perceptions per second. Most likely the attentional
6
snapshots are timed by volleys of nerve impulses that are sent from
the deep core of the brain to the cortex. These are the rhythmic
pulses of activity that are recorded in the EEG. One implication is
that we can read only 25 to 40 characters per second. If you dont
believe it, take a stopwatch, read one page as fast as you can, count
the letters on the page, and then divide the number of letters by the
reading time.6
In Gods Image?
and when walking, dancing or talking, we do not know which
muscles we contract. For sensation and movement alike, only
unconscious processing in parallel channels is fast enough and
complex enough.
Simple organisms rely on reexes. A y-catching frog only needs
bug detectors in its eyes or brain that are hooked to a motor program for snapping. And a human infant smiling at a face only needs
a face cell circuitry capable of distinguishing face from non-face,
hooked to a motor program for smiling.
The unconscious information processors are called modules. Each
module is devoted to a specialized task, such as smiling or smile
recognition. It is informationally encapsulated, receiving only the
kinds of information needed for its task. Its like in the military, where
information is given on a need-to-know basis. Reex-like, the module
thoughtlessly transforms an input pattern into an output pattern.
One example is the perception of constancy in the visual world.
When you walk, move your head or shift your gaze, you see the
world as stationary although the image on the retina moves. But
when you press your nger against your eyeball, the image of the
world shifts. The module that makes us see the world as stationary
computes information about head and body movements and active
movements of the eyeballs, but not about passive displacement of the
eyeballs.
The malfunction of a single module leads to abnormalities that are
restricted to the modules function. For example, there seems to be a
sexual-orientation module whose malfunction leads to homosexuality. Sex identity perceiving oneself as male or female is
determined by a different module. Malfunction of this module
produces not a homosexual but a transsexual. These modules function as autonomous units independent of the cognitive system.
Therefore people are not free to choose their sexual orientation or
sex identity.
In a classical reex, the input of the module is sensory and the
output is a motor act. In perception, the input is sensory and the
output is a conscious mental representation of the stimulus. In willed
action, the input is a mental representation of an intended action and
the output is a motor act.
The modules cannot afford short-term memory. The visual processing units, for example, must forget their past activity in order to
be ready for the next volley of nerve impulses when the attentional
8
In Gods Image?
If information becomes conscious only after its transfer from the
sensory modules to the short-term memory cells, then we experience
the world with a delay. That this is the case has been shown by
Benjamin Libet at the University of California in San Francisco.
When he applied a brief, barely perceptible stimulus to the skin of his
subjects, he observed two responses in the EEG: a fast response over
the somatosensory cortex that peaked one-tenth of a second after the
stimulus, and a widespread response that developed gradually during
one half of a second.
When lowering the stimulus intensity, Libet reached a point where
the slow response vanished although the fast response could still be
measured. At this point the conscious awareness of the stimulus
faded. Anesthetic drugs impaired conscious experience and also
depressed the late potential, but left the fast response intact. The
sharp early potential marks the unconscious processing of the stimulus in the modules of the sensory cortex, and the slow fuzzy
potential tracks the conscious experience.
Although the late potential signals conscious awareness, the subjective experience of the event is referred back in time. A sprinter
starts running within one-tenth of a second after the start shot.
When asked about the timing of the shot, she will say that she heard
it immediately before she started running. But actually, she starts
running before the shot has reached conscious awareness.
Conscious thought was needed to program the contingency into
the sprinters sensory-motor systems: When you hear the shot, run.
But when the shot is red, the response is automatic. Conscious
processing would be too slow. And yet, somehow the subjective
experience is pre-dated to the time when the stimulus rst reached
the sensory cortex, or perhaps even to the approximate time of the
shot itself.
Libet demonstrated this subjective referral in time by stimulating
the thalamus, a small structure in the innards of the brain that relays
signals from the body to the somatosensory cortex. At low current
intensity, he had to stimulate for at least half a second to induce a
conscious experience. And yet, the subjects reported feeling it at
roughly the time when the fast potential appeared in their EEG.8
People can respond to a stimulus without being aware of it.
Patients with damage to the primary visual cortex are blind in part
or all of the visual eld, but vestiges of vision can be demonstrated in
forced-choice tasks where the patient has to guess the location or
10
In Gods Image?
originate from a cognitive map that is kept up-to-date by sensory
input. The location of this map is revealed by patients with one-sided
brain damage who show a striking neglect for the side of the world
opposite the side of their brain damage. A patient with right-sided
damage might ignore people approaching him from the left side, eat
food only from the right side of his plate, and shave only the right
side of his face. When asked to copy a drawing he will omit the left
half, as shown in Figure 1.3. The neglect patient is not aware of his
decit. He is convinced that all the food on the plate is eaten, his
shaving is complete, and there is nothing wrong with his drawings.
Figure 1.3 Many patients with right-sided brain damage fail to
reproduce the left side of drawings. (Milner and Goodale, 1995, p.193)
In Gods Image?
risky because a single foolish act can be deadly. We are better off
constructing mental models of planned actions and evaluating the
imagined consequences for their desirability. By imagining the consequences of our actions, we can let our ideas die in our stead.
If you are not satised with the liveliness of your imagination, and
your perception of the world is pale and unexciting, you can do
something very simple: drop a little LSD. After a low dose of LSD,
vision is altered in subtle ways. Color is perceived more intensely,
and attention turns to otherwise neglected details of the world. The
world becomes an enchanted place, detached from the routines of
ordinary experience. Hallucinations appear only in the dark, consisting of simple visual impressions such as colored ngerprints or
colored dots or shapes that keep changing at a breathtaking pace.
Meaningful images, such as little naked women sitting in the
drawer of your desk smiling at you, or little white mice with red caps
scurrying along the walls of your room, are not typical for LSD. If
you have hallucinations of this type you are probably not the victim
of a practical joke by your hallucinogen-using friends, but you had
better do something about your drinking. These hallucinations occur
in patients with alcohol psychosis.
LSD widens emotional as well as visual experience, with effects
ranging from ecstasy to horror. Like sensory experience, feelings are
produced by the transfer of information from modular systems to
the conscious working memory system, and this is exactly the process that is facilitated by LSD.
Elements of the LSD experience can recur spontaneously many
days or weeks after the trip. This is called a ashback. More
importantly, many users report that aspects of the LSD experience
become part of their normal emotional repertoire. LSD has been
found useful in psychotherapy, presumably because it can lead to a
lasting facilitation of information transfer from the modules to
consciousness.
The hallucinations of schizophrenics are different from those
induced by LSD. They are auditory rather than visual, and they are
meaningful. The patient hears voices talking about him, or ordering
him to do weird things. Some patients describe their hallucinations
as thoughts becoming loud, and thats what they are. They are not
created by dumb modules but are projected into them, and from the
modules they are back-projected into consciousness. The fault is not
in the sensory system but the cognitive system.
14
15
2
The Nature of Knowledge
Our sensations, our pleasures, our pains, and the relations of
these, make up the sum total of the elements of positive,
unquestionable knowledge.
(Thomas Huxley, 1879)1
Thinking is the processing of mental models that are held in shortterm memory stores. The craftsman builds his mental models mainly
from current sensory input, but the absentminded professor creates
them from long-term memory. Thus the craftsman and the professor
have different cognitive styles, according to their preferred source of
information. In this chapter we will encounter the mechanisms and
limitations of long-term memory.
In Gods Image?
drugs known at the time worked for him. So he was nally referred
for neurosurgical treatment.
His seizures seemed to originate in the medial parts of the temporal lobes, and therefore his surgeon, William Scoville, decided to
remove the medial temporal lobes on both sides. Up to that time,
this radical surgery had only been tried in a few hopelessly psychotic
patients in a last-ditch effort to relieve their suffering. Malpractice
suits against physicians were almost unheard-of in those days, and
therefore doctors were more ready than now to try desperate cures
for desperately ill patients.
But it didnt work well for H.M. His epilepsy was indeed much
improved, but he lost his memory. He could still hold things in mind
for seconds and even up to one or two minutes, but his memory was
wiped out whenever his current train of thought was interrupted.
The doctors and nurses who took care of him had to reintroduce
themselves every time they saw him, and whatever he saw, heard or
read was forgotten within minutes. His thinking was clear, and he
still scored in the brightnormal range on IQ tests. He wasnt stupid,
he just couldnt remember.
He could still remember events from his early life his childhood,
his high school sweetheart, and the jobs he had held. But his memory
for the last few years before his surgery and anything thereafter was
wiped out completely. He never got familiar with the place where he
lived after his surgery, and he knew neither the current date nor his
age.
He used accent as a clue to a persons origin, the weather as a clue
to the time of the year, and his own emotional tone as a clue to
whether things had gone well lately. Having aged, he could no longer
recognize himself on recent photographs. He knew Franklin D.
Roosevelt and Louis Armstrong, but never learned about Ronald
Reagan, Michael Jackson and Osama bin Laden. H.M. survived his
surgery for more than 50 years, serving as a willing subject for a host
of studies about memory a life for science.
H.M.s brain lesion is known precisely. The missing piece of brain
includes the anterior two-thirds of the hippocampus, a seahorseshaped fold on the medial edge of the temporal lobe. Also a strip of
neocortex next to the hippocampus was removed, as well as the
amygdala, an almond-shaped collection of gray matter in the depth
of the temporal lobes.2
H.M.s intact short-term retention and reasoning ability show that
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In Gods Image?
The memory module
I have done this, says my memory. I cannot have done that,
says my pride, remaining inexorable. Finally memory yields.
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)
The story goes somewhat like this: conscious contents from working
memory are copied into the medial temporal lobe where they are
kept alive until the sustained activity has effected lasting changes in
synaptic strength. Working memory cannot do this itself because the
prolonged activity required for smooth encoding would arrest the
ow of thought. During recall the memory trace becomes activated
and copies itself back into working memory. Fresh memories are
most likely kept in or near the hippocampus but are then gradually
transferred to the neocortex. This is the reason why H.M. can
remember events from his youth but not events from the last years
before his surgery.
The rat hippocampus has place cells that become active when the
animal visits places in its environment. Assemblies of place cells form
a cognitive map of the environment, with the animal itself in the
center. This self-centered cognitive map forms the contents of episodic memories. It is the essence of self-awareness, not only in
humans but presumably also in rats.
When a rat explores its environment, large assemblies of hippocampal place cells re in synchrony. These same cells again become
active during sleep, ring in synchrony as they did during the
activities of the day. They send their messages to the sleeping neocortex, and like little elves the hippocampal messengers work
throughout the night to engrave lasting memories in the neural
networks of the neocortex. Our dreams are the noises made by these
untiring little workers.5
To be honest, we still dont know what dreams are made of and
what they are good for. They are enacted in the working memory
system, for otherwise we would be unable to remember them. But the
hippocampus accepts no messages during sleep. It is in receiving
mode in the waking state, and in sending mode during sleep.
Therefore our memory span for dreams a few seconds is the same
as for working memory unaided by the hippocampus.
If the hippocampus receives its inputs from working memory, then
the place cells should respond not only when we are in a place, but
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In Gods Image?
In the legal system, eyewitness reports are the worst possible evidence. A majority of cases where a prisoners innocence is established by DNA evidence involves the false identication of the
perpetrator by one or more eyewitnesses.7
Other minds
We should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
(Albert Einstein)
The evolutionary origins of working memory and its hippocampal
memory module are revealed in studies of eye-blink conditioning. An
eye blink is the normal response to a sudden stimulus applied to the
eye, for example an air puff or a light touch. This is the unconditioned stimulus.
In delay conditioning a tone (or any other neutral stimulus) is
presented for about one second, and an air puff to the eye is applied
shortly before the stimulus ends. The tone becomes a conditioned
stimulus, and in time the subject blinks whenever the tone comes on.
This simple response is learned in the cerebellum. It works in rats,
rabbits, monkeys and humans, and even in amnesics and in animals
whose hippocampus has been destroyed.
Trace conditioning is a slightly different procedure in which the air
puff is delivered after the end of the tone. Amnesics and animals with
hippocampal damage can manage this procedure only if the interval
between the end of the tone and the onset of the air puff is less than
half a second. They fail to learn the response with longer intervals.
In delay conditioning and short-interval trace conditioning, the
messages about the tone and the air puff can be associated because
both converge on a cerebellar neuron at the same time or nearly the
same time. With longer intervals, the association can be formed only
when the gap between the end of the tone and the onset of the air
puff is bridged by short-term memory. This requires the short-term
stores of working memory, which then feed their output into the
hippocampus.8 Most likely, the initial reason for the evolution of
short-term memory in the ancestors of vertebrates was to permit the
association of stimuli that do not overlap in time.
In Chapter 1 we saw that we scan our environment by rapid
attentional shifts. Without short-term memory, the animal can only
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In Gods Image?
system in addition to circuitry in the brain stem and cerebellum that
is also used in delay conditioning.10
If declarative memory and consciousness per se are not unique to
our species, perhaps our own variety of episodic memory is. Humanstyle episodic memory implies not only rich contextual information
but also an awareness of ones own continuity over time, a narrative
of ones own life. These are cognitive abilities that we do not like to
concede to other animals.11
Most people cannot remember events pre-dating their third or
fourth birthday. This is called childhood amnesia. Furthermore,
children before the age of three or four years cannot report the
sources of their knowledge although they are able to learn simple
facts and skills. This is called source amnesia. Frequently, though
not always, abilities that develop at a late age in children also
emerged late during human evolution. Therefore childhood amnesia
and the source amnesia of children suggest that episodic memory is
an evolutionary latecomer that distinguishes us from the brutes:
The hippocampus produces episodic memories.
Episodic memories are more complex in humans than in other
animals.
Therefore the hippocampus is more complex in humans than in
other animals.
Actually, it isnt. The hippocampus is an archaic structure that is
present even in the earliest vertebrates. From the most primitive
mammals to humans, the hippocampus increased vefold in size
while the neocortex increased 200-fold. This ts with the idea that
episodic memory and, by implication, conscious experience is an
ancient cognitive specialization that evolved in early vertebrates for
navigation in the environment.12
The apparent memory gaps of childhood are not convincing
either. Even children younger than 18 months can repeat a sequence
of actions that they have witnessed up to a few months earlier. The
delayed imitation method used in these studies requires a mental
representation of the imitated action, and it does not work in
amnesics.13 Perhaps we cannot remember early childhood events
because the old episodic memories are overwritten by new experiences. Or perhaps memory traces are still buried in the adult brain
24
In Gods Image?
needed solidarity and cooperation within the group, combined with
indifference or wariness toward strangers. As human societies grew
larger, the boundary between us and them moved farther and
farther away from the individual until it nally reached the species
boundary.
Only recently did cognitive scientists become fascinated by consciousness, a concept that is sufciently vague to be useful as a
modern substitute for the soul. They even offered us specic cognitive abilities such as language, self-awareness, mental time travel and
generativity as uniquely human accomplishments. These ideas help
us to justify our actions: they dont have syntax; therefore we can eat
them.15 If we eat animals because they dont have syntax, why dont
we eat babies and retarded people? All those traits that distinguish us
from the brutes are present in different degrees in different people!
In reality, consciousness is what we share with other animals.
What sets us apart from them are greater fact knowledge, more
abstract concepts and more complex reasoning. Some of our allegedly unique attributes, including our sense of time and our vast
semantic knowledge system, are elaborations of cognitive abilities
that are also present in other animals. Others, most notably language, are not true cognitive functions at all. Language comprehension is as modular as color perception and face recognition, and
speech is a motor skill that is learned thoughtlessly.16
Sorry, but you have to stick to the old-fashioned soul if you really
feel the need to justify the way you treat other species. This is indeed
uniquely human: the desire to understand and justify our own
behavior. To this end we construct mental models of our place in the
world and the meaning of our interactions with the world, lling the
black holes of cognitive impenetrability with the yarns of myth and
philosophy and science.
The question of animal consciousness is part of a wider issue: the
problem of other minds. The problem is, in short, that I have rstperson knowledge of my own subjective experiences cogito, ergo
sum. There is no way I can ever know whether such states exist in
other creatures, be they rats, computers or other humans.
If I dont know, I must guess. Out of pure pragmatism, scientists
use a guessing rule that they call the rule of parsimony, or Occams
razor.17 Occams razor demands that entities should not be multiplied and that of two alternative explanations, the simpler one
should be preferred. Scientists always try to explain as much as
26
In Gods Image?
Only the link between the visual system and the knowledge is cut.
Thus, knowledge is different from perception.
If knowledge is not in the senses, is it in the words? You may
remember tip-of-the tongue situations when you just couldnt come
up with the name of an acquaintance or the word for a familiar
object. In these situations the knowledge of the person or object is
crystal clear. Only the link between the knowledge and the mental
lexicon is malfunctioning.
For most people name-nding difculties are an occasional
embarrassment, but some brain-damaged patients have persistent
naming problems. One of these cases has been described by Antonio
Damasios group at the University of Iowa. The patient code-named
AN-1033 had trouble nding the correct names for pictures of animals, fruits and vegetables, but he could describe what he saw. When
presented with the picture of an ostrich, he would say Bird that
sticks head in sand, and a pumpkin was identied as Melon . . . use
it on Halloween.
Another patient, known as Boswell, was also unable to name
animals and vegetables, but unlike AN-1033 he did not recognize
them either, except at a very general level. He would identify a duck
as Bird, and a pineapple as Possibly vegetable. Questioning
showed that he had no further knowledge of the things he was
looking at.
The reason for the difference is that AN-1033s brain damage is
limited to the left temporal lobe, while Boswell has similar damage in
both temporal lobes. Perception and the knowledge of the perceived
entities are represented on both sides of the brain. Therefore a severe
loss of previously acquired knowledge is likely only after bilateral
damage. But the links between the knowledge and the lexicon are
left-sided only. Therefore patients with left-sided damage are likely
to have naming difculties despite near-normal recognition and
knowledge.
Knowledge is distributed in vast networks, with object attributes
represented near the corresponding sensory and motor structures.
Thus, screwdriver color is represented near the color center in the
ventral stream; screwdriver movements near the motion-sensitive
area of the dorsal stream; and screwdriver uses near the motor cortex
controlling the hand. Some brain areas are especially important for
knowledge of animals, others for tools, and others again for famous
people.19
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In Gods Image?
omnipresent threats to our ancestors. But our ancestors did not
know about abortion and therefore could not evolve instinctive
responses to it. In the absence of tailor-made responses, we can form
an opinion about it only by associating it with something that
already has emotions and instinctive responses attached to it. This is
how we grope for meaning in a world for which we did not evolve.
Natural scientists are of course totally untouched by semantic
manipulation and self-manipulation. They concern themselves with
the origin of the universe, the nature of matter and energy, the origin
of our species, and the mechanisms of thought and judgment. These
issues are too unimportant to rouse strong emotions. Therefore
black holes, atoms, evolution and intelligence never become politically incorrect or do they?
Networks of meaning
Not mere contemplation, but action forms the center from
which for human beings the cognitive organization of reality
originates. (E. Cassirer)21
Back in the 1930s, the Russian neurologist Aleksandr Luria visited
Central Asia to nd out how illiterate peasants reason about the
world.22 In one example he presented a peasant with the drawings of
a hammer, a saw, a log and a hatchet, and asked him:
Which of these items does not belong here?
The hammer doesnt belong here. The hatchet chops the log,
the saw saws it, but the hammer doesnt t in. Then again, if
you saw the log, youll have to drive a wedge in, so youll need
the hammer.
But can you say that a saw, a hatchet, and a log are the same
types of things?
Sure, theyre alike, they work together.
Another peasant was asked:
What do blood and water have in common?
Whats alike about them is that water washes off all sorts of
dirt, so it can wash off blood too.
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In Gods Image?
and more than half had an undergraduate degree in biology. But the
creationists among them had compartmentalized their knowledge:
science for passing exams, and religion for explaining how the world
works.
In theory, explicit knowledge is available for multiple uses. In
reality, however, it is rarely applied outside the context in which it
has been learned. This requires something in addition to storage
capacity and categorization. It is called intelligence. And there is yet
another ingredient: the motivation to use ones intelligence.
Situational grouping is not the only organizing principle of primitive categorization. One of Lurias illiterates was presented with
the drawings of a glass, a saucepan, spectacles and a bottle and
asked:
Which one does not t in?
I dont know which of these things doesnt t here. Maybe
its the bottle? You can drink tea out of the glass thats useful.
The spectacles are also useful. But theres vodka in the bottle
thats bad.
This villager used the archaic dichotomy between approach and
avoidance. Even a frog has to distinguish between things-to-beapproached and things-to-be-avoided. Finer distinctions are based
on the type of approach or avoidance: a y is something-to-be-eaten,
a mate is something-to-be-courted, a stork is something-to-bejumped-away-from, and a pond is something-to-be-jumped-into,
especially when a stork is nearby. Also humans start out like this.
For a three-month-old infant a face, but not a book, is something-tobe-smiled-at. Later on the face versus non-face distinction is rened
into concepts such as person versus non-person, and animate versus
inanimate.
We categorize by intended action whenever there is a salient action
tendency, for example when we label certain objects as food. And
we do it with people. Is alcoholism an illness or a character aw? Are
suicide bombers heroes or murderers? These categories are dened
by our action tendencies. An illness is something-to-be-treated, a
character aw something-to-be-reprimanded, murder something-tobe-punished and heroism something-to-be-admired.
These categories do not exist in the real world. They are only in
our heads. Therefore sensible folks dont argue about them. Instead
32
33
3
The Nature of Intelligence
The hardest thing to understand is why we can understand
anything at all.
(Albert Einstein)
In Chapter 2 we saw that patient H.M.s intelligence was intact
because he had lost only long-term memory but not working memory: the system that creates mental models and transforms them for
the purpose of problem solving.
The information-processing ability of working memory comes at a
steep price: a sharply limited capacity for the amount of information
it can hold. This is demonstrated in the digit span test. The examiner
calls out a sequence of digits that the subject has to repeat. Most
people can repeat about seven digits a far cry from the tens of
thousands of words and images that we keep in long-term memory.
To permit cognitive processing, the information in working
memory must be unstable, pliable and rather fuzzy. For example, the
sequence MAN, CAD, MAT, MAP, CAN is harder to keep in mind
than PIT, DAY, HOT, COW, PEN because the sound structures of
the items are too similar. The sound-based verbal memory store that
holds these words has difculty keeping the items apart.
In addition to short-term stores that keep information alive for
some seconds, working memory has a central executive that sets
expectations and goals, moves the focus of attention, searches longterm memory, corrects errors and controls access to the motor system. All conscious thought, and indeed all conscious experience, is
produced by this system.1 This chapter describes the mechanisms of
intelligent reasoning and their shortcomings.
35
In Gods Image?
Quantities and probabilities
Through and through the world is infected with quantity. To
talk sense, is to talk in quantities. It is no use saying the nation
is large. How large? It is no use saying that radium is scarce.
How scarce? . . . Elegant intellects which despise the theory of
quantity, are but half developed. (Alfred North Whitehead)2
A woman who goes on her rst date and nds that the man wants
sex should not conclude that all men want sex. A woman who went
on dates with 100 men and found that every one of them wanted sex
can be more condent in her judgment. What she applies intuitively
is the law of large numbers.
Failure to apply the law of large numbers can result from the
emotional impact of an event. Even a single highly disturbing
experience can lead a woman to conclude that all men want sex
despite the unrepresentative sample size. This bias is wired into the
brain because emotionally salient experiences are usually about
something important. A failure to learn from them quickly is more
dangerous than learning something that eventually turns out to be
false.
Aside from emotional salience effects, people can learn efciently
from repetitive experience. Social stereotypes are formed that way.
In one study, subjects were asked to estimate the academic performance of Toronto high school students from nine ethnic groups.
When their answers were compared with data published by the
Toronto Board of Education, it turned out that the participants were
fairly accurate in their perceptions of both the relative standings of
groups and the magnitude of between-group differences. Some kinds
of prejudice are hard to eradicate because people are too good at
picking up regularities that actually exist in the world.3
Social stereotypes are learned with minimal mental effort. But
reasoning about repetitive events and large numbers can be difcult,
as in this classical demonstration:
A certain town is served by two hospitals. In the larger hospital
about 45 babies are born each day, and in the smaller hospital
about 15 babies are born each day. As you know, about 50
percent of all babies are boys. However, the exact percentage
varies from day to day. Sometimes it may be higher than 50
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In Gods Image?
Probability format:
The probability that one of these women has breast cancer is
1%. If a woman has breast cancer, the probability is 80% that
she will have a positive mammogram. If a woman does not have
breast cancer, the probability is 10% that she will still have a
positive mammogram.
Imagine a woman (age 40 to 50, no symptoms) who has a
positive mammogram in your breast cancer screening. What is
the probability that she actually has breast cancer? __%
Natural frequency format:
Ten out of every 1,000 women have breast cancer. Of these 10
women with breast cancer, 8 will have a positive mammogram.
Of the remaining 990 women without breast cancer, 99 will still
have a positive mammogram.
Imagine a sample of women (age 40 to 50, no symptoms) who
have positive mammograms in your breast cancer screening. How
many of these women do actually have breast cancer? __ out of __
Only two of the 24 physicians presented with the probability
format but eleven of the 24 physicians presented with the natural
frequencies format came up with the correct answer that eight out of
107 women (7.5 percent) with a positive mammogram have cancer.5
Our senses perceive quantities of people but not fractions or percentages of people. Therefore our mind can handle numbers far
better than fractions and percentages.
In other tasks, people jump to a conclusion based on the rst thing
that comes to mind. This is called the availability error. For example,
when asked whether a typical English text passage contains more
words beginning with the letter R or more words with R in the third
position, most people answer, incorrectly, that there are more words
beginning with R.6 Words with R in the rst position are judged
more common because they are more easily retrieved from memory.
Also the vividness or salience of the information affect judgment.
In 1986 the number of Americans visiting Europe as tourists dropped sharply because many people were scared by highly publicized
plane hijackings. In fact, the rate of violent crime in the US was so
high at that time that Americans living in cities put themselves at a
greater risk of dying a violent death by staying at home rather than
38
In Gods Image?
Although the rst scenario was included in the second, the probability estimates were more than three times higher for the second
than the rst. The same fallacy was demonstrated in a classical
experiment where subjects were presented with the following
description:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She
majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned
with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations. Please rank the following statements by their probability, using 1 for the most
probable and 8 for the least probable.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
In Gods Image?
However, any large force would detonate the mines. Not only
would this blow up the road and render it impassable, but the
dictator would then destroy many villages in retaliation. A fullscale direct attack on the fortress therefore appeared
impossible.
The general, however, was undaunted. He divided his army
up into small groups and dispatched each group to the head of a
different road. When all was ready he gave the signal, and each
group charged down a different road. All of the small groups
passed safely over the mines, and the army then attacked the
fortress in full strength. In this way, the general was able to
capture the fortress and overthrow the dictator.
After reading this story the subjects were presented with a different problem:
Suppose you are a doctor faced with a patient who has a
malignant tumor in his stomach. It is impossible to operate on
the patient, but unless the tumor is destroyed the patient will
die. There is a kind of ray that can be used to destroy the tumor.
If the rays reach the tumor all at once at a sufciently high
intensity, the tumor will be destroyed. Unfortunately, at this
intensity the healthy tissue that the rays pass through on the
way to the tumor will also be destroyed. At lower intensities the
rays are harmless to healthy tissue, but they will not affect the
tumor either. What type of procedure might be used to destroy
the tumor with the rays, and at the same time avoid destroying
the healthy tissue?
Those who had read the fortress story were more likely than those
who had read other, unrelated stories to come up with the solution
that the rays should be focused on the tumor from many directions.10
IQ tests contain verbal analogies such as Human is to shoe like
car is to . . .? or School is to student like hospital is to . . .? The
hydraulic model of the circulatory system, the planetary model of
atomic structure, and the billiard ball model of gases are founded on
analogies. Linguistic analogies become entrenched as metaphors: the
doors of perception, the weight of the evidence. In narrative form
they are called parables.
42
In Gods Image?
voluntary euthanasia will soon follow. This is again reasoning from
analogy, but this time the source analog on which the proposition is
mapped is not pulled from memory. It is the product of our
imagination.
What needs to be explained is this: Why is there only one slippery
slope? If we prohibit voluntary active euthanasia, terminally ill patients
will soon be kept alive against their will with ever more sophisticated
life support systems, no matter how much pain they suffer!
The problem is that not everything can be imagined with equal
ease. One reason for the lopsided slippery slope argument is that
those who defend it are not dying. In their world, death by homicide
is a matter of concern but the risk of being kept alive under disagreeable circumstances is not. Perspective taking requires thinking,
and ordinarily we try to do with as little thinking as possible. And
besides, who wants to imagine himself in the situation of a dying
patient suffering severe pain?!
Also, the risk of being killed by a fellow hominid was very real
throughout the history of our species, but the risk of being kept alive
suffering has never been around. Even if it had been, it would have
made no difference for the genes that wire our brains. Therefore we
evolved a horror of being killed but not a horror of being kept alive.
Times have changed, though. The world of our ancestors was full
of would-be murderers. Our world is full of doctors who are tempted
to prolong the patients life despite his suffering. For the doctor, the
dying patient is a goose that lays golden eggs!
b) Mental rotation tasks like this one are included in many intelligence
tests.
In Gods Image?
you can readily conclude that Olp blobbers. This syllogism is no
more difcult than Aristotles classic:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore Socrates is mortal.
In syllogisms, the reasoner has to plug a new piece of information
(the minor premise: Socrates is a man) into an inductively derived
rule (the major premise: All men are mortal).
Some cognitive scientists believe that reasoning is performed by
chaining together verbal propositions according to logical inference
rules. Others believe that there are reasoning rules of sorts, but that
people pick their rules pragmatically, according to the nature of the
task.
Others again believe that verbal propositions are translated into
meaning-based representations, or mental models, of the premises.
If a proposed conclusion holds in all possible models of the premises,
it is judged valid; if it holds in at least one of them, it is judged
possible; and if it holds in none of them, it is judged impossible.12
If people use abstract logic only, then reasoning should be independent of meaning. Lets assume you are in a restaurant. The
manager tells you about the patrons:
All of the Frenchmen are wine drinkers.
Some of the wine drinkers are gourmets.
Are some of the Frenchmen gourmets? Most people endorse this
conclusion. Now try this:
All of the Frenchmen are wine drinkers.
Some of the wine drinkers are Italians.
Are some of the Frenchmen Italians? Few subjects endorse this
conclusion, although this syllogism has the same logical structure as
the rst. If we were thinking logically, the two syllogisms would be
equally difcult, but they are not. Either we reason with meaningbased representations in the rst place, or at least we apply a nal
reality check before accepting a conclusion.
Limitations in working memory capacity force reasoners to
46
In Gods Image?
Our reasoning is limited by low working memory capacity or
stupidity, as less subtle writers would call it. Only, to make sure that
nobody understands them, cognitive scientists dont call it stupidity.
They call it bounded rationality.
Most people can solve the drinking age problem. You have to turn
the rst and the fourth card. You have to check on those who drink
beer and those who are underage. Few solve the restaurant problem
although it has the same logical structure: you have to check on
those who eat chili and those who do not drink beer. Again you have
to turn the rst and the fourth card. In this problem most people
turn the rst and the third card. Instead of trying to falsify the rule
the way a scientist should do it, they make a misguided effort to
verify it.
The difference in difculty cannot be explained by the number of
logical inference rules that have to be chained together, the number
of mental models to be inspected, or familiarity. Over time, most
people have been exposed to at least as many contingencies between
food and drink as between drink and age: cereal and milk, coffee and
cake.
The important difference is that the restaurant problem presents a
descriptive rule, whereas the drinking age problem presents a prescriptive rule. It is framed as a social contract with rights and obligations. Reasoning about ordinary contingencies is called indicative
reasoning, and reasoning about social rules is called deontic
reasoning.
Does this mean that social contracts promote logical thinking?
Take this example:
49
In Gods Image?
If you mow the lawn I will give you ve dollars.
You do not mow the lawn.
Therefore, I will not give you ve dollars.
Now consider the next example:
If it is a cat then it is an animal.
It is not a cat.
Therefore, it is not an animal.
Most people endorse the rst syllogism but not the second, although
they have the same logical structure and both are invalid.16
In another example, subjects are confronted with the following
rule in the four-card task:
If an employee works on the weekend, then that person gets a
day off during the week.
Each card represents an employee, with information about
his weekend work on one side and information about the day
off on the other side:
Indicate only the card(s) you denitely need to turn over to see
if this rule has been violated.
This problem was presented with two different context stories. In
one story the subject was asked to put himself in the place of an
employee who is considering working on Saturdays from time to
time. However, there are rumors that the rule has been violated
before. The subject has to check information about four colleagues
to see whether the rule has been violated before. Most subjects
turned the Worked on the weekend and the Did not get a day off
cards.
Another context story instructed the subjects to put themselves in
the role of the employer who had heard rumors that the rule has
50
In Gods Image?
Figure 3.2 Detour learning is easy for squirrels but very difcult for dogs.
(Barash, 1977)
In Gods Image?
detect signs of directed attention, a spatial mapping algorithm to nd
the point in space that the other is looking at or aiming at, and the
behavioral response of orienting toward that point. Even monkeys
use joint attention to respond to a food source or a predator that has
been discovered by someone else, and to learn by observation.
Emotional contagion is an even simpler reex. A monkey who
notices that all other monkeys in the troop are frightened should
respond in kind because danger may be near. If he keeps daydreaming while everyone else rushes to the trees, he is the one who
gets eaten by the leopard. Panicking crowds are driven by emotional
contagion. The canned laughter that tells the viewers of TV comedies
where the funny parts are is an example, as is the contagious nature
of yawning. And for the same reason, marrying a cheerful person is
better than marrying a grumpy one.
Even very young children use these copycat reexes to respond to
other peoples emotions, desires and intentions. Understanding
peoples knowledge and beliefs is learned at a much later age because
it requires cognitive perspective taking: putting oneself in the others
shoes. Perspective taking requires general intelligence.
Children younger than four or ve years misapply the copycat
reexes by falsely imputing their own knowledge and beliefs to
others. They act as if they assume that other peoples knowledge and
beliefs create corresponding states in themselves. Even adults
sometimes succumb to this fallacy.23
We use cognitive perspective taking to manipulate others. We
atter them, and we deceive them. Deception is at the pinnacle of
cognitive evolution because it requires a mental representation of the
others beliefs and the capacity to gure out ways of manipulating
them. Deception is therefore ubiquitous in humans, fairly common
in the great apes, very rare in monkeys, and almost unheard-of in
any other species.
Thinking folks are not content with case-by-case applications of
their mindreading skills. They also use their theory of mind in their
attempts at understanding how the world works, treating humans as
autonomous agents. Other cultures believe that intentional beings
such as spirits and sorcerers can cause human actions. No culture
outside modern science describes human motivations, intentions,
actions and habits of thought the way we would describe a machine.24
In our enlightened age we should know that there are no free
autonomous agents. There are only events and their consequences.
54
In Gods Image?
about internal states but also about the external world. In fact many
people, especially males, are none too good at talking about their
emotions.
Another difference is that the expressiveness of animal signals, and
of our own emotional expressions, depends on ne gradations. We
signal not only the presence or absence of fear, surprise or delight,
but also the intensity of the feeling and whether we are delightfully
surprised or fearfully surprised. Language, however, is eitheror and
all-or-none. We must distinguish lamb from lamp, write from
ride, and furry from ferry. Each word and each sentence has its
own discrete meaning. The neural networks that produce and
understand language have to draw sharp boundaries.
Emotional expressions are coordinated by the anterior cingulate
gyrus, a limbic region of the frontal lobe that represents the internal
state of the body.27 Our language areas did not evolve from this
neural substrate, but they skirt the temporal lobe structures that
represent the state of the outside world, the auditory cortex, and the
part of the motor cortex in charge of mouth and throat.
The left hemisphere usually controls language, but there are other
differences between the two half-brains. Figure 3.3 shows the
Figure 3.3 Patients with damage in the left or right hemisphere were asked
to reproduce the target gures from memory. (Posner and Raichle, 1994,
p. 162)
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In Gods Image?
E: Why dont you need time to proceed from thought to
action when you use your right hand? Maybe you cant move
your left hand?
P: I can move it perfectly. Only, there are sometimes illogical
reactions in behavior; some positive and some negative . . .
E: (Placing the patients left hand between his own hands)
Whose hands are these?
P: Your hands.
E: Ever seen a man with three hands?
P: A hand is the extremity of an arm. Since you have three
arms, you must have three hands.30
This patient has lost the ability to match the feedback from his
paralyzed left hand with his body image, but his last reply reveals
that his intact left brain is a true intellectual, drawing logically valid
conclusions from absurd premises.
It is doubtful that the analytic thinking that we use for logic and
mathematics has ever been useful for an animal in the wild, but
language was immensely useful for communication. We can therefore suspect that language evolved for communication and that the
evolving language areas of the left hemisphere shaped the conceptual
knowledge system in their own image:
Words are mapped onto concepts.
Words must have discrete meanings in order to be useful for
communication.
Therefore the concepts must have discrete meanings.
Thus the left hemisphere evolved the habit of chunking its
knowledge of the world into handy pieces. This way of representing
the world is a precondition for deductive reasoning: the rule-based
type of reasoning that produces logic and mathematics.
Your left hemisphere will now triumphantly conclude that this is
nally a categorical difference between humans and other animals.
Your right hemisphere will object that it is merely a difference in
degree, not in kind. Any chimpanzee makes categorical distinctions
between a rock and a banana, and between the alpha male and a sexy
female. It might yet turn out that even monkeys represent objects as
discrete entities in the left brain, and space in continuous coordinates
in the right brain.31
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In Gods Image?
pseudoscience of phrenology. Remember, most of our judgments are
based on simple association rather than reasoned weighting of the
evidence!
Even worse, brain localization seemed to imply that mental abilities and personality traits are innate and thats bad. To improve
the world, we must improve people. To improve people, the brain
must be malleable by education and propaganda.
In consequence, twentieth-century pop science portrayed the brain
as a tabula rasa, and party talk soon revolved around Oedipus
complex and penis envy rather than bumps on the head. This
changed only during the 1970s, when Freudian psychobabble went
out of fashion and language organs and mate choice modules
usurped its place.33
Real science does not seesaw the way pop science does. There is
only the continuous revision of old ideas and addition of new ones to
accommodate new facts. Even the most revolutionary theories look
revolutionary only to those who are not familiar with the older ones
on which they were built.
For modern neuroscience, the brain does indeed have specialized
provinces for different functions: movement perception, number
sense, face recognition, verbal short-term memory, autobiographic
memory and the like. But unlike phrenology, neuroscience tries to
localize computational steps rather than folk psychological traits
such as loyalty and benevolence.
Another difference is that neuroscientists think in terms of widespread networks, rather than localized functions. For example, the
network of visual attention includes parts of the right parietal lobe,
right frontal lobe, anterior cingulate cortex and subcortical systems;
and episodic memory requires not only the hippocampus but also
circuits in the frontal cortex, thalamus, hypothalamus and basal
forebrain.
On balance, Galls two conjectures that mental activity is produced by physical processes and that it depends on specialized brain
structures proved correct, more correct at least than the alternatives.
Also Galls assumption that brain functions are innate is not dead.
Following Chomsky, many linguists describe even language as an
instinct with innate learning dispositions and dedicated neural
substrates; and evolutionary psychologists attribute just about
everything, from reasoning biases to sexual attraction, to genetically
prewired Darwinian algorithms.34
60
61
4
Reason and Emotion
Without [feelings] there would not be I. And without me
who will experience them? They are right near by. But we
dont know what causes them. It seems there is a True Lord
who does so, but there is no indication of his existence.
(Chung Tzu)
As a student of biology, I learned about the mating behavior of
spiders. The instructor explained the courtship rituals, and how in
some species the female eats the male during copulation. Suddenly a
student asked: Do the spiders feel anything when they have sex? It
was of course a girl who asked this question. Males are more
interested in the mechanical aspects of copulation.
You will say that only the spiders themselves could answer this
question, and that was what the instructor replied. Still, we can
approach the students question by rephrasing it this way: Would
feelings during copulation help the spider in its reproductive effort?
Feelings dont seem parsimonious, for all a spider needs is a
copulatory reex that is triggered when a member of the opposite sex
is in sight. Male sexual behavior is said to work like this in our own
species. The difculty in building a copulating robot is not a need for
emotion. It is the computational demand for programming the
correct motor sequence. Behavior can be automatic, the way the
heart beats and the hair grows because the heart is programmed to
beat and the hair is programmed to grow, oblivious of pleasure and
pain.
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In Gods Image?
Pleasure and pain
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two
sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. (Jeremy Bentham, 1789)
In many instances, however, it is probable that instincts are
persistently followed from the mere force of inheritance, without the stimulus of either pleasure or pain . . . the common
assumption that men must be impelled to every action by
experiencing some pleasure or pain may be erroneous. (Charles
Darwin, Descent of Man, 1871)
We must respond appropriately to important objects in the environment, such as sexy females and erce enemies. In the simplest case
the animal responds, reex-like, to a sensory stimulus that triggers a
motor program. The innately recognized stimulus is called a sign
stimulus, key stimulus or release stimulus. A bug triggers preycatching in frogs because it activates bug detectors in the frogs
nervous system that are hooked to the motor circuitry for snapping.
And a face triggers smiling in babies because it activates face cells
that are connected to a smile center in the frontal cortex.1
Without learning, the neural lock on which the key stimulus is
tted is always crude. The face cells of a newborn recognize no more
than a round shape with two dots. Learning is needed to transform
this primitive circuitry into an image-like template on which external
stimuli are tted.
This type of learning is called imprinting. The classical example,
skillfully demonstrated by Konrad Lorenz, is the imprinting of newly
hatched geese. After Lorenz had spent a few hours with the goslings,
they recognized him as their mother. They followed him wherever he
went, and when given the choice, they preferred him to mother
goose.
The goslings knew that they must follow a large moving object
that makes noises. Thats all the innate knowledge they need, for
ordinarily the rst large noisy moving object a gosling sees is mother
goose, and not an Austrian ethologist. Their follow-the-mother
response is hard-wired into the brain but the sensory template has to
be shaped by learning. Likewise, a billy goat raised by a sheep foster
mother will socialize and mate with sheep rather than goats.
Somehow, the templates for socializing and mating seem to develop
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In Gods Image?
even if spiders have such a system, feelings during copulation would
make sense only for those species that copulate repeatedly. Those
that copulate only once in a lifetime need no feelings because there is
no opportunity for emotionally guided learning.
In Gods Image?
precise but not as much as might have been expected. The effects of
most life events wear off after a few months, and people keep
moderately happy by adjusting their expectations to their circumstances. And we all know a few people who are always malcontent
no matter how lucky the conditions of their life, and others who keep
happy even in the greatest adversity. Make sure you dont marry one
of the malcontents!
Overall, married people are a little happier than singles, rich
people are a little happier than the poor, and churchgoers are a little
happier than atheists. But all this together explains only a small
portion of the variations in happiness. People living in rich countries
are much happier than those living in poor countries, though, possibly because differences in wealth are far greater between than
within countries. Making the poor richer makes them happier, but
making the rich even richer does little to boost their happiness.
Someone should tell that to the politicians!4
Genes are more important than money. In one study of adult
twins the subjects responded to a subjective-well-being questionnaire
twice, 4.5 to 10 years apart. Their happiness levels at these two
points in time were quite different, indicating that either happiness is
not very stable over time or the measurement of happiness was
inaccurate.
The heritability of happiness during the rst assessment was
modest, but combining the two assessments revealed that 80 percent
of the individual differences in the stable component of happiness
were genetic. Although current happiness depends on the triumphs
and catastrophes of the past few months, average happiness over a
lifetime depends heavily on genes!
Even the subjective well-being of zoo chimpanzees, as judged by
their caretakers, was found to be highly heritable. One of the
investigators pointed out that this means we can breed happier
chimps.5 What about breeding happier people?
Without selective breeding or gene therapy we depend on chemical
crutches. If mood is regulated like blood pressure, then the use of
mood-improving drugs is no different from the use of blood pressure
pills. The only difference is that nobody wants an extreme blood
pressure, but many people want to feel extremely good. Stimulants
and narcotics being in ill repute, we have to nd something less
offensive and more protable, properly patented and promoted:
listen to Prozac!
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In Gods Image?
lions, tigers and bears topped the list of things they feared. Hardly
any child mentioned the real dangerous things, such as cars, germs
and electrical outlets.
Adults with simple phobias have irrational fears of specic objects
or situations. The most common phobias are about snakes and
spiders, social situations, being in open places (agoraphobia), in
small closed places (claustrophobia) or at great height (acrophobia).
Flower phobias, by contrast, are rare. Our brain seems to be programmed to fear exactly those objects and situations that were
dangerous in the world of our ancestors.
Rhesus monkeys in the wild are afraid of snakes, but many captive
monkeys are not. They have to learn their fear. When an infant
monkey sees a snake, it will look from the snake to the mother, or to
any other monkey that happens to be nearby. If the adult shows no
sign of fear, the infant calms down; if the adult jumps and screams, the
infant does the same. The lesson sticks, for the monkey who learned
its snake fear by observation will fear snakes throughout its life.7
This combination of joint attention and emotional contagion is
called social referencing. It shows how instincts are really learning
dispositions. Fear of snakes is learned more easily than fear of
owers, but most of the time it is learned socially by observation.
On page 36 I attributed the social stereotyping of ethnic groups to
implicit associative learning: the thoughtless picking-up of regularities in the world. This is not the whole story. The other part of the
story is that our ancestors lived in social groups that competed one
against the other. They had to learn about other human groups
easily, for the same reason that monkeys have to learn about snakes
easily. And because learning about strangers by personal experience
can be dangerous, they evolved a knack for copying the prejudice of
other group members.
In Gods Image?
his illness. Everyone expected him to return to his family, resume his
work, and live happily ever after.
But nothing was as it had been before. One problem was a loss of
initiative. He had to be prompted to get out of bed and go to work,
and at work he had to be given detailed instructions for tasks that he
had previously been able to organize himself easily. When working
on a complex task, he would do individual steps accurately but lose
sight of the overall project. When sorting documents pertaining to a
client, he would start reading an unimportant document and keep on
reading for the rest of the day rather than doing what he had
planned to do. His actions were stimulus-bound, rather than
internally guided. This would be just ne for an assembly-line
worker, but for a mid-level manager it spells disaster.
Although Elliot did not seem to notice his shortcomings spontaneously, he did acknowledge his mistakes when they were pointed
out to him. But despite his insight he was unable to learn from his
mistakes, and his employment was soon terminated. Since then he
kept drifting from one job to another.
He also lost the ability to make prudent decisions about his life.
He could no longer plan ahead for a day, much less for the months
and years of his future. Being unemployable in his previous occupation, he embarked on risky business ventures that ended in predictable bankruptcy. There was a divorce, and a new marriage
followed by another divorce. How could a knowledgeable, experienced person like Elliot be so foolish?
What he had lost was not intelligence but judgment. In the psychology lab he was still good at all those things he couldnt get right
in his life: plan nances, predict other peoples reactions in hypothetical social situations, and make commonsensical moral judgments. He could think straight and he understood what was expected
of him, but he couldnt translate his insights into action.
The failure to act on ones better insight is called goal neglect. It
is seen not only in brain-damaged patients but also in normal people,
especially those with low intelligence. Lots of people smoke, drink or
commit crimes despite their better insight. They may invent rational
reasons for their irrational actions, but Elliot seems to have lost even
this ability.10
Elliot had lost the interface between emotion and cognition. He
could still respond to simple emotional stimuli. He could be annoyed
by a distressing noise, and generate the expected autonomic
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In Gods Image?
a new job you have to represent your current situation in your mind
and compare it with the job you are applying for. You should
evaluate every part of these mental models for its desirability: the
kind of work, your relations with your boss and colleagues, pay,
overtime work, the distance of your workplace from your home,
opportunities for professional advancement, and so on. Elliot makes
foolish choices because he cannot attach the appropriate feelings to
his perceptions, thoughts, conjectures and fantasies.12
Thoughts as well as perceptions function as key stimuli that trigger
emotions, guide attention and press for action. There are many
different emotions pressing for different kinds of action. We need a
parliament of instincts to make the nal decision. Simple-minded
animals resolve these conicts by majority vote, with stronger action
tendencies suppressing weaker ones: sex inhibits disgust, fear inhibits
sex, and fear and anger inhibit each other in some situations but not
others.
Large-brained animals know how to integrate conicting motivations into a single course of action. A child who tries to do well in
school does so for many unrelated reasons: conformity, the avoidance of disapproval or physical punishment, a desire to be like the
adults, and anxiety about an uncertain future after failing in school.
Going to school is not an instinctive behavior, but it is motivated by
a coalition of basic needs and desires that are programmed into the
brain.
In Gods Image?
This patient has the ancient instincts of aggression and sex but is
defective in love, respect, devotion, caring, compassion, guilt, shame
and embarrassment. This makes her incapable of social learning. She
cannot weight her options and plan her actions according to her
emotional needs; nor can she take account of other peoples emotional needs. Elliot still knows the rules of the social game although
he can no longer apply them, but M.H. never learned them.
Sociopaths like M.H. are fairly common, populating prisons and
placing a burden on social and psychiatric services. Do all these
crooks and cranks have frontal lobe damage? Sociopaths of the
common garden variety have no obvious brain damage, but many
test abnormally on psychological tests that are used to identify
patients with frontal lobe damage. Most criminals have poor selfcontrol like those with frontal lobe damage, and there even are
reports of reduced gray matter volume or reduced metabolic activity
in frontal brain regions. Also many drug addicts have the same
decision-making defects as neurological patients.14
There is no difference between brain dysfunction, psychiatric
disorder and bad character. If our diagnostic tools show brain
damage, we call it a neurological disorder. If not, its bad character.
We can also use a psychiatric label such as antisocial personality
disorder. Bad character is an abnormality of brain function. Or
else we have to blame it on evil spirits but spirits are not
parsimonious.
Who is in charge?
Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are
conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes
whereby those actions are determined. (Baruch dEspinoza
(Spinoza), Ethics)
Most people believe that rational choice produces voluntary action.
And yet, the goal neglect of neurological patients and some normal
people shows that insights are not always translated into action. One
part of the brain knows what should be done, but a different part
acts.
Split-brain patients illustrate this point. In split-brain surgery, the
ber bundles that connect the left and right cerebral hemispheres are
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In Gods Image?
Figure 4.1 Rationalization of choice in a split-brain patient. For
explanation, see text. (Gazzaniga and LeDoux, 1978)
In Gods Image?
As long as everything works smoothly we can maintain the illusion
that the thinker is in the drivers seat, but when some of the modules
drop out, as in Elliots case, the illusion collapses. The subjective
impression of free will only demonstrates our inability to introspect
the causes of our thoughts and actions.
Whether conscious or not, brain events are physical events. Our
100 billion neurons are 100 billion billiard balls, all moving at the
same time. There is no place for freedom, and certainly no place for
uncaused causes. Its all causes and effects, events and their
consequences.
You may object that the world of quantum mechanics is not
deterministic but probabilistic. Radioactive isotopes decompose with
a predictable probability, but the decay of an individual atom is not
predictable by any known causal rule. And, who knows, perhaps the
origin of a new universe is a probabilistic rather than deterministic
event although theologians will dispute this point.
We tend to think of determinism and freedom as opposites
because in the domain of social cognition we have a concept a
cognitive template of compulsion that is linked to aggressive and
avoidance responses, adversarial thinking and aversive emotional
states. The opposite is called freedom. We are prone to map the
concept of physical determinism on this template not realizing that
uncaused causes cannot produce free will. In this universe, the
opposite of determinism is not freedom but randomness.
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5
The Logic of Nature
What a book a devils chaplain might write on the clumsy,
wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature!
(Charles Darwin)
Things are the way they are because they got that way. Thats called
evolution. Evolutionary biology is an existentialist science dealing
with life and death. But unlike the existentialist philosopher, the
evolutionary biologist is not interested in the lives and deaths of
individual bodies, or the brains that inhabit the bodies, or the souls
that inhabit the brains that inhabit the bodies. It is not the individual, but the succession of bodies with brains that is the subject of
evolutionary biology.
Aside from the soul, the only immortal parts of the body are the
double-stranded coils of DNA, the stuff from which the genes are
made and the blueprint for the construction of bodies and brains
(though not necessarily souls). The bodies and brains that we see
today exist because the DNA that makes them still exists; and the
DNA still exists because the bodies it made in the past were able to
survive and procreate. They were the fastest runners in the great
relay race of life. The body is the DNAs way of making more DNA,
much as the hen is the eggs way of making more eggs.1
There is nothing inherently good or bad, valuable or worthless
about life and death, existence and nonexistence. These value
judgments are only in our brains. They got wired into our neural
networks by the forces of biological evolution to keep us on the track
of life. But you have to drop them, or else you will understand
nothing.
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In Gods Image?
The Red Queen
The Red Queen took her hand and led her on a wild run. When
they had stopped they were right where they had started, and
the Red Queen explained why: Now here, you see, it takes all
the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want
to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as
that! (Louis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)
We have two sets of about 30,000 genes each: one from mom, and
one from dad. These genes construct bodies with brains by controlling the synthesis of the bodys proteins. Actually, only 1.3 percent of our DNA codes for proteins. Most of the rest is useless junk
DNA: dead weight that we carry with us only because natural
selection was not strong enough to eliminate it.
If DNA is faithfully copied from generation to generation,
how can a species ever change? How can a sh evolve into a mammal, and an ape into a human? Any plumber can give you the
answer: nothing in the world is perfect. No matter how well designed
things are, sometimes they break. What is true for water pipes is also
true for DNA. Whenever the 3 billion base pairs of our genome are
copied, a few little errors creep in. These random errors are called
mutations, and their consequences can be tragic. Sickle cell disease,
cystic brosis, hemophilia, deafness, muscular dystrophy and a host
of other genetic diseases are caused by mutations in a single gene
that cause the production of a defective protein. At least one out of
200 children is born with a serious single-gene disorder. Another one
in 200 is born with a chromosome aberration, as in Downs syndrome which is caused by an extra copy of one of the smaller
chromosomes.
Many mutations cause a disease only when they are present in two
copies. Mutants who also carry a normal copy of the gene are
healthy. These recessive mutations are transgenerational time bombs
that go unnoticed for many generations before they cause serious
disease in an unlucky child who inherits two copies, one from each
parent.
Disease-causing mutations keep the doctors busy, but they are not
the stuff of which evolution is made. Indeed, the reason why serious
genetic diseases are not more common than they are is that many
patients are too sick to reproduce. Therefore their mutations die with
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In Gods Image?
Evolutionary change
The natural world is rampant with awed designs that reect the
trouble evolution has had turning one form into another, such
as a quadruped into a biped. (Frans de Waal)
Genes for schizophrenia and genes for homosexuality are genetic
variants that increase the likelihood of becoming schizophrenic or
homosexual, compared to alternative variants of the same gene.
Some of these genes for are freak mutations that remain rare
because they get selected out of the gene pool, but others are common because they do something good. Genes, like drugs, have many
side-effects.
The real interesting question about a gene that increases a mans
chance of becoming homosexual from, say, 2 percent to 5 percent, is:
What else does it do? Does it increase intelligence? Or stimulate
maternal behavior in women? Or does it make the men more
cooperative? Perhaps it increases the likelihood of homosexuality
only in men who carry two copies of it but makes those who carry a
single copy more fertile. Whenever a genetic variant occurs at fairly
high frequency in the population, you can bet its there for a reason!
Truly useful mutations are rare, and most of the time their effects
are so subtle that it takes hundreds or thousands of generations
before a genetic innovation has spread through the species. We are
designed to function properly, and the chance of improvement by a
random mutation is about as great as the chance of improving the
functioning of a computer by blindly poking in its innards with a
screwdriver.4
Mother Nature has no foresight. If an improvement requires a
combination of several new mutations but each mutation in isolation
is maladaptive, it cant be done. We have a tness valley that cannot
be crossed.
This point is illustrated by a small, faraway country called Moronia. Although the Moronians are peaceful people, there are more
guns than people in the country and lots of people die in gun-related
accidents and crimes. And yet, the Moronians cannot get rid of their
guns. If guns were outlawed, decent folks would surrender their guns
and criminals would hold back theirs. Armed criminals could prey
on unarmed citizens. Eventually the police would conscate the guns
of all criminals as well, but the Moronians elect their president every
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In Gods Image?
We may be heading in the same direction. But most species do not
evolve into less complex forms. They simply die out. An average
animal species survives only for 1 million years or so before it disappears from the scene. Most of the species that lived as recently as 5
million years ago have no living descendants. In nature, death is the
rule, survival the exception.
Some species have changed very little. The deep-sea dwelling
coelacanth, for example, is a sh whose anatomy has not changed
much since the time of the rst land vertebrates. At the other end of
the scale are our crop plants and domestic animals. Both the Chihuahua and the St Bernard are the descendants of a Chinese race of
wolf that was presumably rst domesticated about 15,000 years ago.7
What distinguishes coelacanths from dogs is the selective pressure
imposed by the environment. Coelacanths have been living in the
same environment for 200 million years. Therefore the genes that
were good enough 200 million years ago are still good enough today.
Natural selection in an unchanging environment penalizes any
deviation from the status quo.
For dogs, by contrast, everything changed with domestication.
Suddenly some of the abilities that had been useful in the wild were
no longer needed, while others became important: docility, good
looks and the ability to digest the inferior food that their human
masters left for them. Suddenly, natural selection was pushing them
in a new direction. The deliberate selection of domestic animals by
people who had at least a crude grasp of the principle of inheritance
began only later, long after the rise of the rst civilizations.
Humans are more like dogs than like coelacanths: a transitional
entity in the history of life, not only racked by the spasms of cultural
fads and fashions but also subject to the insidious workings of
directional selection in the articial environments we have created
for ourselves.
Suicidal genes
No one man in a billion, when taking his dinner, ever thinks of
utility. He eats because the food tastes good and makes him
want more. If you ask him why he should want to eat more of
what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher he
will probably laugh at you for a fool. (William James, Psychology: briefer course, 1892)
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In Gods Image?
degree of obesity that reduces their chance of nding a mate. And
this is indeed bad for their genes!
The modern practice of contraception is even more damaging.
Evolutionary theory predicts that animals produce offspring as fast
as they can and thats exactly what they do, as any owner of a
female pet cat knows only too well. But we are different. We enjoy
sex while avoiding babies.
The reason for this bizarre aberration is revealed by an observation of the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. In the early
years of the twentieth century, Malinowski spent several years with
the natives of the Trobriand Islands, off the coast of New Guinea.
The Trobrianders were a seafaring people of Melanesian origin, with
an economy based on shing, gardening and the periodic exchange
of gifts. They were an anthropologists dream. Unspoiled by outside
inuences, they provided a window on the thinking of humans in a
state of nature.
The sexual behavior of the Trobrianders was quite typical for our
species. Teenagers went through a succession of sexual adventures,
and adults spent most of their lives in monogamous marriage. Wives
were expected to be faithful to their husbands, and husbands were
expected to be sometimes unfaithful to their wives.
One day Malinowski saw how a Trobriander, returning from a
two-year voyage to neighboring islands, was cheerfully greeting his
wife and the baby son she presented to him. Too polite to ask the
man himself, Malinowski asked one of the other Trobrianders why
the returning husband was not upset at his wifes indelity.
The Trobriander did not understand Malinowskis point, and
eventually it turned out that the Trobrianders did not see a birth
under these circumstances as evidence of indelity. It is true, Malinowski was told, that a virgin cannot conceive. But otherwise,
sexual intercourse is not required. A woman gets pregnant when an
ancestral spirit decides to return to the earth. His interlocutor
pointed out a woman who was inordinately ugly. Every man in the
village was rm that he never had sexual relations with her. And yet,
she had a child. This, he was told, proves that sex is not required for
pregnancy.8
The Trobrianders were unusual. Almost all simple societies studied by anthropologists did know that sexual intercourse leads to
pregnancy. Besides the Trobrianders, only some Australian aborigines were unaware of the connection. Also, all of Malinowskis
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twice the size of her own, she will incubate the plaster egg rather than
her own.
Perhaps the peahen likes showy tails because all peahens like
showy tails. A son tends to resemble his father because he got half of
his genes from him. Mating with a sexy male increases the likelihood
of sexy sons, and sexy sons are likely to produce more grandchildren.
The logic of nature is circular! This runaway sexual selection is not in
the best interest of the species. It only benets the genes that give the
males beautiful tail feathers, and those that make the females prefer
these tail feathers.
Good genes could be another reason. Poor nutrition and chronic
infections impair feather growth, diarrhea soils the tail, and moths
and mites can literally eat the males beauty. By insisting on an
impeccable tail and unrufed feathers, the female selects a male who
can resist the ever-present threats of parasites and malnutrition.
Such a male is likely to have a low mutational load, and his good
genes will benet her offspring. There is indeed evidence that the
offspring of males with the most beautiful tails have a better survival
chance than those of less attractive sires.9
Mate choice for good genes does not explain why sheer size and
elaborate colors should be important. A more economically designed
male could just as well be inspected for signs of good genes by the
choosy female. Even if we could ask the peahen, she couldnt give us
the answer. All she knows is that huge, colorful tail feathers on a
male are sexy. Mother Nature gives her children feelings, but she
does not tell them why.
In Gods Image?
object that their children compete more and cooperate less than they
should if they share 50 percent of their genes, and they are right. It is
likely that during the millions of years of human evolution, most
siblings were actually half-siblings. Half-siblings share only 25 percent of their genes. You have to save four half-siblings, not just two,
to break even!
We never evolved a reliable capability for kin recognition, and
unless you get a DNA test from a paternity lab you will never know
how much you should love your brother. We are merely programmed to love those with whom we are very familiar, and also
those who are similar to us.12 There has always been a high probability that such people are relatives.
Boundless love
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. (Matthew 22, 39)
No altruism gene is lost when you sacrice your life to save the life of
an identical twin. Therefore you should love your identical twin like
yourself. But in reality, total altruism occurs not even among identical twins. It could not evolve because identical twins were too rare
among our ancestors. To evolve total altruism by natural selection,
we would have to live for tens of thousands of years in groups of
genetically identical individuals from the cloning lab that compete
against other clones for reproductive opportunities.
We dont have to wait so long to see boundless love. As the
genetically identical descendants of the fertilized egg, the cells of our
body are a community of clonemates that competes with other such
communities for reproductive opportunities. Therefore they are
unconditional altruists. They willingly restrain their growth to
comply with the needs of their neighbors. Many even die dutifully
during fetal development, committing suicide by programmed cell
death when they are no longer needed.
If our cells were not genetically identical, embryonic development
would be a mess. All cells would scramble for access to the gonads,
for only the genes in the germ line are immortal. This is the reason
why all truly multicellular organisms that evolved on this planet are
made up of genetically identical cells.
This harmony of boundless altruism or tyranny, as we would call
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In Gods Image?
you dont, he goes free and you get ve years (Figure 5.1). What
should you do?
Figure 5.1 Pay-off matrix in the prisoners dilemma. The squares show
what I get.
To get the best overall result, you should both stay mum and
accept a total of two years. But for you, it is always best to confess. If
your friend stays mum you go free rather than serving a year; and if
he confesses you get only three years instead of ve. Either way,
defection is better than cooperation.
The prisoners dilemma can be played not only for years in prison
but also for money or, if you want to model evolution, the number of
offspring. The essential conditions are that cheating pays no matter
what your partner does, and that the overall outcome of mutual
cooperation is better than the overall outcome after defection by one
or both partners.
Cooperation will always lose in the prisoners dilemma as long as
only a single round is played. But what if the situation repeats itself
again and again? The iterated prisoners dilemma game can be
modeled on the computer. You can generate digital creatures that
always cooperate, always defect, or use more complex decision rules.
Robert Axelrod, a political scientist at the University of Michigan,
did exactly this. He even invited game theorists to submit strategies
for the iterated prisoners dilemma game, and pitted these strategies
against each other in his computer. It was already known that
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In Gods Image?
One nal requirement is the absence of strong dominance hierarchies. Why should you bother with the give-and-take of social
exchange if you are strong enough to steal with impunity? In the real
world, tit-for-tat never rules supreme. It is only one of many strategies in social interactions.
Humans are bright enough to know that cooperation brings its
rewards. An employee works because he expects a paycheck at the
months end, and some merchants refrain from cheating their customers in expectation of future business. But this awareness of the
future is not a precondition for reciprocal exchange. Blood-sharing
vampire bats (see Box 5.1) may not have it. All that is needed is an
awareness of the past, combined with a few simple decision rules.
Tit-for-tat players need no more foresight than the digital creatures
in Axelrods computer.
BOX 5.1
Blood ties among vampires
The common vampire bat is one of the most cooperative animals
we know. In Central America, vampire bats spend their days in
hollow trees where clusters of up to a dozen females roost along
with several males. Every night the bats leave their roost to feed
on the blood of horses, cattle, and sometimes humans. Vampire
bats have a ravenous appetite, drinking 50% of their own weight
in blood every night. The greatest danger they face is starvation. A
bat will die if it goes without blood for two consecutive nights.
Typically, 7% of the adults and 30% of the less experienced
juveniles return empty stomached every morning. Without mutual
help, more than 80% of the adults and almost all juveniles would
starve to death every year, but actually the mortality is only 24%
per year. Female vampire bats can reach an age of 18 years.
The reason for their low mortality is this: the hungry bat begs for
food by stroking the bulging tummy of a more successful roostmate
who will then regurgitate part of its meal for its needy comrade.
This unselsh act can save the petitioners life without endangering
the blood donor. Unrelated bats have a buddy system, so that two
individuals regurgitate almost exclusively to each other. Because
female vampire bats feed their own young with blood and some of
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In Gods Image?
This greater-goodism of the early ethologists went unchallenged
until the Scottish zoologist Vero Wynne-Edwards formalized some
of its assumptions in his 1962 book Animal Dispersion in Relation to
Social Behaviour. Wynne-Edwards claimed that animals limit their
populations by self-imposed restraints on breeding, thereby preventing overpopulation and the depletion of their food resources.
Wynne-Edwardss favorite example was the red grouse, which he
had studied on the Scottish moors. The males of this species ght
over breeding territories early in the season. Most gain a territory
and can breed, but some dont. The losers simply give up, condemned to a bleak existence on the margins of the moor and an
almost certain death by slow starvation.
Why dont the defeated males try again and again until they drop?
Wynne-Edwards claimed that they dont try because their efforts, if
successful, would cause overcrowding and depletion of the food
resources. The unrestrained breeders get wiped out when their
population crashes, and neighboring populations of restrained
breeders come in to ll the vacuum.
This position was immediately attacked by game theorists who
showed that a gene for restrained breeding would rapidly go
extinct.19 Genes that benet the group with little or no detriment to
the individual can prosper, but genes that are clearly bad for the
individual cannot survive even if they are good for the group.
All of Wynne-Edwardss examples can be explained as instances of
genetic selshness. Why should a defeated red grouse try yet another
ght and risk serious injury if the chance of winning is minimal? To
make the best out of a bad situation, he should stick around and
preserve as much of his remaining strength as possible, hoping to usurp
a territory and a wife when one of the territory owners succumbs to
roundworm infestation or gets eaten by a fox or shot by a hunter.
Human birth control is neither an evolved behavior nor altruistic
in the psychological sense. It does not benet the local population
either, for in our time, contracepting populations become rapidly
supplanted by populations of unrestrained breeders.
We are also lacking any evolved behavioral mechanisms to protect
the natural resources on which we depend. We happily ravage the
planet without any thought of the consequences. The Lebanon
cedars that supplied the timber for the temple of Jerusalem and the
eets of ancient Egypt are no more. The Lebanon mountains have
turned into bare rocks, hardly able to support some grass and thorny
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In Gods Image?
children. This kind of altruism could and did evolve by kin selection.
But altruism for descendants who are not yet born could not evolve
because our early ancestors had no opportunity of helping them.
Kin-selected altruism depends on a personal bond. Therefore it
cannot even give us love for our own future children, let alone future
generations in the abstract. We could possibly translate kin-selected
altruism into transgenerational altruism by imagining future states
of the world along with the contingencies leading to these states, and
feeding these mental models into the emotional circuits that control
altruistic behavior. We would have to create imaginary personal
bonds with people who do not yet exist.
Cognitive-emotional acrobatics of this kind is too much for most
humans at their current stage of cognitive and moral evolution. One
problem is that cognition and emotion would both have to work in
full gear at the same time, but they usually inhibit each other.22
Cognitive engineers should rewire the human brain so that strenuous
thinking suppresses only the selsh and aggressive emotions but not
the altruistic ones!
Reciprocity is even less suited than kin-selected altruism as a
source of concern for the future, because our descendants can never
repay us for the sacrices we make for them. What has the future
ever done for me?
Concern for future generations will always have a lunatic touch.
People recognize that it is a misapplication of our altruistic instincts,
just as sadism is a misapplication of the sexual instinct. Altruism
evolved only for relatives and friends. Extending it to strangers
with the exception of terrorists and other assorted enemies is
considered acceptable and even laudable in modern societies, but any
further departure from the natural situation is perceived as deviant.
In Gods Image?
are still there because they were hard enough to resist the water while
others were ground to grit. And yet, we nd the selsh-gene metaphor titillating because it triggers a cognitive routine that we use for
thinking about people.
Another reasoning error is known as the naturalistic fallacy. It
states, in simple terms, Its natural, therefore its good. If people
used to live without the complexities of civilization since time
immemorial, then the natural life is good; if evolution is a struggle
for survival, than the struggle for survival is good; if we evolved to
take advantage of others, then we should take advantage of others.
This direct translation of an is statement into an ought statement is contrary to formal logic. Nevertheless, a statement such as If
it is universal in nature, its all right is similar to our most fundamental social algorithm: If it is universally practiced in my community, its all right. We take this social algorithm for granted
because we are born conformists, and unthinkingly we transfer our
conformity from the social to the physical domain.
Again the thinker works with two supercially similar mental
models, one about nature and its rule-governed goings-on, and the
other about human society and its rule-governed goings-on. He does
not necessarily collapse the two models into one, but stuffs them into
the same mental le folder and in the process transfers a value tag
from one to the other. This creates the idea of a moral world order
that can be rationalized by claiming that God made both the natural
and the social order, and therefore both must be good.
Out of pure malice I invited you to commit the naturalistic fallacy
by describing certain modern behaviors, such as science and contraception, as bizarre aberrations that are maladaptive and dysfunctional. Common folks use such labels for various kinds of social
pathology. But in evolutionary biology they only mean that the
genes that form the psychological structures on which the behavior is
based are no longer selected for, but selected against, provided
alternative genetic variants are available in the gene pool that
hamper the development of these structures.
If contraception is favored by high intelligence or a sense of personal control over ones life or a preference for competitive rather
than nurturant activities, then, everything else being equal, the genes
favoring these traits will become less frequent in the population.
Whether thats desirable or not is a different question altogether.
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6
Origins
Mans derived supremacy over the earth; mans power of
articulate speech; mans gift of reason; mans free-will and
responsibility . . . all are equally and utterly irreconcilable
with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was
created in the image of God . . .
(Samuel Wilberforce, 1860)1
Biologists distinguish between analogies and homologies. Analogous
structures have similar functions but different origins. The bird wing
and the insect wing are analogous. Homologous structures have the
same origin although they may have acquired different functions.
The bird wing and the human hand are homologous.
The same applies to behavior. Konrad Lorenz marveled at the
human-like social bonds of graylag geese.2 But human love and
goose love are unrelated. They evolved independently because the
common ancestor of humans and geese a lizard-like creature that
lived 250 million years ago most likely lacked stable social bonds.
Also chimpanzees have human-like social bonds. But chimps and
humans are the descendants of an ape-like creature that lived as
recently as 6 to 7 million years ago. Therefore chimpanzee love and
human love most likely have a common origin and are produced by
homologous brain structures.
Degrees of relatedness
It is dangerous to make man see too clearly his equality with the
brutes without showing him his greatness. It is also dangerous
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In Gods Image?
to make him see his greatness too clearly, apart from his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of
both. (Blaise Pascal, 1670)
Mutations in the non-coding junk DNA are not removed by natural
selection and therefore accumulate over evolutionary time. They
form a molecular clock that tells us how closely two species are
related. The greater the differences in the junk DNA of two species
are, the more distant is their last common ancestor.
Along with the fossil record, the molecular clock shows that Old
World monkeys diverged from the human lineage between 25 and 35
million years ago, orang-utans 12 to 16 million years ago, gorillas 8
or 9 million years ago, and chimpanzees 6 or 7 million years ago.
With 98.7 percent DNA sequence identity between human and
chimp, the chimpanzee is more closely related to us than to the
gorilla. The genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees is
about as great as the distance between blue whale and n whale,
horse and donkey, or rhesus monkey and baboon. These species
pairs can produce viable inter-species hybrids. Does this mean that a
cross between human and chimp is possible?
Perhaps, but the scientic value of this experiment would be
limited because the hybrid will most likely be sterile. During human
evolution two ape chromosomes fused to produce human chromosome #2. Therefore we have only 23 pairs of chromosomes while
apes have 24. A hybrid will have 47 chromosomes, and many of its
gametes will contain an unbalanced set of chromosomes that produces a non-viable fetus. There are also other chromosomal differences that are likely to impair the fertility of the hybrids.3 A better
way of nding out which of our genes make us human would be to
produce chimps who have some of their genes or chromosomes
replaced by those from humans, or humans who have some of their
genes or chromosomes replaced by those from chimps.
Should a humanape hybrid be considered human? Should he
have the legal status of a person, or should it be an object that can be
owned as property? What makes a humanchimp hybrid interesting
are not the insights it gives us into the nature of species differences,
but the insights it gives us into the nature of our thinking.
When you travel into the past with your time machine, stopping
every 100,000 years, you will meet creatures that are less and less
human and more and more ape. And when one of our descendants, 5
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Origins
million years into the future, does the same, he will look in vain for
the dividing line between his humanity and our animality.
In Gods Image?
Modern people are so used to birth control that they are rarely
aware of the mechanisms of natural fertility. The two important
factors are breast-feeding and nutrition. A healthy, well-fed mother
resumes menstruation and ovulation within a year after birth, even
with continued breast-feeding. But if the mother is in poor health or
suffers chronic undernutrition, continued breast-feeding can delay
the resumption of fertile cycles for years, in humans as well as apes.5
Well-fed orang-utans in captivity and well-fed humans in naturalfertility populations give birth every two years.
The orang-utan father is conspicuously absent. And why should
he bother? The mother can raise his child alone. She is infertile for
many years after conception, so he has to roam the jungle to nd
fertile females elsewhere. Although most bird fathers help raising the
brood, more than 90 percent of mammals have father-absent
families.6 This is old mammalian heritage. The rst mammals had no
paternal care, or else lactation would have evolved in males as well as
females, and men as well as women would have breasts. Once
female-only lactation had evolved, it was a barrier for the evolution
of paternal care because the father was useless for feeding the brood
anyway. Feminist genetic engineers should introduce genes for male
lactation into our species!
Female orang-utans stay in the area where they were born but the
males stray off after puberty, roaming the jungle in search of food
and mates. In all animals either the males or the females or both
leave the place of their birth. This is necessary because inbreeding is
hazardous to the offsprings health. In our species incest is not
recommended because about half of the children from matings
between father and daughter or brother and sister are seriously
abnormal. Even the children of rst cousins have mildly increased
mortality.7
Because female orang-utans spend most of their adult lives pregnant or nursing, receptive females are rare in the jungle. Once an
adult male has located a sexy female he will follow her for some days
to get her used to his presence, and copulate when she is ready. When
there is more than one adult male around, they have to ght it out.
Seasoned males can often be distinguished from one another by scars
and lasting deformities from their past ghts.
You may have wondered why orang-utan males are so much
bigger than the females, although the females must be strong for the
rigors of pregnancy and lactation while the males only copulate. The
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Origins
only reason is that the males have to ght over the females! The male
expends only 200 milligrams of protein, 1 milligram of zinc, and
trivial amounts of other nutrients in each ejaculate, plus a few calories for muscular activity during copulation. With this low investment, his priority is to copulate with as many females as possible.
And because every male has the same priority, they have to ght.
Any gene that increases a male orang-utans size and ghting
power is selected for. Some of these genes make only the males
bigger, but others make both males and females bigger. As a result,
orang-utans are too big for their ecological niche. Their large size
limits their mobility in the trees, and a big body needs more food
than a small one. A fruit tree that could support a whole troop of
small monkeys cannot feed more than one or two orang-utans at a
time. Orang-utans pay a high price for their imposing size: a solitary
lifestyle, long birth intervals, and a place on the list of endangered
species.
Not all male orang-utans use the same strategy. Younger, smaller,
subadult males dont ght. When an adult male consorts a female,
the subadults keep out of his way. But they are never far, always
ready to jump in for a quick copulation when the big guy turns his
back.
Mature females dont like these sneaky fuckers although they
copulate willingly with the big males. But the subadults have a
simple solution for this problem. If the female doesnt want him, the
male simply rapes her. Orang-utans are among the few primate
species where forced copulations are common. Some males never
seem to grow up, and they use the sneak-and-rape strategy
throughout their lives. This type of behavior is illustrated by an
unusual report about the ex-captive orang-utan Gundul:
One day, I went to the platform with a visitor from North
America and one of the cooks. When Gundul arrived, he ate a
little but seemed distracted. Suddenly Gundul grabbed the cook
by the legs and wrestled her down to the platform, biting at her
and pulling at her skirt. I had never seen Gundul threaten or
assault a woman, although he frequently charged male assistants. The cook was screaming hysterically. I thought, Hes
trying to kill her. I had a vision of Gundul tossing the cook off
the platform into the shoulder-deep swamp water and drowning
her.
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In Gods Image?
I attacked Gundul with all my strength, trying to jam my st
down his throat. I shouted to the visitor to take the dugout back
to Camp Leakey for help. My repeated blows had no effect on
Gundul; but neither did he ght back very aggressively. I began
to realize that Gundul did not intend to harm the cook, but had
something else in mind. The cook stopped struggling. Its all
right, she murmured. She lay back in my arms, with Gundul on
top of her. Gundul was very calm and deliberate.
He raped the cook. As he moved rhythmically back and
forth, his eyes rolled upward to the heavens. I was in shock. I
felt as though this were happening to other people somewhere
else, and I was watching from a distance. I have no idea how
much time passed.
Gundul let the cook go, stood up, and, soundlessly, moved
off the feeding platform into the trees. It was over just like that.
The cook had a look of relief on her face; she seemed grateful to
have survived . . . Although badly shaken, the cook had not
been injured. Later, her husbands reaction gave me an insight
into Kalimantan thinking. It was just an ape, the husband
said. Why should my wife or I be concerned? It wasnt a man.8
This incident has been reported by Birute Galdikas, who has been
working with orang-utans in Kalimantan (Borneo) for many years.
It appears bizarre because most males, ape as well as human, are
sexually attracted only to females of their own species. Only they t
on the males sexy female template.
But Gundul had been raised in a human household before being
released into the wild at the research station of Camp Leakey, and
presumably he became imprinted on the women in this household. I
am not trying to excuse the apes behavior, but Indonesian women
are not much bigger than female orang-utans.
Origins
Unlike orang-utans, gorillas spend most of their time on the ground.
They have to, for with a weight of 200 pounds for females and 400
pounds for males they are the largest living primates. Although
scattered over wide areas of Africa, their populations are dwindling.
The mountain gorilla, which has been studied in more detail than the
other races, has been reduced to a few hundred individuals in the
Virunga Mountains at the border between Rwanda and the Congo.
Most gorillas live in family groups with a dominant silverback
male, some wives, and their offspring. Many groups contain one or
more junior males, but only the dominant silverback breeds. Gorillas
can afford this family structure because their efcient digestive system enables them to subsist on low-quality food. They stuff up to 40
pounds of greenery into their mouths every day, but their food
supply is so abundant that there is not much feeding competition.
Therefore relationships between the family members are peaceful,
relaxed and affectionate, except for occasional squabbles that are
adjudicated by the silverback. The females interact more with their
husband than with their co-wives, and they all defer equally to the
power of their silverback a feminists nightmare.
Both males and females are likely to leave their family at puberty.
A female can either join a lone silverback or transfer to an established
family group. An adolescent male can become a lone silverback or
join a bachelor group, but eventually he has to get married. There are
two ways to acquire a harem. Ideally, he succeeds in soliciting the
transfer of young females during peaceful encounters with established
families. Or else he can raid a group, chase off the resident silverback
and herd off one or more of the females. These incidents are rare, but
their effect on the victimized group can be devastating.
One unwritten law of gorilla society is this: if a new wife has an
infant already, it has to die. According to one count, infanticide by
males is responsible for 14 percent of all infant deaths in mountain
gorillas. This is most common after the death of a silverback when
the surviving family members are exposed to the encroachments of
roving males.
The logic of infanticide is crystal clear. The female is infertile until
two years after birth when the infant is weaned, but a mother who
loses her infant will start cycling within one or two months. By
killing her infant, the male not only eliminates a competitor of his
own children but also gains the opportunity to start reproducing
almost immediately.
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In Gods Image?
The males of our species are more civilized, but most prefer a
childless woman to one who has someone elses baby already.
Among the Yanomamo indians of the Amazon forest and the natives
of the Pacic island of Tikopia, a man may ask his bride to kill the
children from her previous union as a precondition for marriage.9
Untouched by feminist ideas, the gorilla female mates with the
baby-killer within weeks after the event. Emotions are programmed
into the brain by genes, and her genes have nothing to gain by
resisting his advances. The faster she gets pregnant again, the better.
Her next child will not be at risk because gorillas are exemplary
fathers who never harm their own brood.
She does not need her husband to feed or carry the child, but she
needs him for protection against other males. This is the nature of
gorilla love, and the origin of family life in this species. If we could
ask a female gorilla what qualities she values in a mate, she would
certainly say, He has to be strong.
Origins
supervised at Gombe, where she studied the behavior of the local
chimps. Human children have big brains!
Another remarkable feature of chimpanzees is their use of simple
tools. They use sticks to poke for termites, and stones to open hardshelled nuts; and branches are brandished and stones are thrown
during the charging displays of the males. There are true cultural
differences, since the patterns of tool use differ among
communities.10
A chimpanzee community is like a little village where everyone
knows everyone else. Each female has a core area where she spends
much of her time alone with her children, while grown males roam
all over the community range, usually in small groups. Only the
females emigrate at puberty. Therefore the males in the community
are genetically related but most of the adult females are unrelated.
Possibly for this reason, there is more cooperation among males than
among females.
The males have a clear hierarchy, and each chimpanzee community has a ruler who bears the royal title of alpha male. The alpha
male must be able to win ghts and impress others in wild charging
displays, but he is not always the ercest ghter in the forest. He
must also be able to secure support from others while isolating his
rivals. There is a lot of intrigue at the top of the hierarchy where the
more ambitious characters are found, and most alpha males are
overthrown by a coalition of rivals within a few years. Whole books
have been written about the political histories of chimpanzee
communities.
The will to power is important, but the need to be with others is
even stronger. Chimpanzees are extraverts. They are gregarious, and
sometimes they form special friendships. The term is anthropomorphic, but it is the closest we have in our vocabulary. Friends
groom each other, feed together, share food, warn each other when
danger is near, help each other when one is in trouble, and sometimes they embrace and kiss each other. Like humans, chimpanzees
have a keen sense of reciprocity in their social relations.11
Social grooming occurs in most primates, but kissing is customary
only among chimpanzees and humans. Kissing gives us an idea
about the evolutionary origin of friendship, for it is almost certainly
derived from mouth-to-mouth feeding, a behavior that occurs
between a mother and child in many primates.
Mothers cared for their children and children were attached to
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In Gods Image?
their mother since the time of the earliest mammals. Friendship was
created when attachment and caring were transferred from the
motherchild relationship to relationships between adults. In this
process some behaviors that were originally used by mothers only,
such as embracing the infant, grooming and feeding it, came to
reinforce relations between friends. Mother Nature does not create
new adaptations from scratch. She nds new uses for what is already
there.
Like human societies, chimpanzee communities are torn between
competition and cooperation. Group-living animals are attracted to
one another but they also compete for food, mates and money.
When chickens are penned up in a chicken yard there is much
ghting during the rst days, especially at feeding time. Gradually
the ghting subsides as a dominance hierarchy forms. Once a
chicken knows its place, it will no longer attack the strong guys but
assert itself against the weaklings.12 Dominance hierarchies are universal among group-living animals. An ethologist who is uncertain
about the dominance relationship of two monkeys can make the
peanut test: put a peanut between the two animals, and see who
grabs it.
The peanut test does not always work with chimpanzees because
the boss may choose to be generous to a subordinate. Dominance,
attachment and reciprocity are so closely interwoven in the chimpanzee mind that generosity becomes a way of securing the loyalty of
a subordinate. A forgone peanut is a small sacrice if you can get
sympathetic help during your next ght with a rival.
Male chimps have something more valuable than peanuts to
compete for: fertile females. The few females who are not pregnant
or nursing are in estrus for only ten days during their 35-day menstrual cycle. During these ten days they have gorgeous pink swellings
in the perineal region that are visible from a distance and are
absolutely irresistible for the males. Sexual swellings occur in many
primate species during estrus, although not in humans and orangutans.
Compared to gorillas and humans, male chimpanzees are models
of tolerance. They simply take turns copulating with the female.
They have to, for the grouping patterns in a chimpanzee community
are so uid that a male would not be able to control a female, let
alone a harem. The alpha male does have certain prerogatives,
though. He often tries to monopolize the most attractive females:
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Origins
those with the biggest swellings at the height of estrus who are most
likely to conceive. But he has to watch out, for there are always
youngsters around who try to sneak a copulation. A chimpanzee
copulation takes only ten seconds.
In the chimpanzee mating system, sperm from many males have to
compete for access to the egg. The males cope with sperm competition by adopting General Grants strategy, trying to reach the
battleeld the fastest with the mostest. Male chimpanzees have a
higher copulation rate, larger testes and a higher sperm count than
humans and gorillas.13
By sampling every male in the village the female runs a risk of
sexually transmitted diseases, and her children would be better off if
she would limit her activities to the males with the best genes. But she
has no choice. She has to be promiscuous because male chimpanzees
are xenophobic they really loathe strangers. They get along well
enough in their own tribe, but both males and unattractive females
from neighboring communities are attacked viciously. When the
female has an infant, often enough the infant is killed and sometimes eaten when the mother is attacked. Familiar females and
their infants are treated in a more gentlemanly manner. By spreading
her favors, the female makes herself thoroughly known to all males
in her community.
She can also sneak off during the peak of her attractiveness to visit
a neighboring community as a sex tourist. Her sexual swellings are
the passport that allows her to cross the border. Next time she runs
into one of the enemys border patrols, there will be at least one or
two who tell their comrades, I know her, shes okay. This does not
mean that she copulates out of fear. All she needs is lust. And thats
what Mother Nature gave her.
Female chimpanzees are as vulnerable to male harassment as
female gorillas, but they have found a different solution for the
problem. In gorillas the result is a family, and in chimpanzees a
tribe.14
The feminists
The womens effort has never been anything more than a
symbolic agitation . . . The reason for this is that women lack
concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can
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In Gods Image?
stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past,
no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such
solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat . . . They
live dispersed among the males, attached through residence,
housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain
men fathers or husbands more rmly than they are to other
women. (Simone de Beauvoir)
The females of most ape species have to suffer indignities from the
males that range all the way from displacement at feeding sites to
rape and infanticide. There is not one primate species in which
females dominate males with one exception. This exception is the
pygmy chimpanzee or bonobo. While common chimps used to roam
all over tropical Africa before their habitats got fragmented by
humans, wild bonobos live only in the forests of the Congo. Their
habitat is richer than that of the common chimpanzee, with largefruited trees that provide a reliable food supply year-round.
The most important difference between the two species is in their
sexual adaptations. Female chimpanzees are in estrus for only ten
days during their cycle, and they rarely have sexual swellings during
pregnancy and lactation. Bonobos, by contrast, are sexy for more
than 20 days every cycle, are sexually active during pregnancy, and
resume cycling within a year after birth although ovulation resumes
only at the end of lactation, three years after birth.
Like common chimpanzees the bonobos live in communities of
related males. But because their food supply is secure, the females
can afford to spend most of their time in sizable groups. This creates
opportunities for social interaction. And interaction there is. In
addition to mutual grooming and play, female bonobos enjoy genito-genital rubbing: two females clasp each other ventro-ventrally,
and rub their swollen genitals in rapid sideways movements. A
female immigrant can achieve a smooth transition by attaching
herself to one or a few older females in her new community. This is
very different from chimpanzees, where immigrant females have to
put up with hostility from the resident females.
Non-reproductive sex is rare in the animal kingdom. Bonobos use
sex to reinforce bonds between females, but gorillas (and some
humans) maintain lasting bonds between mates although copulations are infrequent. Perhaps their bonding pattern evolved earlier
and is more mature than the sexually-reinforced bonds of female
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Origins
bonobos, and the all-purpose glue of sex has been replaced in time by
more selective emotional adhesives.
While male chimpanzees form coalitions to dominate other males,
female bonobos use their solidarity to dominate the males. When a
mixed chimpanzee party nds a bunch of bananas, the males eat rst
and the females have to wait. When bonobos nd a bunch of
bananas, the females share the best fruits among themselves and the
males have to wait. Since most of the females are unrelated, their
cooperation must have evolved through the benets of reciprocity
rather than kin selection.
Male bonobos have a dominance hierarchy, but they rarely form
coalitions against other males. They dont have to. There is no need
to compete for attractive females because attractive females are
never in short supply. A male is better off sticking around the
females and copulating whenever an opportunity arises.15
Bonobos show us that a feminist paradise is possible. All it needs
are strong bonds between females, reinforced by genital rubbing.
Feminist genetic engineers should nd the genes that are responsible
for femalefemale bonding in bonobos and engineer them into the
human genome!
In Gods Image?
walking on two legs. Most of the threefold increase in brain size from
450 grams in the early hominids to 1350 grams in modern humans
took place during the past two million years.
Eventually, the place of these small-brained creatures was taken
by Homo erectus. With a height of up to 6 feet, H. erectus was larger
than the early hominids. He looked almost perfectly human from the
neck down, but his archaic face with its prominent brow ridges and
receding chin and forehead, and his smaller brain between 700 and
1,200 grams distinguish him from us.
We dont know where H. erectus came from; 1.8 million years ago
he suddenly popped up in Africa, Java, the Caucasus Mountains and
possibly China, complete with hand axes and other simple stone tools
that were more advanced than those used by earlier African hominids. He was probably the rst human to tame re. With this
advanced technology he dominated the scene until 600,000 years ago
when larger-brained humans rst appeared in Africa and Europe. In
Java he died out only 50,000 years ago, and on the Indonesian island
of Flores he evolved into a dwarf species with chimpanzee-sized body
and brain. These dwarves were still alive 18,000 years ago. They were
a human species that had reverted to a more ape-like state.16
In Europe, however, a trend for bigger brains produced the
Neandertal. Living in Ice Age Europe, the Neandertals had the
stocky physique that is typical for natives of cold climates, with thick
bones and tendon insertions suggesting enormous muscle strength.
But the most diagnostic differences are in the shape of the skull.
Neandertals had an undeveloped chin, conspicuous brow ridges, a
receding forehead, and a braincase that was widest at the base. The
average Neandertal brain was marginally bigger than the modern
European brain, but marginally smaller when adjusted for body size.
The Neandertals ruled Ice Age Europe until 40,000 to 30,000 years
ago when they were replaced by the Cromagnons, a race of fully
modern people. But where did these modern people come from?
Origins
A fossil may be either an ancestor or a blind alley of evolution, but
the DNA of living people must have been inherited from real
ancestors. Beginning in the late 1980s, the rst important studies
were done with mitochondrial DNA. The mitochondria are not only
the powerhouses of the cell but they also contain a small snippet of
DNA, only 17,000 base pairs long compared to the 3 billion base
pairs of nuclear DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is easily obtained in
quantity because it is present in thousands of copies in each cell, not
just two copies like the nuclear DNA. And unlike nuclear DNA, it is
inherited only from the mother.
The most striking nding was the great similarity between all
living humans. All mitochondrial DNA sequences could be traced to
a common female ancestor mitochondrial Eve who lived between
120,000 and 250,000 years ago. This does not mean that there was
only one woman living at that time. It only means that the mitochondrial DNA of all other women living at that time has died out.
This happens easily because a womans mitochondrial DNA will
die whenever she fails to produce a surviving daughter. In a very
small population say, an island population that is cut off from the
rest of the world for thousands of years most of the original
diversity gets lost by chance. Soon only the mitochondrial DNA of a
single female founder will remain. But in a large, continent-wide
population, many more lineages will survive and therefore the last
common ancestor of all surviving mitochondrial DNA will be in the
distant past.
The young age of mitochondrial Eve means that the human
population was small for many generations and probably many
millennia after she lived. Studies of the Y chromosome, which is
inherited only in the male line, show that Y-chromosomal Adam
lived at about the same time as mitochondrial Eve. Only long after
the time of Adam and Eve did the population expand.
Where did this small band of people come from who were destined
to become our ancestors, and when did they expand? When a
population expands into a new area, usually only a few move while
everyone else stays behind. Many genetic variants will not reach the
newly occupied areas although they survive in the old homeland.
Therefore our original homeland is, most likely, in that part of the
world where the genetic diversity among living people is greatest.
This area of greatest diversity is Africa. The excess diversity can
simply mean that the African population used to be larger than the
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In Gods Image?
populations of the other continents, but the genetic guesswork is
supported by the fossil record. The only fossils in the critical age
range of 120,000 to 70,000 years ago that looked similar to us and
could conceivably be our ancestors have been found in Africa and
the Levant.
The oldest fully modern fossils outside Africa are about 60,000
years old, and the modern human races evolved only after that time.
Indeed more than 90 percent of the non-selected diversity in the junk
DNA of modern humans is between individuals within the same
ethnic group, and less than 10 percent is between ethnic and racial
groups.17
Were the moderns brighter than the Neandertals? We cannot
administer IQ tests to Neandertals, but we can compare their stone
tools with those of the modern humans who displaced them. In the
Middle East there is no difference. Both human types used the same
toolkit, and the same caves where near-modern humans lived 90,000
years ago were occupied by Neandertals 30,000 years later.
In those days, anatomically modern humans represented a tropical
variant, and the Neandertals were a cold-adapted race that inhabited
the inhospitable regions of Ice Age Europe and the frigid mountains
north of the Fertile Crescent. For tens of thousands of years the
Middle East was a border territory between these two human types,
with Neandertals prevailing during the glacial maxima and moderns
during the warm interglacials.
Things look different in Europe. By the time the Cromagnons
began inltrating Ice Age Europe 47,000 years ago, their culture was
already clearly advanced over that of the local Neandertals. The two
human types then coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, until
the nal demise of the Neandertals 28,000 years ago. During this
time the Neandertals borrowed some cultural elements from the
advancing Cromagnons, but they never quite matched the Cromagnons sophistication.18
Did bloodthirsty Cromagnons exterminate the simple-minded,
peaceful Neandertals in an orgy of war and genocide? Not necessarily. Population replacements are not military but demographic
events. Lets assume that a tribe of 1,000 Cromagnons invaded a
continent that was inhabited by 100,000 Neandertals. And lets
assume that there was a 10 percent difference in reproductive rate
between the two populations. The average Neandertal woman raised
1.9 surviving children, and the average Cromagnon woman 2.1.
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Origins
What would be the situation 2,500 years later, assuming a generation
time of 25 years? You only need a pocket calculator to gure out that
after 100 generations there would be 600 Neandertals and 130,000
Cromagnons!
Population replacements are common in history. In many parts of
North America, the native Indians disappeared within a few generations. The Hottentots, who inhabited much of South Africa 300
years ago, no longer exist. The white South African population
stagnated during the second half of the twentieth century while the
black population doubled every 20 to 30 years. The birth rate of
Palestinian Arabs has been twice that of the local Jews for two
generations, and the Arab population of the West Bank has risen
from 1 million to 3.5 million over the past 40 years. After World War
I, Northern Ireland became British rather than Irish because 80
percent of the population were Protestant and only 20 percent
Catholic. By now the two religions are approaching parity because
the Catholics had a 40 percent higher birth rate than the Protestants
during the past three generations.19
These demographic trends are too slow to be newsworthy, but
they are the stuff of which history is made. Whenever two populations share the same country, the more prolic one prevails. What is
truly surprising is that Neandertals and Cromagnons could share
Europe for so many millennia. It shows that the Neandertals were
not wiped out suddenly by a new disease to which the Cromagnons
were resistant; the Cromagnons had no guns; and the Neandertals
had no condoms.
In prehistoric and early historic times, child mortality and the
effects of nutrition on female fertility were most important for the rise
and fall of human populations. Under civilized conditions, the same
is achieved by deliberate fertility control. Strangely, although today
fertility differentials are more important than war and genocide, most
people nd it easier to think of history in terms of war and genocide
than differential reproduction. Why should this be so?
One reason is stupidity. Violence has immediate consequences, but
differential reproduction has long-term consequences, and the prediction of immediate consequences requires less reasoning than the
prediction of long-term consequences. You dont need a pocket
calculator to gure out that genocide leads to population extinction!
Another limitation is that our attentional and motivational systems
evolved for situations where effective behavioral responses were
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In Gods Image?
possible. Our ancestors could kill their enemies, and they could guard
against being killed. Therefore human beings evolved a keen attention
to inter-group violence, wariness of being killed by strangers, and a
readiness to kill potentially dangerous strangers. If you dont believe
it, switch on the evening news! But our ancestors have never been able
to parachute condoms over enemy territory or sell their enemies food
laced with contraceptives. Until very recently they didnt even know
how baby-making works. Therefore they never evolved the ability to
perceive birthing as a hostile act of inter-group competition.
The Hottentots disappeared as an ethnic group, but their genes are
still alive in the mixed-race population of South Africa. And in the
unlikely case that current trends continue indenitely, there may be not
a single Palestinian Jew or white South African left 1,000 years from
now, but their genes will still be alive in the surviving populations.
The Neandertals, however, walked the earth and left no genetic
trace. Much as they tried, geneticists did not nd DNA variants
unique to Europeans that were inherited from them. Their mitochondrial DNA, at least, has gone for good. Pieces of mitochondrial
DNA from at least nine different Neandertal fossils have been
sequenced, and these sequences were very different from ours.20
Modern humans would not be as homogeneous as they are if there
had been substantial interbreeding with Neandertals.
Evolution takes place at three levels. First, there is the random
accumulation of genetic changes in the junk DNA. These mutations
do not matter for the organism that carries them but can be used as a
molecular clock to measure genetic relatedness. Second, there are
meaningful genetic changes that affect anatomy, physiology or
behavior. Third, there are genetic changes that prevent interbreeding
or reduce the tness of the hybrids: changes in the number or
structure of the chromosomes, and traits that interfere with mate
choice, fertilization, or fetal survival. Mutations of this kind can
create a new species.
Bigger is better
Some races increase, others are reduced, and in a short while the
generations of living creatures are changed and like runners
relay the torch of life. (Lucretius, De rerum natura)
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Origins
After adjustment for body size, the human brain is three times bigger
than a typical ape brain. Brain enlargement took place neither evenly
over time, nor all of a sudden. We can recognize two brain explosions, one about 2 million years ago at the transition from the
australopithecines to Homo erectus, and the other from 500,000 to
200,000 years ago at the transition from Homo erectus to Homo
sapiens.
Our big brain is a mixed blessing. It consumes at least 20 percent
of our metabolic energy, and it makes the infants head so large that
birth is difcult. To make birth possible at all, our babies are born at
an immature stage, and this increases the burden of child rearing for
the mother. Our brain could not have evolved to its present size
unless it provided its owner with sufcient advantages to offset these
enormous costs.
In general, those primate species that depend on hard-to-get, highquality food have big brains and small guts, and those that can
subsist on leaves have small brains and big guts. According to the
food-for-thought hypothesis, big brains evolved to locate scarce
food. Orang-utans, for example, are almost as smart as chimps
although they are solitary. They need a good brain to remember
when and where food can be found. Humans have a substandard
digestive system that makes them dependent on high-quality food,
but that doesnt explain why we are so much brighter than orangutans.
Big brains also go with complex social systems. According to the
Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, a cognitive arms race results
from the demands of alliance formation, cooperation, cheating and
cheater detection. We certainly have complex social systems, but this
does not explain why we are so much brighter than chimps. There
must have been additional incentives for brain evolution.21 Most of
our excess brainpower is used for two related functions: language
and intelligent reasoning. Therefore human brain evolution was
most likely driven by either the benets of talking or those of
thinking.
Brain evolution follows a simple pattern. Whenever brains become
big, the forebrain enlarges more than the brainstem, within the
forebrain the neocortex enlarges more than the limbic cortex, and
the frontal cortex enlarges more than the posterior cortex.22 This
means that everything else being equal, a big-brain gene will improve
both language and thinking. If such a gene is selected for because it
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In Gods Image?
improves language ability, reasoning ability will increase as a sideeffect; and if it is favored because it improves reasoning, language
will improve as a side-effect.
Apes cannot talk because their vocal tract cannot produce the
sounds of human speech, but they can be trained to communicate
through sign language or through the use of lexigrams on a keyboard. Apes of all species can learn about 100 signs, and they use
them in the appropriate context. They can produce two-word and
three-word combinations, but no true sentences.
Language comprehension is easier than speech. Some bonobos
that were exposed to spoken English from an early age learned to
understand words. One of them even distinguished between syntactic
structures, for example Make the doggie bite the snake versus
Make the snake bite the doggie. Like humans, bonobos can develop
speech comprehension only during early childhood but not as adults,
and they develop it not by effortful training but incidentally by daily
exposure. Human-raised bonobos can achieve a level of speech
comprehension similar to a 2-year-old child.
Disappointingly, conversations with language-trained apes are not
very intellectual. Most of the time they use their skills to request
things, such as Gimme juice, or Tickle me. Sometimes they name
spontaneously the things they see, and they can even use signs or
lexigrams to communicate with other language-trained apes.23 The
ape language studies show that the bottleneck in language evolution
was not comprehension but speech production. They also show that
vocabulary is easier than grammar. Therefore most likely words
evolved rst, and grammar came later.
A protolanguage of single words and short word strings of the
kind produced by signing apes would be immensely useful in the
world of an early hominid. Words like tiger or g tree are useful
communications, especially when combined with pointing or other
signs of directed attention. Smart people need no grammar because
they can infer meaning from the context and from non-verbal signals. Complex grammar in the human brain is somewhat like a
Ferrari motor in a Volkswagen car, and we have to wonder how it
could evolve at all.
According to one view, articulate language is a latecomer that
made its debut 40,000 years ago in physically modern humans. This
is the time when symbolic activities such as ritual, personal ornaments and cave painting became common. One problem with this
122
Origins
theory is that the proposed date for the origin of language coincides
with the divergence of the major racial groups. Therefore we have to
expect marked differences in language ability across races; but for all
we know, all human races have pretty much the same language
ability.
Because the brain areas devoted to language are large, the most
active periods of language evolution most likely were periods of
rapid brain enlargement. It is quite possible that the rst burst of
brain evolution that produced the H. erectus brain was triggered by a
fortuitous restructuring of the vocal tract. The rst grammarless
protolanguage must have been immensely useful for the reinforcement of social bonds, social learning, and entertaining ones comrades and prospective mates. Thus it pushed the evolution of bigger
and better brain structures to make better use of this newly gained
ability. We do not know why language got started in the hominids
but not in the ancestors of present-day apes. Perhaps bipedality
created the conditions for the later evolution of speech by changing
the anatomical relations of the neck region and thereby incidentally
restructuring the vocal tract.
But why did the brain get even bigger? One possible reason is
technology, such as the rst use of re by H. erectus. For the most
backward human groups on record, re is important not only for
food preparation but also for defense against predators.24 Fire was
enormously useful, but only the more intelligent specimens of H.
erectus could make effective use of it. This imposed a selective
pressure for increased intelligence. In time, higher intelligence led to
the invention of projectile weapons that increased hunting efciency,
but again only the brightest members of the species were able to
make and use these weapons. Thus began a process of runaway brain
evolution, with human intelligence producing new technologies and
the technologies selecting for even higher intelligence that produced
even more complex technologies.
This implies that the more recent advances of human brain evolution were driven not only by the perennial needs to nd scarce
food, outmaneuver rivals, and entice prospective mates with wellgrammared speech. We also needed a good brain to make use of our
own technology. By inventing useful but complicated things, our
ancestors created the selective pressures for their own evolution. If
the late stages of brain evolution were technology-driven, then it is
not surprising that our grammar is more sophisticated than
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In Gods Image?
necessary for the needs of simple hunter-gatherers. It is a byproduct
of selection for high intelligence.
Brains actually got a bit smaller during the past 50,000 years, but
so did overall body size. This need not mean that we are evolving
back into apes. Perhaps it only means that further increases in brain
size would entail prohibitive costs, especially for childbirth, and that
brains kept getting better without getting bigger.
Even the variation in brain size among present-day human races is
substantial. To be precise, the average cranial capacity has been
found to vary between 1,085 and 1,518 cc among modern human
populations. As shown in Figure 6.1, those populations that evolved
in cold climates tend to have bigger brains than those that evolved in
the tropics. Some but not all of this variation can be explained by
differences in body size or nutrition.25
Figure 6.1 Cranial capacities of aboriginal populations. Note that cranial
capacity does not vary with the classically recognized races, but with
climate.
1450cc and over;
14001449cc;
13501399cc;
13001349cc;
12501299cc;
less than 1200cc (from Beals,
Smith, and Dodd, 1984)
The only way to nd out whether human brains got more efcient
over the past 50,000 years or so is to identify those genetic variations
that affect intelligence among living humans. Then we have to study
fossil DNA to determine whether the high-IQ variants are more
frequent now than they were in Fred Flintstones time.
124
7
Men and Women
The sexes differ so much in structure and function, and
consequently in traits of feeling and character, that their
interests are antagonistic. At the same time they are, in
regard to reproduction, complementary.
(William Graham Sumner)1
If a genetic engineer of the twenty-second century could increase the
intelligence of chimpanzees vastly and give them speech, his products
would be very much like us. They would be gregarious, love their
children, cooperate and compete like humans. If we could put one of
them on a congressional subcommittee, he would be as savvy as his
human colleagues, forming alliances, cultivating a positive image of
himself, obstructing his opponents, manipulating others, and seeking
his advantage whenever he can get away with it.
Only in one respect would our mentally enhanced chimpanzee be
very different from us. He would not understand why these silly
humans make so much fuss about sex. It could be so easy. When you
see a sexy female and you dont have anything better to do at the
moment, just copulate with her on the spot, if she doesnt mind. And
why should she mind? After all, sex is fun!
Breeding systems
The contractual nature of marriage is perhaps, in part, a
recognition that the motherinfant bond must be protected
from the fragility of the malefemale bond. (Anthony Walsh)2
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In Gods Image?
A survey of 97 countries showed that 93.15 percent of women and
91.85 percent of men in these countries had married at least once by
age 49. This is quite remarkable. Only 15 percent of all primate
species are monogamous, but they live dispersed in self-sufcient
pairs, with the female guarded against rival males by her husband.
This is the perennial curse of married life, that the man must ensure
that his wifes children are also his own, for short is the life of a gene
that allows its bearer to shepherd somebody elses genes. It is the
reason why monogamy is so rare in the animal kingdom. The desert
baboons are the only non-human primates that maintain a lasting
mating bond, usually with more than one female, while living side by
side with other males. They herd their females, never leaving them
alone with other males day or night.3
Human husbands can avoid the nuisance of round-the-clock mateguarding because they dont have to do all of it themselves. In traditional societies, their wives are always surrounded by other women
and a bunch of children who will tell the husband about his wifes
escapades. Quite possibly our ancestors could evolve their monogamous habits only when the rst grammarless protolanguage
allowed them to gossip about who did it with whom.
Despite our gorilla-like family life, there is one feature that we
share with chimps. In about 65 percent of traditional societies the
woman joins her husbands family at marriage. The reverse pattern is
far less common. This means that humans have a chimpanzee-like
dispersal pattern in which girls leave their home at puberty. Whereas
the female chimpanzee joins a neighboring community of males, the
woman joins her husbands kin group.4
What an ancestral woman needed for herself and her children were
protection and material help. She could achieve this by attaching
herself to a man and granting him exclusive sexual access in return
for protection and help. In other words: getting married. Paternal
care can evolve because 50 percent of the childs genes are from the
father, but only if his paternity is reasonably certain and only if his
help makes a big difference for his childs survival. Otherwise, his
genes are better off if he spends his time chasing after other women,
rather than caring for his wifes children.
A woman can also return to her family and rear her children with
the help of her mother and brothers. One problem with this strategy
is that the grandmother may still have young children of her own
who carry 50 percent of her genes while her grandchildren carry only
126
From each according to his ability, for each according to her need
[The] chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes
is shown by mans attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever
he takes up, than can womanwhether requiring deep thought,
reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and
hands. (Charles Darwin, Descent of Man)
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In Gods Image?
Since time immemorial, all early humans subsisted by hunting and
by collecting wild fruits, berries, tubers and vegetables. Therefore
our basic mental toolkit evolved as an adaptation to life in small
hunter-gatherer bands. Agriculture has been practiced only during
the past 10,000 years in the Middle East, and for shorter periods
elsewhere. During that time biological evolution did change our
genes to some extent, to adapt us to the new farming lifestyle, but a
few millennia are too short for truly dramatic genetic changes. Also
the emergence of truly civilized conditions of life has been too
recent to have had any major impact on our genes. Therefore the
only way to understand human nature is to understand it as an
adaptation to the lifestyle of Stone-Age hunter-gatherers.
In hunter-gatherer societies, the men hunt and their wives collect
vegetables. The reasons for this division of labor are, in decreasing
order of importance, that men are more mobile than women because
they have no children to carry about; men can run faster than
women because their pelvis is designed for running whereas the
female pelvis is a compromise between the needs for running and
childbirth; and men are stronger than women.
According to one anthropologist, Women are most likely to make
a substantial contribution when . . . the participant is not obliged to
be far from home; the tasks are relatively monotonous and do not
require rapt concentration; and the work is not dangerous, can be
performed in spite of interruptions, and is easily resumed once
interrupted. Therefore activities such as basket weaving, cooking
and the manufacture of clothes pass from the female to the male
domain as they become professionalized. Contrary to Marxist ideas,
the economic contribution of women in the society has little to do
with their property rights, access to leadership positions, or any
other status attributes. This is still true in the modern world.6
A woman will always invest her excess resources in her children.
But a man can use his economic leverage not only for wife and
children but also for attracting new mates and cultivating cooperative networks with other men. Ethnographers have long noted that
most of the meat brought home by hunters does not go to wife and
children but to other men and to fertile females other than the
hunters wife. At least, this is typical for hunter-gatherers in tropical
habitats where the women can provide most of their childrens needs
through their gathering. It would not be possible for Eskimos where
women and children depend entirely on male hunting. But even
128
Woman power
Unless woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her
husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone
but herself, she cannot emancipate herself. (George Bernard
Shaw)
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In Gods Image?
Figure 7.1 Cognitive differences between men and women. (Silverman and
Eals, 1992)
a) Which of the shapes on the right side is produced by folding the
cardboard piece shown on the left? Typically, men are better than women at
this task.
b) Look at this picture for one minute, then try to remember as many
objects as possible, plus their location. Typically, women are better than
men at this task.
The world is ruled by men. Most political and military leaders are
men, and even where women and men have the same property rights,
most people who have earned great wealth through their own efforts
are male. Human sex roles are chimpanzee-like, not bonobo-like!
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In Gods Image?
This means that matriarchal societies cannot survive. They breed
themselves out of existence. In Chapter 5 we saw that knowledge
about the connection between sex and babies originated only
recently as a by-product of cognitive evolution, probably sometime
during the past 100,000 years in physically modern humans. Before
that time, the women could not plan their sexual relations to avoid
unwanted pregnancies. Therefore the reproductive disadvantage of
matriarchal societies must be of recent origin.
Most anthropologists agree that family planning has never been
terribly efcient in preliterate societies. Therefore cultural selection
against matriarchy should be strongest in advanced literate societies
where family planning is practiced more widely. Today, most traditionalist societies have high birthrates. Therefore the number of
people with a traditionalist cultural background is rising worldwide
although most societies are drifting toward a non-traditional,
rational worldview. If traditionalist societies owe their demographic
advantage to gender inequality, then cultural selection favoring
patriarchy is a powerful force here and now.12
The Israeli kibbutzim are among the few societies where children
are brought up gender-blind. The kibbutz is a type of rural commune
that was founded with the explicit aim of creating a socialist society.
People were viewed as essentially good, but as having been corrupted
by bourgeois culture and urban civilization. The antidote was a
community with communally organized work, strict pay equality,
communal dining halls, childrens houses where even infants were
cared for communally, and strict gender equality. The sentiments of
love, affection and cooperation, which traditionally were associated
with the family, were to be transferred from the family to the
collectivity.13
Unlike most other experiments of this kind, the kibbutzim have
survived to the present day, providing their members with income,
services and a lifestyle that is genuinely valued by the kibbutzniks.
Even economic equality has survived at least to some extent.
What did not survive was gender equality. In less than one generation, women had drifted from the machine shops and agricultural
work groups into the communal kitchen, laundry, primary school
and childrens house. Also most leadership positions were left to the
men, and women attended the general assembly less often than the
men and participated less in the discussions.
The womens distaste for hard labor can be explained by their lack
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In Gods Image?
more power-conscious, compete in male-dominated occupations,
and be economically self-sufcient.
There are three types of marital relation. Originally, husband and
wife had to cooperate in the survival tasks of making a living,
maintaining the household and raising the children. There was much
interaction with high interdependence. From the Victorian Age
onward, this type of marriage was replaced by the breadwinner
housewife marriage. This type of marriage is stable because interdependence is high, but interaction is low because husband and wife
work in separate domains.
Today, husband and wife pursue separate careers while housework is minimized by automation and children by contraception.
Interdependence is low and therefore marital stability is low, and
interaction and cooperation are also low. We will have to see whether this development will nally succeed in eliminating marriage
altogether.16 The most interesting social experiments of our time are
not done in the kibbutz, but in mainstream Western society!
Emotional glue
When two people are rst together, their hearts are on re and
their passion is very great. After a while, the re cools and thats
how it stays. They continue to love each other, but its in a
different way warm and dependable. (Kalahari Bushman)17
[He manifested] all Sapphos famous signs his voice faltered,
his face ushed up, his eyes glanced stealthily, a sudden sweat
broke out on his skin, the beatings of his heart were irregular
and violent. (Plutarch)
There are less tangible reasons for malefemale bonding falling in
love, for example. Many twentieth-century anthropologists believed
that romantic love is a product of Western culture that is unknown
in the rest of the world. As early as 1928, Margaret Mead reported
that on the South Sea island of Samoa, teenage girls were unaficted
by the scourge of romantic entanglement. They rather found fulllment in a succession of brief sexual affairs.
Margaret Meads conclusions have not passed the test of time. A
more recent survey found that romantic love is a species-wide
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In Gods Image?
In a study in the United States during the 1960s, college students
were presented with the question: If a man (woman) had all the
other qualities you desired, would you marry this person if you were
not in love with him (her)? At that time, 64.6 percent of the males
but only 24.3 percent of the females rmly said no. When the survey
was repeated in 1984, 85 percent of both males and females said no.
Apparently, emotional involvement was considered more essential in
1984 than during the 1960s. This is part of a general trend from a
pragmatic, survival-oriented value system to one that emphasizes
emotional gratication and individual self-expression.20 The reason
for this trend is only too obvious. In an afuent society, we can
afford it!
When I told my friends from Mars about romantic love, they
asked me how people reason out when they should fall in love and
with whom, and whether we teach this subject in our schools. They
thought I was pulling their legs when I told them that people dont
know how and why they fall in love! My friends knew that people are
supposed to make important decisions after careful deliberation,
especially those that require the processing of complex information.
A decision to fall in love is both important and computationally
demanding.
I hope I did not give my friends a bad impression about our
species, but I told them that decision-making is decentralized in the
human brain. The fall-in-love module is informationally encapsulated. It works on a set of inputs that need not be available to the
cognitive system. And it is cognitively impenetrable, which means
that we are only aware of its output but not of the computational
steps that produced this output.
Few animals fall in love the way humans do. When Jane Goodall
started her studies of chimpanzees at Gombe, she noticed that most
friendships were between males. Friendships between females or
between a male and a female were less common, but there was one
exception: Rodolf and Flo. Jane Goodall wondered how the two
would behave when Flo came into estrus. Being human, and being
female, she expected that they would form a special sexual relationship and that Rodolf would stop other chimps from mating with
Flo. But nothing like this happened. When Flo became sexy, Rodolf
simply took turns with the other males mating with her. These stupid
chimps didnt see any connection between their friendship and sex!21
And why should they? Friendship and sex have different roots.
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In Gods Image?
which the sex drive is strongest. Therefore teenage boys should be
more devoted husbands than middle-aged men. I doubt that this
prediction is supported by much evidence.22
The idea of sex as an emotional glue for pair bonding was
attractive at Morriss time. Many twentieth-century thinkers did not
only consider unrestrained sexual pleasure essential for psychological health; they also believed that sexual freedom and political
freedom are two sides of the same coin. The government in George
Orwells 1984, for example, took great care to suppress any nonreproductive sex.
A theory that ts snugly into a cultural niche or satises the
emotional needs of its protagonists is not necessarily false. Still,
when a theory is popular although it is not supported by any decent
evidence, we have to look for the needs that it satises on the marketplace of ideas after judging it on its merits.23
The social sciences are cluttered with improbable theories and
implicit assumptions that are popular only because they fulll a
psychological need. There are also theories that are most likely true
but that nobody likes because they offend peoples feelings. Both
kinds are fascinating because they provide a window on the minds of
their protagonists and opponents and on the preoccupations of the
culture in which they are embedded.
A study of mate preferences in 37 cultures found that men universally desire a young marriage partner. Young men prefer women
who are about their own age, but old men lust for women who are
much younger than themselves. Even homosexual men prefer male
partners of an age in which women are most fertile. However, cognitive information about a womans reproductive state does not
reach the beauty-assess module. A face-lifted, estrogen-replaced 50year-old can still be attractive, even for a man who knows full well
about the sorry state of her reproductive system.
According to Aristotle, it is tting for the women to be married at
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In Gods Image?
around the age of eighteen; the men at thirty-seven or a little before.
At those ages, sexual union will occur when their bodies are in their
prime, and will end, conveniently for both, at the time when they
cease to be fertile. If you disagree, you can also follow the old folk
rule that ideally the woman should be half as old as the man plus
seven years.24
Men seem to pay special attention to those body parts that are
involved in reproduction. Within healthy limits, women should be
hourglass-shaped with well-developed breasts and a low waist-to-hip
ratio. When investigators studied the body proportions of centerfold
models in Playboy magazine from 1955 to 1990 and winners of the
Miss America contest from 1923 to 1987, it turned out that the
models and beauty queens got thinner over time, but their waist-tohip ratio was consistently low at about 0.7.
A low waist-to-hip ratio signals fecundity because it distinguishes
women of reproductive age from prepubertal girls and postmenopausal women and because it shows that the woman is not
pregnant. The male preference for robust breasts is more mysterious
because breast size is thought to be unrelated to milk yield. The
mammary gland is so small that it forms only tiny, barely visible
swellings under the nipples. For the most part, breasts are merely
two hunks of adipose tissue that are held in place, poorly so in most
cases, by a small amount of brous connective tissue.25
Also signs of good genes should be attractive because good genes
used to be important for child survival. Many genetic defects cause
physical abnormalities, especially in nely structured body parts
such as the face. Therefore too much deviation from the healthy
average should be perceived as unattractive. When faces are digitized
on the computer and averaged, the composite faces thus generated
are indeed judged more attractive than most of the original faces.
Mediocrity is beautiful!
There are less obvious elements of female attractiveness. Under
natural fertility conditions, if you have had regular sex with a
woman for some time she is probably either pregnant or lactating or
infertile. Additional copulations wont make a difference. Everything
else being equal, a man should therefore always nd his own wife less
attractive than another woman.
For a woman, the two most important items on her shopping list
are good genes for her children, and support in rearing the children.
We know that in many species the offspring of sexy males are
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fourth, if the mate values are similar, the comparator activates the
fall-in-love module. I should present this theory to my friends from
Mars who asked me how people decide whom to fall in love with! I
am sure they will understand it.
There are other inputs for the fall-in-love module. Empathy works
best with a partner who feels like oneself, and cognitive perspectivetaking works best with one who thinks like oneself. This is also true
if the partners personality resembles ones own personality as it has
been at one or another time in ones past life. The result is called
assortative mating: the attraction to those who are similar to
oneself.29
In Gods Image?
are very status-conscious. The abolition of polygamy in some of the
most advanced societies seems to be an attempt at reducing conict
among the men and making male status hierarchies less visible.
Polygamy is bad for the wives of rich and attractive men but good
for other women. In a strictly monogamous system, a woman who
couldnt secure an investing male can remain single, marry a criminal
or alcoholic, or become the mistress of a married man. Polygamy
gives her the additional option of becoming the second wife of a
business executive or the tenth wife of a movie star. Or possibly she
could marry a postal clerk whose sweetheart opted for the business
executive or the movie star.
One consequence of monogamy is that a man who wants to marry
another wife has to dump the one he has already. In a polygamous
society, he would simply add the new wife to his household. So,
whats worse: divorce, or a second wife?
The big problem is that most women are ill-tempered, argumentative and uncooperative. In a polygamous household, almost
invariably the co-wives quarrel with each other. Any husband who is
pestered by a nagging wife should be aware that if he had two wives,
most likely the wives would pester each other but leave him in peace.
Female aggression evolved for female rivals, not husbands!32
Although 93 percent of all societies in the Ethnographic Atlas
permit at least certain men to have more than one wife, only 0.5
percent allow a woman to have more than one husband. The reason
is only too obvious. When women quarrel they shout at each other.
When men quarrel they kill each other!
Men apply a simple decision rule: if there are opportunities for
casual sex, take advantage of them; if not, marry. Why buy a cow if
you can get the milk free? This collides head-on with the female
decision rule: if he shows evidence of serious commitment, copulate;
if not, dont. This is a very unethical strategy. By refusing to copulate
with non-investing males, the women breed us for high investment
the way a farmer breeds his cows for high milk production! Fortunately, modern men found an ingenious counterstrategy: we tell
our women that in order to be truly liberated they have to be as
promiscuous as the men!
There is a more constructive angle to this. Promiscuous animals,
including promiscuous people, have no reason to prefer altruistic
partners, but monogamists have good reasons to do so. This means
that in a monogamous system, the evolution of altruism is favored
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cursory inspection of womens magazines shows that women are
single-mindedly preoccupied with their looks.
Sex differences in beauty are explained by Triverss parental
investment theory. It states that in those species where the females
rear the young and the males contribute nothing but their sperm,
females are the limiting resource for reproduction. They need not
compete for the males but the males have to compete for the females,
either by ghting off other males or by gaining the females favor.
Therefore males must be either strong or beautiful. Most male birds
attract their mates, but male primates ght over them.
In our species, however, the women used to depend on male help
and protection. They had to be beautiful to compete for investing
males. They even had a greater need for beauty than the men because
men compete not only by attracting their mates, but also by ghting
over them.
Triverss theory can explain why the Caribbean has sexy men and
plain women while Thailand has sexy women and plain men. Possibly, the ancestors of the Thais evolved under conditions where
women could not rear their children without male help. Therefore
their women had to be sexy to attract investing males. The men did
not need to be sexy because the women depended on them.
Conversely, if African women were able to raise their children
alone, they could afford to attend to signs of good genes rather than
high commitment in their suitors. Therefore the men had to be
sexy.34
It seems unfair that opportunistically mating men should evolve to
be more attractive than good providers and that hard-working
women should evolve to be less attractive than those who let the men
work for them, but such is the logic of nature. The application of
parental investment theory to international sex tourism is an
example of a theory that might be true but is unpopular because it
offends peoples feelings.
The biggest problem with monogamy is that the husband never
knows whether his wifes children are also his own. A modern husband can send the familys DNA to a commercial paternity testing
lab to make sure, but our ancestors had to rely on indirect cues the
sex drive, for example. Most men prefer as marriage partner a
woman who is not very active sexually although they prefer women
with a higher level of sexual activity as dating partners. The mate
value of a promiscuous woman is very low because there is a high
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as he does not establish an emotional bond that would divert his
investment.
In one experiment, subjects were seated comfortably in a chair
while pulse rate, electrical skin conductivity, and the activity of the
corrugator supercilii muscle (frown muscle) were recorded. The
subjects were given one of two instructions: Please think of a serious
romantic relationship that you have had in the past, that you currently have, or that you would like to have. Now imagine that the
person with whom you are seriously involved becomes interested in
someone else. (a) Imagine you nd out that your partner is having
sexual intercourse with this other person (b) Imagine that your
partner is falling in love and forming an emotional attachment to
that person.
When imagining their partner in bed with someone else, the men
sweated and their heartbeat increased by nearly ve beats per minute, similar to the effect of three cups of strong coffee, and their
brows wrinkled. They calmed down somewhat when they imagined
emotional indelity. Women showed the reverse pattern. This result
is not surprising. Men in general are focused on copulation while
women attend more to the emotional peripherals.
The male brain has a mate-eject module that is triggered by the
partners sexual indelity. In traditional societies, adultery is the
most commonly reported cause of divorce. In 25 of the societies for
which information is available, divorce follows from adultery by
either partner, in 54 it follows only from adultery on the wifes part,
and in two only from the husbands. In one of the two exceptions,
the Trobrianders, divorce in response to the wifes indelity is not
mentioned but we hear that should she commit adultery the husband has the right to kill his wife (though he is more apt to thrash
her).36
In Gods Image?
penalty. Generally, the harsher the punishment, the less common is
rape.38 It looks as if a universal male inclination for rape had to be
checked by disincentives prison, for example. Or does the causal
arrow point in the opposite direction? Where rape is rare, it is
considered devious and is punished severely; but in those societies
where most men rape, the men agree among themselves that it is all
right. If only a few do it, its a crime; if everyone does it, its an
inalienable right.
Other behaviors are judged that way. If you go on a killing
rampage, it is called murder and you are put on death row; if your
country goes on a killing rampage, it is called war and if you are
good at it you get a medal. The most commonly cited example of this
moral stance is not rape or murder, but drugs. Alcohol causes more
harm than marijuana, and yet, alcohol is legal and marijuana is not.
The reason is that most people like to drink alcohol, but only a few
like to smoke marijuana. This difference in popularity is not an effect
of the law. In the Netherlands, marijuana use did not increase to any
great extent after it had effectively been legalized39; nor has alcohol
prohibition done much to curb drunkenness. We may have no
opportunity to test the alternative views about rape and its punishment anytime soon. I dont know of any country where the Legalize
Rape movement has been very inuential lately.
One theory proposes that rapists are mate-deprived. In its sociobiological incarnation, it states that men are programmed to use
coercion when they have no opportunities for legitimate copulations,
like the subadult orang-utans that we encountered in Chapter 6. In
reality, however, many coercive men have extensive sexual histories.
Most of them do not have less mating opportunities than others, but
more. Men who cannot nd partners for casual sex become husbands, not rapists!
Some feminists believe that the motivation for rape is not sexual
but aggressive. Brainwashed by the ruling patriarchal system, the
rapist wants to hurt and humiliate women. This theory predicts that
most rapes are committed in aggressive rather than sexual contexts.
Rape is indeed common in aggressive contexts, especially during
war, but the most parsimonious explanation is that soldiers rape
because there is no risk of legal complications.
Actually, most rapes are date rapes. Date rapists nearly always
start with innocuous tactics. If honest advertising doesnt work, they
feign love; if that doesnt work, they try to get their date drunk; and
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by other means; for the date rapist, rape is the continuation of
courtship by other means. Male thinking really is stereotyped like
this!
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Pair-bonding genes
Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate the secret of
their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern
them. (Ivan Pavlov)
How can individual variation in mating behavior ever persist? If one
type of behavior is only slightly better for the behavers genes than
the other, then the genes that favor the less effective behavior will
soon die out. But will they?
Women have an alternative between one-night stands and marriage, and because of the male mate-eject module these two behaviors
are somewhat incompatible. Lets assume that those women who
secure an investing male produce more surviving children than those
who dont. In that case all women should pursue marriage, and genes
favoring stable pair bonding will prevail.
But what if only half of the men are suitable for marriage and the
other half are only good for one-night stands? In a monogamous
system, the genes of a single promiscuous woman in a tribe where all
other women insist on marriage would be at an advantage because
she will raise children while those who insist on marriage run a 50
percent risk of childless spinsterhood. However, if all other women
are promiscuous, then the genes of a woman who insists on marriage
will have the advantage because with her husbands help she will
raise more children than her promiscuous sisters. Natural selection
will lead to a state where some women pursue marriage and others
prefer one-night stands. This is an example of frequency-dependent
selection. Like the physical environment, the social world has many
ecological niches where alternative behaviors can thrive side by side.
Behavioral geneticists study the causes for behavioral variability.
For example, if unrelated adopted children who were reared in the
same family behave in similar ways, then the rearing environment
must be important; and if identical twins are similar even when they
were reared apart, then genetic hard-wiring must be important.
Matt McGue and David Lykken from the University of Minnesota applied this kind of test to divorce, also known as mate
desertion in sociobiological jargon. In a twin study, they found that
about 50 percent of the divorce risk could be attributed to genetic
factors of one partner. Most of the remaining risk was presumably
contributed by the other partners genes.
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virginity before marrying her; and in some traditional societies,
Samoa for example, a virginity test used to be part of the wedding
ceremony. A woman who is no longer a virgin is of course not
suitable for marriage! Fifty years from now, your grandson will
marry his sweetheart only after sending her to the geneticist to have
her tested for divorce genes and for genes that predispose to extrapair copulations. Why use the error-prone evolved algorithms if the
lab can do it with far greater accuracy?
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8
Parents and Children
For the reproduction of the race, there are two instincts
needed, the sexual and the parental, and the way these two
are organized is to say the least curious.
(Charles Darwin)
Mates are genetically unrelated and therefore we must expect endless
conict, but parent and child share 50 percent of their genes. And
because children are their only direct route to genetic posterity,
parents should be nice to their children although it is less obvious
why children should be nice to their parents.
Childhood is the most dangerous time in life because under natural conditions, an unweaned infant is doomed after the mothers
death. The dependence of the child on the continued existence of the
mother is the reason why females live longer than males, even in
species whose males are not addicted to alcohol and tobacco. The
female advantage is greatest in species such as chimpanzees where
only the females care for the children, smaller in species like us where
the males help a little, and minimal in monogamous siamangs and
New World monkeys where father and mother are equally important
for the childs survival.1
A gene that causes the premature death of a male is selected
against because it ends his reproductive career, but a gene that causes
the premature death of a female is selected against even more
because it kills her youngest offspring in addition to ending her
reproductive career. The female survival advantage that results from
this kind of selection is one of the few instances where Mother
Nature concurs with the human sense of justice.
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True communism
Great idea. Wrong species. (The ant researcher Edward O.
Wilson, when asked for his opinion about communism.)
In theory there is a simple way to protect children from the risk of
being orphaned, and also from the risk of maltreatment by devious
and incompetent mothers: raise all children communally! But it
doesnt work like that. Throughout the animal kingdom parents care
only for their own children, sometimes with assistance from close
relatives. This is true even under the most crowded conditions. In the
Mexican free-tailed bat, more than 1 million females raise their
young in maternity caves. In one of these caves the researchers
counted a density of 4,000 pups per square meter. At one time these
bats were hailed as the only true communists of the animal kingdom,
with females feeding their young collectively.
Not so. Careful observation showed that each female nurses only
her own pup. Other pups try to get a free suck and sometimes they
succeed, but as a rule the mother will reject them in favor of her own.
Most mothers manage to allot more than 90 percent of their milk to
their own pup.2 The only examples of parenting communism are
found among the social insects, where armies of sterile workers feed
the brood. And even here its all in the family, for the workers merely
feed their own sisters.
Love is the genes way to reach out to copies of themselves in
others, and this is true for people as it is for bats and bees. Love for
other peoples children makes no evolutionary sense. What is worse:
your child dying in a trafc accident on the way to school; or the
school bus having an accident, with 50 other children dying while
your own child is safely in bed at home with the u? This may not be
satisfactory for our rened moral sensibilities, but it is the logic of
nature.
While the mother starts out with the cute schema, the infant has its
own mother schema. Back in the 1950s, Harry Harlow from the
University of Wisconsin showed this by separating infant rhesus
monkeys from their mothers after birth. He then gave them a choice
between two substitute mothers: a wire mother with a built-in
feeding bottle, and a milk-free cloth mother. Much to the scientists
surprise the baby monkeys spent most of their time clinging to the
cloth mother, visiting the wire mother only to drink.
In Harlows time, most psychologists believed that the infants
attraction to the mother developed through regular feeding. As good
behaviorists the leading research tradition in those days they were
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used to training their animals with food rewards and electric shocks.
This worked better than expected, for the animals managed to
condition the scientists into the belief that all behavior is motivated
by these simple rewards and punishments! In reality, softness,
warmth and rocking movements were the attributes that attracted
Harlows monkeys to their mother. Everyone except psychologists
had known this all along. Babies calm down when they are carried,
and babies who are carried a lot cry less than others even when they
are not carried. Physical contact never quite loses its reassuring effect
throughout life.4
Few experimenters would want to repeat Harlows experiments
today, for the motherless monkeys became awfully neurotic. Those
who were raised with a cloth mother did learn to interact socially
with other young monkeys, but they never learned how to copulate.
Monkeys reared in total isolation without a substitute mother for the
rst six or 12 months of their lives were far worse off. They became
autistic, spending all their time with self-clasping and stereotyped
rocking and huddling. There was no play, no exploration of a new
environment, and no social contact. Their only social responses were
fear and aggression. In the worst cases, even aggression was obliterated and the animals were torn by fear and anxiety.
When infant monkeys were initially cared for by the mother and
then put in solitary connement, they went through a predictable
sequence of responses. First they protested, as shown by increased
activity and vocalization. After a while, the protest subsided and the
infant withdrew and became inactive. The rst stage is dominated by
anxiety, and the second stage is probably the monkey equivalent of
depression.
When the monkeys were reunited with their mothers after six days,
they clung to them more tightly than ever before. Even 12 months
later they explored and played less than those who had been with
their mothers all the time. The experience was most distressing for
those monkeys whose mothers had shown signs of rejection before
the separation.
The same pattern of protest followed by withdrawal and despair
has been observed in human children who were separated from their
mothers for periods of a few days to several months. If the child is
reunited with the mother within a few months, or if it nds a substitute attachment gure, chances are it will grow up to be normal; if
not, lasting emotional disturbances are inevitable.5
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mothers teachings should be heeded: not to play with the sabertooth, or to stay out of the trafc. But they also know that other
teachings are not in the childs interest but the mothers: to be nice to
brother and sister, respect elders and go to bed early.
The best learning rule for the child is to emulate what the parents
like to do. Smoking should be emulated because the parents like it.
What the parents do with gusto is most likely good for them, so it is
most likely good for the child. But when the mother wants the child
to do something that she herself abhors, such as washing the dishes,
it is probably an attempt to manipulate the child against its own best
interests. These are examples of social referencing, which we have
encountered already in Chapter 4.
Jane Goodall described an example of parentoffspring conict in
chimpanzees. Although young chimpanzees enjoy sex plays long
before puberty, they do not like adult sex. When mother copulates,
the children try to push the male off.7 They are jealous. They seem to
know that mating effort conicts with parenting effort. By spoiling
their mothers enjoyment of sex, they try to tilt the balance between
sex and parenting in their own favor.
Some human children have the same prejudice against adult sex.
When my seven-year-old daughter saw a copulation on TV, she
watched, and then said, I dont like to see that; and on vacation, my
daughters used to guide me ceremoniously and in a wide arc around
any newspaper stand with displays of sex magazines. No sex for
daddy! Most twentieth-century psychologists believed that such
behaviors in children are the result of a sexually repressive
upbringing. If this is the case, why do chimpanzee children act in
similar ways although they grow up in a world where the adults
copulate in the streets?
The psychoanalytic theory of parentoffspring conict is known
as the Oedipus complex. Boys between two and ve years of age are
supposed to develop a sexual attraction to their mother that brings
them in conict with the father. Freud did not derive this theory
from observations of children, but he developed it to explain the
neuroses of his adult patients. There is still no evidence for the
Oedipus complex from observations of children. There are boys who
love their mother, but boys lusting after their mother are a rare sight.
The evolutionary logic of the Oedipus complex is utterly
improbable. Why should a boy who develops sexual feelings for his
mother and thereby risks the ire of a potentially dangerous father or
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Trade-offs
Woman seems to differ from man in her greater tenderness and
less selshness. Woman owing to her maternal instincts, displays these qualities toward her infants in an eminent degree;
therefore it is likely that she would often extend them toward
her fellow-creatures. (Charles Darwin)
For the father there is an optimal mix of mating effort, dominance
striving and parental effort, and under most conditions his genes
fared best with a very modest dose of parenting. And so Mother
Nature gave men little interest in infants, a low responsiveness to
infant needs, and indeed a low responsiveness for all emotional
signals, not only those from infants. Therefore childcare is always
womens work. Nowhere in the world do the men stay at home with
the kids while the women go out to work, ght or pursue sex with
additional mates.10
But women should be doting mothers, shouldnt they? A woman
need not scramble for copulations, and power struggles would only
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endanger her and her children. For her, children should be more
important than sex and power. But they arent. Most modern women
want only one or two children or none at all. In a survey in Australia, less than one-quarter of the women reaching adulthood after
1960 said that enjoying motherhood is more important than enjoying
sex. Among those who reached adulthood between the Wars, the
proportion was more than 50 percent.11
Present attitudes are dysfunctional, but the brain mechanisms that
produce them have once been adaptive. To keep herself and her
children alive, an ancestral woman had to spin her social networks to
acquire investing males, outcompete rival women, and protect herself and her children from dangerous men. She needed aggressiveness
and competitiveness along with abilities for deception, cooperation
and exploitation. No wonder that women are as bitchy as they
are!
Above all, our female ancestors had to feed themselves and their
children. Rural women in the pre-industrial era worked as hard as
their men, but without xed working hours. They worked around the
house in close proximity to their children, switching back and forth
between housekeeping, gardening, spinning, weaving, dairying and
the children. But todays women have to work away from their
children. They can have either a career or a family, but not both. As
a result, we are selecting for women who are high in maternal
instincts but low in ambition, competitiveness and motivation to
work.
Parental love evolved because children are the vehicles for their
parents genes. It should therefore parallel the childs reproductive
value. In traditional societies, the reproductive value of a newborn
was not very high because about half of all children died before they
had a chance to reproduce. Prospects were best at puberty when the
child was past the dangerous age but still had its whole reproductive
career ahead.
In a Canadian study, adults were asked to imagine the death of a
child and estimate the grief of the parents. Most respondents thought
that grief was moderately great for a dead infant, maximal around
puberty, and less for an adult child. The curve matched the reproductive value of a child under uncivilized conditions.12 Mother
Nature made sure that parents do not imprint on their children
immediately in full intensity. Rather, parental love deepens over time
as long as the young child lives with the parent.
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crystal clear. Americans consider fat women unattractive. In a natural environment, an unattractive woman may not be able to secure
an investing male and suffer high infant mortality as a result.
Therefore an attractive daughter used to be in a better position to
produce lots of grandchildren for her parents. The psycho-logic is
even simpler. Parents follow the general tendency to reject unattractive people. This is, almost by denition, what unattractiveness
means. Natural selection could have wired the brain to eliminate this
general tendency in the parentchild relationship, but it didnt. It
would have been good for unattractive children, but not for the
parents genes.
Parental support used to translate into better survival and
reproduction for the child, but does a college education improve a
daughters reproductive prospects? Of course it doesnt. Of all
demographic variables, a college education is the most powerful
predictor of female reproductive failure. In the United States, college-educated women have only a little more than half as many
children as those who drop out of high school.15 If you want to be
nice to your genes, dont send your daughter to college! In the brave
new world in which we live, parental love is no longer adaptive.
In Gods Image?
15 of the surveyed societies, adulterous conception was offered as a
reason. Other reasons were related to the overburdening of the
mother. The birth of twins was mentioned in 14 societies, but usually
only one twin was killed. In eleven societies, a newborn was killed if
it arrived too soon after the last child or the mother had too many
children already. The unwed status of the mother was offered as a
reason in 14 societies, and in six the infant was killed when no man
would acknowledge paternity or accept an obligation to provide for
the child.17
One reason is never mentioned: population control. Traditional
societies did not use infanticide deliberately to regulate their population. The practice was tolerated, discouraged, prohibited and very
rarely encouraged, but the decision about an infants fate was made
by the parents without any regard for the common good. This
should not surprise us. Modern women who pop their contraceptive
pills never give any thought to the effect that their behavior has on
the world population.
The exposure of infants was common in ancient Greece and
Rome. Romulus and Remus were exposed by their parents, as were
Heracles and Oedipus. The examples are mythical, but they show
that the practice was familiar to the mythmakers. In the second
century AD, the gynecologist Soranus wrote: Now the midwife,
having received the newborn . . . [and having] examined beforehand
whether the infant is male or female . . . should also consider whether
it is worth rearing or not.18 In Rome, the decision about the infants
fate was left to the father. In our own matriarchal society, where
only women are involved in child rearing, the decision would most
likely be left to the mother. The cruel practice of raising even seriously disabled children took hold only with the rise of Christianity.
In AD 374, infanticide was nally categorized as murder under
Roman law.
Asian societies did not follow this trend. In the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries in China were horried to nd that in
Beijing alone thousands of babies (almost exclusively females) were
thrown on the streets like refuse, to be collected each morning by
carriers who dumped them into a huge pit outside the city.19
In Europe, the Church never managed to eradicate child exposure,
although it was quite successful in suppressing contraception.
Foundling homes were established since the fteenth century, and
millions of abandoned children passed through them until prosperity
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In Gods Image?
evolution, why did it not stop the process? Imagine a world, perhaps
100,000 years ago, where some women but not others were already
bright enough to predict the blood, toil, tears and sweat that a new
child would impose on their future lives. Bright women but not
stupid women would have killed many of their infants without any
pressing need to do so, and their high-IQ genes would have been lost
to posterity. Obviously, thats not what happened.
One reason is that mothers are naturally averse to killing their
newborns. Therefore well-situated women who could raise their
children with only moderate inconvenience were not likely to kill
them. Child exposure and infanticide were practiced mainly by
women who were strongly motivated: those who were in dire straits
because they had no husband or were too poor. On average, these
women were likely to be less intelligent and less socially skilled than
others.22
Compared to immediate distress, long-term consequences are
lousy motivators. Knowing about the mechanism of reproduction,
even primitive people were in theory able to use coitus interruptus
to prevent unwanted pregnancies. But they rarely did, presumably
because they were not in the habit of thinking ahead by nine months.
Contraception became possible only when a certain level of intelligence and intellectual culture was reached in the most advanced
societies.
Thats how it is today. Contraception is used most liberally by
bright women in the more advanced societies, and it is quite effective
at eradicating their genes. Abortion seems to be more popular with
single mothers and other poorly adjusted women. Thus we can see a
general pattern: infanticide selects against social maladjustment, and
contraception against intelligence and foresight. Abortion falls
somewhere in between. We can predict that over the millennia,
infanticidal societies tend to evolve toward higher intelligence and
reduced antisocial tendencies, whereas contracepting societies evolve
in the opposite direction. In Chapter 12 we will see that this is
actually the case.
We will never be able to assess the evolutionary impact of infanticide in traditional societies. Old-fashioned cultural anthropology is
a dying science because unacculturated traditional societies are
rapidly disappearing. There is not a single uncontacted tribe left in
the world that is not spoiled by mass media, alcohol, schools and
police.
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In Gods Image?
peoples children only to the extent that we respect their property,
and for the same reason: because we depend on good relations with
other adults.
Another example can be drawn from the American debate about
abortion. Pro-abortionists could point out that unwanted children
will have to suffer if their parents are forced to have them, and they
would be right. Unwanted children are at risk of becoming socially
maladjusted or criminal and of failing in school.25 Abortion could be
advocated by pointing out that every child has the right to be born
under auspicious circumstances.
But nobody argues like this. The pro-choice argument is made
exclusively from the perspective of the mother, who is expected to
make the decision for her own personal benet. An adult can easily
imagine herself in the place of a woman who doesnt want a child,
and feel great indignation at the thought that she should be forced to
have one. Despite the cute schema it is far more difcult to empathize with an unwanted child exposed to an unloving mother.
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9
Friends and Enemies
Men should be either treated generously or destroyed,
because they take revenge for slight injuries for heavy ones
they cannot.
(Niccolo Macchiavelli, The Prince)
Group life evolved for protection. It originated as an adaptation to a
dangerous world where predators and hostile neighbors were lurking. It enabled our ancestors to respond to threats that had been
detected by other group members, warn each other of impending
danger, and ght together to ward off enemies. On your own you
will be eaten. As a group you will prevail.
But group-living animals also compete with one another for the
good things of life: food and mates, sex and money. Therefore,
community life is precariously suspended between the yin and yang
of competition and cooperation. We need friends in order to prevail
against our enemies.
In Gods Image?
childless couples are actually happier than those with children. As
rational happiness maximizers the parents should grieve at the birth
of a child, and celebrate when the child dies!
Life satisfaction is only weakly related to wealth, age, gender,
education and occupation, but it does depend on social bonds.
Married people are happier and healthier than singles, who are in
turn happier than the divorced. Psychiatric hospital admissions are
least common for the married and most common for the divorced.
And although young children can make their parents miserable,
connectedness with their adult children is the best predictor for the
happiness of old women.1
In Chapter 3, I described autism as a wiring problem that makes
the autist unable to attend to people. Most autists are not only
unable to attend normally to others, but they also lack the positive
emotions that reinforce social behavior. Still, most of them can and
do respond to their isolation with negative emotions. Therefore they
are haunted by anxiety and depression, like the isolation-reared
monkeys that we encountered in Chapter 8.
Sociality evolved for protection, and therefore it is little wonder
that danger brings people closer to one another. People seek support
from their friends in their troubles, and the child stays close to the
mother in unfamiliar places. This security-through-attachment knee
jerk can become dysfunctional. Counselors have noted for a long
time that many abused wives are reluctant to dump their devious
husbands. They go through endless cycles of physical abuse, reconciliation and renewed abuse. This is called traumatic bonding.
Are these women masochists? Do they enjoy being beaten up? Of
course not. They are terried, and they do what every terried
human being does: seek refuge in a close personal relationship. If the
only close relationship that is available to the abused wife is the
husband, then she will return to him again and again. She behaves
like a horse that runs back into the burning stable.2
The emotional resources that drive and reinforce social relations
are crude. Pleasure can motivate us to approach and explore physical
objects as well as people; anxiety motivates the avoidance of all kinds
of risk; and sadness is a response to any worsening of our condition,
teaching us to avoid such outcomes. Therefore depression and generalized anxiety disorders have no specic evolutionary meaning.
They are multi-purpose brain mechanisms running wild. There are
limits to the number of special-purpose mechanisms that can evolve.
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In Gods Image?
Ntologis tactic works. With ten years tenure he is the longest-ruling
alpha male in any chimpanzee community studied so far.4
Power struggles are common in chimpanzee communities. There
are several weeks or months of instability with recurrent ghts, until
one of the contestants gives up and pays homage to his opponent.
Chimpanzees signal submission by bowing and pant-grunting to the
boss. This seals the dominance relationship between the contestants,
and keeps everyone up-to-date about who pant-grunts to whom.
Social status is not in the outcome of ghts but in the minds of the
community members.
Human societies have multiple dominance hierarchies. Socioeconomic status denes a master hierarchy, but tiny little rank orders
are everywhere. They are in the playgroups of preschool children and
among school-age boys. Each academic institution has a dean,
associate dean, assistant dean, professors, associate professors and
assistant professors, with the poor students at the bottom of the
hierarchy. And the schoolteacher who cannot get accepted as alpha
male (or alpha female) by the children is in deep trouble.5
We dont pant-grunt, but like chimpanzees we signal respect or
submission by making ourselves look small. We used to bow or
curtsey to show respect, and people used to prostrate themselves
before despotic rulers. Important people exaggerated their size with a
crown, a wide gown, or an elevated throne. A persons stature can
refer to either his size or his importance. There are higher cognitive
functions and lower vertebrates. In the scala naturae we are on one
of the higher rungs, somewhere between the brutes and the angels.
We are the pride of creation, the alpha males of the world.
Dominance is mentally represented on a highlow dimension,
whereas belongingness is mentally represented on a closedistant
dimension. We speak of close friends and distant relatives, but of
high and low social classes. In Chapter 2 we saw that the cognitive
system evolved as a spatial mapping device to represent the animals
physical environment. In time, we have co-opted this spatial cognitive map for the mental representation of social relations.
The rich and powerful are taller than the rest of the crowd.
Researchers at an American university found that the assistant
professors were 1.24 inches taller than the average of their age and
sex, associate professors were 1.50 inches taller, and professors were
1.97 inches taller. Department chairs were even 2.14 inches taller
than average. Most animals show a similar relation between body
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In Gods Image?
authoritarian style; and low afliation with low dominance makes
for neglectful parenting.8
In Gods Image?
Being wronged makes you look like a sucker. It lowers your status
relative to the perpetrators, and revenge is required to restore the
old balance. As one gang member explained: Its like this. If you
slap me, Im gonna hit you with my closed st. If you stab me, Im
gonna shoot you. An eye for an eye doesnt exist its one-up. Oneup is what it is in gang life.11
When the Nazis were ghting terrorists in the occupied territories,
they applied a simple rule: for every German who was killed, they
would shoot ten local villagers. And when 3,000 Americans were
killed in the World Trade Center, Afghanistan was attacked in
retaliation. And to make sure the customary ten-to-one ratio was
exceeded, Iraq was attacked as well. This is the logic of terror: if you
cannot defeat your enemys army, attack civilians; if you cannot
punish those who attacked you, lash out against bystanders.
There is a brighter side to all this. Men show off their machismo
not only in crime and war, but also in sports, moneymaking, arts and
science. And most of the time they compete by cooperating with
other men. The age of peak creativity for artists, pop stars and
scientists is the same as for criminals. Thus civilization is the creation
of competing and cooperating males. It is the incidental byproduct
of the male desire to show off.12
In Gods Image?
This did indeed coincide with behavioral changes. Until at least
the 1920s, killings of blacks by whites were more common than
killings of whites by blacks. Sometime during the twentieth century
the pattern reversed, and recent murder statistics show that blacks
kill whites ve to ten times more often than whites kill blacks. Until
1950, rapes of black women by white men were more common than
rapes of white women by black men. The numbers were balanced
during the 1950s, and every survey after the 1960s showed that
black-on-white rape was more common than white-on-black rape:
ten times more common according to the latest counts.
The same applies to collective violence. The Nazis did not kill the
Jews because they felt inferior to them, but because they thought of
themselves as a master race that is entitled to exterminate others. The
most aggressive nations are always those that have the highest opinion of themselves: France in the eighteenth century, Germany and
Japan during part of the twentieth, and the United States now. This
is the logic of dominance hierarchies. High-ranking individuals and
groups are, almost by denition, those who can afford to lash out at
the underlings. Weird responses are most likely when unrealistically
favorable self-evaluations are threatened by others, for example
when a nation that has an inated opinion of itself is humiliated by a
lost war. Thats what created the Nazi movement in Germany after
World War I.14
With evidence being so ambiguous, why is the belief that raising
peoples self-esteem has prosocial effects, so popular? One reason is
simply that our culture is based on the pursuit of happiness. Happiness means not only sex and money but anything that feels good,
including high self-esteem. Therefore we need experts to tell us that
indulging our egotism is a good thing.
Also, there can be no revolution without high self-esteem. Satan
was impelled by his pride to rebel against God and the angels. Also
in our species the poor, downtrodden and disenfranchized rebel
against oppressive rule when they no longer believe that their lowly
station in life is deserved. The rst task of the revolutionary is
therefore to raise their sense of self-worth and convince them that
they deserve better.
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In Gods Image?
After they had failed to do so, the discrepancy between his
expectations about himself and his actual behavior may have produced yet another emotion: guilt. Being a chimp he couldnt tell her
he was sorry, but he did allow her to chase him across the enclosure.
Chasing him raised Puists self-esteem at his expense, and thereby
Luit did eventually repay part of his debt.
This kind of behavior is common in chimpanzees and humans but
rare in monkeys. Tit-for-tat reciprocity did not fall from the sky,
but was patched together from elements that had evolved in other
contexts. The positive emotions of trust and gratitude were co-opted
from kin-selected social bonding. And when attachment was
rened into commitment, a social exchange relationship came to be
valued for its own sake, not only for its material benets. Retaliation
was co-opted from the mechanisms of social dominance. In social
animals with stable dominance hierarchies, the boss expects deference and punishes insubordination. All that was needed to turn
retaliation against insubordination into retaliation against cheaters
was the expectation that a favor would be returned.16
Therefore the cognitive map of reciprocity mirrors that of dominance. A reputation for fairness and honesty is the equivalent of
high dominance status; moralistic aggression against a cheater is
equivalent to the punishment of an impertinent underling; pride
is produced by displays of either ones competence or ones virtue;
and shame can result from defeat, failing at a task and getting caught
cheating. Ones honor is at stake when either ones dominance status
or ones honesty is called into question.
Still, dominance and reciprocity do allow alternative cognitive
mappings. When labor relations are mapped on the dominance
template, the employer is a legitimate authority and the employee is
subject to that authority. Work is obedience to the employers
commands, and pay is the reward for the employees obedience. The
employer is somewhat like Ntologi who shares meat with subordinates in recognition of their loyalty. On the social exchange
template, however, work is an object of value. The worker is the
possessor of his work and the employer is the possessor of his
money, and employment is the voluntary exchange of the workers
work for the employers money.17
Not everyone plays tit-for-tat. There is an alternative social
strategy, called Pavlov, that uses a simple decision rule: if your
partner cooperates, repeat your last move; if not, change. Lets
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In Gods Image?
By deception and self-deception, of course! By overrating the benets due to them and underrating their obligations to others, people
can behave like selsh opportunists while posing as righteous tit-fortatters. Sometimes it works but sometimes it doesnt. Thats why we
need lawyers.
Criminals always underrate the impact of their crimes on others.
Many imprisoned rapists sincerely believe that they do not deserve
their fate. They are the real victims, singled out by a rabid legal
system to go to prison for nothing at all only a copulation! This
kind of bias is wired into the brain so we can take advantage of titfor-tat players who are temporarily off-guard and of poor suckers
who are powerless to resist our machinations.19
In Gods Image?
that the love for ones family should be extended to include persons
outside it as well. Benevolence should guide the rulers relations with
his subjects as it does the fathers relations with his children. The
citizens, in turn, owe loyalty and obedience to their government in
the same way that a child is loyal and obedient to the parents. And
we should treat everyone with human-heartedness the way we treat
family members.
Confucianism was opposed to the legalist tradition, which maintained that people will always pursue their own advantage. Rather
than convincing them to restrain their selsh pursuits for the benet
of others, the ruler has to harness their selshness through a system
of rewards and punishments.23
In China the Confucian tradition became the leading social ethos
for more than two millennia, but the West embarked on a different
trajectory. In Europe and America, the Christian obsession with sin
and personal salvation became secularized into an obsession with
freedom and competition. The struggle for eternal life was transformed into the struggle for sex and money.
Western societies have been enormously successful by harnessing
peoples selsh persuit of personal gain. Soviet communism was
doomed because it rejected the legalism of modern capitalist societies
but failed to become Confucian. Karl Marx was not a psychologist
but an economist. He and his intellectual heirs never understood that
every society needs a guiding ethos that is rooted in human nature.
Perhaps a modern society that is based on benevolence rather than
the harnessing of peoples quest for sex and money can work only if
pharmacologists develop an altruism drug that can be mixed in the
drinking water, or if genetic engineers equip everyone with an extra
dose of benevolence genes.
The proposal to improve society with drugs or genes is based on
the assumption that people will always create the kind of society that
suits their inclinations. Sophisticated people will create sophisticated
societies, and simpleminded people will create simple societies.
Populations with a high proportion of altruists will create harmonious societies, and those with a high proportion of antisocials are
plagued by distrust, violence and corruption.
This is an example of reductionism: explaining complex phenomena at a more basic level of analysis. For some twentieth-century
intellectuals, reductionism was a term of abuse.24 A world ruled by a
few fundamental laws is not only boring. It also seems to limit the
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In Gods Image?
reason why a strong middle class is a social force favoring political
stability. A president enacting tax breaks for the middle class to
ensure his re-election is not very different from Ntologi sharing meat
with males in stable mid-ranking positions.
Conformity to established hierarchies is also favored by the perception of threat. This mechanism evolved in the social primates
because a high anxiety level correlates with a low probability of
success in power struggles. One convenient side-effect of this anxietycauses-conformity reex is to prevent quarrels among group members when the group is threatened by an external enemy. Nations
become more disciplined and authoritarian when they are threatened
by unemployment, crime or war. The outbreak of World War I
aborted any attempts at social reform or socialist revolution in the
warring countries; economic depression in Germany brought Hitler
to power; authoritarian religious groups make more converts during
times of economic crisis than in times of prosperity; in the Deep
South, lynchings of Blacks were most frequent during times of
economic strain; and the best way to prop up support for authoritarian rule is to scare gullible citizens with an evil enemy who
threatens them with weapons of mass destruction.25
Individual differences in attitudes and values can be examined by
asking people what they value in life, what they like or dislike, and
what they consider important or unimportant, right or wrong. Such
surveys can show, for example, whether those who are against
abortion also dislike nudists and support the death penalty and the
war on drugs.
In one study of this kind, Valerie Braithwaite from the Australian
National University in Canberra extracted four general clusters of
attitudes and values. The rst cluster included an emphasis on
cleanliness, ambition, a comfortable life, international power,
national strength and order, propriety in dress and manners, and
social standing and getting ahead, combined with a distaste for
humanitarianism. Braithwaite labeled this value orientation security
through order and status. In the twentieth century, people with
these preferences used to be called conservatives.
A second cluster included obedience, religiousness, honesty and
self-control, and a distaste for independence and the experience of
pleasure and abandonment. This factor, religiosity and personal
restraint, was also associated with political conservatism, although
to a lesser extent than security through order and status.
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Us and them
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any
country. (Hermann Goering)
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In Gods Image?
We need friends so we are better able to ght our enemies. This, at
least, is the male variety of friendship. Nowhere is this logic more
visible than in war, when armies of cooperating males thrash their
enemies and get thrashed by them.
Ninety percent of the hunter-gatherers known to anthropologists
fought wars, usually in the form of raids and ambushes. Pitched
battles are common only under civilized conditions where the leaders
can leave the ghting and dying to the common soldiers. Usually
only males ght, captured male enemies are killed either with or
without prior torture, and captured women are kept as wives. Only
15 percent of simple societies without centralized political systems
killed women as well as men.27
The only other primate that indulges in this pattern of inter-group
aggression is the common chimpanzee. Jane Goodall describes the
chimpanzee raiding parties as border patrols. A party of males
ventures into the border territory and sometimes even into the
heartland of the enemy. That the chimps are not strolling aimlessly
through the bush is shown by their telltale behavior. They are
uncharacteristically quiet and often stop to listen intently. When they
meet a sizable group of enemy chimps, they either retreat quietly or
impress the enemy with charging displays before retreating.
Chimps attack only when they encounter a lone male, a lone
unattractive female, or a consorting malefemale pair. The victim is
held to the ground, pounded with stones or sticks, deep bite wounds
are inicted, and strips of skin are torn from the victims body.
Thats fun, isnt it? These attacks can last for more than half an hour.
The victim is left to die of blood loss and wound infections. Quite
obviously, aggression against strangers is not subject to the same
inhibitions as is aggression against compatriots. Humans are exactly
like this. For example, many Americans today approve of the torture
of foreign terrorist suspects although they oppose the use of torture
for American citizens.
Jane Goodall described a war of secession in Gombe. A small
group had split off from the Kasakela community, founding the
Kahama community at the periphery of the old community range.
Over a period of ve years, all six adult males and at least one female
of the Kahama community were killed by Kasakela males.
Annexation of the Kahama territory brought the Kasakela males in
conict with the powerful Kalande community, which nearly led to
the extinction of the Kasakela community.28
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In Gods Image?
guys. This lopsided sense of justice is the strongest motive for war,
so strong that it leads some individuals to sacrice their lives.
Suicide terrorists are the most familiar example of self-sacricing
heroism. They almost invariably come from weak nations such as
Chechnya, Palestine and Iraq that are treated like dirt by a powerful
enemy. We ght our wars for fun, but they ght theirs to right a
wrong.
Crashing a hijacked airliner into a building will not exactly
increase the copy number of your genes in future generations.
Therefore we must ask: How could belligerence and heroism persist?
Wouldnt any pacist mutant who leaves the ghting to his compatriots have an advantage, especially if he stays at home with the
women while the others are risking their lives? The pacism gene
would rapidly take over. Obviously, thats not what happened. There
must be something in it for the warrior.
Part of the answer is that in primitive warfare, enemies are raided
and ambushed only when they are grossly outnumbered by the
aggressor. The attackers rarely get killed. Even in todays wars 90
percent of the victims are non-combatant civilians.32 With all
advantages on the aggressors side, attacking an enemy who is
actually not dangerous at all entails only a slight risk. The converse
error, sitting peacefully at home while the enemy prepares his attack,
would be fatal. Therefore our brain evolved to make the less costly
mistake: shoot now, think later. Attack the enemy now, before he
gets the false idea that we are evil and dangerous. We need this bias
to counteract the tendency for wishful thinking that is also wired into
our brains.33
Once the members of a community sense an external threat, even a
minimal one, fear and hate are blown out of proportion by the
primitive mechanism of emotional contagion, aided by rumor
spreading. In our time rumor spreading about terrorists and
weapons of mass destruction is the task of the mass media.
But most important for the evolution and maintenance of belligerence and heroism are the benets that accrue to valiant warriors
in their own community. Males have to show off in order to assert
their status. What better way is there to show off than by killing
enemies? Males also must cooperate. What better way is there to
show cooperativeness than by ghting side by side with ones comrades? Tensions within the community can be defused that way, not
because an aggressive drive needs to be discharged but because
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Everlasting peace
Everlasting peace is a dream, and not even a pleasant one; and
war is a necessary part of Gods arrangement of the world . . .
without war the world would deteriorate into materialism.
(Helmuth von Moltke)
The rarity of women warriors and the similarity of warfare in
humans and chimpanzees show that war is a biological phenomenon.
How can we hope to overcome this primate heritage in the nuclear
age?
Drugs or genes that prevent cooperation among males would not
be a good idea because civilization is as much a product of male
cooperation as is war. But eliminating male violence without eliminating male cooperation should be possible. Reducing the testosterone level would be a good starting point. We can also take all
power from the men and try a civilization that is based on female
rather than male cooperation, but we would have to increase female
intelligence to compensate for the lower female desire to show off.
Without such interventions there will always be incentives for war:
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In Gods Image?
the prestige accruing to the brave soldier, the experience of comradeship, and the opportunities for looting and raping. Russian soldiers in Afghanistan used to make necklaces from the cut-off ears of
their killed enemies, and American soldiers had their fun with Iraquis in the prisons they inherited from Saddam Hussein. On the
other hand, ghting is dangerous and one is bossed around by the
ofcers.
In some historical settings, for example the raids of the Vikings, all
the incentives were there and they were more than sufcient to offset
the rigors and dangers of the venture. But todays armies discourage
looting and raping and torturing, taking the fun out of the whole
enterprise. Therefore volunteers are in short supply, and the selfrecruited raiding party of yore had to be replaced by forced levies of
citizens and nally by mercenaries. The ancient Greek and Roman
world went through this sequence, as did Christian Europe.
War is still exciting for armchair patriots, idealists, and the political and military leaders, but not for the grunt soldier who does the
dying. Its the political and military elites, not the nations and armies
led by them, that are the equivalent of the ancient brotherhood of
males. And in an international community with more than 150
nations, it takes only one powerful clique to start a war.
Xenophobic aggression is an individual-difference trait. Only
some people identify strongly with in-groups, and only some of those
turn their allegiance into an aggressive stance toward outsiders.
These people are likely to join the military, a fundamentalist religious group or a political party. A politician must identify strongly
with his party or political program, or his own idiosyncratic ideas
that he promotes through his party; and to succeed he must translate
his allegiances and convictions into a valiant struggle against his
opponents. Therefore on average, successful politicians are more
cohesive, aggressive and xenophobic than the rest of us. This is the
reason why demonstrations of outraged citizens demanding a war of
aggression are less common than anti-war demonstrations except
in places where the government succeeds in brainwashing its citizens
through the mass media.
Things are changing, though. War is no longer fun even for the
leaders. Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden had to
duck smart bombs and cruise missiles aimed at their headquarters,
and if America ever gets nuked, the rst bomb will be dropped on
Washington, DC before a single soldier dies in the trenches.
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10
Good and Evil
Since morals, therefore, are meant to have an inuence on
the actions and affections, it follows, that they cannot be
derivd from reason . . . Morals excite passions, and produce
or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this
particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of reason.
(Hume, Treatise of Human Nature)
For the theologian, rules of conduct are imposed by God or inherent
in the world order. For the philosopher, they are imposed by people
or inherent in the world order. Both the theologian and the philosopher acknowledge that moral truths can be recognized, either by
the right kind of belief or by the right kind of reasoning.
The scientist is not concerned with moral truths. He merely studies
how people form their judgments. He investigates the epidemiology
of moral intuitions, behaviors and philosophies; looks for the relevant brain circuitry; studies precursors and analogues of adult
human morality in children and in other animals; and, of course, he
wonders why it exists in the rst place. The scientist studies morality
the way he studies digestion: as a biological phenomenon with its
own history, mechanisms and functions for the organism. At least,
thats what he ought to do.
The moral philosopher is an object of study for the amoral scientist. Philosophers like to retaliate by claiming that the scientist
cannot be objective because he is always guided by his own moral
intuitions. This is a valid objection. The world is not the way it ought
to be, and scientic research is bound to uncover upsetting truths
from time to time. Being human, and being prone to wishful
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In Gods Image?
thinking, scientists are tempted to avoid, misinterpret or denigrate
such research. Morality is one of the most powerful impediments in
the scientists pursuit of the truth, second in importance only to
stupidity. But this does not invalidate the scientic enterprise. Scientic objectivity is like measurement accuracy. It is never 100 percent, but it can be approached to a satisfactory extent.
Philosophers have a reputation as unpractical people whose
intellectual edices are pathetically useless in everyday life, whereas
scientists do useful things. But scientists do not create useful products. They only create knowledge. Natural science lays the foundation for engineers who translate scientic knowledge into tools
and toys, and treatments for our illnesses. The science of human
behavior lays the foundation for philosophers who translate its
insights into moral philosophies at least, thats what moral philosophers ought to do. Thus science is as much a foundation of moral
philosophy as of engineering.
The scientists task is to hypothesize, observe, analyze, and tell the
truth. He is meant to enlighten the moral engineer (and everyone
else) by predicting the consequences of actions such as human
cloning or nuclear war. He can also advise him about the ease with
which moral systems can be adopted by people. For example, a
proposal to consider the dignity of cabbages inviolable while other
humans should be treated as a source of vitamins and minerals may
not appeal to the public because it runs up against evolved food
preferences and altruistic instincts. We cannot engineer moral sentiments from scratch.
In Gods Image?
in their own self-interest.2 This is the treatment for Basenjis, not
Shetland Sheepdogs.
The difference between internalizers and non-internalizers lies in
the relationship with the person imposing the rule. In close relationships, people tend to treat their partner like themselves. Hurting
the partner would be like hurting oneself, and violating his expectations would be like failing to live up to ones own standards. Only
individuals (of any species) that are capable of close personal bonds
can equate anothers expectations and standards with their own. And
because humans can identify with the groups to which they belong in
the same way that they identify with loved and valued people, they
can internalize rules that are imposed by the consensus of their group.
Not all rules are imposed from outside. Konrad Lorenz related
how one of his dogs, Bully, accidentally bit Lorenzs hand when he
tried to break up a dogght. Even though Lorenz did not reprimand
him and immediately tried to reassure him, Bully was so upset about
his misdeed that he suffered a complete nervous breakdown. For
days he was virtually paralyzed, and uninterested in food. He would
lie on the rug breathing shallowly, an occasional deep sigh coming
from his tormented soul. For weeks Bully remained extremely subdued. Lorenz noted that his dog had never bitten a person before, so
could not have relied on previous experience to decide that he had
done something wrong.3
Dogs need not learn the rule, Never bite your master. It is
implicit in the relationship between a dog and its master. For millions of years a wolf biting the pack leader had to expect grave
consequences, and for the past 10,000 years or so a dog biting its
master was apt to be shot a very effective way of breeding a masterbite inhibition into a species.
In Gods Image?
They seem to be less moral than Lorenzs dog, though. But what do
you expect? Chimpanzees are not like dogs. They are more like us.6
Not only aggression is reined in by inhibitory controls. Jane
Goodall reported the following anecdote about Goblin, the young
alpha male of the Gombe chimpanzees:
One day, about half-way through her rst period of swelling,
Goblin approached Melissa and summoned her with vigorous
shaking of vegetation. She ignored him at rst and then, when
he persisted, she threatened him. This seemed to enrage him
with a scowl he leapt at her and, as she ran off, chased after her
and actually stamped on her back. Melissa was beside herself
with fury and, as Goblin displayed away, she stamped after
him, screaming until I thought she would choke.7
Estrous females do not normally rebuff the alpha males sexual
advances, but Melissa had a special reason to be outraged: she was
Goblins mother. Goblins power as alpha male must have gone to
his head, for ordinarily a male chimpanzee does not show much
sexual interest in his mother. We dont know whether incestuous
chimps experience anything resembling shame, guilt or remorse.
King Oedipus did, but he was human.
If she were human, Melissa would argue that copulation between
mother and son displeases the gods or violates the natural order of
things. Or she would say that the motherchild relationship is sacred
and should not be deled by sexual acts. Only a scientist can be
boorish enough to say that a reluctance to copulate with ones
mother has been wired into the brain because many children of incest
used to die early, so the incestuous genes failed to survive.
People vary in the strength of their inhibitory controls. In Chapter
9 we saw that one of the major value orientations, religiosity and
personal restraint, is dened by an emphasis on religiousness, obedience, honesty, politeness and self-control. This is the value system
of people with well-developed inhibitory controls and a somewhat
hypertrophied moral sense.
The antisocial types who populate our prisons are at the opposite
end of the bell-shaped distribution for self-control. Think of a psychologist who puts a marshmallow on the table in front of a child.
He tells the child, I am going out for ten minutes. If you dont eat
this marshmallow, I will give you two when I come back. When the
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In Gods Image?
Our anatomists are certainly weird people, but do they really believe
their rite does any good for the cadavers? I would think that once
you are on the anatomists dissecting table, it really doesnt matter
any more. No, they must do it for selsh reasons!
The real reason is that people value the capacity to maintain
lasting bonds of attachment, caring and loyalty. Honoring the dead
is a good advertisement for this capacity. Even respect for the corpse
of a stranger makes a good impression because it shows ones
membership in the imaginary community that spans the whole
human species.
Through an emotionally charged ceremony, the anatomy professors and their students reassure each other that they belong to a
moral community where the intimate emotions of attachment and
caring are extended to every community member. The amoral biochemist who asks whats in it for the cadavers can only be a
high-Mach who treats human relations as a matter of costbenet
calculation, rather than something that should be cultivated for its
own sake! Ritual is important not only for anatomists but for other
primitive tribes as well. It conrms group membership and reinforces
shared beliefs and a shared value system, as it does in the Holy
Communion of the Christians.
When I told my friend from Mars that according to the Pope
humans have an immortal soul but other animals dont,10 he asked:
Does this mean you should not kill pigs but killing humans is
okay?
Why that?
When you kill a pig, the pig is dead. Thats bad. But when
you kill a human, his soul continues to exist. You are not guilty
of destroying a life. Therefore your Popes teaching implies that
killing a human is okay.
I had to explain to my friend that humans do not really consider
killing a bad thing. I told him that many politicians and teenage boys
are fascinated by military technology because they like killing as
many people as possible without risking their own lives. They only
consider it bad to kill their own people. Therefore they have to mark
their own kind as different from everyone else. People wear their
immortal soul the way the soldier wears his uniform: to distinguish
themselves from those who can be killed with impunity.
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In Gods Image?
group membership. This link was rediscovered at the time of the
French revolution when those who valued equality and community
came to value freedom as well: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite! But today
freedom is no longer seen as a token of group membership. For us
freedom is the right of the individual to pursue sex and money
without outside interference, and it includes the right of the strong to
take advantage of the weak. Therefore freedom and equality are
incompatible. Since the rules of the game are made by the strong,
wealthy and successful members of society, modern consumer
societies are invariably democratic, libertarian and inegalitarian.
This emphasis on freedom creates the principle of autonomy: an
opposition to any interference in other peoples affairs. Prohibiting
homosexuality, human cloning, alcohol and marijuana is bad, and
taking from the rich to give to the poor is also bad because it violates
the autonomy of the rich. Autonomy is the harakiri of moral philosophy because it implies that people are free to choose the moral
principles that suit them. Today moral philosophies are judged by
the same criterion as other consumer goods: customer satisfaction.
With freedom devalued and equality abandoned, human dignity
had to take their place as a token of group membership. Dignity
used to refer to attributes, rights and obligations that go with
membership in a select group. A dignitarys dignity is a function of
his ofce and position in society. It is undignied for a boy to cry,
and menial work is below the dignity of an aristocrat. The aristocrat
has the right to an aristocratic lifestyle, and you dont let the Queen
live in a suburban at.
Dignity means conformity to the standards of ones social group:
noblesse oblige. The modern concept of professionalism comes close
to this traditional meaning of dignity: living up to the standards of
ones profession. The captain of the Titanic who sank with his ship
was a paragon of dignity as well as professionalism, as were the
musicians who played to the end.
Modern thinkers managed to stretch this element of old-fashioned
in-group chauvinism into the concept of human dignity and human
rights. Now mankind at large is understood as the in-group whose
members have certain rights forget about the duties by virtue of
their species membership.
I tested your understanding of this point in Chapter 7 when I
wrote that on the Caribbean island of Dominica a woman will come
in heat when she is physically ready for her next pregnancy. This
208
Authority
If you love me, obey my commandments. (John 14,15)
The Bible relates how Abraham proved his worth by obeying Gods
command to sacrice his only son. This unconditional obedience to
authority has fallen into disrepute lately, and for good reasons. Sure
enough, loyalty to a legitimate government and respect for laws are
hard to avoid, and few moralists can nd fault with this. But herding
innocent victims into gas chambers or dropping atomic bombs on
unsuspecting civilians because one has been ordered to do so is
something else. These are cases where the conict between obedience
to authority and other moral values is more blatant than usual.
One of those who were appalled by these experiences of World
War II was Stanley Milgram of Yale University. He decided to study
obedience at close quarters, in the psychology lab at Yale.11 And so
he advertised for experimental subjects in local newspapers, ostensibly for participation in a learning experiment. In the lab, the
subject was introduced to a man who said he was also recruited by
an advertisement but who was actually a confederate of the
experimenter.
The subject was shown an impressive-looking shock generator
with a voltage range from 15 to 450 volts. Next to the voltage, the
scale showed, from left to right: Slight shock Moderate shock
Strong shock Very strong shock Intense shock Extreme
intensity shock Danger: Severe shock. Two switches after this last
designation were simply marked XXX. The effect of the shock
generator was demonstrated to the subject by a sample shock of 45
volts applied to his wrist.
The subject was told that he was the teacher and the other participant was the learner. The learner was strapped down in a chair,
with the electrode wrapped around his wrist. The subject had to
teach the learner word pairs and punish him for every wrong answer,
starting with 15 volts and increasing the shock intensity in increments of 15 volts.
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In Gods Image?
In the rst experiments the learner was placed in a different room,
but it turned out that without feedback from the learner virtually
everyone went to the highest voltage. Therefore Milgram brought
the victim close to the subject and used a standardized sequence of
responses from the victim: there were no signs of discomfort up to 60
volts; grunts of increasing intensity from 75 to 105 volts; at 120 volts
the subject shouted that the shocks were becoming painful. At 150
volts, the victim cried, Experimenter, get me out here! I wont be in
the experiment any more! I refuse to go on! By 270 volts, the victims response was an agonized scream. At 300 volts the victim
shouted in desperation that he would no longer provide answers to
the memory test. At this point the experimenter instructed the subject to treat no answer as a wrong answer, and to shock the learner
on the usual schedule.
Whenever the subject wanted to terminate the experiment, the
experimenter used a standard sequence of prods: Please, continue.
The experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely
essential that you continue. You have no other choice, you must
go on. The experiment was terminated when either the highest voltage was reached or the subject refused to continue after the last prod.
With only vocal feedback from the victim in a neighboring room,
25 out of 40 subjects went to the highest voltage; when the victim was
strapped down in the same room, a few feet away from the subject,
16 out of 40 went to the highest voltage; and when the subject had to
place the victims hand on a shock plate before administering the
shock, only 12 out of 40 obeyed to the end.
The physical presence of the experimenter was important. When
the experimenter left the room after giving the initial instructions
and then gave his orders over the phone, total obedience dropped
from 26 in 40 to 9 in 40. Does this remind you of Daviss rats?
Now you may think that Milgrams subjects were sadists who got
a kick out of the experiment. That this was not the case could be
demonstrated by letting the subject choose the shock intensity. In
this situation a large majority of the subjects never went beyond 90
volts. There were only two sadists in the sample of 40 men who went
to shock intensities of 375 and 450 volts, respectively. Thats the
right stuff for concentration camp guards!
People obey either out of fear, or out of love. Legitimate authority
is based on a personal bond or shared group membership. The child
obeys the parents because it loves them; the law not only demands
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In Gods Image?
driving to work, I often take riders in the back of my pickup. Last
time I left my car in the auto repair shop, a car stopped by my side
when I was walking the half-mile from the repair shop to the school,
offering me a ride. On the way the driver said, I know you. You like
to give people ride. This assessment of anothers deservingness is
called indirect reciprocity or generalized reciprocity.13
Those who do little favors to others because it is in their nature to
be nice are called altruistic, and those who do the same because they
expect a favor in return are called selsh. We like those who are
guided by social emotions because their behavior is predictable, but
we dislike the costbenet thinking of the high-Mach. In personal
relationships, intelligence is a concealed weapon that makes us
feel secure but is rarely used. In Chapter 7 I proposed to subject
prospective marriage partners to genetic screening and to paternitytest every newborn. These ideas do not sound right because they
involve personal relationships where people are supposed to be
guided by love, trust and self-deception rather than statistical base
rates.
Our distrust of rationality is not arbitrary. There are personality
tests that measure agreeableness with questionnaire items such as I
couldnt deceive anyone even if I wanted to or We can never do too
much for the poor and elderly. Other tests measure the extent to
which people rely on feeling or thinking. They contain items such as
Which rules you more: your head or your heart? or Are you more
drawn toward the convincing or the touching? Sure enough, most of
those who rely on feeling rather than thinking score high on the test
for agreeableness.
Even the use of sophisticated technology by aloof technocratphysicians causes misgivings in many people because the treatment
of the sick should be guided by love and compassion, not cold calculus. Our ancestors must have felt the way we feel about impersonal
high-tech medicine when commercial exchange rst appeared thousands of years ago. Before that time the exchange of goods and
services was not a purely utilitarian act but also conrmed bonds of
kinship, friendship or bondage.14
But we have long left the Stone Age. We live in a thoroughly
articial world whose opportunities we cannot use and whose dangers we cannot evade unless we apply cold reason even in those
domains where feelings are supposed to reign. This is not a world for
the fainthearted and the feebleminded! Luckily we can split the
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In Gods Image?
However, aside from human relations and peoples commitment
to the moral order, everything can be bought and everything has to
be paid for, and people like it that way. In the United States, those at
the 90th percentile of the income distribution earn ve times more
than those at the 10th percentile. However, when asked what groups
in their country they perceive as advantaged or disadvantaged, most
people rate the poor as more advantaged than the rich.16
People nd comfort in the belief that ability and effort earn their
rewards, and deviance and sloth are self-defeating. Whereas entitlements come from group membership or ones position in society,
deservingness comes from ones own effort. In a just world, the poor
deserve their poverty because they are lazy, careless or stupid. People
get heart attacks because they eat too much fat and lung cancer
because they smoke, and women get raped because they themselves
provoked the assault. Victims are blamed for their misfortunes, and
we maintain a clean conscience by convincing ourselves that our own
victims do not deserve better.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Melvin Lerner showed this effect in
his laboratory at the University of Kentucky. In a classical experiment, the student subjects were instructed to watch a learning
experiment that was taking place in another room, and to analyze
the emotional cues of the experimental subject. They witnessed how
the subject, ostensibly a fellow student who had signed up for the
experiment as part of her course credit, was told that she was doing
the negative reinforcement condition. The victim was strapped into
the chair, an electrode was fastened to her wrist, and after every
wrong answer in the learning test she was given a strong electrical
shock. Of course it was all staged, but the student subjects believed
that they were observing a real experiment.
After observing this experiment, the subjects had to ll a questionnaire about their impressions of the victim: was she intelligent or
unintelligent, friendly or unfriendly, mature or immature, and the
like. When the students believed that the victim would earn money in
the positive reinforcement condition after having to endure the
shocks, the evaluations were not too bad. If they believed that she
would be shocked again, they were worse. And in a martyr condition where the victim volunteered for the negative reinforcement
condition to benet a squeamish peer, the evaluations were worst of
all.
In this experiment the subjects could do nothing to help the victim.
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In Gods Image?
Rules, rules, rules
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the
majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what
they dislike. (Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues, 1954)
I have no hope of meeting a truly virtuous and benevolent
person. To meet someone who has mastered constancy would
be enough. But constancy is impossible if you imagine yourself
having when you have not, full when you are empty, prosperous
when you are destitute. (Confucius, Analects VII,26)
According to the primatologist Hans Kummer,
as a member of a group, a human can be too tricky for his own
good. He becomes less predictable to the others, and a person
or any other being whose behavior cannot be predicted is
dangerous, not only if he is an enemy or competitor, but even as
a collaborator and friend. The fundamental disadvantage of
group life is competition, and its fundamental advantage is
cooperation. To succeed, cooperation requires that each participant be able to predict the others actions.19
As individuals we ought to make ourselves predictable for our
partners by being truthful: tell the truth, and show our true feelings.
As a society we ought to standardize our behavior by adopting
universal rules of conduct. The sexual domain, for example, is a
mineeld. You can easily lose a valuable mate by trampling on your
partners feelings, and an enraged husband with underdeveloped
inhibitory controls can reduce your life expectancy considerably.
Therefore it is mandatory to plant the sexual landscape thickly with
moral signposts.
But moral injunctions tend to encroach on behaviors that do no
damage at all, such as contraception, masturbation, homosexuality,
and copulation in unusual positions. Homosexuals make an easy
target because they can be tted on the us-and-them template. Thus
the moralist creates an out-group whose members can be despised
and mistreated. Thats good for his self-esteem. But a more general
reason for gratuitous rules is, simply, that people feel more comfortable when others do what everyone does.
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In Gods Image?
between morality and convention is as fuzzy as that between nature
and nurture.
Perhaps Daviss rats are not that amoral after all. Perhaps they
used an advanced, postconventional type of reasoning to distinguish between learned rules and moral principles.21 To refrain from
eating more than four food pellets is an arbitrary rule that is valid
only in the context in which it has been learned, but to refrain from
eating ones pups, thats morality! Conventional rules can be internalized, but moral rules are internal to begin with.
In Gods Image?
clearly. And yet, she only produced misery. She solves the dilemma
of allotting her limited emotional and material resources by helping
baby animals rather than adults, presumably because baby animals
are closer to the cute schema than are the adults. Compassion is
unfair. It discriminates against the unloveable.
In Darwins words, in group-living animals, sympathy is directed
solely towards members of the same community, and therefore
towards known, and more or less loved members, but not to all the
individuals of the same species. Being driven by love, raw compassion is partial. It cannot support a system of justice for everyone but is
a recipe for favoritism and nepotism. A business executive may retain
an ineffective employee out of compassion, hurting both the company
and the customers, and a politician may give administrative posts to
his needy friends rather than to those best qualied to serve the
public. People are more compassionate with their own children than
with other peoples children, and they help a distressed friend while
turning their backs on a stranger; and aid to the victims of war and
famine depends on how the misery is presented by the mass media.23
Compassion is stimulus-bound. When Milgram pitted obedience
against compassion, his subjects objected only when they were close
to the screaming victim. Bomber pilots drop their bombs without
compunction because they are never confronted with the mayhem
they create; and in civilian life we keep compassion in bounds by
pushing the misery out of sight, locking it up in hospitals, prisons
and nursing homes.
The lady with the cats shows that raw compassion is nearsighted.
No doubt she is a little feebleminded, but her approach has a distinctly Christian touch. The Good Samaritan of the gospel did not
ght crime. He only helped the crime victim. And what about
Mother Teresas work in the slums of Calcutta? Did she really reduce
human suffering? Or did she merely permit starving children to
survive and live miserable lives and produce a new set of starving
children? Compassion was not designed by Mother Nature to make
the world a better place.
When the lady objected that sterilizing her cats would deprive
them of the joys of motherhood, she simply projected her own
human emotions into her cats. It never crossed her mind that
motherhood could have a different meaning for a cat than for herself. For perspective-taking and empathy one has to model the
others thoughts and feelings in ones own mind. This works best
220
In Gods Image?
undertake their activities as members of a political or religious
group. They did not describe their actions as patriotic or political.
And, despite the horrors of war, not one of the non-German rescuers
made anti-German statements.
Virtually all the rescuers insisted that they simply did what they
had to do. One of them, a German-Czech man by the name of Otto,
was sent to concentration camps for helping Jews, and even as a
prisoner he struck deals with guards to continue his rescue activities.
When asked about the moral principles that made him do all this, he
said, I never made a moral decision to rescue Jews. I just got mad. I
felt I had to do it. I came across many things that demanded my
compassion . . . Every other person is basically you. Gradually, by
opening your eyes, you see that . . . everyone is you.26
Otto and the other rescuers saw their activities not as a prescribed
duty but as the essence of being human. It dened their identity, not
as happiness-maximizing individualists but as members of the moral
community that includes all human beings. Moral choices are not
rational but intuitive in nature. People as simple and honest as Otto
accept their intuitions at face value, but philosophers rationalize and
systematize theirs into impressive intellectual edices. At bottom,
however, judgments of right and wrong are gut feelings, more akin to
aesthetic judgments than to factual ones.
Reason can still make a difference because it allows us to predict
the effects that our actions have on us and on others. To give an
example, do you like the idea of transplanting organs from genetically engineered pigs to humans? Perhaps you dont, and your yuk
response makes you judge such a practice unethical. But now put
yourself in the place of a patient who is going to die unless he gets a
pig heart. You will revise your original judgment if and only if the
intuitions aroused by this mental model outcompete the original yuk
response. If you are disgust-prone you are likely to stick with the yuk
response; and if you are empathy-prone you will give the poor
wretch the heart unless you empathize with the pig.
There are two levels of moral judgment. Level 1 judgments are
direct responses to external stimuli, such as the presence of helpless
puppies and kittens; or they are responses to the mental representation of ones own intended action, such as biting ones master.
This level of moral judgment is shared between humans and other
large-brained animals. Level 2 judgments depend on the mental
representation of anticipated outcomes. They require a level of
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High-Mach moralists
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing
evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the
rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil
cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is
willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? (Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn)
After my devastating critique of compassion, you may be languishing for an alternative that is more appropriate to the dignity of an
intelligent species. What about this one:
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In Gods Image?
Whether the other nations live in prosperity or whether they
perish interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for
our culture. Whether or not ten thousand Russian women drop
from exhaustion when digging an anti-tank ditch concerns me
only to the extent that the ditch gets nished for Germany. We
will never be crude and heartless without need. Thats clear.
We Germans, as the only ones in the world with a decent
attitude toward animals, will take a decent stance toward these
human animals as well. But it is a crime against our own blood
to care for them and bring them values, so that our sons and
grandsons might have even more problems with them . . . Most
of you know what it means when hundred dead bodies are lying
together, or ve hundred, or even a thousand. Having gone
through this and aside from exceptions of human weakness
having remained decent, thats what made us hard. This is a
never written and never to be written page of honor in our
history.29
So spoke Heinrich Himmler, in a speech delivered to SS ofcers in
the Polish town of Posen in 1943. Himmler was keenly aware that
compassion is a powerful motive, but he explicitly rejected it as a
guide to moral action. We saw that morality emerges from the
inhibition of inappropriate impulses, such as biting ones master,
copulating with ones mother or going to church naked. According
to Himmler, compassion also ought to be suppressed when it
interferes with moral action. Resisting it is virtuous, and yielding to
it aside from exceptions of human weakness is shameful.
Himmler knew what the lady with the cats does not know: that
unthinking goodness can lead to misery. It has to be suppressed for
the benet of our sons and grandsons. Daughters and granddaughters didnt seem to count for him. This is not the primitive level
1 morality of the lady with the cats. Any chimpanzee can dote on
little kittens or be nauseated by a heap of dead bodies. Only some
humans can control these impulses for the benet of sons and
grandsons because only they can create in their minds an image of
the world in which their sons and grandsons are going to live.
In Chapter 5 we saw that humanitarians the kind of people who
extend the habits of kin-selected love beyond the narrow circle of
family and friends do not usually support measures that benet
future generations at the expense of people living now. Himmler
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In Gods Image?
reason why the Nazis depended on the most powerful propaganda
machinery history has ever seen. And because the prevailing culture
of the time had already made the cut-off between us and them at
the species boundary, Himmler had to speak of human animals to
justify his actions.
Values are shaped by experiences. Where survival and success
depend on ones family, the family is held sacred; where war is
perpetual, warrior values prevail; where misery is inescapable, people
are preoccupied with life after death and salvation; where opportunities to get rich are plentiful, materialism is rampant; and where
security and afuence are taken for granted, self-realization becomes
the main concern.
Like everyone else, idealists deceive themselves. They overestimate
the happiness that their struggle can bring to others, and the ease
with which their aims can be attained. Sensible folks know it. They
keep their paradises in the distant past. They dream about the
Garden of Eden, the original afuent society of the noble savage, or
the matriarchal societies of Old Europe before the outbreak of
patriarchy.30 Traditional mythologies have tales of a long-lost
Golden Age, and modern pop science is adding some more.
The idealisms of the twentieth century are not much in favor
today, mainly because the outcomes were awful. We have realized
that the better worlds that idealists dream up are not that ideal after
all. The Nazis dream of a heroic future with perpetual war could
actually be a nasty state of affairs, especially in the nuclear age; and
the classless society of Marxist dreams must be a boring place where
nobody would want to live. Wasnt it boredom more than anything
else that brought the Soviet power down?
We have learned that collective benet should not be pursued at
the expense of individual benet. And because we have to draw a line
between those who count and those who dont, we now insist that it
be drawn at the species boundary. Herding pigs to the slaughterhouse is okay, but herding people into gas chambers is not, no
matter what their nationality, race or religion. That way we make
sure we have only out-groups that cannot retaliate. We also insist
that good ends do not justify bad means. Translation: we must not
impose short-term sacrices on people for the sake of long-term
benets. We must discount the future, not the present! We respond
as strongly to the failures of twentieth-century world-improvement
schemes as the eighteenth-century enlightenment philosophers did to
226
227
In Gods Image?
Theories of justice
As Plato was conversing about Ideas and using the nouns
tablehood and cuphood, [Diogenes] said, Table and cup I
see; but your tablehood and cuphood, Plato, I can nowise see.
Thats readily accounted for, said Plato, for you have the eyes
to see the visible table and cup; but not the understanding by
which ideal tablehood and cuphood are discerned. (Diogenes
Laertius)31
As a student I attended a seminar in forensic psychiatry. In the very
rst session, before introducing the rst patient, the professor
explained in well-chosen words the principles of forensic psychiatry.
According to him, normal, unimpaired people are free to choose
between alternative courses of action, and this makes them responsible for their actions. However, this freedom is compromised in
certain psychiatric diseases, and people so aficted are not responsible for their misdeeds. While a common criminal deserves punishment, the psychotic is ill and deserves treatment.
One of the students objected that this distinction makes no sense
because all behavior, criminal or otherwise, has causes: the family
environment, genes or society. The psychiatrist insisted that these
inuences do not abrogate the freedom of choice. A normal person
acts by his own free will and therefore has to be held responsible for
his actions.
The student was right. The brain activity that produces crimes is
subject to physical causality. Being trained in the natural sciences, I
could see not a shred of logic in the psychiatrists argument. Sure, he
had to justify his professional activity, but why these inanities about
freedom and responsibility? Couldnt he tell us something sensible,
for example that recidivism for psychotic criminals is lower if they
get treatment instead of punishment, or that the deterrent effect of
punishment doesnt work for psychotics, or that common criminals
are happier in prison while psychotics are better off in a psychiatric
ward?
Criminal justice is the civilized variety of retributive justice. The
uncivilized variety is called revenge. The desire to punish evildoers
evolved as a means of behavior control by the old-fashioned but
effective technique of operant conditioning. It restrains rebellious
underlings and forces selsh opportunists into cooperation. In the
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In Gods Image?
doseresponse relationship is steeper for compassion than it is for
revenge. Moderate but protracted suffering of the criminal satises
our desire for revenge without rousing compassion. Intense suffering
satises the desire for revenge only a bit more, but it rouses compassion to an intolerably greater degree. Thats how rational our
treatment of criminals is!
The rational approach, which I labeled level 2 morality, is
endorsed by the utilitarian school of moral philosophy. Utilitarianism exhorts people to work towards the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, based on the recognition that all people pursue
pleasure and avoid pain.32 For the utilitarian, punishment is meant
to deter people from crime. The convicted criminals suffering is a
cost that is acceptable as long and only as long as it is outweighed
by the benet of deterrence. By punishing criminals we use bad
means to achieve a good end.
But the punishment of evildoers evolved in early human ancestors
who were too stupid to reason about its costs and benets. Therefore
it cannot depend on a utilitarian calculus. Indeed, when confronted
with hypothetical scenarios in the psychology lab, people allot
punishments on the basis of intuitions about deservingness rather
than the weighting of costs and benets.
Some philosophers rationalize these level 1 judgments by claiming
that punishment is intrinsically good because crime is intrinsically
evil. Others rationalize the intuition that a successful crime upsets the
dominance hierarchy by raising the status of the criminal at the
victims expense by claiming that crime upsets a natural balance
that has to be restored by punishment. People keep confusing the
natural order with the social order!33
Philosophies that rationalize level 1 morality are called deontological. They work with concepts such as responsibility, dignity,
personhood, deservingness and the value of human life. Above all
there is the concept of moral agency that the forensic psychiatrist
invoked: the idea that human beings are responsible for their actions
because somehow they are autonomous agents. For these philosophers, punishment is not a bad means to a good end; it is a good end
in its own right.
Deontological thinking is user-friendlier than the utilitarian variety because it requires less thinking, and because it can accommodate personal preferences. The American moralist Leon Kass, for
example, claimed that all decent people nd human reproductive
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In Gods Image?
When the forensic psychiatrist appealed to responsibility and
moral agency, he tried to conceptualize and ended up reifying the
cognitive manifestations of another process that takes place outside
conscious awareness: the decision to allot moral outrage to an evildoer. Diogenes might have replied, Action I see; but agency, my
dear moralist, I can nowise see.
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11
Nature and Nurture
Nature has always had more power than education.
(Voltaire, Vie de Molie`re, 1739)
Education makes a greater difference between man and man,
than nature has made between man and brute.
(J. Adams, Letter to a Relative, 1776)
All people have roughly the same cognitive architecture. Why?
Because of sexual reproduction. If genetically predetermined wiring
patterns were totally different in different people, then combining
Moms genes with Dads would lead to a terrible mix-up in the
childs brain. Therefore differences between people can only be differences in degree, but not in kind.
While evolutionary psychologists describe the generic human
being, behavioral geneticists study the causes of individual differences. Any measurable trait is fair game for behavioral geneticists:
divorce, criminal convictions, school grades, church attendance, and
the scores on personality questionnaires and IQ tests. I will concentrate on intelligence, for three reasons: rst, it is the trait that
most clearly sets us apart from other animals. Second, it predicts
many important social outcomes. And third, it plays a key role in
cultural evolution.
Measuring minds
. . . man is a suspicious, sensitive, and uncooperative animal who
objects to having his intelligence tested and is not usually
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interested in helping a scientic investigation at such a price.
(Donald O. Hebb, 1949)
Intelligence is what intelligence tests measure. This is an operational denition: dening something by the way it is measured.
Anything that requires complex thought can be used in an IQ test.
The Wechsler test, for example, contains six verbal subtests and ve
non-verbal, performance subtests. The verbal part includes Vocabulary (What does presumptuous mean?), Information (Who wrote
the Iliad?), Comprehension (Why is gold worth more than copper?),
Mental arithmetic (13 6 17 = ?), Similarities (In what way are fruit
and egg alike?), and Digit span (repeat the sequence 7395268).
The performance part contains Object assembly (jigsaw puzzles),
Block design (copying a design with colored blocks), Picture
arrangement (arranging cartoon pictures to make a coherent story),
Picture completion (incongruities in pictures, such as smoke from a
chimney blowing one way and a nearby ag blowing the opposite
way), and a Digit symbol test that measures the speed with which a
routine task is performed.
The reason for lumping all this together in one test is that most
people who are good at one task are good at the others as well. It is
like in school, where children who are good in one subject usually
excel in the others as well. Using a procedure called factor analysis,
statisticians describe this in terms of a general-ability factor that they
call the g factor. Other factors describe special abilities such as
memory, spatial ability and verbal ability.1
Does the g factor mean that all mental abilities are produced by
the same brain system? Not necessarily. Lets assume, for a moment,
that there is a language-ability network in the left hemisphere and a
spatial reasoning network in the right hemisphere. If these networks
are truly independent, then people with good verbal ability would
not necessarily have good spatial reasoning ability and vice versa.
But what if good food during childhood boosts both hemispheres
simply because all neurons have the same nutritional requirements?
If some children get better food than others, then many of those with
high verbal ability will also have high spatial ability. There would be
a g factor although each ability is produced by a different brain
system.
In reality, brain imaging studies show that some brain areas are
engaged in all reasoning tasks while others are recruited only for
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Life is an IQ test
All evil comes from ignorance. (Confucius)
In IQ tests, the mean of the famous bell curve is dened as 100, and
the standard deviation a measure for the variability is set at 15.
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In Gods Image?
One-half of the population have an IQ above 100 (although at least
80 percent believe they are in that range), two-thirds are between 85
and 115, and 95 percent between 70 and 130.
Figure 11.1 The normal distribution. It shows that people of average IQ are
far more common than those with extremely high or extremely low IQ.
Cognitive class
Percentage with
illegitimate birth
Very bright
Bright
Average
Dull
Very dull
4
9
24
37
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In Gods Image?
should be born skilled by nature in any particular art. It is
possible, however, that through natural causes he may from
birth be so constituted as to have a predilection for a particular
virtue or vice, so that he will more readily practice it than any
other. (Moses Maimonides 11351204, The Commentary on the
Mishna, Eight Chapters VIII)
Give me a dozen healthy infants and my own specied world to
bring them up in, and Ill guarantee to take any one at random
and train him to become any kind of specialist I might select
doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar and
thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities,
vocations, and race of his ancestors. (J.B. Watson, Behaviorism)
Lets assume that your IQ is 100 and you read in the New York
Times that the heritability of test intelligence is 60 percent. Does this
mean that 60 out of your 100 IQ points come from the genes and the
other 40 from the environment? Does it mean that without genes you
would have an IQ of 40, and without environment you would have
an IQ of 60?
Of course you realize that I am pulling your leg unless you are
one of those who have either no genes or no environment. Heritability is not the extent to which a trait is determined by genes, but
the extent to which its variation in the population is caused by
genetic differences between people. Heritability is estimated with
family studies. For example, identical twins have all their genes in
common, except for the occasional mutation. If identical twins who
were reared apart in different families are more similar than unrelated people who were reared apart in equally different families, their
similarities must be caused by their shared genes.
Conversely, similarities between unrelated children raised in the
same family must be caused by their shared environment. For
example, the education, income and marital status of the parents are
shared among siblings. Many other environmental effects are not
shared by children in the same family. They make the children different from one another.
Some gene effects are additive. When a gene comes in a high-IQ
variant and a low-IQ variant, then those with two copies of the highIQ variant are bright, those with two copies of the low-IQ variant are
stupid, and those with one copy of each are in between. Now think
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In Gods Image?
115. Under these conditions the heritability of IQ would be zero in
China and 100 percent in America because in China all remaining
variation would come from the environment, and in America it
would come from the genes.
Another proposal would be to improve everyones genes or
everyones environment by one standard deviation. With a heritability of 70 percent, an environmental improvement of one standard
deviation would raise the IQ of the population by 8.2 points.
Improving the genes by one standard deviation would raise it by 12.5
points. To improve the environment by one standard deviation, we
only need to make the environment of the average child better than
the environments of 84 percent of todays children. And in the age of
molecular genetics, even improving our childrens genes by one
standard deviation is not beyond reach. We still dont know which
genes are responsible for variations in mental ability, but the hunt
for IQ genes is just getting started.8
Although we have not yet identied the genes, mutational load is
likely to be important. Thousands of genes are needed for mental
development, and disabling mutations in any one of them are
expected to lower the IQ. This means that people with few mutations
are bright, and those with many mutations are stupid. Such mutations tend to be selected out of the gene pool, especially if they do
other nasty things in addition to lowering the IQ. Therefore any one
of them is rare.
Another possibility is that a gene exists in two or more common
variants. The alternative forms of the gene can coexist in the
population either because their good and bad effects balance out; or
because people who have one copy of each variant are a little better
off than those who have two identical copies; or because a new
variant is in the slow process of replacing an older one.
Also personality traits such as neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness are inuenced by genes, although the
heritabilities are a bit lower than for IQ. Again the shared family
environment is important for children, but loses its importance as
children grow up. Even for social attitudes such as traditionalism
and religiosity, the inuence of the rearing environment slowly fades
during adulthood. So far only a few genes have been found to
inuence personality, and their effects seem to be very subtle.9
The relative unimportance of the rearing environment for adult
personality is not exactly what twentieth century psychologists
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In Gods Image?
American study, children with IQs between 90 and 109 earned an
average of $46,000 as adults, those of their siblings with IQs above
120 earned $68,300, and those of their siblings with IQs below 80
earned only $22,000. This difference was seen although the siblings
had been reared in the same family.
Social class does inuence both IQ and achievement, though.
Adoption into a good family can boost a childs IQ by at least 10
points, although we dont know how much of this advantage is
maintained through adulthood. The educational achievement and
occupational status of adopted children are intermediate between
those of their biological and adoptive parents, but there is a tendency
for adoptees to move away from the occupational status of their
adoptive parents and closer to that of their birth parents in the
course of adult life.11
According to one theory, technology creates a rising demand for
intelligence in modern societies. Everyone tries to learn in order to
earn, as market forces drive the salaries of the skilled up and those of
the unskilled down. Thus high-IQ genes drift to the top of the social
hierarchy where they are maintained by assortative mating: the
tendency to mate with someone similar to oneself. Wealth and power
are monopolized by a cognitive elite while the ranks of the working
class are depleted of the brighter elements. Being stupid, the poor are
unable to improve their lot by insisting on reforms or organizing
revolutions.
This type of society is called a meritocracy. It is the most efcient
and most oppressive society history has ever seen, with those at the
bottom deprived not only of wealth and power but of intellect and
culture as well, their self-esteem crushed by the insight that they are
not capable and worthy individuals shortchanged by an unjust
society, but the dregs of humanity: cognitive and genetic garbage.
Income inequality in most of the Western world has been rising
since the 1970s. If this reects a technology-driven demand for high
intelligence, then we must expect that the salaries of technical professions such as engineers, scientists and computer programmers
have risen the most.
However, the incomes of engineers have actually stagnated. The
rising inequality is caused by the soaring incomes of upper-level
ofce workers.12 In other words, corporate managers are diverting a
greater share of their companies resources into their own pockets.
What has become more important in recent decades are not
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emphasize the importance of IQ, while revolutionaries and escapists
condemn it.14
Social cognition is built around the two dimensions of dominance
and afliation. Dominance is bad because it leads to conict and
oppression. Afliation is good because it means friendship and
compassion, and the belief in the brotherhood of all men. Emphasizing dominance at the expense of afliation is inhumane; and IQ
research is inhumane because IQ is a measure of dominance. This is
the psycho-logic that determines peoples opinions about intelligence.
Claiming that IQ identied with social dominance is innate is
even worse. We evolved to be cruel with underlings who are too
weak to take revenge on us. If we believe that another persons
inferior status is not a temporary embarrassment but is genetically
caused and therefore permanent, we feel invited to exploit or mistreat him. During the twentieth century, before the advent of genetic
engineering, genes were generally perceived as immutable.
Genes are perceived as the essence of a persons true nature.
When an unpleasant outcome such as poverty is attributed to a
persons true nature, it is judged to be deserved; but when it is
forced upon him by external circumstances, he cannot be blamed.
This moral knee-jerk tells us to be nasty to people whose problems
are caused by their genes.
On the other hand, we blame people for the things they do
intentionally, but not for their bad luck. Those who are born with
genes for laziness, stupidity or deviance did not choose their genes.
They merely had bad luck in the genetic lottery. Therefore some of
our social knee-jerks demand discrimination against the genetically
handicapped while others demand sympathy for them. If it turns out
that a criminal is chock full of crime-predisposing genes, should we
punish him harder because the genes conrm that he has a bad
character? Or is he exonerated by his genes?15
In Gods Image?
Berkeley schools was immediately terminated and permanently
proscribed by the Berkeley school ofcials.
After the rioters came the scholars. Not behavioral geneticists, but
outraged intellectuals from diverse backgrounds. One of the major
studies on which Jensens conclusions were based, a study of identical twins reared apart by the British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt,
was claimed to be fraudulent. Others were claimed to be awed on
technical grounds.18 By the mid-1970s, the behavioral genetics of
intelligence seemed all but dead.
And yet, new evidence came trickling in, slowly at rst but in an
ever-increasing stream during the 1980s, conrming the old result:
genes are important. Not quite as important as Jensen thought in
1969, but important nevertheless. Like the Lernaean hydra, behavioral genetics grew two new heads for every one cut off by the critics.
The greatest discovery, however, did not come from behavioral
geneticists but from a single scholar with an improbable background. James Flynn is not a psychologist, but an American-born
political philosopher at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
Flynn started out as an activist in the civil rights movement during
the 1950s before emigrating to New Zealand, and his interest in the
genetics of intelligence was an extension of his political commitment.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, he searched through the records of
army testers for evidence that the results of IQ tests administered to
black and white recruits had been mishandled or misinterpreted. He
never quite found what he had been looking for, but he hit on
something far more interesting: performance had increased over time
for everyone.
Next he looked at instances where old IQ tests had been revised.
IQ tests have to be updated from time to time, and the new version is
normed on a representative sample of the population. Flynn found
that whenever an old version of a test had been administered along
with a more recent one to the same people, the scores on the older
test were higher. In other words, the populations on whom the tests
were normed had grown brighter over time.
This initial discovery was followed up by the most impressive
detective work in the history of modern psychology. In many
countries, for example, mental tests had been administered to military recruits over many years, and the trend lines could be analyzed.
By the mid-1980s it was clear that in all Western countries for which
data were available, IQ had risen between ve and 25 points over a
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In Gods Image?
should have lowered the population IQ by two to ve points during
the century.21
We need overall environmental improvements of 3.7 (present-day)
standard deviations to explain an IQ gain of 30 points. This means
that 100 years ago only one or two people out of 10,000 lived in an
environment that was as good for the development of their intelligence as the average environment is today.
Schooling is an obvious candidate. In Chapters 2 and 3 we saw
that Aleksandr Luria attributed the poor reasoning skills of peasants
in Central Asia to their lack of education. Schooling does indeed
make a difference. Children whose school entry is delayed lose about
ve IQ points for every year of school missed, and those who continue school between age 14 and 18 gain about 1.8 points for every
additional year in school. Since the average length of schooling has
increased by more than ve years in most industrialized countries
over the past century, most of the Flynn effect can be explained by
more and possibly better schooling.
Therefore it is surprising that the Flynn effect is strongest for
reasoning tests such as Ravens Progressive Matrices that had been
designed to minimize the effects of culture and education. Flynn
calculated that the gain on the Raven test in the UK was 55 points
between 1892 and 1992. By this measure, only 10 percent of Britons
had an IQ above 75 in 1892!
We know that the Flynn effect is present even in pre-school children. This means that in addition to education, better nutrition is a
likely candidate. We know that malnutrition in infants and young
children can cause mental deciency, but we dont know whether
dietary improvements within the normal range make a difference.
Perhaps better food makes bigger brains, and bigger brains make
higher IQs. According to the autopsy records of more than 7,000
patients who had been processed by the Institute of Pathology at the
London Hospital between 1860 and 1940, brain weight increased by
52 grams in males and 23 grams in females over this time period.22
Whatever its causes, by now the Flynn effect has ended in the most
advanced societies. IQs are still rising in the backward countries. On
the Caribbean island of Dominica, for example, the average IQ has
risen by about 18 points over the past 35 years. But in Norway and
Denmark, the Flynn effect has ended in the cohorts born after 1980.
If anything, IQs are declining again among young people in these
countries. The same may be true for other advanced societies as well.
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In Gods Image?
that case higher genotypic IQ will reduce delinquency, whereas
environmentally boosted IQ will raise it. Thus there seem to be hard
correlates of intelligence such as computer-building ability (or temple-building ability in the case of classical Athens), and soft correlates such as resistance to crime. Only the hard correlates track the
historical trends of intelligence.
IQ population genetics
In science convictions have no rights of citizenship. Only when
they decide to descend to the modesty of hypotheses . . . they
may be granted admission . . . though always with the restriction
that they remain under police supervision, under the police of
mistrust. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science)
Most studies about test intelligence in different ethnic groups have
been done in the United States, and the results are consistent. An IQ
gap between African Americans and Whites of about 15 points has
been observed since the earliest days of IQ testing. Even when socioeconomic status is held constant, about three-quarters of the difference remain. IQ tests do not under-predict the occupational status
of African Americans. In this sense they are not biased against
African Americans. Hispanics are only slightly above Blacks in IQ
and achievement.
Asian Americans from China, Japan and Korea score as high as
Whites on IQ tests, but they overachieve in the educational and
occupational arenas. Flynn estimated that they perform as if their
IQs were 10 to 21 points higher than they really are. This means that
IQ tests are biased against Asian Americans.
International comparisons show the same. IQs have been measured in at least 114 countries, and they range all the way from 59 in
Equatorial Guinea to 108 in Hong Kong and Singapore. Chinese,
Japanese and Koreans in their own countries have IQs of about 105,
slightly higher than the white populations of Europe and North
America. Typical IQs are near 90 in Southeast Asia, 85 in India and
the Middle East, and 70 in tropical Africa. We do not know to what
extent these differences are genetic or environmental in origin, but
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In Gods Image?
DNA sequence variations that are most likely not subject to
selection.
Arthur Jensen made a similar breakdown for the test intelligence
of 622 Black and 622 White children in California. He found that 44
percent of the variability was between individuals, 29 percent
between families, 8 percent between socio-economic status groups,
14 percent between races, and the remaining 5 percent were measurement error. The IQ difference between the Black and White
children was 12 points.29
Thus about 14 percent of the overall variability in both IQ and
DNA markers are accounted for by differences between populations.
If IQ genes oat as randomly in the gene pool as Cavalli-Sforzas
DNA variants, the genotypic difference between the most distant
human populations should be about as great as the observed difference between Black and White children in California: 12 IQ
points.
In reality, IQ genes do not oat freely in the gene pool but are
subject to natural selection. To create an IQ gap of 12 points in the
60,000 years since the rst divergence of the major racial groups,
natural selection would have to shift the population IQ by one point
every 5,000 years. Is selection of this magnitude credible? Lets
assume that in the United States only Whites with below-average IQ
reproduce at all. Similarly, only the brighter half of African Americans reproduces. We can calculate that this would drive the average
White IQ down by six points, and raise the average Black IQ by six
points.30 The present gap of 15 points would almost disappear within
a single generation. If the IQ gap is genetic, its easy to eliminate!
Its easy? Dame Eugenia Charles, the former prime minister of
Dominica, once remarked, AIDS is easy to prevent. Have sex only
with your legal partner. If you dont have a legal partner, be celibate! And when a student asks me about the best way to lose weight,
I tell her, Thats easy. Eat less! Diet plans are foiled by gluttony,
AIDS programs by lust, and social engineering projects by moral
knee-jerks. We all know that liberals dont want to make themselves
unpopular by telling others how they should reproduce; and conservatives believe that we have no right to interfere with the Godgiven differences between the races.
When solutions to problems would run up against moral intuitions, most people prefer to ignore the problems or nd explanations
in something we cannot change. For example, in the United States
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In Gods Image?
its easy. We simply have to nd those genetic variations in our
genome that contribute to personality and intelligence. If the frequencies of the alternative variants differ systematically between
populations, then the evolutionary stories might be true; if not, they
must be false.
Once upon a time every intellectual was free to champion a theory
because it pleased him or furthered his career. Now all this is jeopardized by the encroachment of hard science. Will the intellectuals
complain? Some will. Others wont, because they are sick and tired
of silly academic debates that can be resolved easily by modern
molecular genetics.
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12
The Logic of Culture
History itself is an actual part of natural history, of natures
development into man. Natural science will in time include
the science of man as the science of man will include natural
science: there will be one science.
(Karl Marx)
For the behavioral geneticist, culture is the variance component of
psychological and behavioral traits that is explained by membership
in social groups. Translation: culture describes similarities between
members of the same group, and differences between members of
different groups. Some traits, for example the burning of widows on
the dead husbands funeral pyre, are highly cultural. Others, such as
the habit of scratching ones head, are not.
Many behaviors are near universal. People all over the world have
marriage-like arrangements; they have an aversion to copulating
with their mother, especially if she is postmenopausal; stealing from
ones comrades is always considered objectionable although stealing
from a stranger is sometimes not; and the belief in an afterlife is near
universal although the belief in a beforelife is not. Only the details
vary with culture.
Culture has to respect human nature. As if tied by an invisible
rubber band, cultural usages and habits of thought gravitate toward
a stable center. If they conform to human nature they persist; if not,
they will be abandoned on the slightest provocation.
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In Gods Image?
Diversity and uniformity
We learn the mores as unconsciously as we learn to walk and
eat and breathe . . . [W]hen we wake to consciousness of life we
nd them facts which already hold us in the bonds of tradition,
custom, and habit. (William Graham Sumner)
Rooted in the soil of human nature is the jungle of socially learned
knowledge: how to make a living, what dress to wear, on what side
of the road to drive, and what to do to go to heaven. All culture is
knowledge. Richard Dawkins even invented a name for bits of culturally transmitted knowledge. He called them memes.
We have cultural universals such as marriage and war because the
human brain is not a blank slate, and the acquisition of knowledge is
not a passive process. We are predisposed by our genes to learn
certain things more easily than others. To understand cultural
diversity, however, we need to understand two further processes: the
transmission of knowledge in social groups, and the mechanisms by
which differences between groups are maintained.
Knowledge transmission is the easy part. Children learn
thoughtlessly by observation. Even the lowly octopus is capable of
observational learning, and chimpanzees have reached a stage where
behavioral skills and routines are transmitted across generations.
Chimpanzees have culture.1 Humans have added a further renement: language. Through language we can learn about things we
have never seen, such as spirits and microbes.
Culturally transmitted knowledge produces social and economic
institutions, and it produces the material culture of the group: tools,
buildings, weapons and works of art. For the prehistoric period we
know only the material culture. For historic societies we also have
written records about belief systems and behavior.
Because knowledge changes faster than genes, cultural evolution is
faster than biological evolution. Thus, 30 years ago scientists were
studying a deadly disease called kuru that was ravaging the Fore
tribe of New Guinea and that was transmitted by cannibalism. At
rst they assumed that eating the deceased members of the community was an ancient custom of the tribe that had survived through
the millennia. Not so. Informants told them that this custom had
been acquired from neighboring tribes only recently, after the rst
airplane had been sighted. Similarly, in the fourth century BC Plato
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environments in which we live, selection produces directional change
to adapt the organism to the new conditions. The more the conditions of life deviate from the ancestral hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the
faster is the pace of biological evolution.
Cultural selection
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection
determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it
did that of species. (Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression)
Some cultural entities persist, but most dont. The Jews survived but
the Manichaeans didnt. Whole tribes were dispersed or extinguished
by warfare in the New Guinea highlands, and the Roman writer
Tacitus reported the same about the Germans. Only recently, many
small-scale traditional societies were wiped out by contact with
Western civilization: physically, culturally, or both. In culture as in
nature, death is the rule, survival the exception.4
Some memes, especially the religious ones, are transmitted from
parents to children almost like genes. Therefore the fate of religions
depends not only on their t with evolved cognitive structures, but
also on genetic reproduction. Sects and cults imposing celibacy, selfcastration or suicide on their members did pop up from time to time,
but they are no longer with us because their members did not
reproduce their kind.
In the United States, the liberal and moderate Protestant
denominations are stagnating while conservative churches have
increased their membership throughout the past century. This trend
is not due to the greater attractiveness of conservative religion.
Actually, the gains and losses through conversion have been more or
less balanced for all churches. The important difference is the birth
rate. In one survey, liberal Protestants had an average of 2.27 children in their lifetime, moderate Protestants had 2.67 children, and
conservative Protestants had 3.12. Without any conversions at all,
conservatives will outcrowd liberals in the course of a few
generations.
Catholics are replacing Protestants as the majority religion in
Northern Ireland because they have more children; in Palestine the
Muslims out-reproduce the Jews, and indeed the Palestinian Arab
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In Gods Image?
more likely to survive and reproduce than those who couldnt. A
reproductive advantage of 2 percent in every generation would be
sufcient to explain the current gene frequencies. Unlike cultural
fads and fashions, genetic selection is cumulative over time. Even a
slight selective advantage can produce large effects, provided it is
maintained over many generations.
The hemochromatosis mutation is another example. This mutation,
which enhances the absorption of dietary iron from the intestine,
popped up only 2,000 to 4,000 years ago in a single individual somewhere in Northwestern Europe. Since it can cause the iron overload
disease hemochromatosis, this mutation could not have persisted in
hunter-gatherers who live on an iron-rich diet. However, the early
European farmers depended on a low-iron diet of cereal grains and
milk, and iron deciency anemia was an important limitation on
female fertility. The hemochromatosis mutation could spread in the
population because it protected its carriers from iron deciency.
Today, more than 10 percent of people in Britain, Ireland and the
Scandinavian countries carry at least one copy of this mutation.
Above all, however, people adapt to new environments by
inventing new technology and establishing appropriate social institutions. Therefore we must expect that new environments have
selected not only for those genes that affect physical traits such as
skin color, iron absorption and milk digestion, but also for genes
that affect behavioral traits. This seems to be the case. We know of
several genes that are required for normal brain development.
Crippling mutations in any one of them cause microcephaly, with
grossly reduced brain size and mental deciency. At least two of
these brain size genes, the microcephalin and ASPM genes, have
common variants that originated only recently and that have been
selected to high frequency since then. The microcephalin mutation is
about 37,000 years old and is now present in more than 80 percent of
North Asians, Europeans and American Indians. The ASPM
mutation popped up in a single individual about 5,800 years ago and
is now present in 40 percent of people in Europe and the Middle
East. Presumably these genes were selected because they improved
one or another aspect of brain function.6
These examples show that the genetic constitution of free-breeding
human populations can change to some extent within one millennium, and large changes are possible in the course of some millennia.
In most cases, the selective pressures that produced changes on this
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In Gods Image?
Therefore I hate X.
2. I want to make the people I hate unhappy.
I hate X.
Therefore I want to make X unhappy.
3. People are happy when they can do what they want to do.
I want to make X unhappy.
Therefore I prevent X from doing what he wants to do.
Each of these three syllogisms is implemented by a separate processing unit, or module, in the brain. The minor premise (the second
line of the syllogism) is the input of the module. The major premise
(the rst line) is the processing to which this input is subjected. The
cognitive system treats it as implicit, taken-for-granted knowledge.
The conclusion of the syllogism is the modules output. The three
modules are arranged in series such that the output of one is used as
input for the next. Going through this programmed sequence, you
can deter people from acting in ways that are bad for you.
Module #1 can be replaced by another one:
1a. I hate people who are unkind to others.
X is unkind to others.
Therefore I hate X.
This module protects us from unkind people. It is engaged when an
abortionist is unkind to a fetus. And there is yet another one:
1b. I hate people who do strange things that I would never do.
X does strange things that I would never do.
Therefore I hate X.
This module protects us from weird and unpredictable people. It is
engaged when homosexuals do strange things that we ourselves
would never do.
Did you ever notice that the natural sciences have advanced in
leaps and bounds during the past century, while the social sciences
have turned in circles? One reason for this is that most of the time,
thinking about human affairs and social relations gets subverted by
special-purpose reasoning routines. These routines are terric at
solving the problems for which they evolved, but lead us astray when
we use them in our attempts at understanding how the world works.
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In Gods Image?
state of mind that produced the change. Negative feedback can
maintain a stable equilibrium, but it can also lead to cycles of
punitiveness and humanitarianism once the equilibrium has been
disturbed. Such cycles actually occur. In the United States, for
example, humanitarian values prevailed during the 1960s but then
gave way to punitive attitudes since the 1980s.
Bright young people are quite good at identifying the follies and
vices of their elders. They have to, because they must distinguish
between good examples that should be emulated and bad examples
that should be used as a warning. This critical approach to social
learning fades after adolescence, and what has been learned early
sticks for a lifetime. The result is a pattern of generational replacement, with old people holding on to the fashions and follies of their
youth while young folks develop their own.
Feedback loops between genes and culture need more time. In
Chapter 6 I argued that the prehistoric inventions of campres and
of sophisticated hunting and ghting gear created an advantage for
those who were bright enough to use these technologies. This culturally imposed natural selection favored high-IQ genes. The genes
made better brains, and the better brains created even more
sophisticated technologies that selected for even better brains. This is
an example of positive feedback between genes and culture. Whereas
negative feedback maintains a stable or mildly cycling state, positive
feedback produces runaway evolution.
Genes and culture can also be opposed. Lets assume that there is
a bell-shaped distribution of sexual restraint in the female population. A few women really like sex, a few avoid it altogether, and most
are somewhere in between. Lets further assume that both genes and
cultural norms inuence female sexual restraint. How will this system evolve when married women raise more children than promiscuous women, and spinsters die childless?
In a licentious culture unrestrained women are promiscuous,
restrained women are married, and there are no spinsters. Because
married women raise more children than promiscuous women, genes
for female sexual restraint spread in the population.
People preferentially learn those cultural norms that conform to
their natural preferences. Therefore, as genes for female sexual restraint
become common, cultural norms favoring a high level of female sexual
restraint spread in the population. Eventually we get a culture like in
Victorian England: restrained women are childless spinsters,
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Scala culturae
Humans can continue to exist at very low levels of cognitive
development. All they have to do is reproduce. (Arthur E.
Hippler)8
The complexity of human societies ranges from hunter-gatherer
bands with two or three dozen members to modern nations with
hundreds of millions. Social complexity has increased over the millennia in most parts of the world, but this does not mean that all
human societies become more complex over time. Many complex
societies have regressed to a more primitive condition, and overall
social complexity has increased mainly because the decadent societies were wiped out by more successful neighbors.
The Tasmanians escaped this fate because their island got cut off
from mainland Australia by rising sea levels 11,000 years ago. Since
that time they not only failed to innovate, but lost a whole array of
useful technologies: bone tools, boomerangs, barbed spears, hafted
stone tools and catamarans. Finally their inventory of manufactured
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In Gods Image?
goods was reduced to no more than two-dozen items. They never
learned the manufacture of clothes despite the frigid winters on their
island, and they even gave up shing although they were starving
every year during the winter season.
One problem was that there were only 4,000 Tasmanians. Such
small populations easily lose cultural practices by random transmission failure or by social or ecological upheavals that disrupt
cultural transmission. The Tasmanians could not offset this random
loss by the acquisition or reacquisition of cultural practices from
neighboring groups; and due to their small population size there
were not enough talented individuals capable of making new
inventions. Everything else being equal, the number of inventors is
proportional to the size of the population.9
Also, a large population is required for the extensive cooperative
networks that dene complex societies. In the simplest societies, all
the cooperation there is takes place between a few individuals and
families. In the most complex societies, government bureaucracies,
armies and multinational businesses coordinate the activities of
millions. This coordination requires technologies such as writing and
money. But in last analysis everything depends on the brains that
invent these technologies, make use of them, and maintain the social
structures in which they are used. Cultural complexity is the societylevel expression of cognitive complexity. Roughly, the complexity of
a society is determined by its population size and the proportion of
highly talented individuals in the population.
Anthropologists measure cultural complexity with indicators such
as settlement size, political organization, long-distance trade, craft
specialization and the presence of written traditions. Societies that
are complex on some of these measures are usually complex on the
others as well, and much of the overall variability is explained by a
single cultural g factor.10
Until about 10,000 years ago all human societies were simple
because they were small. Larger settlements became possible only
with the invention of agriculture in the Neolithic revolution, starting
9,000 years ago in the Middle East, 7,500 years ago in China, 5,000
years ago in Mexico and Peru, and 4,000 years ago in Africa south of
the Sahara. Each region cultivated its own indigenous crops: wheat
in the Middle East, rice in South China, maize in Mexico, potatoes in
the Andes, and local millets in North China and Africa. This means
that agriculture was invented independently many times. If, say, the
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In Gods Image?
the supply of wild plants and animals on which hunter-gatherers
depend. Thus population growth was not the cause for the initial
adoption of farming, but it prevented the rst farmers from
returning to the Garden of Eden of their hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Female fertility is controlled by the supply of calories. This is an
ancient adaptation to a world where a shortage of calories was
common but deciencies of specic nutrients were rare. The diet of
early farmers was adequate in calories but decient in vitamins,
minerals and protein. Therefore their fertility was high and their
populations kept growing despite their poor health. Indeed, the
fertility of simple agricultural populations exceeds that of huntergatherers by at least 10 percent.
As a result the agricultural populations multiplied and soon displaced or absorbed the remaining hunter-gatherers. Europe was
inltrated by farmers from the Middle East, and the early agricultural Indoeuropeans spread their language and their genes over
an area stretching from the Atlantic coast of Europe to India and
Central Asia.12
With continued population growth the rst cities appeared more
than 5,000 years ago in the Middle East and only a little later in
China and the Indus valley. Civilization was born when communities
grew too large for everyone to know everyone else. The face-to-face
leadership of the earlier communities gave way to formal government, and custom was reinforced by law. At the same time, occupational specialization produced the variety of industrial, mercantile,
artistic and intellectual activities that dene civilized life. Was this
merely the outcome of larger populations and increased settlement
size? Perhaps. But earlier on I speculated that new technologies select
for those genes that make people able to use them. Could it be that
this kind of feedback was triggered by the new farming technology?
We know that in traditional agricultural societies, wealthy men had
more surviving children than the poor. If wealth was related to intelligence, perseverance or other qualities conducive to cultural evolution,
then genes favoring such traits would have spread in the course of a
few millennia. It is even possible that mental ability was depressed by
poor nutrition among early farmers, and that this created a selective
pressure favoring high-IQ genes to compensate for the decit.13
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In Gods Image?
of their cultural creativity. The Greeks of the tenth to sixth centuries
BC, for example, were so prolic that they formed colonies from
Spain in the west to the foothills of the Caucasus in the east. So
massive was this population expansion that geneticists can still nd
its traces in the populations of the Mediterranean coasts.
Greece was considered overpopulated by writers of the fth and
fourth centuries BC, at the peak of Greek civilization. Later writers
paint a different picture. Polybius wrote in the second century BC:
In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low
birth-rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to
which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to
yield fruit although there have neither been continuous wars
nor epidemics . . . For men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice and indolence that they did not wish to
marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at
most as a rule but one or two of them.
Inscriptions from Polybiuss time conrm that many families had
no more than one or two children. There were families with two
sons, but very few reared more than one daughter. The same happened in Rome. The Romans of the early Republic were embroiled
in perennial wars, but their numbers kept increasing. When 80,000
Roman soldiers were slain by Hannibals troops in the battle of
Cannae, the Romans had no difculty raising a new army. But two
centuries later, during the Augustean age, we hear of a birth dearth
among Roman aristocrats that contemporary writers ascribed to the
aversion of Roman ladies to motherhood. According to Ovid, Rare
is in our time [the woman] who wants to be a parent.14
The laws passed by Augustus to stem the tide of childlessness
among Romes leading citizens were to no avail. Nor did the
emperors set a good example. The Antonines maintained good
government because every one of them remained childless. Rather
than passing the rule to a possibly inept son, they established the
tradition of adopting a capable young man to take their place. By AD
500 many cities of the Western Roman Empire had turned into ghost
towns and large tracts of arable land were abandoned. According to
the most thorough study available on the subject, over the six centuries from the time of Augustus to AD 600 the population of Italy
fell from an estimated 7.4 million to 2.4 million.15
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In Gods Image?
people are once married, the idea, in this country, never seems to
enter anyones mind that having or not having a family, or the
number of which it shall consist, is amenable to their own control. One would imagine that children were rained down upon
married people, direct from heaven, without their being art or
part in the matter, that it was really, as the common phrases have
it, Gods will and not their own, which decided the number of
their offspring.18
When people became more rational than this, populations
declined in some of the ancient civilizations, including Greece and
Rome. And less people meant less scientists, artists, inventors, philosophers, statesmen, administrators, engineers and merchants.
In our time family planning has diffused through the whole
population, but in the early civilizations it was limited to the cognitive
elite. This doomed not only their social class and their cultural values,
but also their genes. When bright people fail to have children their
high-IQ genes are lost from the gene pool. What else do you expect?
To sum it up, civilizations evolve through two feedback loops.
First, rising cultural complexity and improvements in the conditions
of life raise peoples intelligence. Thats the Flynn effect. Higher
intelligence further increases prosperity and social complexity, which
raise intelligence even more. This feedback loop works on a timescale
of one to a few centuries.
The brainculture feedback is embedded in a geneculture feedback
that takes about one millennium to become fully effective. Under
civilized conditions, the more intelligent and open-minded have less
children because only they limit their family size deliberately. As the
cognitive elite breeds itself out of existence and high-IQ genes become
more thinly spread, the civilization loses its vitality, and eventually the
living conditions start deteriorating. This throws the Flynn effect in
reverse, and declining intelligence leads to further deterioration of the
living conditions. The ancient civilizations did not die by the sword.
Their elites were submerged in an ocean of stupidity. This cyclic
pattern of geneculture coevolution I call yoyo evolution.
Our civilization is an extreme example. We have experienced
dramatic declines in the birth rate over the past one-and-a-half
centuries, and most advanced nations today do not reproduce
themselves. We also know that since the fertility transition of the late
nineteenth century the brightest have had the smallest families. This
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Aberrant cycles
The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in
the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. (Alfred
North Whitehead)
History is not as stereotyped as my model of yoyo-evolving civilizations suggests. First, we can discount the earliest civilizations
altogether. Egypt, Mesopotamia and the civilizations of the New
World never reached the age of reason. Therefore they did not die
from internal burnout but succumbed to historical accidents. After
their fall they were succeeded not by a dark age but by more
advanced civilizations.
But even those that did reach the age of reason had very different
fates. The decline of Rome was cut short by barbarian invasions and
the adoption of a foreign religion, but in the Muslim Middle East the
slow process of deculturation was allowed to proceed for a whole
millennium. From the eighth to the twelfth centuries AD the Middle
East was one of the most advanced regions of the world. In many
areas of inquiry, including mathematics, astronomy, optics, physics,
medicine and agricultural innovation, the Middle East surpassed the
achievements of China and Europe. But by the thirteenth century the
Muslim world was past its prime, and it has been on a path of
relentless decline ever since.
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In Gods Image?
Over the past millennium the Middle East not only failed to
develop the way the West did, but actually regressed in all areas of
intellectual inquiry. Of the scientists listed in an encyclopedia of
Muslim scientic pioneers, 64 percent produced their important
works before 1250, 36 percent between 1250 and 1750, and not one
lived after 1750. The rst printing press to serve Muslims was
established as late as 1727 in Istanbul although printing had been
widely used in Europe since the fteenth century. Although the
rapidly developing West was next door, the Muslim world failed to
copy Western technology the way the Japanese did in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century
the Turkish intellectual Ziya Pasha wrote:
I passed through the lands of the indels, I saw cities and
mansions;
I wandered in the realm of Islam, I saw nothing but ruins.
In our time the Muslim Middle East remains economically and
socially backward and pathetically unable to defend itself against
foreign invaders. The average IQ in the Muslim countries hovers
around 85, and the per capita scientic output of the Arab world is a
mere 1 percent of Israels. It must have something to do with Islam,
because wherever Muslims and non-Muslims live in the same
country the Muslims are the poorer part of the population.
China, by contrast, reached a rst peak at the same time as classical Greece. Since then there have been ups and downs, but no
sustained decline. Only recently, between 800 and 1400 AD, China
came close to an industrial revolution of the kind that took off in
Europe during the eighteenth century. Today the Chinese economy
is vibrant, the average population IQ is 105, and Chinese scientists
make great contributions at home and abroad.
One thousand years ago both China and the Middle East were
highly urbanized, and the Middle East had the added advantage of a
central location in Eurasia, with the opportunity to learn from both
its western and eastern neighbors. Early Islam was, if anything, more
supportive of science, free enterprise and participatory government
than Confucianism and medieval Christianity. It is therefore not
surprising that the advent of Islam gave a powerful stimulus to the
economic development and cultural creativity of the newly islamized
countries. And yet, after a delay of a few centuries this great
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In Gods Image?
selection than any other genes. Their frequencies in the population
are bound to change a lot on a timescale of about one millennium.
Under civilized conditions, the biological evolution of human
populations is no longer driven by the external forces of climate and
subsistence but by the prevalent means of fertility control!
The greatest anomaly in the history of civilization is not the
decline of the Middle East but the rise of Christian Europe. Had
Europe followed the same trajectory as the other high civilizations, it
should have gone into stagnation or decline soon after the Italian
renaissance, but it didnt.
Unlike the other civilizations, Europe had inherited a wellstructured and power-conscious religion from the spoils of the
ancient world. Christianity originated in the same Middle Eastern
civilization as Islam, but 600 years earlier at a more pristine stage of
cultural evolution. Therefore it is less rational and enlightened than
Islam in its foundational teachings, beset with primitive superstitions
and full of logical inconsistencies.
Because of these inconsistencies, critical thinking was suspect and
the value system was rampantly moralistic. Christian preachers
thundered against contraception, abortion and infanticide because
sex was so sinful that it could be justied only by its procreative
purpose. For religious authorities from Augustine to John Paul II,
contraception was irreconcilable with Christian marriage. Thomas
Aquinas taught that to depart from the inseminating use of the
sexual act is to offend God directly.
Coitus interruptus was a sin against nature, as serious as sodomy
and bestiality and worse than incest; and the use of poisons of
sterility was considered as bad as homicide. Being preached to the
masses for many centuries, these injunctions were so effective that
most of the ancient medicinal knowledge about contraception and
early abortion was lost by the time of the Renaissance. By that time
confessors were advised not to inquire too directly about coitus
interruptus so they wouldnt give bad ideas to simple folk who for
the most part no longer knew about this practice.
Even when Europe was ready for the age of reason, faith did not
yield at once but the rationalist impulse was deected into the
Reformation. One little-noticed consequence of this was that contraception continued to be condemned by the responsible classes well
into the nineteenth century. The eighteenth century British demographer Thomas Short complained about nefarious practices used
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In Gods Image?
effect. The Flynn effect seems to have started slowly during the
nineteenth century in Europe, when schooling was extended to a
greater proportion of children and economic development brought
better living conditions and healthier nutrition for many people. This
economic development was triggered by the industrial revolution of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Before the industrial revolution, educated people became philosophers, theologians, statesmen or artists, while technology was left
to semi-literate craftsmen. Only when science and mathematics were
sufciently developed to be useful in the craftsmans domain did the
key inventions of the industrial revolution become possible: the
steam engine, railroads, and the factory-based mass production of
goods. Unlike the works of art and the philosophical and theological
systems of the past, these inventions improved the conditions of life
for many (though not all) people.
At this point Europe passed a critical threshold where public education, combined with the improved conditions of life, widened peoples mental horizons and triggered the Flynn effect. With scientic
thinking and technological knowledge already in place, higher intelligence could be translated into more science and technology. This
created even better living conditions and greater social complexity,
which in turn raised the intelligence of the population even more.
Thus our civilization owes its continuing existence to religious
injunctions that delayed the widespread adoption of effective contraceptive practices until after the industrial revolution, when the
Flynn effect was up and running already. Thus the damaging effects
of declining birth rates and adverse genetic selection could be
masked by the effects of rising prosperity, modern medicine and
mass education.
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13
Ideologology
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of
comforting convictions, which move with him like ies on a
summer day.
(Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays)
Every society is based on fundamental assumptions about the world
and mans place in the world. Although these assumptions vary
somewhat in different times and places, the invisible hand of human
nature attracts us to certain beliefs but not others. Even infants have
intuitions about the properties of physical objects, intentional action,
emotional expressions and the fundamental kinds of human relations. In last analysis, all knowledge that we acquire in a lifetime is
an elaboration of this innate knowledge. But humans do not see it
that way. Being able to think as well as talk, they cook up explanations in a verbal code. These explanations take the form of religions, political ideologies and moral philosophies. The study of these
ideational systems is what I call ideologology.1
In Gods Image?
wall all around, or an island surrounded by an ocean, with the sky as
a tent or dome erected over the earth and an angel with a crank
moving the stars across the sky. There are two traditional ways of
explaining the origin of the world. In technomorphic myths the world
is the creation of a divine articer; and in biomorphic myths it is the
product of a sexual act. If artifacts can be made by craftsmen, it is
plausible that God made the earth and the rst humans that way, too.
And if living things are created by sexual acts, why not the Earth?
But why do simple folk imagine the Creator as an engineer or
father rather than a physical force? One reason is that under pristine
conditions, mistaking a physical cause for an intentional one is less
dangerous than the reverse. Mistaking a stick for a snake wont kill
you, but mistaking a snake for a stick might. And mistaking the
sounds of an approaching enemy for the rustling of the wind in the
leaves wont increase your life expectancy either. Therefore the brain
is constructed to make the less dangerous mistake. We tend to see
intentional action in physical events, but we rarely explain intentional action as the effect of physical causes. Only scientists do that.
And so our ancestors lled their world with purposeful agents:
gods and demons, elves and spirits. The community of the Olympic
gods mirrored the human communities in which the mythmakers
lived, and the Jewish god was created in mans image.3
Imagining God as a person rather than an impersonal force allows
us to direct human feelings at him: awe and wonder, fear and
deference, and above all love. These feelings assume a sacred character when they are freed from their attachments to body and world.
Therefore those in search of spiritual perfection always live celibate
lives. God is jealous. He feeds on the feelings that common people
extend to their partners. Through meditation and medication LSD,
for example the spiritual truth seeker detaches feelings from their
customary objects, purifying them and redirecting them to God.4
This is how the fth/sixth-century Hindu sage Bhartrhari saw it:
In this vain universe a man
Of wisdom has two courses: rst, he can
Direct his time to pray, to save his soul,
And wallow in religions nectar bowl.
But, if he cannot, it is surely best
To touch and hold a lovely womans breast,
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Ideologology
And to caress her warm round hips and thighs,
And to possess that which between them lies.
People try to explain human nature, too. They perceive their body
as a physical entity, but feelings, thoughts and dreams are something
else: uffy, shapeless, lacking mass and weight. The experience of the
I as transcending the material world is overwhelming and inescapable. There must be a psychic essence, a soul. Besides explaining
thoughts and feelings, the soul enables us to face the greatest of all
challenges: our mortality. We can accept the death of the body while
the soul continues its existence in another body or enters into an
eternal afterlife.
Being made for action rather than contemplation, the brain is full
of intuitions about how we ought to behave. Religious people
explain their moral intuitions the way they explain the world: as
emanating from God. Religion has two functions for the individual:
explaining who we are, where we come from and where we go after
death; and telling us how we ought to act. It also has functions for
society: creating a sense of solidarity, and justifying existing
hierarchies.
In Gods Image?
and chemistry from alchemy. In Greece, the mystic approach of
Pythagoras gave rise to geometry and mathematics; and something
similar happened much later in medieval China, when the Chinese
variety of algebra was developed from Taoist number mystic.
Like magic, science often comes into conict with religion. This
conict tends to escalate as science advances. Once people reach a
certain level of critical thinking, they recognize religion as unfounded
as well as dangerous. They demand empirical proof for religious
beliefs, eventually abandoning religion in favor of science. Science
does not fulll spiritual needs by providing a home for free-oating
emotions the way religion does. Nor does it offer moral guidance. It
only satises the frivolous desire to know how the world works. Its
most fundamental principle is known as Galileos knife: when
observation contradicts theory, you trust your senses and kick out
the theory.
Science is compatible with spirituality but not with religious
dogma. The scientist does not believe in God. He estimates the
probability of Gods existence. Sometime in the future the gulf
between scientic theory and religious belief is bound to close, and
science and religion will be one. But we are still at a primitive stage of
cognitive evolution, and this point will not be reached for a long,
long time.
Popular religion consists of lively analogies between the known
and the unknowable and is therefore accessible for everyone. Science
is hierarchically ordered conceptual knowledge and principled
deductive reasoning, and its teachings are bland. It can thrive only at
an advanced stage of cognitive evolution and is quickly abandoned
when cognitive evolution goes in reverse.5
Science can never compete with religion. Religion stands secure on
the two pillars of worldview and ethic. Science with its worldview
and missing ethic is limping on one leg. But the brain is designed to
treat knowledge as a guide to action. And so it scans the teachings of
science for elements that can guide its actions.
Ideologology
Napoleon is right, and every cheating tradesman is also right.
(Charles Darwin)6
Some great scientic ideas, such as Einsteins theory of relativity, are
intelligible only for a select few. Darwins theory was nothing like
that. It had two parts, and both of them were ridiculously simple: the
idea that life forms change over geological time, and the idea of
natural selection.
The idea that life changes over time was not new. Darwins
grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had already written about evolution.
Darwins truly original contribution was natural selection. He got
the idea in 1838 after reading Malthus Essay on Population, in which
Malthus had postulated that human populations grow exponentially
until their growth becomes limited by the food supply. Darwins
conclusion was simple enough: if an excess of offspring is produced
in every generation and individuals compete for scarce resources,
then only those who are best equipped for the competitive struggle
will survive and reproduce.
Darwin also assumed that survival-relevant traits are inherited
from parents to children. This was pure speculation because the
science of genetics did not yet exist at his time. Nor did he know how
genetic variation originates. Gregor Mendels insights about the
indivisible nature of genes, published in an obscure journal in 1865,
remained unnoticed until their rediscovery in 1900; and mutations as
the origin of genetic diversity were discovered only in the early
twentieth century. Therefore Darwin never quite abandoned the old
Lamarckian idea that acquired traits can be biologically inherited.
In The Origin of Species, published in 1859, Darwin avoided the
charged issue of human evolution altogether, but he elaborated on it
in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in
1871. Darwins speculations about the evolution of human behavior
stood unsurpassed for the next hundred years.
Predictably, the rst opposition to Darwins theory came from
traditional religion. To the present day, simple-minded Christians
reject evolution because it contradicts the biblical story of creation.
Creationism persists because we have an evolved theory of mind to
understand intentional action, but we have to fall back on general
intelligence to understand natural selection. You can teach divine
creation to a retardate, but not evolution by natural selection.
Sophisticated Christians do not believe in the literal truth of their
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In Gods Image?
creation myth, but they object to the implication that there is no
purpose in evolution that is, no purpose in life. They also maintain
that only humans (actually only males, but nobody stresses the point
nowadays) were created in Gods image. The Catholic Church
accepts evolution but also insists on the special status of humans as
spiritual beings.7 Evolution is more congenial to the Hindu and
Buddhist traditions where all creatures are equipped with souls,
although these souls evolve by a Lamarckian rather than Darwinian
mechanism.
Social theorists and philosophers were more open to Darwins
idea. Herbert Spencer, the most renowned philosopher of his time,
had already developed views about human society that stressed
competition for the means of subsistence. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the catchphrase survival of the ttest. Darwin used
the term struggle for existence although he adopted Spencers
survival of the ttest into the fth edition of the Origin in 1869.
For Spencer, the elimination of the unt in the struggle for existence was desirable because it led to the advancement of society.
Spencer had been an advocate of laissez-faire economic policies long
before appropriating Darwins theory as an extension of his own. As
a diehard liberal he opposed the use of tax money to support the
poor, but he did approve of private charity both because it relieves
the misery of the poor and because it hones the altruistic instincts of
the giver. Spencer believed in the inheritance of acquired traits.
Therefore the practice of altruism was bound to lead to greater
altruism in future generations.
Like Darwin, and like todays mainstream science, Spencer
believed that moral sentiments are based on evolved predispositions,
but unlike todays scientists he had the ambition to develop a prescriptive system of ethics. His conclusion was that moral systems
must be based on evolved predispositions, especially the predisposition to avoid disagreeable consequences. In this he anticipated
both the behaviorist emphasis on conditioning and the neoconservative emphasis on individual responsibility. However, he
thought that responsible behavior, brought about by conditioning,
could be inherited by ones offspring.
Many of Spencers epigones and critics understood his philosophy
as endorsing the naturalistic fallacy: its natural, therefore its
morally right. If the elimination of the unt is natural, then it is
okay. In reality, the naturalistic fallacy makes no sense for
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evolutionists. It makes sense only for creationists who see God as a
benevolent creator.
And, ironically, it makes sense only if we see humans as passive
victims rather than the ghting machines of Darwinian lore. If you
glorify our adaptation for struggle, why dont you demand that we
struggle against the cruelty of natural selection by substituting a
more benign system for human advancement? Spencers friend
Thomas Huxley said so much: Let us understand once and for all,
that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the
cosmic process [of evolution], still less in running away from it, but
in combating it.8
The idea that compliance with the natural order is a good thing
taps into an established reasoning routine because compliance with
the social order is usually the best way to get ahead in life and keep
out of trouble. Likewise, the survival of the ttest ts on the templates for competition and social dominance. Therefore many a
fuzzy thinker has read into Darwins idea a prescription for competition, war and social inequality.9
Like traditional religion, these lines of thought link statements
about what is with statements about what should be done. Marxism
was another such attempt. Marx analyzed the economy of nineteenth-century England and mapped it on the us-and-them and
dominance templates as an exploitative relationship between
antagonistic social classes. Conict calls for struggle, and Marx
exhorted his followers to identify with the proletariat in its struggle
against the bourgeoisie.
Thus we actively search the grab bag of science and pseudoscience
for features the key stimuli of ethology that t our cognitive
templates and make good fodder for the modules. Once we nd a
few good morsels, the modules activate emotions and cognitive kneejerks indignation and the sense of justice, for example and focus
our attention on related inputs. Marx focused on lopsided economics
and the social Darwinists on lopsided biology, but aggressive and
xenophobic reexes were engaged in both cases. Spencer gloried the
struggle between individuals, Marx drew the line between social
classes and Hitler between races.
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In Gods Image?
A scientic religion
We do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build
asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute
poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save
the life of every one to the last moment . . . Thus the weak
members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who
has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt
that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. (Charles
Darwin Descent of Man)
Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he has also the
power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall
well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other
processes that are more merciful and not less effective. (Francis
Galton)10
Not all ideologues t their science on the templates for aggression
and competition. Darwins illustrious half-cousin Francis Galton is
one example. Galton was one of the most versatile scientists of his
time. As a young man he led geographic expeditions in Africa. He
drew the rst weather maps, introduced the use of ngerprints in
forensics, and pioneered composite photography. He developed
statistical tools, investigated the effectiveness of prayer (he found it
to be ineffective), and drew up a beauty map of Britain by noting the
frequency with which he saw attractive women in the towns.
He even used blood transfusions to test Darwins speculation that
the hereditary material circulates throughout the body before
entering the gonads. His observation that gray rabbits transfused
with the blood of white rabbits still bore only gray offspring refuted
Darwins hypothesis. His special interest was in anthropometric
measurements and the study of human heredity. He developed
methods for the testing of sensory and motor functions, and he was
the rst to use twins in the study of heredity. No other Victorian
genius made contributions to as many different research areas as did
Galton.
Galton understood, correctly, that humans are subject to natural
selection and that this entails much suffering for the unt. And so
he proposed to take selection into our own hands: What nature does
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Ideologology
blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly,
and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work
in that direction; just as it is his duty to succour neighbours who
suffer misfortune.11
As early as the 1860s, Galton rejected the inheritance of acquired
traits. This went against the scientic mainstream of his day, for it
was not until the 1880s and 1890s that the German cytologist August
Weismann supported it with his theory of an early separation
between the germ line and the rest of the body. Weismann attributed
inheritance to the chromosomes that he had discovered in the cells of
the gonads.
Galton explored heredity statistically, by studying similarities
between relatives. He used anatomical and physiological measurements, but much as he tried, he never managed to develop useful
tests of talent (intelligence) and character (personality). He was
nevertheless convinced that nature is more important than nurture
for these traits. Only the behavioral geneticists of the 1980s would
settle the point conclusively by showing that genes and environment
are about equally important for variations in intelligence and
personality.
Other premises were of an ethical nature. Galton considered some
traits desirable and others undesirable. He pictured a zoo where the
animals disagree about the value of most traits, but All creatures
would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than
weak, well tted than ill-tted for their part in life.12 In other words,
he believed that being strong, healthy and bright is better than being
weak, sick and stupid.
Like most Victorian intellectuals Galton endorsed the utilitarian
philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, with its prescription that people should pursue the greatest happiness of the
greatest number. John Stuart Mill had written in 1859: Causing the
existence of a human being is one of the most responsible actions in
the range of human life. To undertake this responsibility to bestow
a life which may be either a curse or a blessing unless the being on
whom it is to be bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a
desirable existence, is a crime against that being.13 Galton simply
grafted this moral stance on his understanding of genetics and natural selection.
This transgenerational altruism looks suspiciously Christian, but
Galton was an agnostic. He did recognize its afnities, though. In
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In Gods Image?
one of his lectures he described the means by which his goals could
be implemented:
The means that might be employed to compass these ends are
dowries, especially for those to whom moderate means are
important, assured help in emergencies during the early years of
married life, healthy homes, the pressure of public opinion,
honours, and above all the introduction of motives of religious
or quasi-religious character. Indeed, an enthusiasm to improve
the race is so noble in its aim that it might well give rise to the
sense of a religious obligation.14
Like Mill, Galton extended the ancient Christian ethic of love to
those who are not yet born. Ethics not only precede the worldviews
to which they are linked; they outlive them as well. Also, Galtons
view of science and technology was very different from ours. For us,
they are there to create goodies for our enjoyment and prots for our
businesses. For Galton, they created moral obligations: As it lies
within his power, so it becomes his duty.
Galton even invented a name for this secular religion. He called it
eugenics, after a Greek word that can be translated as well born.
He described it as the science which deals with all inuences that
improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop
them to the utmost advantage.15 Eugenics was to be implemented in
two ways. Positive eugenics encouraged the reproduction of the
more desirable elements of the population; and negative eugenics
discouraged the reproduction of the less desirable elements.
By the turn of the twentieth century Galtons idea had caught on
with the intellectual avant-garde, and it soon took the shape of a
social reform movement. The British Eugenics Education Society
was founded in 1907, and the American Eugenics Society in 1923.
Membership in these societies was always small. The British society
never had more than 1,700 members, and its American counterpart
had even less.
Eugenics attracted the leading minds of the intellectual elite and
the medical profession, but it never had the mass appeal that the
abolitionist movement had in the nineteenth century or the temperance movement in the early years of the twentieth. Only geneticists endorsed its basic ideas well into the 1960s, when its popular
appeal had long waned.
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Ideologology
Eugenics must not be confused with racism. Racists believe in
more or less immutable differences between races. For the eugenicist
the races are evolving anyway, and even the worst race can be
improved by proper breeding. The American arch-eugenicist Charles
Davenport wrote in 1913 in the context of immigration control: The
fact is that no race per se, whether Slovak, Ruthenian, Turk or
Chinese, is dangerous and none undesirable; but only those individuals whose somatic traits or germinal determiners are, from the
standpoint of our social life, bad. Davenport did not claim that the
frequencies of bad somatic traits and germinal determiners (phenotypes and genotypes, in our jargon) are exactly equal in each race.
This belief became fashionable only at a later time.16
However, both racists and eugenicists believe that at least some of
the variability in socially valued traits is genetic. And so racism and
eugenics became confounded after World War I, when many social
scientists began denying the importance of heredity altogether.
People think in simple dichotomies where my enemys enemy is my
friend, and in the naturenurture wars, racists and eugenicists found
themselves in the same camp.
During the rst third of the twentieth century, eugenics attracted
intellectuals of all shades. The British statistician Ronald Fisher and
the American geneticist Charles Davenport were conservatives, but
George Bernard Shaw and the sex researcher Havelock Ellis were
socialists, and the geneticists Hermann Muller and J.B.S. Haldane
were rock-solid communists.
Interestingly, eugenics ourished at a time when evolution was no
longer taken seriously by many biologists. In 1929, D.M.S. Watson
stated in his presidential address to the Zoology Section of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science: The only
theories of evolution which have gained any general currency,
those of Lamarck and Darwin, rest on a most insecure basis; the
validity of the assumptions on which they rest has seldom been
examined and they do not interest most of the younger zoologists.
They didnt sequence genomes in those days!17
Only during the 1930s and 1940s were the seeming contradictions
between Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics nally laid to
rest in what became known as the Modern Synthesis. Ever since, the
combination of genetics with evolution by natural selection has been
the bedrock on which all biology is built.
The rst methodologically sound studies of test intelligence in
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In Gods Image?
twins and adoptees were reported only during the 1930s. They
showed what all behavior genetic studies have shown ever since: both
genes and environment are important. Eugenics ourished when its
scientic assumptions were shaky, and went out of fashion as soon
as these assumptions were shown to be correct!
There were scientic dead ends. The United States produced a
semi-scientic cottage industry of extended family studies that purported to show the inheritance of various forms of degeneracy
(mutational load, in our jargon), such as pauperism, feeblemindedness and crime.18 And Charles Davenport studied not only genes for
eye color, hemophilia, polydactyly and otosclerosis, but also for
eroticism in wayward girls, feeblemindedness and nomadism.
Psychiatrists, in particular, were interested in preventing the diseases they couldnt cure. By 1900 it was known that 3040 percent of
the insane in asylums had a family history suggesting heredity.
Therefore discouraging the reproduction of those with a family
history of mental disease seemed to make sense.
Feeblemindedness was another concern. The rst IQ test was
introduced in the United States in 1908 by Henry H. Goddard,
director of research at the Vineland Training School for the FeebleMinded in New Jersey. After trying it at Vineland, Goddard proceeded
to examine prisoners, prostitutes and immigrants on Ellis Island, with
appalling results. Low intelligence was seen as a risk factor for social
deviance, and thus was born the menace of the feebleminded.
IQ tests were focusing the attention of many psychologists
on intelligence, and behavioral problems that would have been
attributed to bad character and bad breeding (meaning poor
upbringing) during the nineteenth century were now attributed to
feeble-mindedness and bad breeding (now meaning bad genes).
That new technologies change the way we think about problems
should not surprise us. In our time, the wizardry of molecular
genetics is transforming the way we think about our individuality
and the causes of our troubles.
Goddard proposed to keep the feebleminded in institutions
through their reproductive years, but others preferred the surgical
solution. Sterilization was more cost-effective, and it permitted the
patients reintegration into the community. In many American states
(and the Scandinavian countries but not Britain), laws permitting the
involuntary sterilization of mental patients were enacted from 1908
well into the 1930s. About 60,000 sterilizations were performed
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Ideologology
under these statutes between 1907 and the 1960s in the United States.
Of those operated on 60 percent were female, although the operation
is far easier in males, and most of them were institutionalized
although community-living patients have more opportunity to
reproduce than those in captivity. Obviously, most eugenic sterilizations were not done for eugenic reasons at all.19
Interestingly, the voluntary sterilization of normal people for
contraception was either illegal or legally ambiguous in most states
until the 1960s. Vasectomy and tubal ligation should be used only
for serious medical and eugenic indications, but not for frivolous
reasons such as contraception for healthy people!
Logical consequences
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men. (Th.H. Huxley)
The essential scientic assumptions of eugenics were that humans are
subject to natural selection and that at least some of the variability in
those traits that people consider important is heritable. Neither of
these claims is contested today. If these assumptions are correct, then
eugenic practices can be effective.
Actually, there seems to be only one example for a truly effective
eugenic policy. After a steady rise since the 1960s, the crime rate in
the United States nally took a nose-dive during the 1990s. Many
explanations have been proposed for this decline, but John Donohue
at Yale University and Steven Levitt at the University of Chicago
came up with a real interesting one: the legalization of abortion in
1973.
Crime began declining exactly at the time when the aborted fetuses
of 1973 would have reached the crime-prone age, and it declined
most in the states with the highest abortion rates. This makes sense.
Most women who seek an abortion are either single or poor or both.
We know that the children of these women commit more than their
fair share of crimes. If you reduce the reproduction of those whose
children are most likely to commit crimes, youre bound to reduce
the crime rate. What else do you expect? The numbers suggest that
about half of the drop in crime during the 1990s was caused by
legalized abortion.20
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In Gods Image?
Donohue and Levitt believe that abortion reduces crime because it
reduces the number of children who have to grow up under awful
conditions. They are certainly right, but perhaps this is only part of
the story. In Chapter 10 we saw that moral intuitions are produced
by inhibitory controls on aggressive and other socially inappropriate
impulses. It is likely that the same inhibitory brain circuits that keep
people from committing crimes can also cause them to reject abortion, at least in countries like the United States where abortion is
considered immoral. The strength of these inhibitory circuits is no
doubt inuenced by genes. Therefore the selection against abortionliability genes that was legally imposed on the United States in 1973
was bound to select against crime-liability genes as well. This
hypothesis can be tested by comparing the frequencies of crimepredisposing genes in large cohorts of newborns and aborted fetuses.
Its easy, isnt it?
If you object to eugenic effects of abortion, there is a simple
remedy: make abortion so expensive and so difcult to obtain that
only rich and educated women can get it. The children of these
women have a low crime rate, and abortion under these conditions
will actually increase crime. The right of legal abortion is preserved
but the evil of eugenics is avoided. Good idea?
The old-time eugenicists would rotate in their graves if they knew
that we achieve eugenic outcomes through abortion. The American
Eugenics Society regarded abortion as murder unless performed on
strict medical grounds.21 The big issue in those days was not abortion
but contraception. Many people believed that contraception would
loosen sexual morals and lead to promiscuity and unstable marriages. Of course we now know that these concerns were totally
unfounded!
Ideologology
against the abuses of genetics, or as a rhetorical device to slander
those to whom the label is attached.
It was not because of the science. The extended pedigree studies
popular at the time were soon laughed out of court, as were the naive
ideas about single genes as causes of complex traits such as intelligence and eroticism. And yet, we are once again hunting genes. One
group, for example, has recently described a fairly common teenage
daughter gene that is said to predispose to high aggressiveness, low
academic achievement, early reproduction and pregnancy-induced
hypertension. Eugenicists would be thrilled at this discovery! And,
believe it or not, even a gene for nomadism has suddenly reappeared.22 Of course, by now we know that complex traits are inuenced by many genes and that every gene has effects on many traits.
The science of eugenics was as good as Columbuss geography.
Columbus was wrong, for he believed he had reached India when he
was actually in the Caribbean. But his belief that India can be
reached by sailing west was correct. According to one historian,
eugenics is a doctrine that was never defeated in the scientic arena
but rather submerged by political and social events.23
We have inherited our science from the early eugenicists, but we
do not share their values. When I was a student in Germany back in
the 1970s, one day one of the biology students mentioned that since
stupid people have more children than smart people, soon there will
be only idiots left. The immediate response was: That will take many
generations. It wont affect us. And besides, by then well blow
ourselves up in a nuclear war anyway. Everyone agreed, and that
settled the matter.
The students afterthought that we will not survive anyway was
widely shared at the time. The British philosopher Arthur Koestler
wrote in 1978: From the dawn of his consciousness until this August
day in 1945 man had to live with the prospect of his death as an
individual; but since the day when the rst nuclear bomb darkened
the sky over Hiroshima he must live with the prospect of his extermination as a species.24
Galtons humanitarianism was a misapplication of kin-selected
altruism: the kind that evolved for family members who share some
of our own genes. For us today, extending this kind of altruism to
future generations is an abomination. There is a conict of interest
between people living now and people who are not yet born. In such
conicts, for example between the right of the child to be born to
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In Gods Image?
competent parents and the right of incompetent parents to have
children as they please, we are expected to take the side of those who
are alive already.
The eugenicist must attend to individual differences. But the
human brain is programmed to be suspicious of those who are different and unfamiliar, for they might be enemies or social parasites.
Therefore the humanitarian memes of eugenics easily get swamped
by xenophobic memes, as in the menace of the feebleminded. Thus
most people can only understand eugenics as a dogma of race and
class prejudice.
Also, people can respond to illness with compassion but not to low
ability or bad character. They feel impelled to help those who are far
worse off than themselves, but do not feel obliged to improve the lot
of normal people. On the contrary, the good fortunes of others do
not rouse sympathy but envy.25 Therefore eugenics could survive in
the form of medical genetics, with the aim of preventing diseases, but
not as a social reform movement with the aim of making people
brighter and more ethical.
The Nazis, nally, saw the unt as an impediment in the struggle
of the Aryan race against its enemies. Therefore they implemented a
eugenics program under which 400,000 people were sterilized (but
not killed) between 1933 and 1939.26 As we saw in Chapter 3, when
faced with emotionally charged issues we form our judgments not by
deductive reasoning but by associative thinking and analogy. Thus
Hitler discredited eugenics the same way that Robespierre had discredited democracy during the French Revolution.
The academic ecosystem was transformed during the twentieth
century. With increasing knowledge, science became fragmented into
self-contained subdisciplines. We live in an age of experts who know
only what they need to know, and nerds who know only what they
like to know, not an age of sages who integrate in their minds the
accumulated knowledge of their time. As a result, biosocial theories
that integrate the knowledge of the natural and social sciences are no
longer viable.
The naturenurture controversy of the twentieth century was not
about genes and environment, but about immutability and changeability. Aside from the few eugenicists, people perceived genes as
immutable and environments as changeable. Therefore those who
wanted to change society preferred to believe in the power of the
environment, and those who wanted to keep it as it is preferred
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Ideologology
genes. Most intellectuals are self-deluded jerks who believe to be true
what they wish to be true.
Nature versus nurture had never been an issue during the nineteenth century when most people believed in the inheritance of
acquired traits. The two became opposed only at the turn of the
century when Lamarckian inheritance was thrown out in favor of
hard heredity. Once people understood the nature of heredity, most
of them preferred environmental over genetic explanations.27
Today the frontlines have reversed. We have recognized the
environment as a conservative force that perpetuates old evils, while
genes are no longer perceived as immutable. We know their structures, propagate them in our test tubes, and attempt to treat diseases
by bringing new genes into our ailing cells. We test embryos for
messy genes, and before long we will tinker with the genes in our
germ cells the way we already do it with farm animals and laboratory
mice.28 If you want to keep the world as it is, you must oppose
genetics; and if you want to create a better world, you must apply
genetics!
Ironically, this change follows on the heels of James Flynns great
discovery. When there was no evidence for environmental inuences
on intelligence, everyone was a staunch environmentalist. Once
Flynn had proved the importance of the environment, everyone
became fascinated by genes. Remember, the same had happened to
the old-time eugenicists. History is repeating itself.
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14
A Conversation with Dr Stein
What is it, then?
A man is in the making . . .
Begetting as men used to do,
Both vain and senseless we declare . . .
Whereas delighted with it still the beast may be,
Man with his supreme gifts must henceforth win
A higher, nobler origin.
(Goethe, Faust)
Unlikely things do happen in life, and my last encounter with my old
friend, Dr Stein, was one of them. I knew him when he was a medical
student at the same university where I studied biology. Then we went
our separate ways, and we lost touch for more than 20 years. I
thought I would never see him again, and yet, one day I had him on
the phone in my ofce. He was in Dominica, and someone at his
hotel had mentioned my name. The next evening we met at the time
of sunset, on the terrace of the Blue Bay bar overlooking the Caribbean Sea.
After the preliminaries and the inevitable order of a rum punch, I
said:
What a coincidence to have you here on this beautiful island! Did
you come on one of the cruise ships?
No. Im here on business. I am working for a company, ReproTech, International.
ReproTech, International? Last time I saw you, you were a
promising young physician. And now you are selling copy machines
in the Caribbean? Lost a malpractice suit?
Nope. Im not selling copy machines. Its about assisted
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In Gods Image?
reproductive technology. In-vitro fertilization, mainly. We have a
whole chain of IVF clinics.
I see, some sort of franchise, like McDonalds. Sounds interesting.
Do you have a sperm bank?
Sure. Youll nd it on the Internet.
With real Nobel Prize winners? I told my teenage daughter to take
a Nobel Prize winner from the sperm bank as father for her children.
Dr Stein lifted his nger in mock threat: Hm, what you are doing
with your daughter is called directive genetic counseling. Does she
like your idea?
No, she doesnt. But its good for the girls to learn the rational
approach to reproduction. Keeps them out of trouble.
No, we dont have Nobel Prize winners. Theyre too old. Even if
they can still crank up a donation, chances are the sperm count is too
low, or sperm motility is bad. And there is a risk of new mutations
when the father is too old.1 We dont take chances. Our age limit for
donors is forty years.
Does this mean a man should bring his sperm to your sperm bank
while he is still young, get it frozen, and then use it when he is ready
for a child, perhaps twenty or thirty years later?
Yes. But so far we havent seen a lot of customers like that.
You mentioned this thing with directive genetic counseling. Is
that the same as in education? In the early days, teachers used to tell
the children that it is wrong to steal. But then, during the 1960s and
1970s, teachers were told they must not impose their own value
systems on the children. I bet non-directive counseling became
fashionable at that time.
Actually, it did. But in medicine, it only means that we dont tell
our patients what they should do. We dont give advice. We explain
the options, and let them choose. We dont want to be paternalistic.
We are supposed to respect the patients autonomy.2
Counsel the patient without giving advice? Is that done by all
doctors?
Most doctors dont bother. They still tell their patients to quit
smoking. But in theory they should do it like the Surgeon General.
The Surgeon General doesnt say Dont smoke, but Smoking is
hazardous to your health.
Makes sense. Humans are stubborn animals who never do what
they are told to do. And to stop the AIDS epidemic, the Americans
should not tell their women to avoid sex with HIV-infected men.
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In Gods Image?
Thats true if you eat your mother-in-law after she died of a heart
attack. You still dont have the right to kill her in order to eat her.
One problem is that the unborn child cannot claim damages because
if the parents had not made it deaf, they would have aborted it.4 If
the child doesnt like it, there is still the option of suicide. Not
everyone likes that kind of reasoning. I would rather let the hearing
child hear, wait until she is eighteen years old, and then let her decide
whether she wants to be hearing or deaf. Provided the Supreme
Court has no objection.
But it makes sense. Many years ago when I was traveling in India,
somewhere between Delhi and Varanasi, I noticed in the villages
some people with real weird deformities, with the knees bent forward, or the feet pointing backward. The guy who was traveling with
me explained that these were the children of very poor people. When
they were babies, their parents tied their joints with wires to turn
them into more effective beggars.
I like to think that we are more civilized than that.
As long as parents have to raise their child without outside help,
they can claim the exclusive right to decide about the childs education, religion, occupation and marriage partner, and to turn the
child into a cripple. Only if somebody else has an obligation to help
raising the child, does that somebody else have a right to interfere.
That kind of reasoning applies to rights and duties as it does to
apples and oranges. If, say, the government helps the parents with
free health care and schooling, then it can claim a right to ban
mutilation and infanticide. Otherwise it cannot.
Yes, there is a horse trade with rights and duties, and we are going
to see more of that sort. In the old days it was nobodys fault when a
child was born with a problem. Now we can prevent many diseases
and disabilities with genetic screening and prenatal testing. But many
parents dont go for genetic screening even when it is offered, and
they dont show up for prenatal checks. And sometimes we diagnose
a real bad disease in a fetus and the parents still decide to have the
child. Now, if the parents are given the choice and they opt for a sick
child, who is going to pay? Some people say that if the parents have
the right to opt for a sick child, then they should have the obligation
to pay for the medical expenses or special education.
Well, thats not the usual choice between sickness and health but
a package deal between sickness and existence versus no sickness and
non-existence.
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In Gods Image?
I guess there isnt enough brain for that. Anyway, a desire to live
would be useless for a fetus because its brain cannot control the
forces on which its survival depends.
So we consider the killing of a human being wrong because we
respect peoples desire to stay alive, but a fetus has no desire to stay
alive. So can it be wrong to kill a fetus?
No, because it has no feelings and desires.
Exactly. It doesnt matter if we dump an embryo or abort a fetus,
but if we do something to it that has consequences later, when it has
feelings and desires, that counts! Killing disabled children and
replacing them with healthy ones is a different matter. Handicapped
people will be scared because they are afraid someone could decide
their lives are not worth living. Even children who come down with
the u will panic because they think now they are going to be terminated. Thats why we dont kill disabled children although we
abort sick fetuses. Theres nothing special about a fetus. We can even
take the nucleus from a blood cell and put it in an egg and grow it
into a baby. Does this mean we should treat blood cells the way we
treat people?5
Doesnt that have implications for blood transfusions? If blood
can become a baby then it has a soul, and mixing up souls is a serious
matter! Jehovahs Witnesses will say they have been right all along.
Mother Nature is very, very wasteful with things that can become
people. Even a young woman who is exposed to the risk of pregnancy has only a twenty percent chance of getting pregnant every
month. Thats not because no embryo is formed, but because most
embryos dont make it. They are genetically defective, or otherwise
unable to develop.6
But isnt that terrible?
Whats so terrible about that?
But dont you know? In the old days, babies who died after birth,
before they could be baptized, had to be buried outside the
churchyard because their souls went straight to hell. And now you
are telling me that eighty percent of all souls go straight to hell
because they are never born?! If I were in charge in the Vatican, I
would demand that all embryos are made by IVF and get baptized
before they are implanted!7
Not that Im likely to get the offer, but I think I wouldnt want
that job. You know, that whole business with heaven and hell, thats
a rumor. Even worse, its a pernicious dogma. Look at the guys who
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And while we were sipping our rum punch, I realized that I still knew
nothing about the reasons that had brought my friend to this tropical island.
Are you working as some sort of genetic counselor?
No. I do mostly IVF. Ten percent of all couples cannot have
children the old-fashioned way, but most of them can have children
by IVF. One to two percent of all children in the Western World are
conceived by assisted reproductive technologies these days.8
I used to think what people really want is sex and money, and
they do their best to avoid children.
Thats not true for our clients. They are desperate for a child.
IVF must be a pretty complicated procedure.
Getting the eggs is the hard part. With hormone stimulation, we can
harvest more than ten eggs at a time if we are lucky. We mix eggs and
sperm in the test tube. Then we place the embryos in the uterus, at least
two or three at a time because less than ten percent of them implant. If
there are embryos left, then the extras go into liquid nitrogen.
And they survive freezing in liquid nitrogen?
Most of them survive. And they make normal babies.
What about eggs? We have a lot of female medical students here
who will never have time for a family until they are old. Can they put
their eggs in the freezer and use them 30 years later, when they are
ready for children?
In principle, yes. Only the ovaries shut down at menopause, not
the uterus. With the right hormone pills, even a woman in her fties
can still give birth. And why not? A fty-year-old woman can expect
to live another thirty to thirty-ve years. Thats plenty of time to
raise a child. Freezing eggs isnt easy. Your students could freeze
embryos, but chances are they would no longer want their present
sperm donor thirty years from now. So let them try it with eggs.
Methods for egg-freezing have improved a lot lately.9
And what about lesbians? An egg has a single set of chromosomes, just like a sperm, so you can make a baby girl with two
mothers and no father. Just fuse the two eggs! Only, two women
cannot make a son because they have no Y chromosome.
I got some requests like that, but I had to tell the clients, sorry, no
way. Its because there are a few genes that are expressed only when
they come from the father, and others only when they come from the
mother. Thats called imprinting. Theres no way to get normal
embryonic development if you try to make a baby from two eggs.
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hundred cranky mediocrities. We can clone genomes, but we cannot
clone life histories. Anyway, copying an adult wouldnt be safe.
When the cells of the body develop into nerve cells and skin cells and
brain cells and the like, some genes get switched on and others
switched off. Sometimes thats lasting, like the imprinting of genes in
the egg and sperm. Only a few kinds of cell can be used for nuclear
transfer at all. Even worse, mutations build up in the bodys cells as
we get older and there will be problems, especially when you try to
clone an old guy.
But why nuclear transfer if you dont want to copy people?
Its for genetic screening. Two percent of all children are born
with a serious birth defect or a chronic disease. Many of the risks are
genetic and therefore avoidable. The same is true for many diseases
that develop later in life, like asthma and diabetes and heart disease
and Alzheimers. Wouldnt it be nice if we could reassure parents
that their child is going to be okay? In IVF we can check the genes of
every embryo and implant only those who are likely to be healthy.
Thats called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, and its already
done in cases where a disease gene is known to run in the family. But
it is difcult because we have to work with DNA from one or two
cells that are pinched off the embryo. Only now are we learning to
screen for thousands of genes at a time. That makes sense even when
there is no family history of a genetic disease.
How can you test embryos for thousands of genes?
With DNA chips. A DNA chip is only the size of a microscope
slide, but it tests for tens of thousands of genes. This is important
because the risk for common diseases such as diabetes and Alzheimers does not come from a single gene. It is the combination of
genes that is important.11
But if you dump most of your embryos because their genes are
not good enough, then there wont be enough left. You said less than
ten percent of those that you put in the uterus ever make it. So when
you nd an embryo with real good genes, chances are it wont
implant and you have to start all over again.
Thats where nuclear transfer comes in. Instead of implanting the
embryo, we grow the fertilized egg into a cell culture and screen the
cells with DNA chips. If the genes are okay, then we use the cells for
nuclear transfer. That way we can make hundreds of embryos, all
with the same genes. Chances are that at least one of them will make
it. Its tricky. You have to use exactly the right culturing conditions
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In Gods Image?
So you can make cells from the eggs of a beauty queen and the
sperm of an Olympic gold medal winner, screen them with DNA
chips, make embryos from those with the right combination of
athletic genes and beauty genes, and sell the embryos to old career
women?
That would be possible.
Not bad. And when the children grow up they will all meet for a
clone reunion every year, perhaps on the anniversary of the fertilization that created their cell line. You should make jolly clones,
good-natured, sociable and with a sense of humor! And then think of
all that social inequality. I bet you can eliminate some of that if you
make all your clones to the same standard. Karl Marx wrote in the
Communist Manifesto that all men are created equal, but of course
we know thats all bunk.
I dont think it was Marx who said that.
Okay, its not from Marx, its from Star Wars. But no, it cannot
be American. Its not gender neutral.
Right now, reducing social inequality and making jolly clones for
the annual clone reunion are not really our priorities. We want to
reduce health risks.
But isnt there a problem when you serve old career women? You
need a donated egg every time you make an embryo.
Thats the bottleneck. We will have to use paid donors, initially at
least.
That would be a boon for the Dominican economy. The government tries to attract investors with the low wages for local labor,
but in your case its more the egg donors.
Eventually we will have to nd something better. We are trying to
culture ovarian tissue, to mature the eggs in the test tube. Others are
trying to make eggs from cultured embryonic cells, or to use eggs
from genetically modied animals as recipients for the nucleus.13 But
you are right. As long as we depend on human oocyte donors we can
work only on a fairly small scale, and it keeps the cost high. Now, do
you think the Dominican government will give us a concession for
this kind of business?
They are a bit old-fashioned here. Perhaps they let you set up
your factory, but under condition that you dont sell your products
to the locals.
You mean, like in Monte Carlo where citizens of Monaco are not
allowed to gamble in the casino?
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Now, you said that with your DNA chips you can screen thousands of genes at a time?
There are a few million spots in the genome where the DNA is
different between people. Most of them are what we call singlenucleotide polymorphisms. But only some of them, a few thousand
perhaps, do anything interesting at all.
So nally we can get rid of all that genetic garbage that gives us
headaches and colds and at feet and pimples! From the earliest
beginnings people had to suffer and die, for thats the only way to
ush bad mutations out of the gene pool. Now you do away with
that. Rather than letting people suffer and die, you dump embryos.
You take the pain out of natural selection!
Its not so easy. We will have a catalog of common DNA variations, but most of them make only subtle effects. Freak mutations
with bigger effects remain rare because they get selected out of the
gene pool. Because they are rare they are harder to nd. We would
have to scan each of the 30,000 genes in the genome to detect any
possible mutation. And when we nd one that has never been seen
before, we cannot be sure what it does.15
Does this mean it is easier to scan for normal variation than for
diseases?
Most likely.
So you may never be able to predict diseases very well although
you can make fairly good predictions about normal-variation traits.
It will be easier to offer your customers babies with red hair and high
intelligence than with resistance to heart attacks and strokes. All the
time you are talking about disease risks. You can do a lot more than
that, and you know it. Prophets and philosophers and revolutionaries have tried to create more ethical human beings and more
equitable societies. They tried religious teachings and political propaganda and all kinds of social reforms, but nothing worked. People
remained selsh and stupid. Science, technology and universal education did a little better. They made us wealthier and more rational.
Some of the cruder superstitions are gone. We dont burn witches
any more. But we could not truly change the way people treat each
other. Now we have resigned ourselves to our impotence. We have
given up on the grand world-improvement schemes. And you know
why it was bound to fail? Because of human nature. You cannot
defeat human nature. Going with it is better than ghting it. Thats
what we are doing today. But it can bring us only so far. Were
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why there are more male than female assholes, by the way. There is
no reason to suspect that asshole genes do anything that we would
consider useful.
Thats a special case. But I feel more comfortable preventing
diseases rather than making saints.
You make babies from cultured cells. Dont they use that method
to make transgenic animals, such as cows with human insulin in their
milk and pigs that can be used as organ donors? As far as I
understand they put genes into the cells. Then they put the cells into
animal embryos or use them for nuclear transfer. Can you engineer
people that way?
We can insert genes into the germ line. We can also put articial
chromosomes into the egg cell, with genes of our choice. In some
cases we can even repair defective genes. Right now its not safe
enough for use in humans, but it looks promising. Cancer-resistant
mice have been made already. Our genome naturally has tumor
suppressor genes that prevent cancer. When one of the bodys cells
loses its tumor suppressor genes through mutations, then it becomes
a cancer cell. We already have cancer-resistant mice with an extra
copy of a tumor suppressor gene, without bad side-effects. Chances
are it can work in people.
Then all thats missing are immortality genes.
Where do you expect us to get those from? The Olympic gods?
No, but transgenic mice with a longer lifespan have been made
already. Sooner or later we will be able to do it in humans. But dont
expect too much too soon.17
Cant you put these genes into adults? And genetic diseases
shouldnt be a problem either. Now that the human genome project
has nailed down all the genes, cant we use gene therapy to replace
the bad genes with good ones?
That will work only for a few rare diseases, like hemophilia and
muscular dystrophy. No, there will be no miracle cures. Its mainly
to predict and prevent the diseases. But why do you want to make
sick people and then treat them? Why not make healthy people in the
rst place?
My friend had always been a bit naive. Didnt he realize that people
cant think like that? They have compassion with the sick, but
making people cancer-resistant or longer-lived is something else,
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and prevent diseases and disabilities, but not those traits that vary
among normal people.18 But there is no natural cut-off between
normal and abnormal. Only look at the folks who gobble Prozac and
Viagra! Every one of us has his weaknesses and disabilities and
disease liabilities. We must accept these limitations in us and in
others, but we must also struggle with them. If we insist on an
articial cut-off, we only stigmatize those who are labeled abnormal.
So we should select embryos with genius-genes and give them
longevity-genes?
No. We should home in on those problems that can really wreck
peoples lives, not as a matter of principle but of priorities. Thirty
years ago, as a conscientious objector back in Germany, I did
community service in a home for handicapped children. Everything
mixed up. Deformities of all kinds and spastics and paraplegics and
all degrees of mental deciency. One evening I entertained them with
a story about a fairy and three wishes. And then I made a blunder I
will never forget. I asked the children, Now, when this fairy comes
to you and asks you for your wishes, what would you wish? Never
again did I feel that embarrassed. Everyone in that place knew that
the rst wish of any handicapped child is to be normal like the other
children. Everyone knew, except me.
But what about the parents? Arent parents supposed to love their
children no matter how bad their genes are and how sick and disabled they are?
That sounds like the old religious argument that we need poor
people so the faithful can prove their generosity by giving alms. Lets
simply assume that parents are prepared to love their child even if
the child has a problem. But we shouldnt force them to prove it.
But if everyone designs his children, and diseases and disabilities
become rare, we would no longer value the sick and disabled.19
Half a century ago there were lots of people who were paralyzed
from polio. Then someone came up with a vaccine, and polio became
rare. Now its almost eradicated worldwide. Do you think it was
wrong to immunize against polio because it devalued the paralyzed?
When you ask handicapped people if they wish that others get their
disability, do you think they will say yes? And unless they themselves
wish that others share their fate, the argument makes no sense.
Indeed. We cannot tell the disabled, We are going to make soand-so-many people with your disability per year. Thats good for
you. That would be paternalistic. But perhaps they do want others
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The third option is to allow it for those who are willing and able to
pay for it.
So only the poor will still have children with all those preventable
problems?
One hundred years ago only the rich could afford a car. But soon
cars were mass-produced and everyone could buy one. All new
technologies start out expensive, but then the price goes down. You
soon reach a point where it becomes affordable for everyone.
Many people still wont like what you are doing. They will say its
unnatural.
Treating infections with penicillin is also unnatural. We prevent
heart disease with a healthy diet and AIDS with condoms. Whats so
special about genetic diseases?
I dont know. Perhaps people think that by engineering genes you
are engineering the soul.
Thats fuzzy thinking. This morning in my hotel room I turned on
the radio and guess what I heard? A story about some Arctic bird
that ended in the assertion that evolution can never explain how that
bird is so well designed to survive on the Arctic ice.
That was Voice of Life Radio: Creation Moment with Ian Taylor.
They bring that every morning at seven.
So your children must be devout creationists.
Thats how they start out. Until they grow older and understand
how the world works. Its like with Santa Claus.
And do the Dominicans believe all that? Or do they believe in
evolution?
They all are creationists. Perhaps its because the average IQ on
this island is only 70.
How do you know?
I measured it.20
Sure. Every thinking person sees that creation and evolution are
two different issues altogether. Creation is a cosmological problem:
why is there something rather than nothing? Evolution is about how
the world works. Saying that living things cannot evolve because
they were created by God is like saying that the planets cannot be
held in their orbits by gravity because they were created by God. If
people equate that with religion, it discredits religion.
I think I know what you mean. When my daughter was twelve
years old, she wondered what she should believe: science or religion.
She settled for science.
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In Gods Image?
about others, they dont care about consequences. They do what
feels right, and they call that ethics.
Thats the primitive variety. It used to be a matter of obedience
and conformity, but now we are more individualistic. Now people
glorify their gut feelings as moral principles. Worst of all are those
who speak of sacred values. But sanctity is only a feeling. It is a very
personal thing, and it is different for different people. Patriotic and
religious feelings are held sacred by many, and they produce all the
wars and terror and genocide we see in the world. People who try to
force their own sanctity on others are dangerous psychopaths.23
That sounded familiar. The world seems to be ruled by those guys.
In the past they used to keep busy with holy wars and the burning of
heretics. Today they seem to take a special interest in reproductive
medicine. But there was something else.
And so I said:
Now, in your case there is a special problem: parents love their
children.
Thats what we are banking on. People who love their children go
out of their way to give them the best possible education. So why
should they not go out of their way to give them the best possible
genes?
You are working at the tail end of a bell-shaped distribution. At
one end of the bell curve are those who really dont want children.
They remain childless or have children only by accident. At the other
tail are those who really want children. Thats the kind you see in
your IVF clinics. In between is the large majority who take it as it
comes. Its only the ve percent or ten percent at the extreme end of
the distribution who would go out of their way to pick the best genes
for their children. The others are not sufciently motivated. But they
still love their children, and they want to give them an edge over
other peoples children. Now, when you come along and make
perfect babies, these babies will have an unfair advantage over the
majority children. People will be alarmed. They will say you are
breeding a master race, or something of that sort. And its not only
high-IQ genes that are suspect. Even extra good health can be seen as
an unfair advantage. As you said, we all have our little disabilities.
Another problem is that people cannot love a child before it exists.
Its designed only for existing children, and it parallels the reproductive value of the child.24 Spending fty thousand dollars for
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In Gods Image?
child. As you said, they are at one end of a bell-shaped distribution.
On balance, these children are better off than the rest of the crowd
because they are assured of loving parents.26 When Im in the waiting
room, Ill take the door to the IVF clinic, if they let me choose. But if
there is a door to a place where they implant only well-selected
embryos, that will be my very rst choice.
What if they dont let you choose, and you dont go to the embryo
factory but they dump you into the rst womb that passes by?
Wouldnt that be a terrible let-down? You would still have all these
crappy genes, and you would have to live with others who are
healthier and wealthier and wiser than you because somebody did a
good job making sure they get good genes.
Would it make you any sicker, living with others healthier than
you?
No, but perhaps they would make me pay more for health
insurance.
Not if it is a world where the healthy care for the sick. You would
pay less, not more. Would it make you any poorer, living with others
wealthier than you?
Perhaps they would turn their wealth into power, and use that
power to suck me dry altogether.
Not in a world where wealth comes from honest work and people
work together and share their proceeds. In that world you would be
wealthier, not poorer. And would it make you any more ignorant,
living with others wiser than you?
They can take advantage of my ignorance.
In a world where knowledge is put to good use and wisdom is
shared freely, you would be wiser.
I might be envious. I would still have all those genes that make
people envious of others. Actually, without your gene screen I could
be born chock full of asshole genes: a real psychopath. But when
there are others around with better genes and they create a lot of
wealth, then there is more for me to beg, borrow and steal. And if I
kill somebody, they wont put me on death row. If the guys who run
the show were selected for wisdom genes in your factory, they will
not be bent on revenge. They will put me in some sort of hotel where
I can no longer harm others and theyll still let me have fun there.
Youre right. I would be better off, even as a psychopath.
People have to make up their minds. They have to decide into
what kind of world they would want to be born.
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15
Yoyo Evolution and Noahs Ark
God and nature rst made us what we are, and then out of
our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to
be . . . Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our
measurement.
(Marcus Garvey, 18871940)
Science makes predictions that can be falsied by observation or
experiment. If social scientists and biologists cannot predict the
future trajectory of our cultural and biological evolution, then their
science is worthless.
Some twentieth-century futurologists observed that science and
technology were advancing exponentially. Extrapolating from this
trend, they predicted enormous scientic and technological progress.
Most likely we will start colonizing the galaxy soon. We will have to.
The human population grows by 1.5 percent per year. This means
there will be 7.3 billion people on Earth in ten years, 28 billion in 100
years, and 11 trillion in 500 years. Our planet will be too small for us.
This is an example of a projection: the extension of a current trend
into the future. Projections are cheap substitutes for predictions,
used by those who do not understand the causes of the current
trends. Most projections are useless on timescales beyond a few years
or decades. Predictions of long-term trends require an understanding
of causes, and the causes of social and biological developments lie in
human behavior. After 14 chapters about human behavior, lets see
what we have learned!
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In Gods Image?
The prophets of doom
Can a society in which thought and technique are scientic
persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which
must bring either decay or explosion . . .? (Bertrand Russell,
Lloyd Roberts lecture, 1949)
We have learned that the population bomb is a false alarm. In
Chapters 5 and 8 we saw that our ancestors never evolved a reliable
desire for children because they did not know how child-making
works. They only evolved a love for their existing children. This love
backres today, for we have grown bright enough to know that
having many children dilutes the material and emotional resources
available for each child. Therefore parental love keeps us from
having many children. And, more importantly, we know that children interfere with the pursuit of sex and money.
Runaway population growth only occurs at a brief intermediate
stage of cultural evolution, when people have already learned to
reduce infant mortality but have not quite learned that having lots of
children is bad for parents and children alike. In countries that are
past this stage, from Spain and Germany to Hong Kong and Japan,
fertility has plummeted far below replacement. Population decline
rather than population growth is the normal condition for advanced
societies!1
Or are we going to destroy our civilization or even exterminate our
species through an ecological collapse? Its also a false alarm. Air
and water pollution are likely to shorten life expectancy only marginally. Soil erosion is not a fatal problem either because it affects
only part of the arable land on this planet, most of it in the tropics.
And species extinctions will not jeopardize the survival of civilization
or our survival as a species.
Greenhouse warming is more serious. Experts expect a temperature rise of 1.568C and a sea-level rise of 13 to 30 centimeters by the
end of the twenty-rst century. Further sea-level rises, possibly of
several meters, are likely during the twenty-second and twenty-third
centuries. In the worst-case scenario, Manhattan will become the
New Venice, and 5 million Dutch will be resettled in Greenland and
500 million Bangladeshis in Antarctica.
The economy will be affected by the depletion of mineral
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In Gods Image?
grandchildren from genetic health risks. But we know already that
the intelligence of human populations is unstable over time.3 The
same might be true for moral traits as well.
The important point is this: The future of human societies depends
not only on the physical resources of our planet but above all on the
human resources. How many people are there? How intelligent are
they? What purpose do they see in life?
Cultural change
Cheshire Puss, she began . . . Would you tell me, please,
which way I ought to go from here?
That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, said
the cat.
I dont care much where said Alice.
Then it doesnt matter which way you go, said the cat.
(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)
Both human ingenuity and the attitudes, beliefs and values that
dene culture are changing continuously. According to experts:
economic development tends to propel societies in a roughly
predictable direction: Industrialization leads to occupational
specialization, rising educational levels, rising income levels,
and eventually brings unforeseen changes changes in gender
roles, attitudes toward authority and sexual norms; declining
fertility rates; broader political participation; and less easily led
publics.4
International surveys reveal two major dimensions of this change.
The rst is the move from traditional religion to a secular and
rational worldview. The traditional mindset is marked by religious
faith, respect for elders, national pride, an emphasis on family
loyalties and male dominance, an aversion to euthanasia, abortion,
divorce and contraception, and the belief in absolute standards of
right and wrong. These traditional values are opposed to modern
values. The modern value system is directly related to the average IQ
of the population. It is, therefore, in all likelihood a consequence of
the Flynn effect. As people get brighter and understand how the
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In Gods Image?
escapism denes the postmodern fun society. And it works. The
higher peoples scores on the postmodern values factor, the happier
they are.
In any society that has reached a high level of wealth and social
security, people can forget the bare necessities and tackle the allimportant task of maximizing their enjoyment of life. This trend has
reached full force only in the wake of rising prosperity after World
War II. It gave us pop culture and the sexual revolution, spawned
grassroots movements against nuclear energy and genetically engineered food, and killed off the socialist movement.
Personality tests show the change. There have been large rises in
scores for neuroticism (negative emotions) and extraversion (positive
emotions) during the second half of the twentieth century, at least in
America. The shift toward the emotional approach to life is a universal human response to favorable external conditions and therefore it is seen in all societies that have achieved a high level of
prosperity and social security. Even zoo monkeys that are freed from
the daily chores of foraging and anti-predator defense show emotional and self-expressive behaviors in the form of intensied social
interactions the monkey equivalent of extraversion.6
The pursuit of happiness requires freedom and the downsizing of
traditional loyalties. Rights must be maximized and obligations
minimized. Anxiety, shame and guilt are treated as mental disorders,
rather than being cultivated as guides to a socially responsible life.
And, as we saw in Chapter 7, people now insist on romantic love for
marriage, and on divorce when love has run its natural course.
The reciprocity principle demands that individualists who claim
the right of unimpeded self-expression should support the same right
for others. Therefore some self-realizers support liberal politics.
Others are only bored by politics, for in postmodern society politics
has a hard time competing with other forms of entertainment. Moral
values change accordingly. The ethos of the modern world was utilitarian. Its core prescription was that we judge our actions by their
consequences, the way Dr Stein does. This was the heyday of socialism, eugenics, and other social reform movements. Today this
utilitarian approach has given way to an emotionally guided ethos
that insists on the sanctity of this-and-that with little concern for
consequences at least as long as there are no bad consequences for
ourselves. In postmodern society the self-expressive ethos merges
with a new spirituality that gradually reverts to religious dogma.
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In Gods Image?
Knowing the changes in value systems that occur with the Flynn
effect and rising prosperity, we can try to predict the trajectory on
which modern societies will evolve during the next millennium. In
Chapter 12 we saw that our civilization is driven by a feedback loop
between brain and culture. Human intelligence produces technology,
prosperity and an efcient educational system, which in turn boost
intelligence even more, and this creates even more technology and
prosperity. The intelligence part of this loop is called the Flynn
effect. Our civilization will advance as long, and only as long, as this
feedback is maintained. But can it be maintained?
Of course it cannot be maintained, because human intelligence is
subject to biological constraints. We cannot make our children grow
ten feet tall by giving them better food, we cannot live for 150 years
through vitamin pills and regular exercise, and we cannot turn
everyone into an Einstein by better schooling and educational video
games. The Flynn effect is rapidly becoming history, at least among
young people in the most advanced societies.9
And what if things go badly, for example after a nuclear war or a
political meltdown? If the disruption lasts for at least two or three
decades, the Flynn effect will go in reverse: deteriorating living
conditions will reduce intelligence. Sagging intelligence will cripple
the populations ability to maintain technology, social complexity
and the school system, and this will depress intelligence even more.
We no longer have a Flynn effect but an anti-Flynn effect.
As long as a meltdown like this can be avoided, developments
after the end of the Flynn effect depend on the slow workings of
genetic selection. But what are we selecting for? The authors of a
twin study in Denmark conjectured that with the introduction of
effective contraception, natural selection favors the desire to have
children. Effectively, we are selecting for feminine women with
strong maternal instincts. Others have noted that a traditionalist,
conservative and religious worldview with a preference for sharply
divided gender roles favors large families. Genes that support this
value system may therefore be under positive selection. In a few
centuries we will all be pious, obedient and conservative!10
The rst demographic transition, which peaked during the second half of the nineteenth century in most European countries, was
triggered by the spread of a rational, modern value system, which in
turn was the consequence of rising intelligence. During the late
twentieth century, Europe and virtually all other advanced societies
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In Gods Image?
want only a few children or none at all is that watching movies,
eating out, visiting friends and traveling are more satisfying than
changing diapers. On the workfun continuum, children are far on
the side of work. Modern technology has blessed us with fancy cars,
international travel, cable TV, home videos, computer games and the
Internet. Consumer goods get better as technology advances. Only
children have not been improved by technology. They still wet their
diapers and they still throw their tantrums, and when they grow up
they become liable to alcohol, crime, messy sex affairs and school
failure. Perhaps Dr Stein can re-engineer them, but do you want to
let him do it?
To make matters worse, children are an enormous nancial burden, especially for parents who want to send them to college. The
only remedy would be a massive redistribution of wealth from the
childless to parents. But how do you persuade the childless to pay
horrendous taxes to support other peoples children? Thats not the
kind of campaign issue that gets a president re-elected!
But doesnt this mean that children become unaffordable for the
poor? If only rich people can afford children and rich people are
brighter than the poor, then we can select against stupidity by
making the rich even richer and the poor even poorer! A sudden
change from afuence to poverty does indeed deter people from
childbearing. The East German birth rate plummeted when unication brought high unemployment and uncertainty about the
future. The same had happened before during the Great Depression
of the 1930s. Although universal afuence depresses fertility, people
who perceive themselves as worse off than before, or as worse off
than others, are reluctant to have children.
One problem with this argument is that the relationship between
income and intelligence is not strong. Even worse, if children are
unaffordable for a large section of the population, then only the less
intelligent among the poor will still have children. Indeed, today
selection against high intelligence is substantial in stratied societies
such as the United States but not in more egalitarian societies such as
Denmark and Sweden.12
Another problem is that we present our women with the choice
between motherhood and career. Women with good career opportunities are likely to opt for a career, and those with unattractive jobs
are likely to opt for family life. What advice would you give to a
female college student who fails all her courses? You tell her, You
334
In Gods Image?
there is a greater spread of intelligence and money-making ability in
the population and because social solidarity tends to be low in multiracial societies. Effectively, there will be an underclass that is
recruited mainly from the descendants of immigrants. The other
consequence of replacement migration would be a reduction of the
average IQ and educational achievement in the high-IQ countries,
which eventually leads to stunted economic development.15
In the countries that supply the migrants, fertility is declining with
the introduction of mass education, job opportunities for women,
and a brisk Flynn effect. Massive fertility declines have already
occurred in most Asian countries, but fertility is still high in Africa.
Most likely, migration into Europe and North America will be
dominated rst by Asians and later by Africans.
In Gods Image?
for everyone, it reads: never mind if its true, as long as it makes you
feel good.
As a consequence, research funding will be withheld from controversial research. This is already the case. In America, for example,
embryo research is not supported by federal funds. The breakthroughs that we see in this eld today are funded by commercial
interests; and politically incorrect research in behavioral genetics
during the 1980s depended in large part on private philanthropic
support. We dont burn scientists at the stake any more, but we cut
off their funding.17
Noahs Ark
[As a result of genome mapping] we will be able to increase the
complexity of our . . . DNA without having to wait for the slow
process of biological evolution. It is likely that we will be able to
completely redesign [the human genome] in the next 1,000
[years]. (Stephen Hawking)18
The sequencing of the human genome makes it possible to
envisage for the rst time the creation of a genetically more just
society, one in which the most fundamental kind of wealth the
genes that confer health and tness would for the rst time be
accessible to all. (Nicholas Wade, Life Script)
The dynamic of geneculture coevolution implies that there will be
another one or possibly two good centuries. IQs will no longer rise
the way they did during the twentieth century, and scientic progress
will slowly grind to a halt. The value system will be postmodern, with
a high level of individualism and subjective well-being. The ight
from science and reason will leave people vacillating between the
instant gratication of consumerism and the deeper joys of mysticism and religion. Within two centuries many populations in the
most advanced parts of the world will have been partially replaced
by migrants. Cultural creativity will be lost by this time, and people
will nd it increasingly hard to hold on to the knowledge and
technology of their ancestors. This course of events is inevitable
because of creeping depopulation and the insidious effects of genetic
selection for lower intelligence. In some places the local populations
338
In Gods Image?
practices are used only by a minority, they can offset undesirable
selection effects in the rest of the population.
But what does the public think about designer baby technology?
At my school, a little more than 20 percent of medical students want
it prohibited; 40 percent think it should be permitted but people
should pay for it themselves; and 20 percent think it should be
covered by the health insurance. The rest are undecided. Only 20
percent would use this technology for their own children. Opposition
to designer babies is related to a moralistic attitude of respect for
nature that considers the interference with natural processes unacceptable. It is also related to high religiosity in Christians and
Muslims, though not Hindus.
Still, a relative majority of our respondents favored the freemarket principle over prohibition. Apparently moralistic inhibitions
on coercive and manipulative tactics with people favor tolerance of
the technology, while the application of such inhibitions to natural
processes favors prohibition.
The outcome is everyones guess. Perhaps genetic selection and
germline gene engineering will be permitted for disease prevention
but outlawed for the production of children with high intelligence
and balanced personality. Disease prevention is supported by compassion, but high intelligence is an unfair advantage in the struggle
for sex and money. Most likely we will end up compiling lists of
genes for which selection and improvement are outlawed, the way we
compile lists of illegal drugs. If you want a genius child or one with
extended lifespan, you will have to do it illegally.
And what if the free market prevails? In that case only rich and
intelligent people with a genuine concern for the welfare of their
children will go out of their way to pick the best genes for their
children. Those who already have more than their fair share of
desirable genes will secure an even greater advantage for their children. These children will perceive designer baby technology as perfectly natural, and most of them will again use it for their own
children. For the rst time in history there will be a true genetic elite.
Historically, overachieving groups were prime targets of genocide.
German Jews were vastly over-represented in the academic professions; the Armenians who were slaughtered by the Turks during
World War I were wealthier than their Muslim neighbors; Stalin
targeted the economically successful sections of the population; and
under Pol Pot in Cambodia, the educated were singled out for
340
In Gods Image?
plans for human cloning, and it would make perfect sense for a
religious group to pioneer gene technology for the production of
saints. It also makes perfect sense for a religious group to favor large
families. In fact, because religions are transmitted mainly in the
family, religious groups with pro-natalist values are the only ones
that will survive the present bout of civilization at all. In order to
escape yoyo evolution, a population must have two characteristics:
the use of genetic enhancement technology, and high fertility.
Needless to say, such groups can only exist on the margins of
postmodern society. Even if some of these gene-enhanced, childfriendly deviants survive the threat of genocide, they will be a tiny
minority unable to stem the tide of cultural decline. But in time they
will create a new civilization after the collapse of the old order. This I
call Noahs ark.
In Gods Image?
denitely make the men physically smaller than the women, so they
cannot rape them any more. We can also reduce male intelligence.
There is no compelling reason why a sexually reproducing species
should have high intelligence in both sexes. Some marine invertebrates have dwarf males that consist mainly of testicles and are
about the right size to creep into the vagina. We can also opt for
reduced female intelligence, and we may even achieve this with
minimal interference. Selection against female intelligence occurs
naturally in modern societies,21 and if its natural its morally right,
isnt it?
The problem is that our cognitive system is designed to manipulate
the outside world. It has the greatest difculty representing its own
built-in motivations as objects of conscious control. We never
evolved the ability to decide what our desires should be, or what we
should judge as right and wrong. These value judgments are programmed into the brain to control our thinking, but they are not
accessible to conscious manipulation. And so we can only base our
judgments on our present desires. Someone who already likes promiscuous sex will opt for a promiscuous species, and someone who
nds greater satisfaction or a greater sense of moral righteousness in
pair-bonded relationships will opt for pair bonding.
We have no awareness of and control over the modules that
produce desires and moral intuitions. Without this form of selfawareness, the cognitive system is still a slave that executes the
orders of its invisible masters. It needs to be emancipated. In the
halfway house of evolution where we nd ourselves, ethics is needed
to establish habits of interpersonal conduct that safeguard everyones evolved needs and preferences. For a fully intelligent species, it
is needed to decide what these needs and preferences shall be.
We dont even know why the universe exists. Why is there
something rather than nothing? Nor do we understand the nature of
feelings and subjective experience. To close these gaping holes in our
knowledge, we must enhance our intelligence rst. Then we can open
up our motivation modules, and nally we can negotiate a better
breeding system for our species and gure out the meaning of life.
For now we are too stupid for that. At least, I am.
If you dont like the idea of engineering people for greater wisdom,
what about building intelligent machines instead? Once we know
how the brain works, we can copy human intelligence and some of
344
345
Notes
Introduction
1.
Chapter 1
1.
Chapter 2
1.
2.
3.
347
In Gods Image?
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
Chapter 3
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
348
Notes
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
349
In Gods Image?
battle lines had to be redrawn because most of those who believed in
unitary intelligence also believed in the importance of genes.
34. Language instinct: Pinker, 1994. Evolutionary psychology: Barkow et al.,
1992.
35. Pearson, 1906.
36. Data on intelligence and brain size are reviewed in McDaniel, 2005. Most
popular books about the subject claim that brain size is unrelated to
intelligence, always with reference to Stephen Jay Goulds The Mismeasure
of Man. Gould simply claimed that early investigators had fudged their
data, and ignored the more recent results that were available at his time.
Chapter 4
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
Face cells: Perrett et al., 1987; Quiroga et al., 2005. Smile center: Damasio,
1994, pp. 14042.
Imprinted geese: Lorenz, 1957, pp. 1025. Imprinted goats: Kendrick et al.,
1998.
Brain stimulation in rats: Olds and Milner, 1954. Humans: Heath, 1964.
Dopamine cells: Montague et al., 2004; Ungless et al., 2004.
Lottery winners and accident victims: Brickman et al., 1978. The hedonic
treadmill model is reviewed in Diener et al., 2006.
Heritability in humans: Lykken and Tellegen, 1996. See also Roysamb et
al., 2002. Heritability in chimps: Weiss et al., 2002.
Fear circuitry: LeDoux, 2000. Evolution of emotional systems: D.M.
Tucker et al., 2000.
Childrens fears: Maurer, 1965. Snakes: Ohman and Mineka, 2003.
Drevets and Raichle, 1998; Pochon et al., 2002.
Eslinger and Damasio, 1985; Damasio, 1994.
Duncan, 1995.
Damasio, 1994.
Damasio (1994) speaks of somatic markers. However, the privileged state
of somatic states for emotion is questionable. Evaluations (appraisals) of
emotional value are too fast to depend on the slow process of eliciting a
somatic response and analyzing the feedback to the brain from the elicited
somatic state.
B.H. Price et al., 1990. Similar cases are reported in Eslinger et al., 2004.
Criminals: Brower and Price, 2001. Drug addicts: Bechara, Dolan and
Hindes, 2002.
Gazzaniga and LeDoux, 1978, pp. 14651.
Libet, 1985; Libet et al., 1983. See also Obhi and Haggard, 2004.
350
Notes
Chapter 5
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
351
In Gods Image?
Chapter 6
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
352
Notes
22. Rilling, 2006; Stephan, Baron and Frahm, 1988.
23. Kako, 1999; Savage-Rumbaugh and Levin, 1994.
24. Reconstruction of vocal tract: Fitch, 2000. Fire and H. erectus: GorenInbar et al., 2004. Backward hunter-gatherers: Hewes, 1994.
25. Recent brain evolution: Kappelman, 1996. Living human populations:
Beals et al., 1984.
Chapter 7
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
353
In Gods Image?
22. Divorce in traditional societies: Betzig, 1989. Low copulation rate of
monogamists: Kleiman, 1977. Sex and divorce: Teachman, 2003.
23. Sexual and political freedom: Ollman, 1979. Judging a theory by the
emotional needs it fullls is an example of the genetic fallacy: inferring the
truth of a proposition from its origin.
24. Cross-cultural survey: Buss, 1989. Age preferences: Silverthorne and
Quinsey, 2000. Aristotle, Politics VII, 16.
25. Waist-to-hip ratio: Singh, 1993. But see also Marlowe and Wetsman, 2001.
Milk yield: Hytten, 1954. Breasts: Caro, 1987. But see also Jasienska et al.,
2004.
26. Beautiful averages: Langlois et al., 1994. Good-genes selection: Mller and
Alatalo, 1999.
27. Tallness: Pawlowski et al., 2000. Dominance: Martin, 2005.
28. Buss, 1989; Pawlowski and Dunbar, 1999. Medical students: Townsend,
1989. Rich men: Udry and Eckland, 1984. Fat wives: Lipowicz, 2003.
29. Buston and Emlen, 2003; Mascie-Taylor, 1988.
30. Alexander et al., 1979; Kleiman, 1977; Trivers, 1972.
31. Ideal number of sex partners: Buss, 1998. Invitation for sex: R.D. Clark
and Hateld, 1989. Gays: Symons, 1979. Intelligence of sex partners:
Kenrick et al., 1990.
32. Ethnographic atlas: Murdock, 1967. Polygamy and subsistence: Marlowe,
2000. Benets of polygamy: W. Tucker, 1993. Female aggression: Burbank, 1987.
33. Barber, 2003. Female literacy and labor market participation: South and
Trent, 1988. Shortage of men among African Americans: Barber, 2001.
Interracial marriage: Heaton and Albrecht, 1996.
34. Parental investment: Trivers, 1972. Race differences: Rushton, 1995.
35. Preference for low sexual activity: Sprecher et al., 1991. Pragmatic
approach: Shell-Duncan and Hernlund, 2000. International survey: Buss,
1989.
36. Experimental evidence: Buss et al., 1992; Fernandez et al., 2006. Anthropology: Betzig, 1989.
37. College rapists: Rapaport and Burkhart, 1984. Rape victims: W. Wilson
and Durrenberger, 1982. These studies are reviewed in Berkowitz, 1992.
Menstrual cycle: Chavanne and Gallup, 1998.
38. Quote: Palmer, 1989. Punishment: Otterbein, 1979.
39. MacCoun and Reuter, 1997; Zimmer and Morgan, 1997.
40. Mating opportunities: Lalumie`re et al., 1996. Raping soldiers: Gottschall,
2004. Thrill of raping: Scully, 1990.
41. Ellis, 1991, p. 632.
42. Bernat et al., 1999.
43. K.G. Anderson, 2006. However, Jewish priests enjoyed a 99 percent
paternity condence during the past two millennia: Boster et al., 1999.
European study: Agnes Laville, personal communication. The project was
an epidemiological study about apoE genotypes funded by the European
Community. The rate of paternity exclusion was about 9 percent in Italy.
The apoE polymorphism consists of only three variants of a single gene.
354
Notes
Therefore the actual rate of misassigned paternity is substantially higher
than the exclusion rate.
44. Bellis and Baker, 1990. Ovulation takes place 12 to 14 days after the start
of the last menstrual period.
45. McGue and Lykken, 1992.
46. Diekmann and Engelhardt, 1999.
Chapter 8
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
355
In Gods Image?
22. This pattern has been documented most thoroughly for child abandonment in early modern Europe: Lynch, 2000.
23. Cited from Hrdy, 1999, p. 376.
24. Mentally ill or retarded killers: Daly and Wilson, 1984, p. 500. The
licensing of parents has its proponents: Lykken, 2000.
25. David et al., 1988.
Chapter 9
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
356
Notes
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
Chapter 10
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Davis, 1989. This experiment, and also the experiments on rule internalization by dogs, are reviewed in de Waal, 1996. de Waals book is the
prime reference for the ethological basis of morality. Moral development:
Piaget, 1965 [1932].
Hippocampus and consciousness: OKeefe et al., 1998. Dogs: Freedman,
1958. Criminals: Mealey, 1995, p. 538.
This anecdote is re-retold from de Waal, 1996, p. 106.
Cited from Baumeister, 1997, p. 305. Ted Bundy was a serial killer.
Moral emotions: Haidt, 2003. Childhood attachment and obedience:
Matas et al., 1978.
de Waal, 1996, p. 60.
Goodall, 1990, p. 171.
Children: Krueger et al., 1996. Teenagers: Wulfert et al., 2002. Self-control
357
In Gods Image?
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
and crime: Pratt and Cullen, 2000. Self-control and cooperation: Dewitte
and de Cremer, 2001.
Greene et al., 2001.
John Paul II, 1997.
These experiments are described in Milgram, 1974.
Ruse, 1986, p. 106.
Brandt and Sigmund, 2005.
Agreeableness and feeling: McCrae and Costa, 1989. The questionnaire
items are from the NEO PI-R and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Gift
exchange: Mauss, 1954.
Tetlock, 2003.
The poor are more advantaged than the rich: Lane, 2001.
Lerner, 1980, pp. 3953.
Hafer, 2000.
Kummer, 1995, p. 188. The importance of expectations as a basis for
incipient moral systems in primates is elaborated in de Waal, 1996.
These examples are from Baron, 1988, Chapter 19.
In Kohlbergs theory, the postconventional stages are considered the
highest levels of moral reasoning: Kohlberg, 1981.
Monkeys: de Waal, 1996, p. 46. Humans and Chimpanzees: Warneken and
Tomasello, 2006.
Empathy and altruism: Batson et al., 1999, 2004. Importance for social
exchange: Trivers, 1971.
Haidt, 2002, p. 54. The intuitionist model I am espousing is described in
detail in Haidt, 2001.
Cited from Muuss, 1988, pp. 2357.
Monroe et al., 1990, pp. 103, 114. See also Monroe, 2001.
Haidt, 2001.
Batson et al., 2002.
Wulf, 1960, pp. 256. My translation.
Original afuent society: Sahlins, 1972. Old Europe: Gimbutas, 1999.
Cited from Menzel, 1986.
Historically, the utilitarian tradition in moral philosophy was represented
by Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and others.
Punishment in animals: Clutton-Brock and Parker, 1995. Laboratory
studies in humans: Carlsmith et al., 2002; Feather, 1999. Nonconsequentialist philosophies: J.L. Anderson, 1997. Kant and Hegel are
examples of deontological philosophers. Most British philosophers of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were utilitarian, but most German
philosophers embraced an idealist or deontological approach.
Kass, 1997.
Kurzban and Leary, 2001.
358
Notes
Chapter 11
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
A.R. Jensen, 1998. The g factor was rst described by Charles Spearman in
1904.
Fuster, 2003.
Kyllonen and Christal, 1990.
Lubinski and Humphreys, 1997.
Schmidt and Hunter, 2004. $178.2 billion: Hunter and Schmidt, 1982.
Delinquency: Ellis and Walsh, 2003. Single mothers: Murray, 2002. Correlations of other outcome variables with IQ and socio-economic status are
reviewed in Herrnstein and Murray, 1994.
Heritability: Plomin and Spinath, 2004. Adoption studies: Teasdale and
Owen, 1984; Plomin et al., 1997.
What is additive about genes and environment is not the standard deviation but the variance components. Variance is the square of the standard
deviation. With 70 percent heritability and a variance of 225 (152), the
variance contributed by genes is 157.5 and the variance contributed by the
environment is 67.5. The square roots of these numbers are 12.5 and 8.2,
respectively. IQ genes: Meisenberg, 2005.
Personality genes: Savitz and Ramesar, 2004. Heritability of personality
traits: Bouchard and Loehlin, 2001. Social attitudes: Alford et al., 2005.
W.M. Williams and Ceci, 1997.
Earnings of siblings: Murray, 2002. Adoption effects: van Ijzendoorn
et al., 2005. Children become more similar to biological parents: Teasdale
and Owen, 1984.
Meritocracy: Herrnstein and Murray, 1994. Overpaid managers: Morris
and Western, 1999.
Importance of kin-selected altruism: Flynn, 1999. Workers are an anonymous crowd: Wallerstein, 1999. Narrowing IQ gap: W.M. Williams and
Ceci, 1997. Assortative mating: Mascie-Taylor, 1988.
Knowledge base in the twentieth century: Neisser et al., 1996.
In the case of homosexuality, Americans who believe in genetic causes are
more tolerant than those who believe that homosexuality is either learned
or a matter of free choice: Tygart, 2000. However, in Nazi Germany
homosexuals were prosecuted because they were thought to be genetically
inferior.
Barnett, 1995; Garces et al., 2002; Spitz, 1999.
A.R. Jensen, 1969. The citation is from pp. 1 and 2.
Rioters: A.R. Jensen, 1998b, pp. 1978. Scholars: Hearnshaw, 1979;
Kamin, 1974; Lewontin et al., 1984.
Magnitude of IQ gains: Colom et al., 1998; Flynn, 1984, 1987, 1998; Lynn
and Hampson, 1986. IQ gains in the early twentieth century: Tuddenham,
1948; Loehlin et al., 1975, pp. 1379. Differential gains at different ability
levels: Spitz, 1989; Teasdale and Owen, 2000.
Zindi, 1994.
Selection for stupidity: Lynn, 1996. My calculation assumes an additive
359
In Gods Image?
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
heritability (h2) of 0.5 for adult intelligence. The average IQ in the upper
half of the bell curve is about 112, and with an h2 of 0.5 the next generation
would regress halfway to the population mean.
Schooling effects: Ceci, 1991. Pre-school IQ gains: Flynn, 1984b; Lynn and
Hampson, 1986. Britons in 1892: Flynn, 1998b, p. 33. Nutrition: Benton,
2001; Bigger brains: Miller and Corsellis, 1977.
Dominica: Meisenberg et al., 2005. Norway: Sundet et al., 2004. Denmark:
Teasdale and Owen, 2005.
Flynn, 1987, p. 187; Holloway, 1999, p. 37.
Importance of IQ: Herrnstein and Murray, 1994. Job performance and
delinquency: Neisser et al., 1996, p. 83. The percentage variance explained
is not the correlation coefcient r but the square of the correlation
coefcient.
United States: Herrnstein and Murray, 1994, pp. 27680; A.R. Jensen and
Reynolds, 1982. Asians: Flynn, 1991. International comparisons: Lynn,
2006; Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002, 2006. Spatial/mathematical and verbal
ability: Lynn, 1987; Wainer, 1988. IQ and skin color: Meisenberg, 2004;
Templer and Arikawa, 2006.
IQ, race and crime: Gordon, 1987. IQ, race and breeding habits: Herrnstein and Murray, 1994, pp. 32931. The most thorough review of
empirical ndings about race, personality and reproduction is Rushton,
1995.
White prejudice against Blacks is greatest in those states with the highest
proportion of Blacks in the population: Taylor, 1998. Segregating people
out: Kurzban and Leary, 2001. Dogs: Antinucci, 1990, p. 159.
Cavalli-Sforzas calculation: Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 2003. Jensens
calculation: A.R. Jensen, 1980, p. 43.
The average IQ in the upper half of the bell curve is about 12 points above
the population mean, and the average IQ of the lower half is 12 points
below. With an estimate of 50 percent for the additive component of IQ
heritability, children would on average be halfway between the averaged
IQs of their parents and their own population mean.
1.1 standard deviations: Illegitimate-versus-legitimate childbirth can be
treated as a multifactorial threshold trait for which the liability is continuously distributed in the population. It is based on data in Farley and
Hermalin, 1971, Table 5. The more recent data presented in Herrnstein
and Murray, 1994, p. 331 yield a difference of 1.5 standard deviations
without controlling for IQ, and 1.3 standard deviations with IQ held
constant, but the sample has an average age of only 29 years. African
breeding systems: Caldwell et al., 1989; Draper, 1989. The citation is from
Draper, 1989, pp. 1456.
Lynn, 1991, 2006; E.M. Miller, 1994; Rushton, 1995. The theories of these
authors are not mutually exclusive, and therefore I took the liberty of
collapsing them into one.
Popper, 1964 [1935].
360
Notes
Chapter 12
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
361
In Gods Image?
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
and Sewell, 1988; 0.5 points: Vining, 1995; 0.8 points: Loehlin, 1997; 0.9
points: Lynn and van Court, 2004. See also Kiernan, 1989; Loehlin, 1998;
Lynn, 1996; Rindfuss et al., 1996; Udry, 1978; Vining, 1986.
Middle East: Kuran, 1997. China: Elvin, 1973; Needham, 1954. Muslim
science: Huff, 1993. Population IQ: Lynn, 2006; Lynn and Vanhanen,
2002, 2006. Explanations that dont make sense: Goldstone, 1987; J.A.
Hall, 1985; Kuran, 2003; Sivin, 1984; Wright, 2000.
Arab contraception and abortion: Musallam, 1983; Omran, 1992; Riddle,
1992. Chinese infanticide and contraception: Lee et al., 1992; Wolf, 2001.
Differential reproduction in traditional China: Lamson, 1935; Notestein,
1938.
Lost contraceptive knowledge: McLaren, 1990; Noonan, 1986; Riddle,
1992. Aquinas quotation: Musallam, 1983, p. 24. Thomas Short quotation:
Kuczynski, 1938, p. 292.
Child abandonment: Hrdy, 1999. Contraception and abortion: McLaren,
1990; Riddle, 1992.
Differential fertility in rural Germany: Voland and Chasiotis, 1998. Other
examples: Weiss, 1990. European marriage system: Flinn, 1981.
A similar argument has been presented in Dickens and Flynn, 2001.
Chapter 13
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
362
Notes
15. Galton introduced the term eugenics in his 1883 book Inquiries into the
Human Faculty. The denition is in Galton, 1985 [1909], p. 35.
16. Eugenics societies: Kevles, 1985, pp. 5960. Geneticists endorsing eugenics:
Paul, 1998, p. 12. Davenport citation: Davenport, 1913, p. 222.
17. Many eugenicists did actually appreciate the importance of the environment: Cooke, 1998. The history of eugenics is described in Haller, 1963;
Kevles, 1985; Lynn, 2001; Paul, 1995. Watson quotation: J.H. Bennett,
1983, p. 1.
18. Twins: Newman et al., 1937. Adoptees: Leahy, 1935. In the United States,
family studies had been popular long before the eugenics movement, but
the hereditarian explanation of family resemblance is typical for the early
twentieth century. See Rafter, 1988.
19. Goddards views: Zenderland, 1998. It has been claimed that most
eugenic sterilizations were actually performed to keep the superintendents
out of trouble: Carey, 1998.
20. Donohue and Levitt, 2001. There is also evidence that children who were
born because their mothers requests for abortion had been denied have
poor social outcomes, including an above-average crime rate: David et al.,
1988.
21. Kevles, 1985, p. 92.
22. Teenage daughter gene: MacMurray et al., 2000. Gene for nomadism: C.
Chen et al., 1999.
23. Paul, 1998, p. 29.
24. Koestler, 1978, p. 1.
25. Royzman and Kumar, 2001.
26. Proctor, 1988.
27. History of the naturenurture debate: Cravens, 1978. Political views and
naturenurture beliefs: Pastore, 1984.
28. Gene therapy: Verma and Weitzman, 2005. Embryo testing: Fiorentino et
al., 2006. Germ line manipulations: Coates et al., 2005; Irvine et al., 2005;
Kolb et al., 2005; Urnov et al., 2005.
Chapter 14
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
363
In Gods Image?
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
The Catholic Church does object to IVF, not because of the lost souls but
because reproduction without copulation is outside the bonds of marriage: H.W. Jones and Crockin, 2000. This is the ip side of the Churchs
stance against contraception.
Andersen et al., 2005.
Oktay et al., 2006.
Singles and lesbians: Chan et al., 1998.
Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis: Fiorentino et al., 2006. DNA chips:
Hoheisel, 2006.
Rhind et al., 2003.
Dennis, 2006; Oktay et al., 2004; Master et al., 2006. Using animal oocytes
as acceptors for human nuclei is difcult because the non-human mitochondrial genes are not always able to cooperate smoothly with the human
nuclear genes.
Cauleld, 2001. The sudden shift from total environmental determinism to
total genetic determinism is evident by comparing the EU document on
cloning with the Seville Statement on Violence which had been drafted in
1986 and adopted by UNESCO in 1989: See Silverberg and Gray, 1992,
pp. 2957. The radical shift to genetic determinism took less than one
decade!
Polymorphisms: Hinds et al., 2005. Genetic testing: Hoheisel, 2006.
Linton and Wiener, 2001.
Cancer: Garc a-Cao et al., 2002. Longevity: Bluher et al., 2003; Holzenberger et al., 2003. Gene insertion: Pathak, 2003. Articial chromosomes:
Irvine et al., 2005. Gene repair: Coates et al., 2005. Urnov et al., 2005.
Baylis and Robert, 2004.
Parens and Asch, 1999.
Meisenberg et al., 2005.
Crocker et al., 1999.
Fukuyama, 2002.
Personal preferences gloried as moral principles: Rozin, 1999. Sacred
values in reproductive medicine: Kass, 1997.
Crawford et al., 1989; Littleeld and Rushton, 1986.
Ratner and Miller, 2001.
IVF children: Golombok and MacCallum, 2003.
Rawls, 1971, pp. 13642.
Chapter 15
1.
2.
3.
Billari et al., 2004; Caldwell and Schindlmayr, 2003; S.P. Morgan, 2003.
Global warming: Kerr, 2006. Fossil fuels: Cavallo, 2005; C. Hall et al.,
2003.
Nuclear war: Ehrlich et al., 1983; Smil, 2005. Fruit ies: Shabalina et al.,
1997. Human mutations: Crow, 2000; Gleicher, 2003; Kumar and Subramanian, 2002. Unstable intelligence: Flynn, 1987.
364
Notes
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
365
In Gods Image?
19. The individualist use of genetic enhancement technologies is described in
Silver, 1997.
20. Flynn, 1987.
21. Lynn and van Court, 2004; Retherford and Sewell, 1988; Vining, 1995.
22. Lipson and Pollack, 2000; Sipper and Reggia, 2001.
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