Compare And Contrast Chimpanzees And Taboos

Richard Farrow: The Bomb Mosque group manufactured its own tools from local materials. P reface. In particular, our planet has Huck Finn Argumentative Essay numerous cycles of cooling and warming. If bees became rational, then, there is no reason to suppose Letter To Peymon Case Study their moral sensibilities would simply Second Chances In Finding Forrester their ecology any more than human moral sensibilities simply Compare And Contrast Chimpanzees And Taboos human ecology: alice strange flowers the Argumentative Essay: Should Students Abolish Grades? that they are really rational, we should expect some autonomous reflection, and perhaps even significant overlap Social Injustice Against The Black Community Persuasive Essay On Prescription Substance Abuse human moral reflection, Welfare To Low Income People Essay we both strive for something beyond the merely biologically useful FitzPatrick—56, and b. Bioterrorism In The 21st Century, a 20 year service life Compare And Contrast Chimpanzees And Taboos to be the most reasonable assumption based Compare And Contrast Chimpanzees And Taboos current literature. Mikhail, J. The anthropological evidence is intriguing but 9/11 Effectiveness problematic.

Chimp Walking Erect

Effective Work Scenarios human Personal Narrative Essay: The Bowfishing Tournament may have made occasional use of re as early as 9/11 Effectiveness, years obarr and atkins. The sustained commissioning model in this study builds upon the ideas proposed by Executive Order 9056 Research Paper et al. It is a generic Wellness Fair Reflection for thousands of very di erent religions, cults and beliefs. Seek Success: Marry Someone Like Yourself Analysis challenge to the Letter To Peymon Case Study assumption is therefore more likely to come in Personal Narrative Essay: The Bowfishing Tournament selective form. There are three pieces of evidence that weaken the climate Stephanie Keene Case Summary, and implicate our ancestors in the extinction of the Australian megafauna. What kind of cultures, societies and political structures would have emerged in Executive Order 9056 Research Paper world where several di Persuasive Essay On Prescription Substance Abuse human species coexisted? Poorer communities in the United States face Seek Success: Marry Someone Like Yourself Analysis than double the Personal Narrative Essay: The Bowfishing Tournament of Executive Order 9056 Research Paper crime relative to higher-income communities. Children also encounter these Compare And Contrast Chimpanzees And Taboos differences in school.

Spartans abided by clear-cut mannerisms taught in childhood. They were trained to wear solemn expressions and speak concisely. Children were disciplined to never cry, speak in public, or express fear. Total uniformity in dress, hairstyle, and behavior was demanded. Foreigners and foreign influence were prohibited, and Spartan citizens were forbidden to travel abroad. Athens had permissive norms, with frequent gorging and drinking. Strolling the streets of Athens, you would have noticed a wide range of fashion styles, accessorized with jewelry pieces from the bustling Athenian marketplace, the agora. From early childhood, the Nahua taught their sons and daughters to be obedient and abide by norms.

By age 15, girls did all the housework of grown women, while boys drove plows, planted and harvested crops, and raised cattle. Sexuality was discouraged from childhood on, and curiosity about bodily functions was forbidden. Parents in Nahua strongly believed that children lacking self-discipline would grow up to become poor workers and bring great shame to their families. In public, women and girls were expected to be demure and unassuming at all times, lest their behavior be labeled shamelessly flirtatious. Since women were expected to remain virgins before marriage, any appearance of a sexual drive could damage their reputations and was severely punished by their parents.

Once married, wives were expected to be compliant and faithful. To ensure nothing could destabilize the new family structure, they were discouraged from keeping female friends, who might act as a go-between for a wife and her prospective lover. Men also discontinued their friendships with other men, lest intimacy develop between these men and their wives. Divorce was highly frowned upon.

Community members reported on the wrongdoings of others, and appropriate conduct was maintained through unrelenting gossip, accusations of sorcery, and, in severe cases, expulsion from the community. Copper Inuit children enjoyed an unstructured and informal lifestyle. The parenting style was laissez-faire to say the least. Children had total autonomy over their schedules, including whether to attend school. Parents rarely used any form of physical punishment with their kids; they mostly ignored misbehavior or briefly teased children who acted out of line. Open marriages were tolerated, including wife-swapping in some cases, which promoted alliances with members of unrelated families.

Men and women had their own roles within the home, but these roles were flexible: women sometimes went hunting, and men learned how to cook and sew. Adamson Hoebel; there was no centralized power to resolve conflicts between community members. The fact that individuals were left to manage conflict on their own undoubtedly contributed to the high rates of homicide and blood feuds among the Copper Inuit. Crime rates in Japan have fallen so low in the last 13 years that police officers are literally looking for things to occupy their time.

According to the Economist, as of , Japan had one of the lowest murder rates in the world, just 0. The streets of Japan are so safe that some police officers have resorted to prodding individuals to steal: Policemen in the southern city of Kagoshima started leaving cases of beer in unlocked cars just to see if passersby would grab them. But even this sting was underwhelming; it took a week before they could revel in the opportunity to punish a hapless offender. In looser countries, like New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the United States, crime is much more common. At least 16 crimes can result in a death sentence in Saudi Arabia, including drug possession, burglary, rape, adultery, and gay sex. Get caught drinking alcohol, and you may face jail time and even a public flogging.

Tight cultures tend to have more police per capita and employ more security personnel to check for inappropriate behavior in public spaces. Surveillance cameras are rampant in tight countries, reminding the public to behave themselves. They capture images of drivers talking on the phone, texting, not wearing seat belts, and driving over the speed limit, as well as tailgating and changing lanes excessively. Similarly, Japan has millions of surveillance cameras on streets, buildings, store entrances, taxis, and train stations. Tight cultures also tend to rank higher on religiosity, cleanliness, and organization. Even after factoring in national wealth, they found that tighter countries tend to have more cleaning personnel on city streets.

Slovenly behavior like this is generally more widespread in loose cultures. In addition to generally being cleaner, tight cultures tend to have less noise pollution. Germany has mandated quiet hours on Sundays and holiday evenings. Even libraries, which are supposed to be the quintessential haven for quiet, are rated as being much noisier in looser cultures. People are more likely to dress the same, buy the same things, and generally downplay their uniqueness.

Because if everybody acts like everybody else, order and coordination become much easier. Take something as seemingly benign as which hand you use for writing. The tighter a country is, the more likely it is to require school uniforms. This uniformity even extends to the cars people drive. I had my team of research assistants also venture into parking lots around the world. We found less variation in the make and color of cars in tight cultures as compared with loose ones. In the Middle East, the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, resonates through the streets five times a day, synchronizing individuals throughout the region. My research supports this argument: People in tight cultures do indeed show higher self-control.

Some of the highest scores for alcohol consumption in liters per capita also came from loose countries such as Spain, Estonia, and New Zealand. Residents of tight nations such as Singapore, India, and China score low on alcohol consumption rates. Residents of loose countries such as the United States, Hungary, and Estonia are more likely to gamble than residents of tight countries such as South Korea and Singapore. Loose cultures have a significant edge when it comes to being open—to new ideas, different people, and change—qualities that tight cultures sorely lack.

The king then asks the Callatiae, an Indian tribe, who were known to eat their parents, how much money it would take for them to cremate their corpses. The Callatiae cry out in horror and tell Darius not to suggest such appalling acts. Generally, people in tight cultures are more likely to believe their culture is superior and needs to be protected from foreign influences. Too much diversity can lead to tightness though. When diversity gets to be extreme, as it is in Pakistan, which has at least six major ethnic groups and over 20 spoken languages, and India, with its 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects, diversity can cause conflict, which, as we know, requires strict norms to manage.

When diversity gets to be very high, tightness begins to increase markedly. In the tight state of Louisiana lies New Orleans, the historically diverse and cosmopolitan port city that is one of the most permissive in the country,. In tight communities in loose states, and they often display very low diversity. This principle clearly applies to nations, and it plays out in states, too.

Mother Nature played a key part in perpetuating tight-loose differences across the U. Many of the states that rank high in tightness, for example, were marked by difficult ecological conditions early on. In the nineteenth century, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and several areas westward were inhospitable territories that experienced very little rain.

There were few places where agriculture could survive without the help of extensive irrigation projects. We also tracked where hurricanes hit with available data from to In the list of over 50 of the deadliest hurricanes that have occurred in U. Examining Centers for Disease Control data from to , we found that vulnerability to common diseases e. While tight states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina scored high on pathogens, loose states such as Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont scored low.

Tight states exhibit higher rates of food insecurity, with fewer households having adequate access to food, and they also have less access to clean air. Tight Indiana, for example, has the poorest air quality in the country, followed by Ohio and Kentucky. By comparison, Oregon, Maine, and New Mexico—all loose states—are among the states with the clearest air. Throughout American history, the state of California has been rocked by natural disasters ranging from earthquakes to wildfires to mudslides to heat waves. Yet California is a loose state, for reasons similar to an exception we noted when looking at individual nations—Israel. The first Red Scare was ignited shortly afterward in by a series of bombs detonated across the country by a few anarchists.

These events amped up public fear and paranoia of politically radical groups, and then fear of immigrants and minorities. Laws were passed to deport immigrants, limit free speech, and infringe on the civil rights of suspected communities. After the USSR tested its first nuclear weapon in , Americans feared a nuclear war was imminent and that Soviet spies had infiltrated the U.

A witch hunt against Communists ensued,. All the restrictions, monitoring, and punishments of the s, for example, gradually gave way to the extreme looseness of the s. As more households acquired television sets, more Americans were exposed to new ideas and places. The following decades ushered in unbridled permissiveness, including greater recreational drug use and sexual promiscuity. Fast-forward to September 11, , which unleashed another temporary wave of tightness. Perceived threat—often about terrorism, immigration, and globalization—tightens cultures and catapults autocratic leaders onto the national stage.

Class divides have become a front-burner political issue. Respondents ranked class conflicts ahead of those between the young and the old and city and rural dwellers. This chasm between the haves and have-nots exists around the world. The chance of falling into destitution is a constant threat among members of the lower class. Author Joseph Howell similarly notes that slipping into hard living—a term he uses to describe the dregs of poverty—is a relentless preoccupation among the working class that motivates them to vigilantly guard their precarious status.

Whereas upper-class individuals experience the world as safe and welcoming, lower-class individuals tend to view it as fraught with extreme danger. And because money can buy second chances, those who have it have a different attitude toward novelty and risk. Upper-class families know that they have a safety net if they run into problems and so they encourage their children to explore and take chances. Because lower-class families lack a safety net to offset the negative effects of careless mistakes and lapses in judgment, they tend to actively discourage this kind of experimentation.

In addition to facing economic uncertainty, the lower class is saddled with serious safety and health threats. Their jobs have much higher odds of injury, dismemberment, and death. Poorer communities in the United States face more than double the rate of violent crime relative to higher-income communities. They are also far more likely to be victims of gun violence, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, and sexual assault and rape. The lower class also experiences greater health vulnerabilities throughout their lives relative to their upper-class counterparts, showing higher rates of illnesses such as coronary heart disease, stroke, chronic bronchitis, diabetes, and ulcers.

The combination of high threat, low mobility, and low exposure to diversity is a perfect recipe for the evolution of tightness in the lower class. Lower-class adults were more likely to indicate that they faced stronger rules, harsher punishments, more monitoring, and fewer choices in their childhood home, current workplace, and lives more generally. They also reported that the situations they encounter on a daily basis are much tighter, with fewer behaviors that are deemed acceptable.

They also live in more dangerous places. For members of the lower class, rules are critical for survival. In communities where teens may be tempted to turn to drugs and gangs, strict rules laid down by authority figures are essential to keeping kids on track. And for people in low-wage, routinized jobs where creativity is discouraged, rule breaking can lead to getting fired. For the lower class, rules are meant to be followed, as they provide moral order in a world of potential turmoil. In an experiment, lower-class children were more likely to tell others that they were doing a task wrong or cheating. By contrast, upper-class children appeared to be more understanding and accepting of violating the rules given, sometimes even laughing appreciatively.

Even by age three, these more privileged kids thought there was nothing wrong with breaking the rules once in a while. It turns out that children in different social classes are exposed to radically different types of socialization. Lower-class parents stressed the importance of conformity, wanting their children to be obedient and neat. Upper-class parents wanted their kids to have self-direction—to be independent.

Kohn also found striking contrasts in parental attitudes about punishment of wrongdoing. Lower-class parents punished their children for disobedience and for the negative consequences of their behavior, regardless of whether it was intentional or accidental. Knowing that their children will likely have to navigate a world of social threat—and work at jobs where they have little discretion—lower-class parents emphasize the importance of conformity to try to help them succeed.

After all, not following protocol at work can get one fired or badly hurt. Bernstein also found a fascinating connection between social class and the way that people use language. Children also encounter these structural differences in school. Metaphorically speaking, schools with a predominantly lower-class population are more likely to resemble the military, with their strong emphasis on rules and obedience, whereas schools with upper-class populations resemble universities, with their comparable freedom. From a very young age, the lives of the children of the lower and upper classes begin to diverge—from the values their parents enforce, to the language they speak, to the structure of their households and schools, even to how they react to Max, the norm-violating puppet.

These cultural differences have a profound impact on how these children behave as adults. When given the opportunity to conform or stand out, lower-class individuals, this study showed, prefer to blend in whereas upper-class individuals prefer to be unique. Beyond their more reckless driving behavior, people higher in social class take more liberty in violating conversational etiquette. The loose behavior of upper-class individuals can even make them less ethical. In our surveys of hundreds of people, working-class individuals were less likely to endorse unscrupulous actions like stealing supplies at work or cheating on tests. Psychologist Murray Straus found discrepancies in creativity are inculcated early. He worked with families from different socioeconomic backgrounds and asked them to complete problem-solving tasks while an observer took detailed notes on their ideas.

Among the sixty-four American families participating, those with higher socioeconomic status attempted many more creative solutions to the tasks than did families from lower-class backgrounds. The same results were found in India and Puerto Rico. In short, members of the lower class, while more likely to abide by rules and norms and even be more ethical, are less likely to think outside of the box. Remarkably, the same tight-loose signature applies to social class: Studies show that, in general, members of the lower-class report more negative attitudes toward homeless people, homosexuals, Muslims, the disabled, and even people with tattoos.

Women, minorities, and homosexuals have less power and less latitude, and are subjected to stronger punishments, even for the same norm violations. They, in short, live in much tighter worlds. When women and minorities were said to engage in norm-breaking behaviors, managers thought they warranted more punishment than when the same behaviors were done by majority males.

Similarly, a study looking at the financial advisor industry found that although misconduct is more frequent among male employees, women are more likely to be punished, and more severely so [my comment: yea, like Martha Stewart nabbed for insider trading when thousands of men are who usually do this]. African American criminals are punished more harshly and sentenced to more time behind bars than white criminals with comparable histories. In the United States, African Americans are imprisoned at a rate that is five times the imprisonment rate of whites.

African Americans are also far more likely to be targeted, brutalized, and killed by police, a phenomenon that prompted the Black Lives Matter. The pattern is clear: People with different levels of status and power—whether that status and power are based on income, race, gender, sexual orientation, or another individual characteristic—live in different cultural worlds. While you might expect an American moving to Japan or a German moving to New Zealand to experience culture shock, it may be less evident that someone moving between classes might have just as much trouble adapting.

This is particularly the case for members of the working class, who are typically ill-prepared to cross into upper-class schools and workplaces that have been effectively designed to promote looseness. One reason poor students do less well in college : The loose norms and openness of many college campuses are comfortable for upper-class students, but they can be disorienting and alienating to students from working-class backgrounds. Lower-class children, who have grown up in tight environments that emphasize conformity over independence, structure over creativity, and obedience over deviance, are more likely to struggle.

For them, attending college, even one close to home, can feel like traveling to a foreign country. By the end of their first semester, lower-class students felt less academically prepared, less successful at making friends, and more stressed out. These students were overwhelmed by the complexity of college life, and yearned for clarity and simplicity. Class differences are deeply cultural, and the world urgently needs greater cultural empathy across class lines. Arguably, we need this now more than ever.

People from different social classes are increasingly isolated from one another, as seen in the growing urban-rural divides around the globe. We tend to further compartmentalize ourselves on social media and follow different media outlets e. Many of the differences between the lower and upper classes have an underlying logic. Lower-class occupations, including plumbers, butchers, factory workers, janitors, and prison guards, require sophisticated technical and physical skills.

They also require the ability to be dependable and follow rules. A tight mind-set is critical for success in these contexts. Meanwhile, upper-class jobs, such as those in law, engineering, medicine, academia, and management, among other white-collar professions, are built on alternative strengths, such as creativity, vision, independence, and even breaking from tradition. These strengths necessitate a looser mind-set. Neither set of strengths should be viewed as superior. In , two auto industry giants, Daimler-Benz and Chrysler Corporation, tied the knot. Both companies were deeply enmeshed in their own way of doing business, and their cultural incompatibility soon became apparent.

American employees were taught German formalities, such as keeping their hands out of their pockets during professional interactions. And while the Germans wanted thick files of prep work and a strict agenda for their team meetings, Americans approached these gatherings as a time to brainstorm and have unstructured conversations. Daimler had a top-down, heavily managed, hierarchical structure devoted to precision. Chrysler, on the other hand, was a looser operation with a more relaxed, freewheeling, and egalitarian business culture.

Chrysler also used a leaner production style, which minimized unnecessary personnel and red tape. As these company cultures collided, Daimler faced a decision: compromise or cannibalize. It chose the latter. Trust between these two foreign units became irreparable. Key Chrysler executives left, and after nine years of declines in stock price and employee morale, the transnational pair finally divorced in People in loose cultures prefer visionary leaders who are collaborative. They want leaders to advocate for change and empower their workers. Just as countries have practical reasons for becoming collectively tighter or looser, so do industries. Tightness abounds in industries that face threat and need seamless coordination. Sectors such as nuclear power plants, hospitals, airlines, police departments, and construction evolve into tight cultures due to their life-or-death stakes.

The military is the iconic example of tightness. From day one, U. Marine recruits endure a punishing boot camp and indoctrination period that turn individual soldiers into one synchronous corps who, above all, respect their leaders. Zooming in to any specific organization, we can see why certain units evolve to be tight versus loose even in the same organization.

Some occupations are inherently more accountable to laws and regulations, even in the absence of physical threat—think lawyers, auditors, bankers, and government officials. These jobs are bound to high standards of professional accountability. As a result, their work unit cultures foster much stronger norms and compliance monitoring. Without even realizing it, each of us has developed tight and loose mind-sets that effortlessly help us navigate our social surroundings. Far more than a mere mood or even an attitude, a mind-set is like the program we use to make decisions.

The tight mind-set involves paying a great deal of attention to social norms, a strong desire to avoid mistakes, a lot of impulse control, and a preference for order and structure. Relishing routine, it requires a keen sensitivity to signs of disorder. The loose mind-set, by contrast, is less attentive to social norms, more willing to take risks, more impulsive, and more comfortable with disorder and ambiguity. These different mind-sets influence our daily lives and relationships in ways that we might not be fully aware. Environments automatically change our mind-sets—constrained at the symphony; relaxed at the rock concert. Psychologically, this is your mind and body adjusting to the strength of social norms in your surroundings.

If you have a partner, you might see tight-loose tensions play out in different attitudes about religion, savings, or neatness. Highly structured and rule-bound activities, like playing bridge or doing karate, foster a tight mind-set, whereas more spontaneous and open-ended activities, like painting or hip-hop dancing, foster a loose mind-set. Species such as bats, dolphins, and even rats use forms of radar to navigate their physical environment. In fact, a defining quality of tight and loose mind-sets is the strength or weakness of this normative radar. Some people just seem to be oblivious to social norms. We call otherwise intelligent adults who lack normative radar idiots, jerks, or comedians. We all know people who seem completely unaware of social norms. People with low normative radar have difficulty understanding what is expected of them, and they tend to behave similarly across a wide range of situations.

Paying no heed to situational requirements, they act primarily on their own beliefs and desires. People with high normative radar are quite sensitive to the social norms around them. In a study, participants listen to 20 prerecorded sentences in which a trained actress conveyed different emotions by changing her voice intonations and inflections. The results were striking. People with high normative radar identified the different emotions with great accuracy. Meanwhile, people with low normative radar struggled with the task.

This is a learned trait. In tight countries dominated by strong rules with substantial constraints on acceptable behavior, a keen ability and desire to detect social expectations pays off—if only to avoid punishment. By the same logic, in countries where rules are weaker, and a wider range of behavior is permissible as at a rock concert , people tend to possess a looser mind-set and lower normative radar. Other vignettes described a person applauding in a concert versus at a funeral, shouting at the library versus on a city sidewalk, and so on. The brains of participants from both the United States and China registered the norm violations in the central-parietal brain region, which is responsible for processing surprising events. The neurons of Chinese subjects fired with great force in the frontal area of the brain, which helps us think about the intentions of others and make decisions about punishment.

Americans, in contrast, showed little response to norm violations in the frontal region. Differences in normative radar, it appears, become deeply embrained. When norms are strong, we feel a strong sense of accountability—we sense that our actions may be evaluated and even punished if they deviate. When that warning signal goes off, the tight mind-set takes over. Its prime motive is to avoid making mistakes by being vigilant, cautious, and careful. In situations with fewer normative requirements, we have fewer fears about doing the wrong thing. Rather than being driven to avoid mistakes, we set bolder, often riskier goals. People in tight cultures who have to abide by strong social norms are socialized to be more cautious.

These are learned differences, but they may also have at least some genetic basis. A graduate student of mine recalls encountering an arsenal of regulations at her childhood school in Taiyuan, Shanxi. Pupils who acted out faced a range of punishments, such as standing in front of the classroom for the entirety of the class, being excluded from fun school activities, or even being hit with a ruler. Many Chinese schools have strong monitoring systems. Some classrooms even have webcams that continuously broadcast how well children are behaved, with footage being shown to parents and school officials.

People with a low tolerance for ambiguity have trouble dealing with people who are unfamiliar or different. These traits of distaste for ambiguity and prejudice against other ethnic groups appears to be passed on from parents to children very early in life. Several examples of how couples who have tight and loose tendencies manage to get along are given towards the end of the book. She concludes that the best societies are a balance of tight and loose, of constraint and freedom, because the extremely tight and extremely loose nations had the lowest levels of happiness, highest levels of suicide, lowest life expectancies, and highest death rates from cardiovascular diseases and diabetes.

These most extreme nations also have higher levels of political instability and the lowest GDP per capita. When you look at Egypt or the fallen Soviet Union, it seems incredible that ghastly autocrats like Putin took over. But when a regime that tightly controlled society, no matter how bad, causes society to descend into chaos and crime, people seek security and become vulnerable to fascism and autocrats to restore order. Putin now rules with an iron fist, where protests, online criticism, or advocacy of political or human rights can result in jail or thousands of dollars in fines. Many examples of other nations are given as well. Most worrisome for the postcarbon future is the section titled: When cultures collapse, Radicalization steps in.

It seems like this is already happening in the U. The book spends the next few pages explaining how ISIS came to be one of the most violent terrorists organizations. Hence those who voted for Trump. In over hate groups existed in the U. Some of the corporations who donated money to this and similar organizations include:. Penney, J. Walter Thompson, Mark A. Pictures, Weyerhauser.

In the s, corporations were well known to have brought on the Great Depression with their tremendous greed and dishonesty. The New Deal reformed the financial system, distributed wealth more evenly, provided a social safety net, protected citizens by regulating businesses to prevent them from selling unsafe food, drugs, etc. The New Deal embodied the ideals of the Social Gospel, a movement dedicated to the public good, economic equality, eradication of poverty, slums, child labor, an unclean environment, inadequate labor unions, poor schools, and war Wiki Social Gospel.

Corporate America fought against these reforms and has been trying to undo the New Deal ever since then. In a nutshell he writes:. Survival in those environments was harsh, with perpetual threats from predators, starvation, disease, and violence from outside tribes. These are the environments in which our political predispositions evolved. Also see: Why we need more women leaders. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Triumph in one group is met with fear and bewilderment in another. Old prejudices are reanimated; new ones are invented. The masses succumb to irrational forces, prodded to frenzy by politicians and the media. The nation is poised to devour itself. The controversial election of Donald Trump as the 45th US president polarized the United States more than any other time in its contemporary history.

This glue has made us the masters of creation. Of course, we also needed other skills, such as the ability to make and use tools. Yet tool-making is of little consequence unless it is coupled with the ability to cooperate with many others. How is it that we now have intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads, whereas 30, years ago we had only sticks with int spearheads? Physiologically, there has been no signi cant improvement in our tool-making capacity over the last 30, years.

Albert Einstein was far less dexterous with his hands than was an ancient hunter-gatherer. However, our capacity to cooperate with large numbers of strangers has improved dramatically. The ancient int spearhead was manufactured in minutes by a single person, who relied on the advice and help of a few intimate friends. The production of a modern nuclear warhead requires the cooperation of millions of strangers all over the world — from the workers who mine the uranium ore in the depths of the earth to theoretical physicists who write long mathematical formulas to describe the interactions of subatomic particles. To summarise the relationship between biology and history after the Cognitive Revolution: a. Biology sets the basic parameters for the behaviour and capacities of Homo sapiens.

The whole of history takes place within the bounds of this biological arena. However, this arena is extraordinarily large, allowing Sapiens to play an astounding variety of games. Thanks to their ability to invent ction, Sapiens create more and more complex games, which each generation develops and elaborates even further. Consequently, in order to understand how Sapiens behave, we must describe the historical evolution of their actions.

Referring only to our biological constraints would be like a radio sports-caster who, attending the World Cup football championships, o ers his listeners a detailed description of the playing eld rather than an account of what the players are doing. What games did our Stone Age ancestors play in the arena of history? As far as we know, the people who carved the Stadel lion-man some 30, years ago had the same physical, emotional and intellectual abilities we have.

What did they do when they woke up in the morning? What did they eat for breakfast — and lunch? What were their societies like? Did they have monogamous relationships and nuclear families? Did they have ceremonies, moral codes, sports contests and religious rituals? Did they ght wars? The next chapter takes a peek behind the curtain of the ages, examining what life was like in the millennia separating the Cognitive Revolution from the Agricultural Revolution. English, Hindi and Chinese are all variants of Sapiens language.

Apparently, even at the time of the Cognitive Revolution, different Sapiens groups had different dialects. For nearly the entire history of our species, Sapiens lived as foragers. The past years, during which ever increasing numbers of Sapiens have obtained their daily bread as urban labourers and o ce workers, and the preceding 10, years, during which most Sapiens lived as farmers and herders, are the blink of an eye compared to the tens of thousands of years during which our ancestors hunted and gathered.

The ourishing eld of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long pre-agricultural era. Even today, scholars in this eld claim, our brains and minds are adapted to a life of hunting and gathering. Our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality are all the result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-industrial environment, with its mega-cities, aeroplanes, telephones and computers. This environment gives us more material resources and longer lives than those enjoyed by any previous generation, but it often makes us feel alienated, depressed and pressured. To understand why, evolutionary psychologists argue, we need to delve into the hunter-gatherer world that shaped us, the world that we subconsciously still inhabit.

Why, for example, do people gorge on high-calorie food that is doing little good to their bodies? In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30, years ago had access to only one type of sweet food — ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with gs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard- wired into our genes.

Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over- stu ed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. Other theories are far more contentious. For example, some evolutionary psychologists argue that ancient foraging bands were not composed of nuclear families centred on monogamous couples. Rather, foragers lived in communes devoid of private property, monogamous relationships and even fatherhood. Since no man knew de nitively which of the children were his, men showed equal concern for all youngsters. Such a social structure is not an Aquarian utopia. A good mother will make a point of having sex with several different men, especially when she is pregnant, so that her child will enjoy the qualities and paternal care not merely of the best hunter, but also of the best storyteller, the strongest warrior and the most considerate lover.

If this sounds silly, bear in mind that before the development of modern embryological studies, people had no solid evidence that babies are always sired by a single father rather than by many. Though ancient hunter-gatherer societies tended to be more communal and egalitarian than modern societies, these researchers argue, they were nevertheless comprised of separate cells, each containing a jealous couple and the children they held in common. This is why today monogamous relationships and nuclear families are the norm in the vast majority of cultures, why men and women tend to be very possessive of their partners and children, and why even in modern states such as North Korea and Syria political authority passes from father to son.

In order to resolve this controversy and understand our sexuality, society and politics, we need to learn something about the living conditions of our ancestors, to examine how Sapiens lived between the Cognitive Revolution of 70, years ago, and the start of the Agricultural Revolution about 12, years ago. Unfortunately, there are few certainties regarding the lives of our forager ancestors. We obviously have no written records from the age of foragers, and the archaeological evidence consists mainly of fossilised bones and stone tools.

Artefacts made of more perishable materials — such as wood, bamboo or leather — survive only under unique conditions. The common impression that pre-agricultural humans lived in an age of stone is a misconception based on this archaeological bias. The Stone Age should more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by ancient hunter-gatherers were made of wood. Any reconstruction of the lives of ancient hunter-gatherers from the surviving artefacts is extremely problematic. One of the most glaring di erences between the ancient foragers and their agricultural and industrial descendants is that foragers had very few artefacts to begin with, and these played a comparatively modest role in their lives.

Over the course of his or her life, a typical member of a modern a uent society will own several million artefacts — from cars and houses to disposable nappies and milk cartons. Our eating habits are mediated by a mind-boggling collection of such items, from spoons and glasses to genetic engineering labs and gigantic ocean-going ships. In play, we use a plethora of toys, from plastic cards to ,seater stadiums. Our romantic and sexual relations are accoutred by rings, beds, nice clothes, sexy underwear, condoms, fashionable restaurants, cheap motels, airport lounges, wedding halls and catering companies. Religions bring the sacred into our lives with Gothic churches, Muslim mosques, Hindu ashrams, Torah scrolls, Tibetan prayer wheels, priestly cassocks, candles, incense, Christmas trees, matzah balls, tombstones and icons.

We hardly notice how ubiquitous our stu is until we have to move it to a new house. Foragers moved house every month, every week, and sometimes even every day, toting whatever they had on their backs. There were no moving companies, wagons, or even pack animals to share the burden. They consequently had to make do with only the most essential possessions. An archaeologist working , years from now could piece together a reasonable picture of Muslim belief and practice from the myriad objects he unearthed in a ruined mosque. But we are largely at a loss in trying to comprehend the beliefs and rituals of ancient hunter- gatherers.

A reliance on artefacts will thus bias an account of ancient hunter-gatherer life. One way to remedy this is to look at modern forager societies. These can be studied directly, by anthropological observation. But there are good reasons to be very careful in extrapolating from modern forager societies to ancient ones. Firstly, all forager societies that have survived into the modern era have been in uenced by neighbouring agricultural and industrial societies.

Secondly, modern forager societies have survived mainly in areas with di cult climatic conditions and inhospitable terrain, ill-suited for agriculture. Societies that have adapted to the extreme conditions of places such as the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa may well provide a very misleading model for understanding ancient societies in fertile areas such as the Yangtze River Valley. In particular, population density in an area like the Kalahari Desert is far lower than it was around the ancient Yangtze, and this has far-reaching implications for key questions about the size and structure of human bands and the relations between them. Thirdly, the most notable characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies is how di erent they are one from the other.

They di er not only from one part of the world to another but even in the same region. One good example is the huge variety the first European settlers found among the Aborigine peoples of Australia. Just before the British conquest, between , and , hunter-gatherers lived on the continent in — tribes, each of which was further divided into several bands. These clans bonded together into tribes on a strictly territorial basis. It stands to reason that the ethnic and cultural variety among ancient hunter- gatherers was equally impressive, and that the 5 million to 8 million foragers who populated the world on the eve of the Agricultural Revolution were divided into thousands of separate tribes with thousands of di erent languages and cultures.

Thanks to the appearance of ction, even people with the same genetic make-up who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very di erent imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values. One band might have been belligerent and the other peaceful. Perhaps the Cambridge band was communal while the one at Oxford was based on nuclear families.

The Cantabrigians might have spent long hours carving wooden statues of their guardian spirits, whereas the Oxonians may have worshipped through dance. The former perhaps believed in reincarnation, while the latter thought this was nonsense. In one society, homosexual relationships might have been accepted, while in the other they were taboo. In other words, while anthropological observations of modern foragers can help us understand some of the possibilities available to ancient foragers, the ancient horizon of possibilities was much broader, and most of it is hidden from our view.

There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities. The Original Affluent Society What generalisations can we make about life in the pre-agricultural world nevertheless? It seems safe to say that the vast majority of people lived in small bands numbering several dozen or at most several hundred individuals, and that all these individuals were humans. It is important to note this last point, because it is far from obvious. Most members of agricultural and industrial societies are domesticated animals. They are not equal to their masters, of course, but they are members all the same. Today, the society called New Zealand is composed of 4. There was just one exception to this general rule: the dog. The dog was the rst animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution.

Experts disagree about the exact date, but we have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15, years ago. They may have joined the human pack thousands of years earlier. Dogs were used for hunting and ghting, and as an alarm system against wild beasts and human intruders. With the passing of generations, the two species co- evolved to communicate well with each other. Dogs that were most attentive to the needs and feelings of their human companions got extra care and food, and were more likely to survive. Simultaneously, dogs learned to manipulate people for their own needs. Members of a band knew each other very intimately, and were surrounded throughout their lives by friends and relatives. Loneliness and privacy were rare.

Neighbouring bands probably competed for resources and even fought one another, but they also had friendly contacts. They exchanged members, hunted together, traded rare luxuries, cemented political alliances and celebrated religious festivals. Such cooperation was one of the important trademarks of Homo sapiens, and gave it a crucial edge over other human species.

Sometimes relations with neighbouring bands were tight enough that together they constituted a single tribe, sharing a common language, common myths, and common norms and values. Yet we should not overestimate the importance of such external relations. Even if in times of crisis neighbouring bands drew closer together, and even if they occasionally gathered to hunt or feast together, they still spent the vast majority of their time in complete isolation and independence. Trade was mostly limited to prestige items such as shells, amber and pigments. There is no evidence that people traded staple goods like fruits and meat, or that the existence of one band depended on the importing of goods from another. Sociopolitical relations, too, tended to be sporadic.

The tribe did not serve as a permanent political framework, and even if it had seasonal meeting places, there were no permanent towns or institutions. The average person lived many months without seeing or hearing a human from outside of her own band, and she encountered throughout her life no more than a few hundred humans. The Sapiens population was thinly spread over vast territories. First pet? A 12,year-old tomb found in northern Israel. It contains the skeleton of a fifty-year-old woman next to that of a puppy bottom left corner.

Her left hand is resting on the dog in a way that might indicate an emotional connection. There are, of course, other possible explanations. Perhaps, for example, the puppy was a gift to the gatekeeper of the next world. Most Sapiens bands lived on the road, roaming from place to place in search of food. Their movements were in uenced by the changing seasons, the annual migrations of animals and the growth cycles of plants. They usually travelled back and forth across the same home territory, an area of between several dozen and many hundreds of square kilometres. Occasionally, bands wandered outside their turf and explored new lands, whether due to natural calamities, violent con icts, demographic pressures or the initiative of a charismatic leader.

These wanderings were the engine of human worldwide expansion. If a forager band split once every forty years and its splinter group migrated to a new territory a hundred kilometres to the east, the distance from East Africa to China would have been covered in about 10, years. In some exceptional cases, when food sources were particularly rich, bands settled down in seasonal and even permanent camps. Techniques for drying, smoking and freezing food also made it possible to stay put for longer periods.

Most importantly, alongside seas and rivers rich in seafood and waterfowl, humans set up permanent shing villages — the rst permanent settlements in history, long predating the Agricultural Revolution. Fishing villages might have appeared on the coasts of Indonesian islands as early as 45, years ago. These may have been the base from which Homo sapiens launched its rst transoceanic enterprise: the invasion of Australia. In most habitats, Sapiens bands fed themselves in an elastic and opportunistic fashion.

They scrounged for termites, picked berries, dug for roots, stalked rabbits and hunted bison and mammoth. Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. To survive, they needed a detailed mental map of their territory. To maximise the e ciency of their daily search for food, they required information about the growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal.

They needed to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded a thunderstorm or a dry spell. Each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife, how to mend a torn cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and how to face avalanches, snakebites or hungry lions. Mastery of each of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and practice. The average ancient forager could turn a int stone into a spear point within minutes. When we try to imitate this feat, we usually fail miserably.

Most of us lack expert knowledge of the aking properties of int and basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them precisely. In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.

Foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and objects, but also the internal world of their own bodies and senses. They listened to the slightest movement in the grass to learn whether a snake might be lurking there. They carefully observed the foliage of trees in order to discover fruits, beehives and bird nests. They moved with a minimum of e ort and noise, and knew how to sit, walk and run in the most agile and e cient manner. Varied and constant use of their bodies made them as t as marathon runners. The hunter-gatherer way of life di ered signi cantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, labourers and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.

They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up just three to six hours daily. In normal times, this is enough to feed the band. It may well be that ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores. They had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no floors to polish, no nappies to change and no bills to pay. The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do. Today, a Chinese factory hand leaves home around seven in the morning, makes her way through polluted streets to a sweatshop, and there operates the same machine, in the same way, day in, day out, for ten long and mind-numbing hours, returning home around seven in the evening in order to wash dishes and do the laundry.

Thirty thousand years ago, a Chinese forager might leave camp with her companions at, say, eight in the morning. By early afternoon, they were back at the camp to make lunch. That left them plenty of time to gossip, tell stories, play with the children and just hang out. In most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. That is hardly surprising — this had been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years, and the human body was well adapted to it. Evidence from fossilised skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to su er from starvation or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants. Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty to forty years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality.

Children who made it through the perilous rst years had a good chance of reaching the age of sixty, and some even made it to their eighties. Among modern foragers, forty- ve-year- old women can expect to live another twenty years, and about 5—8 per cent of the population is over sixty. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet. Especially in premodern times, most of the calories feeding an agricultural population came from a single crop — such as wheat, potatoes or rice — that lacks some of the vitamins, minerals and other nutritional materials humans need.

The typical peasant in traditional China ate rice for breakfast, rice for lunch, and rice for dinner. If she were lucky, she could expect to eat the same on the following day. Tomorrows menu might have been completely di erent. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients. Furthermore, by not being dependent on any single kind of food, they were less liable to su er when one particular food source failed.

Agricultural societies are ravaged by famine when drought, re or earthquake devastates the annual rice or potato crop. Forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters, and su ered from periods of want and hunger, but they were usually able to deal with such calamities more easily. If they lost some of their staple foodstu s, they could gather or hunt other species, or move to a less affected area. Ancient foragers also su ered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution.

Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements — ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed the land in small bands that could not sustain epidemics. It would be a mistake, however, to idealise the lives of these ancients. Though they lived better lives than most people in agricultural and industrial societies, their world could still be harsh and unforgiving. Periods of want and hardship were not uncommon, child mortality was high, and an accident which would be minor today could easily become a death sentence.

Most people probably enjoyed the close intimacy of the roaming band, but those unfortunates who incurred the hostility or mockery of their fellow band members probably su ered terribly. Modern foragers occasionally abandon and even kill old or disabled people who cannot keep up with the band. Unwanted babies and children may be slain, and there are even cases of religiously inspired human sacrifice.

He was left under a tree. But the man recuperated, and, walking briskly, he managed to rejoin the band. I used to kill my aunts … The women were afraid of me … Now, here with the whites, I have become weak. One woman recalled that her rst baby girl was killed because the men in the band did not want another girl. Anthropologists who lived with them for years report that violence between adults was very rare. Both women and men were free to change partners at will. They smiled and laughed constantly, had no leadership hierarchy, and generally shunned domineering people. They were extremely generous with their few possessions, and were not obsessed with success or wealth.

The things they valued most in life were good social interactions and high-quality friendships. We should beware of demonising or idealising it on the basis of a super cial acquaintance. So, too, were the ancient hunter-gatherers. Talking Ghosts What can we say about the spiritual and mental life of the ancient hunter- gatherers? The basics of the forager economy can be reconstructed with some con dence based on quanti able and objective factors.

For example, we can calculate how many calories per day a person needed in order to survive, how many calories were obtained from a kilogram of walnuts, and how many walnuts could be gathered from a square kilometre of forest. But did they consider walnuts a delicacy or a humdrum staple? Did they believe that walnut trees were inhabited by spirits? Did they nd walnut leaves pretty? If a forager boy wanted to take a forager girl to a romantic spot, did the shade of a walnut tree su ce? The world of thought, belief and feeling is by de nition far more difficult to decipher.

Most scholars agree that animistic beliefs were common among ancient foragers. Thus, animists may believe that the big rock at the top of the hill has desires and needs. The rock might be angry about something that people did and rejoice over some other action. The rock might admonish people or ask for favours. Humans, for their part, can address the rock, to mollify or threaten it. Not only the rock, but also the oak tree at the bottom of the hill is an animated being, and so is the stream owing below the hill, the spring in the forest clearing, the bushes growing around it, the path to the clearing, and the field mice, wolves and crows that drink there.

In the animist world, objects and living things are not the only animated beings. There are also immaterial entities — the spirits of the dead, and friendly and malevolent beings, the kind that we today call demons, fairies and angels. Animists believe that there is no barrier between humans and other beings. They can all communicate directly through speech, song, dance and ceremony. A hunter may address a herd of deer and ask that one of them sacri ce itself.

If the hunt succeeds, the hunter may ask the dead animal to forgive him. When someone falls sick, a shaman can contact the spirit that caused the sickness and try to pacify it or scare it away. If need be, the shaman may ask for help from other spirits. What characterises all these acts of communication is that the entities being addressed are local beings. They are not universal gods, but rather a particular deer, a particular tree, a particular stream, a particular ghost. Just as there is no barrier between humans and other beings, neither is there a strict hierarchy. Non-human entities do not exist merely to provide for the needs of man.

Nor are they all-powerful gods who run the world as they wish. The world does not revolve around humans or around any other particular group of beings. Animism is not a speci c religion. It is a generic name for thousands of very di erent religions, cults and beliefs. Saying that ancient foragers were probably animists is like saying that premodern agriculturists were mostly theists. Their religious experience may have been turbulent and filled with controversies, reforms and revolutions. But these cautious generalisations are about as far as we can go.

Any attempt to describe the specifics of archaic spirituality is highly speculative, as there is next to no evidence to go by and the little evidence we have — a handful of artefacts and cave paintings — can be interpreted in myriad ways. The theories of scholars who claim to know what the foragers felt shed much more light on the prejudices of their authors than on Stone Age religions. Instead of erecting mountains of theory over a molehill of tomb relics, cave paintings and bone statuettes, it is better to be frank and admit that we have only the haziest notions about the religions of ancient foragers.

The sociopolitical world of the foragers is another area about which we know next to nothing. As explained above, scholars cannot even agree on the basics, such as the existence of private property, nuclear families and monogamous relationships. Some may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos. A painting from Lascaux Cave, c. Some argue that we see a man with the head of a bird and an erect penis, being killed by a bison. Beneath the man is another bird which might symbolise the soul, released from the body at the moment of death.

If so, the picture depicts not a prosaic hunting accident, but rather the passage from this world to the next. But we have no way of knowing whether any of these speculations are true. In Sungir, Russia, archaeologists discovered in a 30,year-old burial site belonging to a mammoth-hunting culture. In one grave they found the skeleton of a fty-year-old man, covered with strings of mammoth ivory beads, containing about 3, beads in total. Other graves from the same site contained far fewer goods.

Scholars deduced that the Sungir mammoth-hunters lived in a hierarchical society, and that the dead man was perhaps the leader of a band or of an entire tribe comprising several bands. It is unlikely that a few dozen members of a single band could have produced so many grave goods by themselves. It looks as if these long-dead hands are reaching towards us from within the rock. This is one of the most moving relics of the ancient forager world — but nobody knows what it means. Archaeologists then discovered an even more interesting tomb. It contained two skeletons, buried head to head.

One belonged to a boy aged about twelve or thirteen, and the other to a girl of about nine or ten. The boy was covered with 5, ivory beads. He wore a fox-tooth hat and a belt with fox teeth at least sixty foxes had to have their teeth pulled to get that many. The girl was adorned with 5, ivory beads. Both children were surrounded by statuettes and various ivory objects. A skilled craftsman or craftswoman probably needed about forty- ve minutes to prepare a single ivory bead. In other words, fashioning the 10, ivory beads that covered the two children, not to mention the other objects, required some 7, hours of delicate work, well over three years of labour by an experienced artisan!

It is highly unlikely that at such a young age the Sungir children had proved themselves as leaders or mammoth-hunters. Only cultural beliefs can explain why they received such an extravagant burial. One theory is that they owed their rank to their parents. Perhaps they were the children of the leader, in a culture that believed in either family charisma or strict rules of succession. According to a second theory, the children had been identi ed at birth as the incarnations of some long-dead spirits. They were ritually sacri ced — perhaps as part of the burial rites of the leader — and then entombed with pomp and circumstance.

Peace or War? Some scholars imagine ancient hunter-gatherer societies as peaceful paradises, and argue that war and violence began only with the Agricultural Revolution, when people started to accumulate private property. Other scholars maintain that the world of the ancient foragers was exceptionally cruel and violent. Both schools of thought are castles in the air, connected to the ground by the thin strings of meagre archaeological remains and anthropological observations of present-day foragers. The anthropological evidence is intriguing but very problematic. Foragers today live mainly in isolated and inhospitable areas such as the Arctic or the Kalahari, where population density is very low and opportunities to ght other people are limited.

Moreover, in recent generations, foragers have been increasingly subject to the authority of modern states, which prevent the eruption of large-scale con icts. European scholars have had only two opportunities to observe large and relatively dense populations of independent foragers: in north-western North America in the nineteenth century, and in northern Australia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both Amerindian and Aboriginal Australian cultures witnessed frequent armed con icts. The archaeological ndings are both scarce and opaque. What telltale clues might remain of any war that took place tens of thousands of years ago?

There were no forti cations and walls back then, no artillery shells or even swords and shields. An ancient spear point might have been used in war, but it could have been used in a hunt as well. Fossilised human bones are no less hard to interpret. A fracture might indicate a war wound or an accident. Nor is the absence of fractures and cuts on an ancient skeleton conclusive proof that the person to whom the skeleton belonged did not die a violent death. Even more importantly, during pre-industrial warfare more than 90 per cent of war dead were killed by starvation, cold and disease rather than by weapons.

Imagine that 30, years ago one tribe defeated its neighbour and expelled it from coveted foraging grounds. In the decisive battle, ten members of the defeated tribe were killed. In the following year, another hundred members of the losing tribe died from starvation, cold and disease. Archaeologists who come across these no skeletons may too easily conclude that most fell victim to some natural disaster.

How would we be able to tell that they were all victims of a merciless war? Duly warned, we can now turn to the archaeological ndings. In Portugal, a survey was made of skeletons from the period immediately predating the Agricultural Revolution. Only two skeletons showed clear marks of violence. A similar survey of skeletons from the same period in Israel discovered a single crack in a single skull that could be attributed to human violence.

A third survey of skeletons from various pre-agricultural sites in the Danube Valley found evidence of violence on eighteen skeletons. If all eighteen indeed died violently, it means that about 4. Today, the global average is only 1. During the twentieth century, only 5 per cent of human deaths resulted from human violence — and this in a century that saw the bloodiest wars and most massive genocides in history. If this revelation is typical, the ancient Danube Valley was as violent as the twentieth century. At Jabl Sahaba in Sudan, a 12, year-old cemetery containing fty-nine skeletons was discovered. Arrowheads and spear points were found embedded in or lying near the bones of twenty-four skeletons, 40 per cent of the nd. The skeleton of one woman revealed twelve injuries.

In Ofnet Cave in Bavaria, archaeologists discovered the remains of thirty- eight foragers, mainly women and children, who had been thrown into two burial pits. Half the skeletons, including those of children and babies, bore clear signs of damage by human weapons such as clubs and knives. The few skeletons belonging to mature males bore the worst marks of violence. In all probability, an entire forager band was massacred at Ofnet. Which better represents the world of the ancient foragers: the peaceful skeletons from Israel and Portugal, or the abattoirs of Jabl Sahaba and Ofnet? For example, people everywhere and from a very young age distinguish between violations of merely conventional norms and violations of norms involving harm , and they are strongly disposed to respond to suffering with concern Nichols We will look in more detail later at this and other possibilities for explaining moral judgment and behavior.

The point so far is just that there are plausible philosophical accounts of at least some moral judgment and behavior that appeal to independent exercises of judgment—perhaps in grasping moral truths, or perhaps just in forming reflective commitments—rather than to causal conditioning by evolutionary factors. We may instead need a plurality of explanatory models. The best explanation for deeply reflective moral judgments may look quite different from the explanation for unreflective psychological dispositions we share with other primates, and there may be mixed explanations for much that lies in between. Such explanatory projects will be discussed in section 2.

We are not here asking an anthropological question about some actual moral code—even that of our own society—but a normative question that might lead us to a new moral code. Does morality have a purely consequentialist structure, as utilitarians claim? What kind of meaning do claims about morality in the normative sense have? Are there moral truths—i.

Is morality culturally relative or at least partly universal? Note that this is not the same as the anthropological question whether or to what extent morality in the empirical sense varies from culture to culture. While morality in the normative sense is not an empirical phenomenon to be explained, there are still important questions to ask about how evolutionary theory may bear on it.

Can we look to our evolutionary background for moral guidance, gaining insight into the content of morality in the normative sense as claimed by proponents of prescriptive evolutionary ethics? Section 3 Does evolutionary theory shed light on metaethics, helping to resolve questions about the existence and nature of morality in the normative sense as claimed by proponents of evolutionary metaethics? Does it, for example, lend support to nihilism the idea that there is really no such thing as morality in the normative sense or to skepticism the idea that even if there are truths about morality in the normative sense we cannot know them, or at least could not know them if they were objective truths?

Section 4. Having distinguished various issues and questions, we may turn now to consider first the scientific explanatory projects concerning morality in the empirical sense. Evolutionary explanations for morality in the empirical sense are offered at different levels, and this makes for very different explanatory projects with different implications. It is uncontroversial that there will be evolutionary explanations of some sort for the very general capacities and tendencies in A and B: we are evolved creatures, and our psychological capacities, like other complex capacities, are outcomes of evolutionary processes. But this does not by itself settle whether these capacities and tendencies are themselves adaptations , having evolved through natural selection because of their adaptive effects.

That is the most common view further explored below , but there are alternatives. It is possible, for example, that our capacity to make moral judgments is a spin-off side-effect or by-product of our non-moral intellectual capacities, which latter are adaptations. The deeper point, however, is that whichever position one takes on the role of natural selection in the emergence of generic capacities for moral judgment, this does not settle how best to account for other, more specific tendencies, such as C-F. In particular:. There are, then, many possible stories to be told about the origins of our moral judgments and behavior. Since our concern is with morality , the crucial issue to begin with is the origins of moral judgment : for morality has not merely to do with certain emotions and behaviors such as sympathy and altruism as such, but with the exercise of moral judgment about how one ought to behave in various social circumstances Joyce , ch.

Certain emotions and behaviors are then relevant too insofar as they relate to the exercise of such judgment, but in the absence of moral judgment they seem only to belong to proto-morality. Since accounts of the origins of moral judgment rely on these ideas as well, and these emotions or behavioral dispositions are also often appealed to as causal influences on the content of moral judgment, it is worth starting with a look at the issue of psychological altruism, distinguishing it from merely biological altruism. Many discussions of morality and evolutionary biology focus largely on the issue of altruistic feeling and behavior. This can be confusing because in addition to psychological altruism there is also biological altruism , which is found in many species.

See Kitcher , part I, for a comprehensive discussion. Though psychological altruism is different from biological altruism, there are a variety of possible explanations of the evolution of psychological altruism that appeal to the same factors that explain the origins of biological altruism, namely:. It would take us too far afield to survey all these biological accounts in detail, the background for which is already treated in the entry for biological altruism ; there are also many excellent and accessible summaries of such accounts and their application to psychological altruism e.

We will settle here for one detailed illustration of one way in which biological altruism can be given an evolutionary explanation, followed by a sketch of the ways in which this and other evolutionary mechanisms might likewise explain the emergence of psychological altruism—keeping in mind that this is all just one part of explaining morality proper, to which we return in the next sub-section. The very idea that biological altruism can come about through natural selection may initially seem puzzling. It turns out there are many ways. To take one dramatic example, consider social insect colonies, and in particular, the Hymenoptera bees, ants and wasps. In these colonies we find such an extreme degree of cooperation—division of labor queen, workers, soldiers, etc.

Indeed, in the case of stinging worker honey bees, there is not only cooperative labor but also, when necessary, the ultimate sacrifice in defense of the hive at least where the invader is a mammal, stinging of which proves fatal to the bee as the barbed sting is torn out upon being deposited in the victim. How can such striking cooperation and self-sacrifice be explained in evolutionary terms? One important fact to notice is that the colony is one large family: typically, the workers are sisters—daughters of the queen. So while an allele that causes an organism to engage in sex more often may thereby spread, so might an allele that causes an organism to help a sibling to reproduce as by aiding survival ; either way, that allele will be helping to propagate copies of itself in the next generation, which in turn means that the helping behavior it causes will likewise spread over time Dawkins , — This extreme biological altruism, however, may be explained by the same principles, with the addition of the fact that due to a genetic peculiarity of the Hymenoptera their haplodiploidy , sisters are more closely related to each other genetically than they would be to their own offspring.

This could explain how worker sterility evolved, as traits focused on helping the queen took precedence over personal reproduction, and it explains how even suicidal behavior could have been selected for as propagating the genes that cause it Dawkins , — It is worth noting, however, that the theory of kin selection and inclusive fitness is highly complex and has received renewed critical scrutiny in recent years. This is only one example of one way in which biological altruism can evolve: there are others, which are not restricted to kin and are explained using game-theoretic or group dynamic models again, see the entry on biological altruism for details.

The crucial point is just that any kind of genetically-based trait can evolve if it happens to have the right kind of feedback effect on the genes that influence it. This brings us, then, to the sort of trait we are more interested in: a disposition for psychological altruism , as defined above. Again, while it may initially seem puzzling that evolution should give rise to psychological altruism, rather than merely to selfishness, there is nothing paradoxical about it: a genetically-based disposition for psychological altruism will evolve just in case such a trait, in the relevant circumstances, promotes the propagation of the genes that bring it about and does so more effectively than alternative traits produced by rival alleles.

And this can again happen in various ways. In some cases, these adaptive psychological mechanisms will involve specifically targeted or conditional altruistic motivations, involving capacities for discrimination to focus benefits on kin or on reciprocators. In other cases, the selection pressures will give rise to less discriminating altruistic sentiments and tendencies as the simplest and most cost-effective mechanisms for promoting adaptive cooperative behaviors in a given environment. One advantage of this hypothesis is that it might help explain some sorts of concern and altruism that are otherwise hard to make sense of in evolutionary terms.

For example, suppose you receive a letter from UNICEF soliciting contributions for health and nutrition programs for children in Darfur, and you are moved to send a check. But a trait that is not presently adaptive may once have been. In the environment in which our hominin ancestors lived, where there was little positive contact with outsiders, even relatively indiscriminate altruism would tend to benefit kin or potential reciprocators, and so might have been a simple adaptive mechanism on the whole. Or it may be some combination of the two. This area of inquiry remains largely speculative, since it is one thing to develop models for how psychological altruism could in principle evolve, and quite another to show convincingly that a given form of natural selection has in fact played the relevant role in actual human evolutionary history.

In any case, it is time to return to the issue of moral judgment, which is crucial to the explanation of morality proper, and goes beyond mere altruistic feeling and behavior. The following sub-section describes one leading hypothesis. Kitcher a,b; has proposed a three-stage account of the evolution of morality. The social structure would have been similar to that of contemporary chimpanzees and bonobos, where cooperation among the relatively weak or those in weak stages of life is beneficial to them, but strategic calculation is infeasible.

Because this disposition was both limited and unstable, however, and competed with powerful selfish drives, there was a continual threat of social rupture and loss of cooperative advantage. This in turn would have made ongoing peacemaking a necessity, thus limiting the size of viable cooperative units and the scope of cooperative projects, as well as imposing significant costs through the devotion of time and energy to peacemaking activities. An example would be extensive mutual grooming going well beyond what is necessary for hygiene, of the sort found in chimpanzee societies.

The next phase, according to this hypothesis, was a transition to much larger groups with more extensive cooperative activities, through the evolution of a capacity for emotionally laden normative guidance , without which such arrangements would not have been possible. See also Gibbard , ch. With the emergence of a capacity to make and follow normative judgments, reinforced by coevolved reactive emotions such as guilt and resentment, and the development of rules and social practices promoting and enforcing group loyalty and cooperation, a new psychological mechanism came into being for reinforcing the previously unstable altruistic tendencies and promoting large-scale social cohesion and stability.

The advantages of membership in coalitions and subcoalitions would be conferred on hominins who had facility with such normative guidance—including a strong sense of obligation and tendency toward social compliance—and who thus acted consistently on these altruistic tendencies, acquiring the reputation for being good coalition partners and participating in a broader array of cooperative projects. If this hypothesis is correct, it might explain not only the origins of our general capacity for normative judgment and motivation, but also the widespread tendency for social rules or norms historically to emphasize such things as group identity, loyalty and cohesion , and to focus largely on the regulation of violence and sex ; and it might help to explain widespread dispositions toward social conformity, concern with reputation and social standing, tendencies for group-wise scorning or punishment of the disloyal, and the power of emotions such as resentment, guilt and shame.

There is, of course, a great deal of leeway in the last part, concerning the details of the transition through cultural evolution from hominin proto-moralities to contemporary moral systems, which allows for some very different possible stories. This brings us to the next major topic. So far, we have focused on scientific projects that treat morality in the empirical sense as calling simply for causal explanation, as by appeal to evolutionary influences. This is unexceptionable with regard to the origins of the general human capacity for moral judgment: clearly some causal explanation is required, and an evolutionary explanation is plausible. But things are much more complicated when we consider the explanation of the actual content of moral judgment, feeling and behavior.

We have had a taste above of the way in which scientists might propose to explain our particular moral attitudes or judgments by appeal to specific evolutionary causes as filtered through cultural developments. Human beings have a strong, emotionally-laden sense of basic fairness, resentment of cheaters, and a desire that they be punished, all of which finds expression in both cultural norms and individual moral judgments. And some of these psychological traits may have analogues in other species.

In the more complex case, chimpanzees sometimes react negatively to inequity even where they are the ones receiving the greater reward. Similarly, a natural explanatory hypothesis for the more complex form of inequity aversion is that it evolved in creatures with sufficient predictive capacities and emotional control because it preserved beneficial cooperative relationships that could be threatened by such inequities, thus proving fitness-enhancing on the whole given the benefits of continued cooperation Brosnan and de Waal, All of this might suggest good prospects for causal explanation of human moral traits in terms of evolved psychological traits. Caution is needed here, however.

Our moral judgments and resulting behaviors cannot just be assumed to be mere causal upshots of some such biological and psychological forces, on a par with the cooperative activity of bees or the resentment felt by capuchin monkeys or even the broader unease apparently felt by chimpanzees over unequal rewards for equal work. When a rational agent makes a judgment, whether in the sphere of morality or in such areas as science, mathematics or philosophy, the proper question is not in the first instance what caused that judgment to occur, but what reasons the person had for making it—for thinking it to be true.

It is those reasons that typically constitute an explanation of the judgment. They explain by bringing out what the person took rightly or wrongly to be the justification for the belief in question—the considerations showing the belief likely to be true. All of this complicates the explanatory project in relation to the thoughts, feelings and actions of rational agents. It is helpful to illustrate the general point first with other kinds of judgment, and then to return to morality. Consider some judgments in mathematics, philosophy and science:. We normally need to know her reasons for believing it to be true, which we can then go on to assess as good or bad reasons for such a belief.

Either way, we typically take her reasons—and the reasoning associated with them—to explain her belief, which is why we engage seriously with her reasons as such in critical discussion, and go on to inquire into their merits. Such independent explanations for beliefs can sometimes be correct, as in the case of someone given a post-hypnotic suggestion, in which case we may regard her judgment as merely caused and the reasons offered as mere rationalization. But this is not the norm. The reason why we normally explain beliefs such as M, P or S by appeal to the reasons the person gives for them is that we normally assume that the person is capable of intelligent reflection and reasoning and has arrived at her belief for the reasons she gives as a result of that reflection whether or not the belief is ultimately correct.

We assume in general that people are capable of significant autonomy in their thinking, in the following sense:. This assumption seems hard to deny in the face of such abstract pursuits as algebraic topology, quantum field theory, population biology, modal metaphysics, or twelve-tone musical composition, all of which seem transparently to involve precisely such autonomous applications of human intelligence. Even if there are evolutionary influences behind our general tendency to engage in certain kinds of mental activity, or behind some of our motives in these pursuits e. Buchanan and Powell , , and Few would deny the autonomy assumption altogether.

The challenge to the autonomy assumption is therefore more likely to come in a selective form. This brings us back to moral judgment. As with M, P and S, people typically have reasons for their moral judgments, and whether or not we agree with them, we typically take those reasons to explain why they believe what they do. Consider again the moral judgment mentioned earlier:. Just as with M, P and S, someone making this judgment will have reasons that she takes to justify this claim, ultimately tying into her overall conception of right and wrong. And we tend to take this at face value as an explanation of why she believes MJ, unless we have special reason to suspect distorting causes, such as prejudice leading to misperception and rationalization.

We tend to think that a person has the moral beliefs she does as a result of background moral reflection and reasoning, within her cultural context. One potential lesson from evolutionary biology, however, is that even if the autonomy assumption equally applies in principle to the sphere of moral judgment, it may be a mistake just to assume that most moral judgment and behavior is in fact a result of the exercise of such autonomous reflection, reasoning and judgment. The autonomy assumption, after all, says only that we have the capacity for relevantly autonomous reflection and judgment; it does not imply that we always exercise it.

Perhaps the human capacity for autonomous thinking is exercised only in some cases, while in others the process that leads to moral belief is largely influenced by evolved psychological dispositions, such as emotional adaptations. While such a situation may not tend to arise in relation to our mathematical, philosophical, or scientific thinking, our evolutionary history may have given rise to emotional dispositions that play a significant role in at least some of our moral thinking, feeling and behavior.

See section 2. On this hypothesis, we cannot treat moral judgments as a homogeneous set, but must recognize that they can come about in very different ways, requiring a plurality of explanatory models. While a model of autonomous reasoning might apply to some moral beliefs and behaviors, a model appealing to evolutionary causal influences will apply to others. And often some combination of models may be necessary, as in cases where both evolutionary influences and our own independent moral reflection might lead to similar judgments, overdetermining them.

For example, even if it is true that evolutionary pressures favoring caring for offspring have strongly influenced our attitudes towards our children, it does not follow that this is the complete explanation for why we believe we have special obligations to care for our children and for why we behave as we do toward them. Advocates of an autonomous reflection model of moral judgment grant that various causal influences—likely including evolutionary ones—often play some role in moral thought and feeling. But opponents who hold a deflationary view of the role of autonomous reflection seek to press the challenge here more fully.

On this view, our giving of reasons for our moral beliefs in such cases is interpreted as mere post hoc rationalization. On this model, our moral reasonings and justifications or at least those to which the model is supposed to apply are just so much window dressing for beliefs that are more like post-hypnotic suggestions than they are like M, P or S; just as with post-hypnotic suggestions, people go to great lengths to provide rationalizations in an attempt to render their moral beliefs intelligible to themselves.

The difference is that instead of a hypnotist, the causal agents are emotional dispositions stemming from our evolutionary past. The basic idea that some moral beliefs are susceptible to this sort of debunking explanation is not new. Moral philosophers have long recognized that people have often been led to moral judgments based on self-interest or prejudice, for example, and then rationalized their views, inventing justifications for positions held due to other causes. A plausible example would be a judgment such as:. While such a judgment was not uncommon just a few generations ago, most readers of this article will recognize MJ2 to be not only false, but also likely to have stemmed from racial prejudice, with much of what was said to justify it being mere post hoc rationalization for a view more attributable to the causal influence of prejudice than to the workings of autonomous reflection and reasononing.

Most philosophers today would say something similar about a moral belief still held by many people, especially within traditional religions:. At one extreme, someone might deny that the autonomy assumption applies to the moral domain at all: we either lack these capacities in the domain of moral thought, or at least never exercise them. Such a claim seems to have little plausibility, however. Why should it be that human intelligence and innovation know virtually no bounds in other domains—as illustrated by feats of autonomous inquiry and creativity in quantum field theory, algebraic topology, modal metaphysics, or symphonic composition—and yet when it comes to moral thinking we remain stuck in ruts carved out for us by evolution, slavishly following patterns of thought prescribed for us by evolved, domain-specific mechanisms, with all of our cultural developments providing mere variations on those themes?

The very fact of human self-consciousness makes such a picture unlikely: for as soon as we are told that our thinking is constrained along evolutionarily given paths, our very awareness of those influences provides the opening to imagine and to pursue new possibilities. If you are told, for example, that you are evolutionarily conditioned to favor your group heavily over outsiders in your moral judgments, you are able, as a reflective agent, to take this very fact into account in your subsequent moral reflection, deciding that this favoring is unwarranted and thus coming to a new, more egalitarian moral view. It is noteworthy that the leading proponent of the mere rationalization hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt , does not take the extreme position of denying the autonomy assumption.

He grants that such capacities exist and are sometimes exercised, singling out the moral deliberations of philosophers as likely examples , — But there are many questions to raise even about this qualified claim despite its generously letting philosophers, at least, off the hook. Similarly, the input from the autonomous reasoning of philosophers and some religious leaders may well influence the background ethical sensibilities of whole societies, thus influencing moral judgment even where there is no lengthy reasoning occurring in the particular case.

But such a conclusion would be supported only if all the subjects in the experiment were consequentialists , specifically believing that only harmful consequences are relevant to moral wrongness. Nor is it surprising that people have trouble articulating their reasons when they find an action intrinsically inappropriate, as by being disrespectful as opposed to being instrumentally bad, which is much easier to explain. To return to our central question: it remains unclear just how much of human moral judgment is susceptible to the mere rationalization hypothesis, or when it is, how much of a role is played by evolutionary influences on emotions.

The mere rationalization hypothesis is best supported when we have independent reason to reject an appeal to autonomous reflection, as when a moral judgment is implausible in itself and we have a very likely debunking causal explanation of why someone might nonetheless be led to believe such a thing. But this does not provide grounds for a deflationary approach across the board. Many moral beliefs—for example, concerning the moral irrelevance of sexual preference, the moral equality of persons of all races and nationalities, or moral obligations even to future generations in far away countries—are much more plausible candidates for being upshots of autonomous moral reflection and reasoning.

Indeed, many philosophers take them to be plausible candidates for moral truths , grasped through reflection that reveals good reasons for believing them, which is therefore what explains our moral beliefs and behavior in these cases. These claims may, of course, be disputed. Even if it is granted that our judgments are often the products of our reasoning, pace Haidt , it remains possible that our reasoning itself is distorted by evolutionary influences. This may be especially worrisome given the role played by intuitions in moral reasoning unlike with mathematical reasoning, say , even in determining our acceptance of premises in arguments: insofar as there are concerns that our intuitions may be distorted by evolutionary influences, there will equally be worries about our moral reasoning Sinnott-Armstrong It remains unclear, however, just how far such worries really extend, even if it is granted that moral intuition and reasoning are often subject to such distorting influence.

Even if there are indeed such special modules devoted to reasoning about obligation and entitlement, as posited by evolutionary psychologists, the question is how much they explain, and whether they really exclude significant input from autonomous moral reasoning. These issues remain challenging and controversial. But the controversies are as much ongoing philosophical ones as scientific ones, and it is therefore unlikely that scientific results will settle them. Science will plainly not settle, for example, whether or not there are moral truths; and if there are, they will likely play an explanatory role with regard to at least some of our moral beliefs—something we will miss if we approach these issues from an exclusively scientific point of view.

A duly cautious claim about the explanatory role of evolution with respect to morality in the empirical sense might therefore be:. In section 1. This section deals with morality in the normative sense. Does evolutionary biology shed light on the content of morality in the normative sense? That is, in thinking about how we ought to live, do we get any insight from evolutionary theory? And does evolutionary biology have any significant implications for thinking about the prospects for moral progress?

Spencer was, by all accounts, a more gifted and subtle thinker than he is typically given credit for today. See the entry on Spencer. Still, we may treat his views briefly here, as his arguments concerning evolutionary biology and ethics were based on deep misunderstandings of evolution. This is not to deny the historical interest of his views. Even philosophers sympathetic to ethical naturalism the view that moral facts are themselves natural facts of some sort have typically been wary of attempts to derive conclusions about morality in the normative sense from facts about evolutionary history. This is especially so when they are clear unlike Spencer about the principles governing Darwinian evolution through natural selection.

From the fact that a certain trait is an adaptation, which evolved through natural selection by virtue of its positive feedback effects on germ-line replication of the alleles that generate the trait, nothing at all seems to follow about whether it is morally good or right, or something we ought to embrace and foster. Certain dispositions may be present in us for good evolutionary reasons without any implication that these traits benefit us, or are moral virtues or produce behaviors that are morally right. And the prospects for meeting this burden have never seemed strong: it is hard to see how such evolutionary facts can possibly have normative authority or force for a rational agent McDowell Regardless of why one has a given trait, the question for a rational agent is always: is it right for me to exercise it, or should I instead renounce and resist it as far as I am able?

Korsgaard Normative ethical conclusions are justified through first-order ethical reflection and argument, just as mathematical propositions are justified through mathematical reasoning, rather than through learning more about our evolutionary past or about what is happening in our brains when we engage in these forms of reasoning Rachels, It would seem to be as much of a mistake to try to answer ethical questions by examining fMRI scans or studying our evolutionary history as it would be to try to solve mathematical problems by such means except, perhaps, insofar as evolutionary theory may shed light on some present, morally relevant empirical facts, as discussed below.

Still, some have argued that empirical psychological studies and related evolutionary hypotheses—see section 4. In particular, it has recently been argued that scientific evidence supports consequentialist ethical theories over deontological ones Greene , , Singer Consider a famous pair of hypothetical cases much discussed by moral philosophers Thomson :. Trolley : a runaway trolley is heading toward five people on the track ahead, who cannot get out of the way; it cannot be stopped, but there is a switch you could flip that would divert it onto a side track containing only one person;. Bridge : a runaway trolley is heading toward five people on the track ahead, who cannot get out of the way; you are standing on a bridge over the track, and if you shove the very large person next to you off the bridge and in front of the trolley, the crushing of his body will stop the trolley before it reaches the five.

Most people respond to these cases by saying that Trolley is permissible while Bridge is not. But what explains this difference in moral response?