Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (27 page)

Finally, the geometry for kin care is different from the geometry for friendships and mateships in a couple of critical ways. It is not as flat as friendship networks, where resources are shared equitably, but is instead top-down, with resources more easily flowing from parents to children than the reverse. And it is the most stable of all the geometries; romantic partners may leave if things get unfair, but parents are likely to continue providing resources for their children, with many fewer contingencies attached, and parents and children are more motivated to keep up contact even if they are geographically separated.

So the message here is this: Individual human beings have different kinds of decision biases that we carry into each of the different domains of social life. Those biases are not only important in influencing what happens between pairs of people, but they drastically influence the larger web of social life, shaping different social geometries
for our different relationships, and doing so in patterned and functional ways.

Right now, inside your brain, different neural mechanisms are working in parallel to analyze different kinds of sensory inputs about your body's temperature, your blood sugar levels, about light levels and noises coming in from the outside, and so on. Our neural systems are designed to organize themselves so that the most important sensory inputs get passed up the line for further processing and the others get ignored. Different kinds of inputs get fed to different subselves, and the different subselves organize themselves so that only the most critically important one gets to control our consciousness at any given moment, and thus to make decisions about which specific behavioral strategy you should pursue next.

When you are in a group of people, each of your behavioral decisions is simultaneously a causal influence on and a calibrated response to the behaviors of the other people around you. Over time, those mutual interactions organize themselves so that the group moves in a particular direction.

As in the simulated neighborhoods, most of us interact only locally, with the closest subset of potential neighbors (even when we are hooked in to the Internet, we pay attention to a select set of inputs, such as messages from our friends or from our preferred sources of news, and ignore most of the others). But because neighbors influence other neighbors, the web of interconnections spreads outward, so that our decisions and those of the small groups to which we belong are an integral part of those big anonymous forces like “popular opinion,” “modern society,” and the “world economy.”

Looked at in this light, we can see why human nature is critically linked to culture, religion, and economics. This is not to say that one
individual's decision biases determine these large-scale phenomena in any unidirectional way, any more than it is to say that “society” determines our individual decisions. Instead, it is to say that broad-scale cultural, historical, and economic patterns emerge from the decisions of individuals.

Most fascinating about this worldview is that it implies there is no Big Brother, no central decision-maker running the show. The emergent aggregate is more powerful and immensely more complex than any single individual. The military-industrial complex, the world economy, public opinion, and modern society is us. The reason it does not seem like it down here is that human society is in some ways like a giant ant colony: a product of many little brains making many little decisions in response to narrow local inputs.

LOOKING UP AT THE STARS

W
e've come a long way since the 1970s, Baby. The suggestive undercurrents of disco have evolved into the pornographic rhythms of hip-hop, with Jay-Z, T. I., and Eminem jamming to the offspring of the generation that used to shake, shake, shake their booties to KC and the Sunshine Band. Despite the persistently sinful ways of mankind, the Jehovah's Witnesses' prediction that the world would end in 1975 did not come true. It is still a scary place out there, the daily news is still filled with ominous forebodings about economic and political doom, and anxieties about al-Qaida and Iraq have replaced the worries about the Weathermen and Vietnam. But
Homo sapiens
is still around. Fewer and fewer hominids still read the daily newspaper; the bad news is now delivered electronically, via devices called iPhones and BlackBerries—powerful minicomputers smaller than the cigarette packs that used to sit inside the Forty-sixth Street Boys' T-shirt pockets back in 1961.

In my little corner of the world, there are no bombs falling, and the background music is a pleasant Brahms waltz. Contrary to the predictions of the Jesuit priest who counseled me when I was being expelled from Regis High School, I did not end up in a mental institution. Contrary to family tradition, I did not follow my biological father to New York's infamous prison in Ossining. And contrary
to my own neurotic fears, I did not get murdered before reaching age fifty.

Instead, I have for several decades lived the comfortable life of a university professor: bicycling to my office down sunny streets with palm trees and swimming pools in the background. I still occasionally wonder when someone in authority will realize there has been a big mistake, but so far the university has kept on giving me paychecks—for doing some of the same things that got me in trouble when I was a high school student: talking too much; making wisecracks in the classroom; sneaking off to read a book whenever I have a lot of overdue assignments; and daydreaming about sex, murder, and the meaning of life. And although I keep discovering more and more things I don't know, I have a better view of the big picture than the young guy who stole away to the bookstore when he should have been studying for his comprehensive exams.

Well then, you may be wondering at this point, what is the meaning of life?

There are, as it turns out, two very different ways to interpret that question.

As I noted in the book's Introduction, the question of the “meaning of life” is sometimes taken to mean “How does it all fit together?” How do the diverse perceptions, thoughts, and feelings buzzing around inside our overgrown brains combine with our prehensile thumbs, upright postures, and chattering larynxes to produce one coordinated organism, and how does our walking, talking species fit into the natural world alongside spider monkeys, timber wolves, and red-faced warblers? I think we now have a pretty good answer to that question, and it has come from integrating the insights of evolutionary psychology with those of cognitive science and dynamical systems theory.

But sometimes when people ask the question about the meaning of life, they are really asking, “How can I live a more meaningful life?” As I observed earlier, academic intellectuals who think Big Thoughts
about evolutionary biology, neural networks, and multidirectional causality usually leave this “how-to” question to the pop psych gurus. But I think there are some important connections between the two versions of the “meaning of life” question.

Let us start with the easy one: How does it all fit together? How do your momentary thoughts about sex, homicide, modern art, and Wall Street link up with one another, and how are those passing thoughts connected to your long-term life choices about career, marriage, family, and religion? Zooming out, how do what is going on inside your head and the choices you make connect with the thoughts and behaviors of your family members, your coworkers, your neighbors, and the billions of strangers in Boise, Brussels, and Beijing? Taking the aerial view, how do today's historical, cultural, and economic events link up with what our ancestors were doing in the Altamira Cave and the Olduvai Gorge? And at the widest camera angle, how does the behavior of us book-reading hominids link up with the behavior of howling baboons, preening peacocks, and mindless colonies of army ants?

Those who specialize too much, as scientists did for much of the twentieth century, might be inclined to think there is not much to be gained from asking such broad questions. But as psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, economists, and other behavioral scientists have increasingly ventured out of their intellectual ghettos, we have begun to discover some fascinating patterns at the interdisciplinary boundaries. As I have discussed in earlier chapters, there have been three big interdisciplinary movements in the last few decades: cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and dynamical systems theory. Let me try to distill a few take-home lessons from each of these three sets of very big ideas.

Inspired by the discovery that machines could perform some of the functions of the human brain, cognitive scientists rejected the strictures of radical behaviorism and tried to shine a light inside the black box of the mind itself. One of the most important things they discovered is that our brains process information in incredibly selective ways: We only pay attention to a small fraction of what is going on out there, we only ruminate consciously about an even smaller fraction, and we upload a still smaller portion into our long-term memory stores. Which information we select and which we throw out can have big downstream consequences. As I discussed in Chapter 2, to give a simple example, men looking at a crowd stare selectively at the beautiful women, which leads them to later misjudge how prevalent those movie starlets are in the real world, which in turn leads them to feel less committed to their current romantic partners.

As I discussed in Chapter 8, the view of the mind as a computer led cognitive scientists to assume that one form of information processing is interchangeable with any other and to emphasize
process
(how our minds crunch information) over
content
(what information our minds select for crunching in the first place). One of the key insights of evolutionary psychology was that content makes a giant difference; our brains come with some built-in crunching priorities, and they crunch information about poisonous foods, about dangerous predators, and about potential mates in fundamentally different ways. Evolutionary history makes a big difference to which information gets processed and how, as in the differences between bats processing sound waves bouncing off trees to decide which direction to fly, rats processing fragrant chemical compounds to determine whether or not to eat a piece of cheese, and humans processing light waves reflected from another person's facial features to decide whether or not that other person is a friend, an enemy, or a potential mate. Most of the research I talked about in this book reflects a fusion of ideas from cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, as does the view of the
mind as being composed of multiple motivational subselves, each designed to deal with different problems.

Besides expanding the focus of psychologists to include content as well as process, the evolutionary perspective has mined some of the powerful general principles from evolutionary biology. The most powerful of those principles—inclusive fitness, differential parental investment, and reciprocal altruism—highlight the connections among such diverse behaviors as aggression, altruism, mate selection, artistic display, conspicuous consumption, and even religious beliefs. They also illuminate the intimate links between our behavior and the behavior of other animals, from nasty gutter rats to elegant peacocks. These connections are still mostly unexplored, and the full implications of these and other broad biological principles are still revealing themselves. In Chapter 7, for example, I talked about life history theory, which has profound implications for understanding how our different motivational subselves make different trade-offs as we develop, shifting priorities in ways designed to maximize successful reproduction. When I was a thirteen-year-old punk hanging around with the Forty-sixth Street Boys, my first priority was status and acceptance; when I was a long-haired college student, my first priority was finding women who would sleep with me; and now as someone approaching eligibility for Social Security, my first priority is helping my children.

These broad ideas have profound consequences not only for psychology but for every other behavioral discipline, including economics, marketing, management, political science, and the law. When the next generation of researchers in these fields overcomes the remaining resistance to thinking about humans as biological organisms, there will be a tidal wave of new discoveries.

Like cognitive science, evolutionary psychology is not a set of inviolable doctrines but a scientific work in progress, as illustrated by the fact that the two broad perspectives are still expanding to incorporate
ideas from each other. When psychologists first began testing evolutionary hypotheses about human behavior, we were accused of placing too heavy an emphasis on sex differences and sexual behavior. The accusation was true, because the powerful theories of sexual selection and differential parental investment generated a host of testable predictions about sex differences in mating behavior (which had been surprisingly ignored by psychologists). But science is a self-correcting process, so the accusations spurred a host of studies examining the many ways in which men and women are psychologically similar. Another concern about evolutionary psychology was that it focused too much on the dark and selfish side of human nature. That concern spurred evolutionary psychologists to examine the circumstances under which people act in cooperative, group-oriented, and even heroically altruistic ways.

All this research has led to another important insight: Selfish genes do not necessarily produce selfish people. It is true that our minds are equipped with a host of simple selfish mechanisms that incline us to make decisions promoting our individual reproductive success. But in our ultrasocial species, the goal of reproductive success is often achieved by being nice to others. I will talk more about that shortly.