Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (17 page)

A second answer emerges from thinking of the variety we observe in our traits as arising from the different roles or strategies the social environment of culture has made available. If there is no single best way of being a human, then natural selection would not “use up” genetic differences among us, the way it uses up, for example, differences in running speed among gazelles. Instead, our genetic variety in things like mathematical, architectural, analytical, linguistic, mechanical, engineering, creative, oratorical, physical, and artistic abilities would be maintained because people with differing genetic makeups have filled the different roles that our many and diverse cultural innovations have created throughout our history.

ALTERNATIVE BUT EQUALLY GOOD STRATEGIES

IT IS
important to emphasize that this is not an argument for the superiority of some combinations of genes. It says that different combinations of genes make people suited to tasks that have been approximately
equally successful
throughout our history in promoting our survival and reproduction. Were they not, the less successful combinations of genes would have disappeared. One of the more subtle and powerful ideas to emerge from evolutionary biology in the past fifty years or so is the notion of
evolutionarily stable strategies
. We can think of a strategy as a behavior you adopt in your encounters with others. An evolutionarily stable strategy can be roughly defined as a strategy that when enough individuals adopt it, it cannot be bettered by any other strategy. A simple example might be your behavior in standing in line to board a train or bus. If you are polite, others will crowd in front of you and you won’t get a seat. So, being polite is not a stable strategy for getting a seat because others will outcompete you. To counter this, you could become pushy and now you probably will get a seat. But is being pushy a stable strategy? Well, if everyone adopts this strategy, fights might break out and you could get injured. Now it might be better to be polite—you won’t get a seat but at least you won’t get hurt.

In fact, this made-up scenario describes a situation that evolutionary biologists call the
Hawk-Dove
game, and it turns out that neither the Hawk nor the Dove strategy is the “best,” because whenever one of them becomes popular, the other can either take advantage of it or obtain higher rewards. So, maybe there is some intermediate “self-interested but not too pushy” strategy—we could call it prudent—that gets you a seat much of the time, but allows you to avoid fights. Maybe you position yourself near to where the train door will open, or you crowd in just a little bit to get in front of someone, but not so obviously that they become indignant and accost you. This strategy of prudence could have a higher payoff than either of the others, and if so it would become the one that most people would adopt. It could even be the evolutionarily stable strategy if it avoided the injuries the Hawks get and simply stepped in front of the Doves.

The simple parlor game of
rock-scissors-paper
is a game of stable and alternative strategies in which all three exist simultaneously. Each strategy (
rock
,
scissors
, or
paper
) can win against just one other, and each strategy beats a different other strategy (
rock
beats
scissors
,
scissors
beat
paper
, but
paper
beats
rock
). Knowing this, one way to approach the game is to adopt a mixed strategy in which you randomly play each strategy one third of the time. This will produce a win on average once in every three encounters. If you deviate from this and play, say,
scissors
over and over, someone who switches to playing
rock
will beat you, and your payoffs or “fitness” will fall. Alternatively, players could adopt
pure
strategies: we could imagine thirty people playing the game, with ten assigned to play each strategy and only that strategy. If they mix amongst each other at random, each person will win, on average, one third of the time. If someone deviated from their strategy, say a
rock
became a
scissors
, the people playing
rock
would begin to do better because they would meet people playing
scissors
just that little bit more often.

Males of the common side-blotched lizard (
Uta stansburiana
) play a
pure strategy
version of the
rock-scissors-paper
game in their competition to mate with females. Each male has one of three different genetically determined mating strategies.
Polygynous
males are large in size and can therefore control large territories. By controlling these large territories, the polygynous males can guard and exclusively mate with a number of females. The polygynous males can even take females away from smaller
monogamous
males which, having smaller territories, attempt to guard just a single female. But the polygynous males don’t ever take over completely. A small,
sneaky
male can take advantage of the polygynous males by snatching a liaison with one of his females when the polygynous male is not watching. On the other hand, the sneaky tactic does not work against the monogamous males because they can guard their single female. As with the parlor game, each one of these strategies can “beat” a different one of the others, and whenever one becomes too numerous, one of the others will take advantage of it.

The idea of stable alternative strategies tells us that genetic variety can exist and be maintained for good adaptive reasons because no one tactic, strategy, or role is always best. Combined with Ricardo’s ideas on the benefits of specialization, it provides a way to understand how societies can maintain variety in their ranks. Think of the Sienese
contrade
. It is reasonable to expect that they have lasted in a relatively stable form for so long because they feed off of each other in much the same way that
rock, scissors
, and
paper
do in the parlor game. When there is an abundance of carpenters, they cannot find enough work, so the number declines; too few carpenters and their numbers can increase; too many or too few bakers and the same thing happens. In this context, we call the force regulating the numbers who can “play” each of these strategies “supply and demand,” and it means that over the long run the variety of strategies can persist so long as there is some demand for their different services.

Variety alone does not say people differ in their innate abilities. People might end up in a particular profession merely by chance or perhaps because their parents introduced them to it, and then they get good at it from practice. It would be like the example we gave of a group of people ten of whom choose to play
rock
, another ten play
scissors
, and the final ten play
paper
. There are no initial differences among them, and they will all have equal returns over the long run. Alternatively, at the other extreme, one could imagine something like Aldous Huxley described in his futuristic novel
Brave New World
in which people were mass-produced to have different predispositions. In that world we are more like the side-blotched lizards, endowed with dispositions to adopt different behaviors or to perform different tasks. This is anathema to the modern liberal view, and no one suggests there are specific sets of genes for each of the many different roles in society. But those many different roles might rely on some smaller set of different talents and skills.

Look around you. Do people tend to settle into tasks they are predisposed to by dint of their genes or because of upbringing and hard work? Is being good at languages helpful for a job in journalism or technical writing? Is being good at spatial reasoning a boost to a career in architecture or design? Does being good at mathematics grant an advantage to being a notary or financier? Do scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs have a psychological disposition to focus single-mindedly on a goal or to wonder if the world could be different? Do musicians have
innate
musical talent? Do children often follow their parents into similar walks of life because of the opportunities their parents provide, or conversely because of a lack of opportunities for social mobility? Or, might children often do what their parents do because they have inherited their parents’ temperaments and abilities? These might be uncomfortable questions and the truth will often be “some of each,” but they are not questions we can dismiss outright. Some combination of a slight genetic push combined with a
win-stay, lose-shift
strategy over long periods of time can sort people by their abilities, even if the contribution of genes is small.

The possibility of equally good but alternative strategies might even explain aspects of personality. For example, when people are asked what aspects of their cultures they are drawn to, they tend to divide into five broad categories ranging from
aesthetic
(drawn to creative culture) and
cerebral
(drawn to information) to
communal
(relationships and emotions),
dark
(intense and hedonistic pursuits), and
thrill seekers
. These categorizations must be treated with caution, but biologists are coming to realize that alternative and equally successful personality strategies can even arise in animals. For instance, people differ in how likely they are to take risks, and a hypothetical evolutionary scenario can give one reason why. Imagine you and I differ in our perceptions of what the future holds. You occupy a position of prestige and great reputation in society and consequently you have an expectation for a long and productive life. I am not so highly regarded and this makes me pessimistic about my future. If each of us is right in our assessments, then it might pay you to be averse to taking risks in order to ensure many future returns. Perhaps you will bypass the big mammoth we are hunting out of fear that one swipe from its large tusks could do us in, and wait for a smaller mammoth to kill. But the opposite will be true of me—I will be motivated to adopt a short-term view, to cash in on what is at hand, even if it means taking a risk of being gored. If I don’t take a risk, I might be injured or dead before I get another chance.

By some estimates, 5 percent of us might be
sociopaths
. Such terms are notoriously difficult to define and harder to judge, but it is said that to understand what it is like to be a sociopath, you need to imagine yourself without a conscience—no sense of guilt or shame, no remorse for your actions. In
The Sociopath Next Door
, Martha Stout says that lacking these emotions sociopaths are unscrupulous and manipulative, and capable of emotional and physical cruelty. They are often able to conceal this from others, and maybe even themselves. It is difficult to get them to change their behavior because they don’t respond to appeals to morality, disgrace, or shame—these are precisely what they lack. In extreme form, this sociopathy can tip over into the malevolent and often deadly violence of a psychotic killer. But most sociopaths are not like that and indeed might wander among us in society. It is suggested they are likely to be chief executives and other people in positions of power in organizations, people not troubled by the nagging voice of their conscience, because sociopaths don’t have this voice, or if they do it is easily overridden. In fact, as the joke goes, being a sociopath means “never having to say you’re sorry.”

Could sociopathy be an alternative strategy, a personality style that can exist on the margins of society, given that most people are not sociopathic? The cooperation on which human society rests depends upon exchanges among people, trust, and a sense of fairness, and so we expect those dispositions to be widespread. But of course the more widespread they are, the more they present a target for others to exploit. Lacking a conscience might make someone the perfect impostor, able to deceive others as to their intentions because they don’t struggle with—and therefore have no need to conceal—the normal feelings of remorse a conscience brings. And what if getting a difficult job done sometimes requires someone who doesn’t worry too much about the consequences to others? Maybe it is even the unpleasant job of attacking that tribe in the next valley that is competing with yours for resources. Societies might only ever have room for a few sociopaths; but those opportunities will always exist, and that might be why we always seem to find them lurking in boardrooms, running companies, or shouting from a dictator’s pulpit. On the other hand, they will limit each other’s numbers because when two sociopaths meet, there is bound to be trouble—like
rock
meeting
rock
in a game of
rock-scissors-paper
.

It must be emphasized that there is no good evidence one way or the other that cultures have sorted us according to genetic predispositions, at least beyond the commonplace observations we all have made. Even so, when we look at how natural selection has molded differences among people who inhabit different parts of the world—differences in skin color, eye shape, stature, hair color—we can be sure it has had the time and ability to differentiate us within societies. Modern genetic technologies make it increasingly easy to collect evidence relevant to this question, but it is an issue we approach as a society the way we would approach Pandora’s box, and for the same reasons. Even among those prepared to ask such questions, the hunt for specific genes related to differences in lifetime performance is still in its infancy. The simple reason is that no one knows in advance which genes to examine. It will only be with the collection of large numbers of human genomes that cohorts of people with differing outcomes can be compared. This is not different from the approach that attempts to find genes for various medical risks, and the technology is becoming available to sequence human genomes cheaply and in large numbers.