Robert Wright is touring the Field Museum of Natural History. It is hoped the museum’s attention to the sweep and diversity of life will offer a felicitous setting for a discussion of Wright’s compelling and provocative book about a radically new understanding of what makes us human beings tick-and often tacky.
Who hasn’t pondered how we can be so noble and so monstrous?
Although we can get a variety of sometimes conflicting theories from theologians, anthropologists, psychologists and bartenders, Wright says there’s sound empirical evidence that the best answers lie largely in our genes, the legacy of evolution.
To a greater extent than we ever realized, he asserts, genes are us, the origin of our speciousness. And our splendor.
Indeed, our genetic heritage, he reports, is now regarded by a small but increasingly influential group of biologists and social scientists as the major player in shaping our behavior, emotions and thoughts.
Wright has written that these scholars, who see themselves as “an embattled minority,” are assembling “a body of scientific theory and fact” that represents “a new worldview,” a “paradigm shift” in science, “a way of seeing everyday life” that will transform our “perception of social reality.”
Wright examines the data for this startling claim in “The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology” (Pantheon, $27.50).
A New York Times review praised the book as “fiercely intelligent, beautifully written and engrossingly original” and lauded Wright for his “consistent, irreverent wit that does not hide a heartfelt seriousness of purpose.”
Time magazine published an excerpt, trumpeting it on the cover with a broken wedding ring and the headline, “Infidelity: It May Be in Our Genes.”
Condensed from the book’s section on “Sex, Romance and Love,” the article cited research which found:
– The Madonna-whore dichotomy is genetic. Genetically more promiscuous than females, males are eager to have sex with loose females but prefer to marry those who are sexually conservative. Thus, what mommas have been forever telling their daughters is true.
– When seeking a mate, male tastes run toward youth and beauty (good genes for offspring), while females tend to be attracted to power and wealth (security for offspring).
While not exactly earthshaking, these pronouncements, because they were cloaked in the mantle of science, raised many hackles, especially among feminists who saw them as cavemannish, picturing women as dependent and subservient.
After the Time cover, the New Yorker named “The Moral Animal” a contender for “the Book Most Heatedly Discussed by People Who Haven’t Finished Reading It (or Even Laid Eyes on It).”
To Wright, the reaction was predictable.
“This is a revolution that will one day rank with some of the great all-time scientific revolutions,” he says. “In terms of the social sciences, the only thing comparable was the initial reaction against Darwinism in the early part of this century, which led to decades and decades of a kind of naive cultural determinism.”
He refers to a common view-“the standard social science model”-that culture and environment are the dominant forces in human development.
Strict adherents of this doctrine believe that we are born as blank slates, and acculturation is the whole ballgame, meaning, Wright writes, “that there is no inherent human nature driving human events, but that, rather, our essential nature is to be driven.”
What he calls “the new, improved Darwinian theory” acknowledges the importance of culture and experience but maintains that it’s genes, behind the scenes, which are stubbornly intent on calling the shots and, in fact, molding culture.
In a sculpture exhibit of aboriginal societies, Wright stops at a bronze statue of a bearded, barefoot fellow clad in a loincloth, holding a hand-made staff and identified as “Ainu Man, 1931.”
Seeing Bob Wright and Ainu Man together evokes a familiar paradox that sometimes slides into glib sentiment: Though the differences between human beings seem great, their similarities are greater and more significant.
The Ainus, thought to be Caucasoid and Asian in descent, are indigenous to Japan; many live on the northern island of Hokkaido, where they hunt, fish and farm.
Wright, 37, a Caucasoid member of the U.S. upper middle-class and a graduate of Princeton University, resides in Washington, D.C., where he toils as an editor and columnist for the New Republic magazine.
Selective traits
Evolutionary psychology says that Wright and Ainu Man are more alike than ever imagined.
They-and all of us-are the product of millions of years on the test track of natural selection, the term Charles Darwin used for the process of evolution.
And though Darwin knew nothing about genes, his theory about how species develop has proved to be scientifically solid.
Wright explains natural selection: “If within a species there is variation among individuals in their hereditary traits, and some traits are more conducive to survival and reproduction than others, then those traits will (obviously) become more widespread within the population. The result (obviously) is that the species’ aggregate pool of hereditary traits changes. And there you have it.”
In other words, traits which didn’t help us adapt and survive disappeared and those which did were passed on, including the traits that make up the human mind. Everyone has the same fundamental mental wiring.
“Every basic human impulse is innate,” Wright says. “That goes for romantic love, family love, loyalty, altruism, guilt, embarrassment, shame, compassion, empathy, envy, jealousy, gratitude. An infant arrives with an inherent sense of justice and a conscience.”
Pretty terrific, aren’t we?
Not entirely. We also have a relentless need for status and a propensity for doing almost anything to attain it. Notice how we kiss up to superiors at work and to anyone higher on the social ladder. Wright and Ainu Man are animals out of the same mold, born to seek status and curry favor with the powerful.
Guess why. “All the social climbing and the office politics that are part of everyday life for all of us ultimately boil down to the imperative of genetic proliferation,” Wright says.
That’s what drives us? To make copies of ourselves? That’s at the core of existence?
“This is not to say that everything we do in a modern environment is actually conducive to genetic proliferation,” Wright says. “But the impulses that guide us through life are the impulses that helped our ancestors get their genes spread. It’s that simple.”
What about love?
A trait called “kin selection” causes us to love, protect and even lay down our lives for our offspring. And close relatives. Because they carry our genes.
And friends? “The altruism we feel toward friends, for the most part, is not pure altruism because, whether we understand it or not, it is premised on reciprocation. That’s not to say it’s bad. It’s still a wonderful thing that holds civilization together-the ability you and I have to like each other. Without it, the boundaries would stop at the family, and we’d have nothing but family feuds.” And the reason we strive for status? The higher the status, the more attractive we are to prospective mates because our genes “know,” even if we aren’t always conscious of it, that higher status equals a better chance for survival.
Another survival key is a conviction we’re always right, which can require a complementary feature-self-deception. “A chief function of our brain is to convince ourselves and others that we are right, whether we are or not,” Wright says. “This is responsible for everything from divorce to strikes to wars.”
Unfortunately, those of us in the modern world are carrying traits designed for our ancestors who lived in hunter-gatherer societies.
Because our smarts enabled us to devise tools and technology to tame our surroundings and fashion a vastly different culture, we’re not in the environment for which our mental apparatus was designed. Tarzan and Jane aren’t really happy in Hinsdale.
Wright says Ainu Man, who appears primitive to us, is better adapted to his life than we are to ours, genetically speaking.
“We’re not designed for our kind of large-scale social environment, living among a lot of people we don’t know. We were designed to live in a small group with an extended family and a set of friends we’d lived with all our lives.”
The way Ainu Man lives.
“Now most people do neither, so it’s no wonder that so many are so depressed. The situation is worse in the suburbs, where there’s a greater sense of isolation. Women were not designed to be suburban housewives. Suburban men have it easier because they spend the day working-`hunting’-with other men.”
The theological debate
Wright is braced for criticism from sources other than suburban chambers of commerce. “The first line of resistance will come from those who read the Bible literally,” he says.
He knows what to expect. When he was a high school sophomore in Texas in the early ’70s, his Southern Baptist parents asked a minister to come by the house and talk some sense to him.
“I’d been introduced to natural selection in biology class and found it pretty captivating,” he recalls.
Although many religious traditions adapted readily to Darwinism, others consider it an affront to the belief that God created us as distinct and exalted creatures, as Genesis has it.
“The minister said how unlikely it was that random change could create something as complex as human beings,” Wright says. “He didn’t persuade me.”
Obviously not. Wright’s mother recently reported that another pastor, unaware her son was the author, blasted the book from the pulpit after the excerpt in Time, complaining it implicity condones immorality.
“Mother reacted in a Darwinian way,” Wright says. “Forced to choose between her religion or her genes, she went with her genes. She backed me.”
A matter of interpretation
Still, just as natural selection has been used as an excuse by social Darwinists to neglect, exploit and oppress the poor, Wright is aware that the new Darwinism can also be misused.
“I emphasize that because an impulse is natural doesn’t mean it’s moral,” Wright says. “Religions recognize our innate selfishness, the dark side of human nature, and try to control our more destructive impulses.”
But human nature is hard to harness. “Effective moral systems that try to conquer our more dangerous animal impulses are often harsh. The Victorian morality of Darwin’s day fought fire with fire, turning the desire for social status against the strong polygynous impulse in men.
“People can decide whether they’d prefer repressive Victorian morality in which marriages lasted or the modern morality, which is not repressive and in which the family is in a crisis.”
Don’t despair. “It’s nothing short of miraculous to me that human beings are as good as they are, given the fact they were designed by natural selection, a process that ultimately values only genetic self-interest.
“We’re capable of tremendous compassion, even toward people we don’t know; we have a conscience, a sense of guilt; we’re capable of very profound love.
“There is certainly room for legitimate theological speculation about what’s behind the process itself. I personally believe there’s a purpose to life and that there’s an intelligence behind all this.”
In noting the book’s title is not without irony, he says: “To be moral requires us to rise above our human nature, which takes great effort.”
Self-knowledge is the best weapon: “Compared to all other species, we’re in the privileged position of being able to think about the moral stakes of our existence and to carry on the moral struggle.”
