Human Things

Disconcerting circumstances can sometimes yield serendipitous benefits – if only because one is so far out of one’s customary comfort zone. Thus I found myself, a native New Yorker, in a wretched little town in southern Utah sitting at a table across from a young woman who would soon break my heart worse than anyone had since I was 18 years old, and nonetheless happy to be living where I was and doing what I was doing there. I had taken a seasonal job as an archaeologist in one of the most archaeologically and environmentally rich places I know of, a place that I already frequented as a hiker and backpacker and general ogler about as often as I could manage. Between bites of small-town Utah diner fare, then, came that oft-asked and almost never satisfactorily answered question: “So why archaeology?”

Why indeed? Answers abound in both the academic and popular literature, ranging from the erudite (“because knowledge of the human past is inherently valuable and furthermore…”); to the practical (“so that we can learn from the triumphs and mistakes of the past”); to the more subjective (“because it’s interesting”); to the extremely subjective (“because it’s sacred”); to the selfish (“because I enjoy it”); to the patently frustrated and, also, somewhat plagiaristic (“because it’s there!”). Among the innumerable possible responses to this question, there are only two in which I have any enduring faith – one of which is tautological and the other paradoxical. But then that’s us, isn’t it?

To begin, a prompting question: why do people do crosswords? Or word-searches? Or Sudoku? Play video games, or board games, or word games and riddles…? Why, in short, do people so often, so thoroughly and passionately, devote themselves to creating and solving puzzles? To begin to understand the answer to this question, we have to delve down toward the deepest tendrils of the roots of humanity itself, to the tiniest gearwheels that precipitate our ticking, some several conceptual hours before the dawn of anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens.

So far as we know, the earliest obligate bipedal hominins, the australopithecines, lived their lives entirely within their respective ecological niches in Africa from about 4.4 to about 1.8 million years ago, spanning some two and a half million years. Despite occupying a variety of territories across the African continent, they appear to show surprisingly little in the way of morphological alterations during that considerable timespan. Instead, their proliferation was more likely due to variability in the australopithecine lineage itself, with different subspecies occupying different environments – there are at least seven distinct subspecies of Australopithecus recognized in the literature, nine if you include habilis and rudolfensis. It’s only with the emergence of Homo erectus, the first truly definitive member of our own lineage, that one finds widespread migration and expansion over a tremendous range of habitats – stretching from sub-Saharan Africa to as far  north as modern-day Siberia and about as far east as Asia goes – by a single hominin.

Not insignificantly, it was also in the last epochs leading up to this time that global climatic conditions shifted from relatively stable and mild to positively chaotic. During the Miocene epoch, which extended up to about 5.5 million years ago, overall conditions were warm and wet without much in the way of seasonality. The succeeding Pliocene epoch, stretching from then to about 2.6 million years ago, was one of gradually drier and cooler conditions with generally increased seasonality. And then came the Pleistocene, an epoch in which factors like orbital forcing and tectonic uplift took a coalescent and colossal toll, when the intensity of both short-term seasonality and less predictable long-term variability became the climatic norm. The effect of this on local environments had some magnitude to it: a narrow swath of land could go from jungle to desert and back again within a decade or two.

Creatures alive during this era had therefore to deal with an enormous amount of environmental diversity and complexity, leading, in the words of paleoanthropologist Robert Potts, to “evolution of adaptability.” Simply put, it doesn’t pay to be a specialist in the face of near-constant change. What pays best in those circumstances is to become, in effect, a jack of all environments, one more adapted for adaptability itself than for any particular ecological architecture – to become, in other words, an obligate puzzle-solver.

Pleistocene archaeology underscores this point with considerable definitude. As mentioned, erectus managed to colonize so much of the Earth’s surface that the type specimen was found not in Africa but in the Indonesian province of East Java, with subsequent and more expansive discoveries emerging soon thereafter near Peking. But they weren’t different subspecies occupying different environments, as with the earlier australopithecines and modern analogues like grizzly and polar bears. They were all erectus, a species which had evolved to specialize in non-specialization and to learn, and learn, and learn in order to adapt to nearly any environmental circumstances. So that now, erectus’ descendants – the one writing this, say, or the one(s) reading it – have colonized almost every type of environment on the planet’s surface and are beginning to leer lasciviously at places beyond even that.

That’s why we love to solve puzzles. It’s because we’ve evolved to gain tremendous pleasure from doing so. The experience of pleasure associated with solving a puzzle is the result of the same neurological mechanisms we’ve inherited to signal when we’ve achieved what behavioral scientists call “fitness gains.” In a creature adapted for supreme adaptability, what this means is that we’ve been hard-wired by natural selection to enjoy solving trivial puzzles because those of our ancestors who managed to solve somewhat less trivial puzzles enjoyed greater fitness as a result. All of which is borne out in our anthropology in general, and our archaeology specifically, evidenced by our dizzying array of behavioral and technological innovations throughout the millennia.

In sum: why do we love to solve the puzzles of prehistory? Because the puzzles of prehistory designed us to.

The second, and more concise of my preferred answers to the perennial question of my choice of vocation centers upon the life lessons derived from – and this phrase will soon strike the reader as ironic – a career in archaeology. It's based on one of the most salient observations I've ever made whilst studying and conducting archaeology, which is this: you can spend your entire professional career plowing as deeply and broadly as possible through human prehistory, and you know what you won't find any of? Professional careers. They're a totally modern phenomenon, along with gluten intolerance, road rage, and Facebook addiction.

Relatively speaking, for all but about the last few moments of the total anatomically modern human experience (that is: the last few hundred out of, by current estimates, as much as 190,000 years) our “jobs” consisted of “whatever has to be done to secure food and shelter for the foreseeable future.” According to ethnologists like Marshall Sahlins, this was usually achievable with about +/-20 person-hours of labor per calendar week. Presumably, then, the rest of our time was spent on craft specialization, or on chasing lovers, or hanging out, exploring, fighting, learning, playing.... That is to say: all the things we now think of as distractions from what’s really important in our lives. They used to constitute practically the entirety of our lives, at least if the Sahlins camp is to be believed, and again the archaeology bears this out: right about the time we start seeing full anatomical and behavioral modernity, we also start seeing art.

In his 1954 volume Motivation and Personality, famed psychologist A.H. Maslow conducted a thorough review of texts and publications by the recognized authorities on American psychology, and discovered that the very concept of fun or “joy” simply never appears. Even pleasurable endeavors like sex and play are perceived as existing, at their core, purely for (respectively) procreation or to unwind before going back to the serious business of life – not, in other words, for their own ends in any way whatsoever. The pleasure associated with such activities is dismissed as adaptive motivation; i.e., if it didn't feel good we apparently wouldn't bother doing it, and would instead crumble into extinction either through overmuch toil or under-abundance of offspring. Thus, as a result of its articulation with our culture, the prevailing concept of our own behavioral processes is “overpragmatic, over-Puritan, and over purposeful,” and by such means we are missing out on “the other – and perhaps more important – half” of life.

Earlier in this same essay I argued for the pleasure associated with puzzle-solving as just such adaptive motivation, and I very much believe that, but said pleasure should not therefore be dismissed on this account in the way that Maslow charged the main body of American psychology with doing. As Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss famously quipped, “the nose is [adapted to] fit spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles.” Well, no, the nose evolved for entirely other reasons; but that doesn’t mean we should stop wearing spectacles as a show of solidarity with better hypotheses about nasofacial adaptation. Similarly, setting aside, deprioritizing, or altogether missing out on the enormous variety of possible joys inherent to human life seems an abominable sin to commit in solidarity with a cultural mythos that holds pragmatism in the highest possible esteem – regardless of how pragmatically evolutionary history has designed us.

Maslow summed up his review by arguing that a great deal of our behavior is and, in all healthful regard, should be “unmotivated” by the bugbears of practicality and pragmatism. That joy and pleasure should be regarded as ends in themselves, human things in their own right rather than enticing but vagarious stimuli for drudgery, and at least as important as so-called serious struggles like professional careerism. And I agree; not merely because I try to live my own life that way, but because I see the material evidence of myriad such-lived lives every time I go to work. 

Dreadful Selection: How American Culture is Designed to Create Monsters

Fitness is a tricky thing. It’s an abstract term, like “quality” or “beauty,” that can’t be quantified and in fact doesn’t really exist outside of our ideas and concepts. Never the less, if held to a consistent standard, fitness can be an extremely useful part of modeling strategies employed to solve puzzles about how physical and behavioral adaptations emerge. Fitness is simply the ability to survive and produce viable offspring. It’s not an inherent quality; it’s relative to the environment in which it is being considered. Thick, white fur imparts a tremendous amount of fitness in the Arctic, for example, but does exactly the opposite in the desert.   

The principle operation of natural selection is fairly straightforward: those individuals who maximize their success in a given local environment will enjoy maximal fitness and therefore more likely pass their genes on to the greatest number of offspring. If the local environment is cold and has only a few fish for prey items, an individual with a thick coat and excellent fishing abilities will likely spawn the most viable offspring. If the local environment is temperate and contains plentiful resources, an individual who outcompetes his or her rivals for either the best resources or the most favorable attention from the opposite sex will likely spawn the most viable offspring. It’s a simple, elegant economic system that has yielded everything from slime molds to polar bears to peacocks – to ourselves.

But what if the local environment is full of assholes?

Because natural selection is economic in nature, principles of economics play key roles in determining how it applies to living organisms and ecosystems, and this is never more evident than in consideration of economic game theory. Given that there is always a cost [c] to everything you do, the benefits [b] you reap from whatever that thing is must always be higher than the cost [b>c] in order for that thing to be worth doing. If you spend 1,000 kcal hunting and you only succeed in capturing 500 kcal worth of prey, you’d better have a supplementary strategy or you won’t be at it for long. Where game theory comes into it is when organisms compete with each other. Take the classic Hawk-Dove game. Two foxes encounter a chicken, and there are two strategies available to each: the Hawk strategy is to be aggressive, the Dove strategy is to back off. If both players back off, nobody gets anything [b|b = 0] – obviously. If both players act aggressively, nobody gets anything then either; the chicken runs away while they’re fighting, and both opponents limp away with wounds [c|c = 1]. The ideal situation is for one player to be aggressive and the other one to be passive; the Hawk player gets the chicken, while the Dove player walks away unscathed and hopes to encounter his/her next chicken alone or at least opposite a weaker opponent [b = 1|c = 0].

You’ve seen this dozens of times in your life, I assure you.

An even more relevant classic for human society is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, although I prefer to explain it as the Hunter’s Dilemma (in order to keep things consistent). Two foxes encounter a porcupine. One fox cannot easily overtake a porcupine because it can spin around and present a wall of quills faster than the fox can run around it; meanwhile two foxes can overtake one much more easily because they can attack from opposite angles. Again, there are two available strategies for each player: Cooperate, which means work with the other fox and share the rewards; and Defect, which means act selfishly. If both players Defect, nobody gets anything because, again, an individual fox can’t easily kill a porcupine [b|b = 0]. If both players Cooperate, they kill the porcupine and both players each get half [b|b = .5]. This would be great if “morality” was anything more than a human social convention, but natural selection favors maximization more than compromise – it doesn’t care how you get there. So the real winner is the fox that Defects when the other player Cooperates, i.e., the one that convinces the other one to work together and then runs off with the entire porcupine without sharing any. Like in the Hawk-Dove game, one player gets a [b] while the other one doesn’t, but in this case it’s a little more nefarious: because the other player participated in the kill and didn’t get any meat out of it, that player actually takes a hit [c] for the wasted effort [b = 1|c = -1]. That’s how you win at evolution.

You’ve also seen this dozens of times in your life, I promise. It’s the operative function of both exploitation and theft, in the first place because others are doing one’s work and in the second because one is taking the product of others’ work without giving anything back. In fact you’ve taken part in this yourself, literally thousands of times, without even realizing it. The reason food is so cheap in the United States is because we don’t pay the actual cost – others plant it, pick it, and process it at near slave-labor pay rates, passing the savings on to you. Ditto gasoline, most consumer products, and basically all of modern technology. Hell, we don’t even pay the costs of disposing of our junk, at least not explicitly; a lot of it – especially the dangerous stuff – is exported at a relatively meager monetary cost as “externalities” to Third World countries, whose residents pay the actual costs (cancer, etc.). But this is all pretty well-known, especially to educated people, and it’s also just plain capital-e Economics. It has nothing to do with evolution. Or so you think.

Culture is another tricky, ambiguous thing, one that has proven notoriously tricky to define. But, like fitness, if held to a consistent standard it can be a useful convention for answering questions about human behavior, and the basis of that standard is that culture essentially means “social environment.” Whereas in a physical environment the constraints are entirely physical (e.g., in a pine forest you’re likely to find piñon nuts but unlikely to find jellyfish), in a social environment they’re entirely social (e.g., in a French city you’re likely to find people speaking French and unlikely to find street signs written in Swahili). Of course, any social animal occupies a local environment that contains both physical and social constraints – even bower birds adhere to local “customs” when constructing their elaborate displays. The point isn’t that either of them ever exists by itself, but rather that both of them are relevant.

So now think again about natural selection, particularly as it applies to behavioral rather than to physical traits. Surely it is the case with social animals that those individuals which prove themselves to be of greatest value to the society will enjoy the greatest fitness because everybody likes them so much. This is the line touted by both “for the good of the species” group-selection enthusiasts and advocates of human beings as the Moral Animal, and it’s also entirely wrong. Remember, natural selection doesn’t care whether you’re a “good” or “bad” – i.e., whether or not others like you as an individual. It only cares how many viable offspring you’re able to produce, and this, in the human as in the non-human world, comes down to resources. The more resources you’ve got at your disposal, the more you can attract mates and also the more you can invest in your offspring (whether directly or indirectly – more on that in a moment). And, as in the game theory examples above, the way to gain the biggest resource advantage is to reap the rewards from others’ hard work. To, in other words, screw people over.

Researchers from both within and outside the social sciences are viciously critical of such simplistic models of behavioral evolution and their applicability to human beings, and rightly so. The thought that natural selection would literally produce human beings who were experts at screwing others over is equivalent to the thought that natural selection would produce, say, chimpanzees that indiscriminately bully others and act a bastard. And yes, before you start to wonder, in the animal kingdom there are naturally-evolved safeguards against that sort of thing. According to the principles of frequency dependence and inclusive fitness, those offspring who receive the greatest amounts of care and doting (and food) will enjoy the greatest health and thus the greatest reproductive fitness in their turn – which, naturally, means the genes that code for “care” and “doting” will be passed along through them. Vicious, selfish, bullying assholes may do just fine among non-social animals because all they’re expected to contribute are gametes, but among social animals it pays to be a good parent.[1]

And this is true of human animals as well, or at least it used to be. In modern society the worst sorts of people can still turn to either hired help or, depending on their economic status, the state to raise their children to reproductive age with relative ease. I know a 21 year-old stripper who, with the help of Food Stamps and a string of boyfriends, is doing her level best to raise her infant son to be a dispassionate alcoholic. On the other end of the economic spectrum, when I was a country club bartender I knew at least half a dozen upper-class scumbags that got rich through the immeasurable suffering of others, who’d fathered something like 100 kids both in and out of wedlock between the lot of them.

I also know a lot of really, truly great people – generous, hard-working, intelligent, passionate, and moral – who have chosen not to have children because they think the modern world is too terrible a place right now to bring a child into. I love those particular friends, but I don’t think they realize that by withholding their gametes they’re contributing to the problem.

Our culture, simply put, is predicated on greed, and it encourages sociopathy on that account. We heap the greatest rewards on people who win at what is essentially a crooked game: screw the most people over and you’ll come out on top. You’ll become the CEO or the Chief of Resources or the Senator or the President or whatever. You’ll win. Free-market capitalism ensures that corner-cutting, back-stabbing, exporting costs and jobs, exploiting workers, raping the earth of resources in the most cost-effective ways, and outright lying (we call it “advertising”) and victimizing consumers will net you the biggest reward [b] while passing the costs [c] on to your competitors, your workers, your customers, the wilderness, foreigners, and/or future generations [b = 1|c = -1]. But you can’t blame free-market capitalism itself; that’s low-hanging fruit. The real culprit is culture. That may be the way to succeed in a laissez-faire economy that exists in a vacuum, but in a human society there are supposed to be constraints in the forms of taboos, rules, and laws that prevent this from getting out of hand. There just aren’t any.

Picture if you will a society in which the principle explicit rule is:

If you lie, cheat, steal, or harm others for your own gain, you will be punished.

While the principle implicit rule is:

If you perfect the art of lying, cheating, stealing, and harming others for your own gain, you will be heaped with envy, riches, and privilege and your children will want for nothing.

That’s us. That’s the United States. We’re evolved to act that way because we’re animals, a product of eons of natural selection, and over and above that we’ve created a society in which the people who commit “crimes” in a sloppy way get caught and punished – while people who commit full-blown atrocities in an efficient way get fancy cars and laid. The effect of that on our gene pool is as straightforward as it is terrifying: whereas genes that code for things like caring and empathy are likely to proliferate in a population in which being a sociopath doesn’t confer differential advantages, the opposite is also likely to be true. And the result?

Have a look in the newspaper.

In a famous piece of research, anthropologist Pauline Wiessner noted a practice of “leveling the hunter” among foraging peoples like the Ju/’hoansi by which sanctions are imposed on hunters to prevent them over-exploiting their hunting success as a means to gain status. Richard Lee noted a similar leveling mechanism among the !Kung that he nicknamed “shaming the meat” (literally telling a hunter that his catch is scrawny and awful and that he shouldn’t have bothered bringing it home at all, especially when it’s a particularly big and fatty kill). And, at least until the dreaded era of contact with the industrialized world, those and similar cultures thrived for tens of thousands of years. In our culture, the closest thing we have to a “leveling mechanism” is encouraging teenagers to think they’re ugly until they either a) buy every fashionable piece of clothing and beautifying product available on the market, or b) kill themselves. We do the same thing to adults, punishing the weak and sensitive through criticism and over-working straight into impotence, addiction, and an early grave – and rewarding sociopaths at both ends of the economic spectrum with ease and plenty. We’re selectively breeding monsters. How long do you think that’s going to last?  

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[1] Authors like Barbara Smuts and Kristen Hawkes like to argue that males – who have the cheaper end of sexual reproduction, according to anisogamy, and who maximize their reproductive fitness more by quantity than by quality – practice good parentage not for the benefit of the kids so much as to impress females. That is to say: it’s not a parenting strategy but a mating strategy. Maybe so, maybe not, but for the purposes of this essay it’s a moot point because the end result is the same.