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?
[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.
