Myth: It was civilization that imbued humankind with common purpose.
Nothing unites a society like common purpose. All too often, that purpose is war – but that very example underscores the point.
Anyone who has been to war, risked everything in defense of home, family and country, understands the concept of ‘Band of Brothers’ – a group of young men are thrown together by an imminent threat to their homeland, rapidly trained and shipped out to some front line where a formidable enemy waits, where bullets are flying and bombs exploding.
And those young men bond rapidly and deeply, to the point that the survivors will be reuniting a half-century later, to celebrate their bond and renew their mutual gratitude.
This experience is rare. Few things bring people together like the response to existential threat. In two world wars, we saw this response, this transformation that forever altered men in the battlefield, women supporting them in a wide range of roles, and the society they returned to serve.
Fighting to survive, side by side – it is hard to imagine a more powerful social force.
In the modern era, it is the rare exception: few of us fight for our lives, ever, let alone for extended periods, side by side with others. Our lives are very easy and trouble-free, compared to our distant ancestors – for whom the fight to survive, side by side, was never-ending, from birth to death.
A number of threats persisted for the 3+ million years the human line was evolving, but the greatest was predation: located in south-central Africa, we lived among the most vicious, efficient hunters roaming the Earth at that time – the members of the Panthera genus. The Big Cats.
We know from the ratio of skeletons recovered in Africa that Paleolithic humans had very limited lifespans. But this wasn’t due to genetics – Cro-Magnon humans were genetically identical to us, and we can live more than 100 years. It wasn’t due to famine – famine didn’t exist; or disease, which existed, but which didn’t impact us heavily until we began living in close, largely unsanitary groups.
We seldom lived to 30 because we were likely to be killed and eaten before we reached that age.
We noted previously that the predation of leopards, tigers, and other cats was systematic, and it took us many tens of thousands of years to develop defenses. During that phase of our physical and social evolution, our mutual reliance in detecting and fleeing predators, prior to (or upon) attack, necessarily required focused attention, strong communication, and an investment in one another’s survival. The invention of the spear didn’t diminish this reliance; if anything, it greatly strengthened it, because communication in coordinated counter-attack was necessarily even deeper, and the trust of the tribe in its defenders heightened, as they undertook risks previously unimagined, in defense of the group and their young.
And this wasn’t the only mutual reliance: while the hunter-gatherer lifestyle offers a wide range of sustenance and many modes of acquiring food, it nonetheless requires deep mutual reliance and trust to cope with the migration of animals that could provide food, adapting to weather affecting the presence of edible plants, and anticipating cold weather and storms. Internally, cooperative efforts such as the manufacturing of survival-critical artifacts, maintenance of fire, and the preparation and distribution of food all required deep familial cooperation. The members of a human tribe were together 24/7 – sleeping, waking, hunting, mating, child-rearing – surviving. Birth to death, for hundreds of thousands of years.
Human beings are the ultimate cooperators.
It is difficult to imagine a more intimate life. It is hard to fathom deeper common purpose.
And if any further evidence of Homo sapiens’ strong capacity for cooperation was the key to our eventual survival and dominance, our entry into Paleolithic Europe sets aside all doubt.
The Savanna Principle
Taking delight in the differences between human beings necessarily begins with enjoying them in the first place.
How this state is achieved and how it works, once achieved, are questions central to our understanding of human nature, and have been for thousands of years. Are human beings naturally competitive or cooperative? Are we instinctively wary of others, or inwardly welcoming? Are the answers to these questions the same today as they were 100,000 years ago, and if not, why not?
That human beings are the ultimate cooperators in the annals of life is beyond dispute: no other species comes close to having achieved what we achieve when we operate collectively, for good or ill. But what drives that cooperation? Economics? Improving our survival by controlling the environment? Tribal dynamics?
Satoshi Kanazawa7, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, had a different idea. In 2004, he proposed the Savanna Principle, which suggests that human beings remain adapted to the environment in which we evolved – central Africa – and that many of our modern-world dysfunction may be attributed to our inherent incompatibility with the environment we have created for ourselves. Our ancient hunger for sugars, for instance – a survival advantage in an environment protein-rich and sugar-poor, where quick-hit energy and immediate storage of ingested carbohydrates could be a huge benefit – is extremely detrimental to our health in the modern era, where all foods are plentiful and none of us are ever tasked with fleeing from large, fast predators.
We are already neck-deep in that general idea, but Kanazawa adds a wrinkle that we can add to our thinking. The wrinkle we now add is the dopamine ding, that rewarding little boost we feel in our brains when we solve a problem, eat a tasty meal, or have sex. Dopamine is our inner assurance that all is right with the world – and we can tie it to a further thought of Kanazawa's.
That idea posits that human tribes on the savanna faced an almost endless series of challenges, puzzles and problems beyond the ken of any individual – and that a human tribe could, collectively, thrive in such a world far better than an individual. This idea, which he crafted with
Norman Li of Singapore Management University, was dubbed the Savanna Theory of Happiness – that the impulse modern humans feel to be around other humans is a holdover from our savanna days, when there was pleasure in facing the dangers of the world surrounded by other problem-solvers.
(A corollary to this idea is its explanatory force regarding high-IQ individuals, who prefer solitude to a far greater degree – because, the theory suggests, they are superb problem solvers on their own, with less need for the emotional relief of a surrounding tribe.)
When we fold the dopamine ding into that theory, we take a huge leap forward: we have a physical, genetically-linked attribute of human cognition (dopamine receptivity) that supports the idea of group selection, that cooperative human groups are subject to an evolutionary driver above the level of personal survival and gene transmission.
We'll take this up in more depth later on.
Last Humans Standing:
Interspecies Cooperation
It wasn’t just cooperation among ourselves that led humankind to survival and success - all primate species cooperate, living and thriving in social groups. Homo sapiens, however, took it to the next level: inter-species cooperation.
In 2009, Mietje Germonpre of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences established a cranial distinction between canine species - a way of separating dogs from wolves. This development overturned previous estimates of the advent of the domestication of canines in human history (around 18,000 years ago), given the presence of much older skulls in Europe (32,000+ years).
This was a stunning finding. It basically established that when our species invaded and took Europe from the Neanderthals, we did so with canine assistance.
As strategic partnerships go, it couldn’t have been a more perfect fit. Humans have an incredibly poor sense of smell, one of the worst in the animal kingdom; dogs, of course, rank near the top, giving Team Sapiens an overwhelming advantage in the hunt. Add to that their auditory range, which extends beyond that of humans, adding significantly to their value as trackers.
Moreover, dogs are possessed of almost human-like loyalty, strengthening the alliance beyond any other domestic bond between human and animal, before or since. Neanderthals couldn’t possibly compete – and the question of how Cro-Magnon took over is answered: the human-canine partnership combined the traits of the world’s most sensitive trackers with those of the world’s most cooperative predators.
It was a piece that had been missing for some time. The fossil and climate records have already informed us of Neanderthal history: they were in Europe more than half a million years in advance of Homo sapiens. They had stronger, sturdier physiques; slightly larger brains; sophisticated group behaviors, even comparable culture. Cro-Magnon (modern) humans show up, and the Neanderthals are gone in an eye-blink (possibly as quickly as 2,000 years).
To some degree, we now know, we absorbed them: each of us carries at least a residual smudge of their DNA. But the fact is, we took their territory, and took it quickly. Per anthropologist Pat Shipman, it was human partnership with dogs that made the difference.
With his best friend at his side, the Cro-Magnon out-hunted the neighbors by a wide margin. Humans and dogs together were far more effective that humans alone - and remain so, as hunters, even today.
The Prehistory of Altruism
The German physicist Stefan Klein offers a bold new insight to our consideration of cooperation, and it’s this: the purest form of cooperation is contributing with no thought of return – altruism. And in his view, it is altruism that ultimately defines us as human.
Reciprocity is doing something for someone, expecting them to do something in return; cooperation is working together in pursuit of a shared goal, expecting to benefit equally from the outcome. But altruism abandons these expectations; it is action taken on behalf of another person or the group for the sake of the action itself.
No other creature behaves in such a way.
Klein continues, building the case that altruism is innate – built into human genes, alongside cooperation and empathy. His case is simple: it is empirically demonstrable that acts of altruism evoke the same neurological satisfactions in human beings as sex or eating a tasty meal. When we perform an act of kindness or service to another person with no thought or expectation of reward, we feel a sense of pleasure and satisfaction – a dopamine response. No one teaches us this feeling; small children experience it when they share a cookie or a toy with a peer (in studies conducted to measure this, facial expressions and vocalizations were used as satisfaction measures).
We experience this pleasure even when the act is remote – when we don’t see the response of the person to whom the kindness or service is offered. Anonymous altruism is, in fact, as pleasurable as an in-person act.
Empathy plays a role here. When we perform an altruistic act for another, we are acting in the confidence that their emotional response will be akin to what ours would be, were we on the receiving end of such an act.
And empathy, Klein points out, is a component of trust.
Acts of altruism, then, are signposts of empathetic bonding – and a trust-building mechanism. As such, altruism is elevated to a key influence in human social success.
The Origin of Trust
In The Moral Molecule: The New Science of What Makes Us Good and Evil, Paul Zak painstakingly explains how empathy arises in human beings, becoming trust, enabling our moral selves and social organization – by way of oxytocin.
Oxytocin is central to our neurological machinery, a key player in our emotional selves. It is a peptide hormone, playing roles in sex, birth, breastfeeding, and social bonding. It is the big moving part in the chain of experiences that makes us the most socially successful creatures on earth.
Oxytocin is the source of the contractions women experience in childbirth, a response to the stretching of the cervix; it subsequently enables lactation, triggering the letdown of milk, and its production is perpetuated by the stimulation of the nipples by a suckling infant.
That seems simple enough, but Zak elaborates in great detail. This birth/breastfeeding mechanism is only the beginning, however. A key point is that oxytocin isn’t a female hormone; it is present in both genders, and has many functions beyond breastfeeding.
When an infant feels the skin of her mother’s breast against her cheek, she will instinctively turn to the nipple. This ‘latch’ reflex facilitates mother-child bonding; the mother experiences warm, affectionate feelings for her child as a direct response to the flood of oxytocin.
The thing is... neither the release of oxytocin nor the feelings it inspires are limited to breasts and baby cheeks.
Gentle skin-to-skin contact in general inspires the release of oxytocin and its bounty of positive feelings. When we touch someone’s face, embrace them, shake their hand, place an arm around them, we trigger a surge of oxytocin in them and in ourselves.
This, Zak explains, is where empathy ultimately arises. It signals to those we are close to that we are a source of warmth and comfort – and this leads to trust, which in turn leads to social cohesion within groups. Oxytocin intensifies in-group bonding.
That sounds like a pretty big leap. But it’s been empirically tested.
One study8 demonstrated that participants who received nasal infusions of oxytocin had stronger emotional responses to pictures of pained faces of in-group members than they did to pained expressions in out-group members. Further, oxytocin stimulates a desire to protect vulnerable in-group members in conflicts between groups: participants in another study9 who received nasal oxytocin infusions presented more defensive behaviors toward in-group members than out-group members. Many variations on this theme have emerged in research: affection for one’s nation, for instance,
measured by feelings inspired when seeing the national flag, measurably increases when oxytocin is boosted.
And the neurological machinery that makes this deep bonding happen has been with us for hundreds of thousands of years; civilization has nothing to do with it.
Zak leaves us with a very broad statement about the crucial role of oxytocin:
“The ‘thou shalt’ religious devotion that my mother tried to pound into me faded away a long time ago, but ironically, something at the core has remained. Oxytocin – a reproductive hormone – makes us moral, so ultimately, you could say that we are moral because of our origins as sexual creatures. Which harks back to that very Christian-sounding idea that God is love, or maybe that love is God. But as we saw, eros – sex – is only one kind of love, and oxytocin covers all the bases. Oxytocin makes us feel the love for others that’s known as philia, the familial love known as storge, as well as agape – transcendence, which can be released during dance, meditation, and magic.”
God references notwithstanding, that sounds pretty humanistic.
Reality: Common purpose evolved as a consequence of human capacity for deep cooperation, altruism, trust in one another and investment in one another…
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