In a recent column in the New York Times, David Brooks asked whether human beings are fundamentally good or fundamentally bad. Based on my understanding of evolution I would be inclined to answer: neither. Robert Sapolsky, author of the book Behave: The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worst offers a more nuanced scientific answer:
Genes have different effects in different environments; a hormone can make you nicer or crummier, depending on your values; we haven’t evolved to be “selfish” or “altruistic” or anything else-we’ve evolved to be particular ways in particular settings. Context, context, context.
Of course, this is a scientist’s answer detached from any moral purpose one’s faith may attach to human life. The fact is that for hundreds of millennia and long before we reached the point to conceptualize the divine as a moralizing force that cares for the morality of its human creatures, we survived and evolved as a species. We did this thanks to genes that found a way to pass their copies to the next generation. This gave rise to the concept of “the selfish gene” that became the title of a blockbuster book by Richard Dawkins.
In the almost fifty years since this book was published the field of evolution has advanced by leaps and bounds and now not every evolutionary biologist or evolutionary behaviorist accepts that evolution works solely in the interest of selfish genes. * Still though the basic principle remains, that evolution is about reproduction, and about new mutations of genes, some of which prove to strengthen the fitness for reproduction and by being inherited keep evolution going.
But here is the greatest thing in the evolutionary process. For genes to succeed in passing their copies on to future generations, many species, and above all human beings engage in patterns of pro-social behavior. This means that, yes, the genes are selfish in their quest to replicate themselves, but we, their carriers, are not necessarily so.
Recognizing others as our kin and acting in their interest is one way to reproduce part of our own genes. A sibling may sacrifice her chances to reproduce or otherwise improve her fitness to survive and reproduce because she knows that the common portion of genes shared with siblings (or another relative for that matter) will be passed on to the offspring of the sibling. Altruism, and its variant reciprocal altruism, has also been selected as another efficient way to increase our fitness for reproduction. I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine so that we both have a better chance to survive and reproduce. Thus, evolution works both in selfish and cooperative ways.
And then there are the universal emotions we all share, most importantly empathy, sympathy, and envy. Our predisposition to feel empathy and sympathy brings us together and make us pro-social. But what about envy? The ethologist Frans De Waal makes the argument that paradoxically envy might have very likely birthed the moral sentiment of fairness. An uneven distribution first triggers envy and rejection. Eventually we realize that fairer arrangements are more likely to be met with less friction and more acceptance by others. Two-year toddlers, long before they have been inculcated by moral and religious values, refuse to accept unfair deals even though that leaves them with nothing.
Although genes can be responsible for our tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities they are not the only thing that matters for human behavior, as Sapolsky argues with plenty of convincing evidence though out his book. Environment and culture do matter. They matter to the point that it is more correct to say that genes and culture coevolve.
Here are some examples of how the cultural environment can twist any original genetic predisposition and affect one’s life. Childhood poverty affects the brain and its development. That can affect the child’s adult life. Children raised by loving mothers have a better chance to be inclined toward good as opposed to bad behavior later in their lives. Living under persistent stress makes people’s behavior more susceptible to emotional reaction (coming from the limbic system of the brain) rather than to reasoned reaction (coming from the frontal cortex). Irrespective of any genetic advantage in analytical thinking, math scores of female and male students can suffer due to gender inequality. (In Iceland, a country of gender equality, girls best boys in math scores!)
The extent of child poverty a society is willing to tolerate, the family and social context that enables mothers to care for their kids, the stress and insecurity people live under through their lives, and degrees of gender equality are all dependent on the kind of environment our political, social, and religious institutions built around people. In other words, they constitute the cultural context within which our genetic tendencies, potentials and vulnerabilities are set to manifest themselves.
Another important interplay of genes and culture has to do with how we treat those we know and those we don’t. As part of our survival and reproduction game our behavior has been biased to favor in group comradery and out group hostility. These biases become the springboard for racism, xenophobia, and ultimately war against others. Even here though, we can avert our genetic predisposition by developing the kind of culture that bridges the precarious gap between Us and Them and leads toward acceptance and tolerance.
The interaction of genes and culture should convince us that it is a mistake to isolate individual behavior from one’s environment and social setting. Our individual nature is not moral destiny. Instead, we have plenty of room to develop the contextual conditions that can lead individuals in our societies to live better lives. Thus, whatever role genes have in one’s behavior gives no pass to a society to remain indifferent or unscathed of any responsibility.
*The alternative to gene selection at the individual level is selection at the group level. In this case traits of behavior are selected for the benefit of the group not of the individual necessarily.
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