Discussion explores human, animal history of cooperation

Sue Vorenberg | The New Mexican

4/3/2008 - 4/1/08

Millions of years ago, some ancestral human developed a strange social adaptation geared at rising up against The Man.

This creature found there's strength in numbers, and if a dominant ruler acted like a bully or didn't share his toys, then a group of his subordinates could easily band together and brow-beat him into submission.

It's a curious trait shared not just by humans and apes, but several other mammals. And at a recent weekend meeting at the Santa Fe Institute, several researchers tried to understand the significance of that behavior, said Sam Bowles, a behavioral economist there.

"The pursuit of fairness is common in our ancestors, and it also has a modern application — it's called the welfare state," Bowles said. "In virtually every country where people vote, they vote for a very large fraction of their incomes to go to people less well-off than themselves. There's a lot of experimental evidence that indicates people, perhaps genetically, are oriented toward justice."

Understanding why our sense of right and wrong evolved, and how, can teach us more about our species and why our social structures work the way the do, he added.

But sharing and tolerance may have originated before any sort of human ancestor evolved. It is common in African lions, for instance, and there's a good reason why, Bowles said.

"Lions, like humans, are very capable of inflicting lethal damage on another individual," Bowles said. "So you don't want to push people around much, because even if they lose, they can still kill you."

Sharing and respecting the properties of others requires less energy and keeps the group overall more healthy, he said.

Observers have seen similar behavior in apes, as well.

When a dominant ape does something the group as a whole doesn't like — such as hoarding resources or bullying subordinates — small coalitions tend to rise up to put him in his place, said Santa Fe resident Christopher Boehm, an anthropology professor at the University of California who is working on a book called In Search of Eden about the concept.

Still, humans took that behavior to a new level, evolving advanced concepts of morality.

And interestingly enough, it may have been our evolution as hunters and meat eaters that brought us there, Boehm said.

"If you look at chimps and bonobos, they both do limited hunting and they both do limited sharing, but they don't approach what human hunters and gatherers do," he said.

Hunters and gatherers who live on large game learned long ago that sharing meat between five or six families was a more effective way to have a steady diet of the rich food.

And that meant alpha-male behavior of hoarding food and only sharing with certain group members had to go, Boehm said.

"The only way to get that meat shared is for the whole group to come together and get rid of the alpha male," he said. "And it appears that happened around 250,000 years ago in human evolution."

Humans retained some of their tendencies toward dominant behavior, but it seems at that point, we also started selecting for group members that were the best adjusted socially, rather than just dominant or bullies, he said.

"And that's also around the time that the human conscience was born," Boehm said. "My theory is that the human conscience came about as an after-effect of hunter-gatherers banding together to control their alpha males."

Humans used their new, more equal hunter gatherer societies to develop a sense of right and wrong and through it, they also invented a new concept called shame, Bowles said.

"In humans, even if there's no punishment, it's just a verbal thing, the concept works," Bowles said. "The ability to make someone feel bad is unique to us."

The egalitarian phenomenon in early human hunter-gatherer societies was controlled by three major factors — the ability to coordinate, throw or to shoot objects and to shame a target into submission, Bowles said.

If somebody stole, bullied or engaged in behavior the group didn't like, it could be risky business — and in early humans, more often than not, it probably ended in death by a violent coordinated group attack, Boehm said.

"It became costly to individual fitness to run afoul of the group," he said. "It was better to have some sort of internal reckoning before the behavior became fatal."

And humans evolved another tactic to get group members to behave — gossip and ridicule, Bowles said.

"If one person doesn't contribute to a group, and others talk poorly about him and call him selfish, then the shame tends to make him help out," he said. "And it doesn't just work on him, but others who aren't helping as much tend to amplify their efforts."

So gossip actually played an important role in creating human value systems, he added.

"Humans are great at gossip and ridicule, we do it all the time," Bowles said. "And hunter-gatherers are also very good at it. The only difference between hunters and gatherers and a modern-day faculty meeting, is that the hunter gatherers always did it within earshot of the target."

The development of shame, like pain, might actually be an evolutionary shortcut to get to a preferred social outcome more quickly, Bowles said.

"Pain is a signal to stop what you're doing, but we don't really need it, do we?" he asked. "What if we put our hand in a fire with no pain? You might think, this is a bad idea. I'll lose function of my hand. With pain, though, it shortcuts that situation and you get out of the fire right away."

Shame is like that, in that it tends to keep people out of social trouble.

Humans continued to evolve their social conscience, Boehm said, but started to backslide in some other egalitarian areas about 10,000 years ago when sedentary farming led to the emergence of chieftains, new civilizations and, finally, nations.

"In the first big centralized societies, you have kings as gods and subjects with little control over them," Boehm said. "And it wasn't really until democracy came about that you saw a return to that egalitarian spirit."

And that egalitarian notion has spread for the past few hundred years, although recently — Bowles noted — there's been a little backsliding once again.

"The long-term trend of 100 years has been toward more egalitarian behavior," Bowles said. "But in the last 20 years there's been a turnaround toward an unequal distribution of resources."

The worst places to find that new backsliding trend aren't that far away, he added.

"The best way to determine that is that if the country speaks English, there's been a turnaround," he said.

Contact Sue Vorenberg at 986-3072 or svorenberg@sfnewmexican.com.