Table Of ContentHuman Morality and
Sociality
Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives
Edited by
Henrik Høgh–Olesen
Human Morality and Sociality
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Human Morality and Sociality
Evolutionary and Comparative
Perspectives
Edited by
henrik høgh-olesen
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Selection, editorial matter and chapters 1 and 9 © Henrik Høgh-Olesen
Individual Chapters © Individual Contributors 2010
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2010 by
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Contents
List of Contributors vi
1 Human Mind – Human Kind: An Introduction 1
Henrik Høgh-Olesen
2 B orn Bad? Evaluating the Case against the
Evolution of Morality 13
Dennis Krebs
3 Morality and Its Relation to Primate Social Instincts 31
Frans B. M. de Waal
4 Why We Believe: Religion as a Human Universal 58
Ara Norenzayan
5 E volutionary Psychology and Criminal Justice: A
Recalibrational Theory of Punishment and Reconciliation 72
M ichael Bang Petersen, Aaron Sell, John Tooby,
and Leda Cosmides
6 Patterns of Chimpanzee’s Intergroup Violence 132
Christophe Boesch
7 The Causes of War in Natural and Historical Evolution 160
Azar Gat
8 G roups in Mind: The Coalitional Roots of War
and Morality 191
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides
9 H omo Sapiens – Homo Socious: A Comparative
Analysis of Human Mind and Kind 235
Henrik Høgh-Olesen
Index 272
v
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Contributors
Christophe Boesch
Department of Primatology,
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
Leipzig, Germany
Leda Cosmides
Center for Evolutionary Psychology,
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Azar Gat
Department of Political Sciences,
Tel Aviv University, Israel
Henrik Høgh-Olesen
Department of Psychology,
Aarhus University, Denmark
Dennis Krebs
Department of Psychology,
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Ara Norenzayan
Department of Psychology,
University of British Columbia, Canada
Michael Bang Petersen
Department of Political Science,
Aarhus University, Denmark
Aaron Sell
Center for Evolutionary Psychology,
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
John Tooby
Center for Evolutionary Psychology,
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Frans B. M. de Waal
Living Links, Yerkes National Primate Research Center &
Department of Psychology,
Emory University, Atlanta, USA
vi
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1
Human Mind – Human Kind:
An Introduction
Henrik Høgh-Olesen
In the hands of philosophers, human nature has proven to be a
slippery thing. Are we cruel, selfish creatures or good, merci-
ful Samaritans? And what is the natural condition of humanity?
Is humanity the primeval state of “warre of every man against every
man,” that Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) pictured in his great
work Leviathan (1651), deeming us to “solitary, poor, nasty and
short” lives, or is it closer to the blissful pastoral envisioned by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in his Discurse sur L´ineqalite
(1755) roughly a hundred years later, in which man, the noble sav-
age, governed by innate compassion, lives peacefully among his
fellow kinsmen? Are we wolves – Homo homini lupus – bloody on
tooth and claw as the rest of nature, or lambs peacefully grazing
the pastures together?
Perhaps it is time to raise our mutual tolerance of ambiguity and
accept that the answer may be slightly more complex than the above
stereotypes suggest. Asking if humans are good or bad, selfish or
caring, peaceful or hostile equates to asking if light is particles or
waves. The answer is, “Yes.” Physical entities can have contradict-
ory properties, but some of these contradictions are complementary,
as modern physics has shown (Bohr 1999), and both characteristics
coexist simultaneously, even if we can only perceive and measure
one at a time.
Another thing to remember is that nature is all about function-
ality and adaptive fitness, and as such beyond good and bad, or any
1
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2 Human Mind – Human Kind
other socially constructed duality for that matter. Additionally, many
aspects of human sociality and morality have to be captured and
understood in this complex, functional and complementary way in
order to make sense. Humans are neither egoists nor altruists in the
absolute. Instead we are exactly as selfish and self-sacrificing as it has
evolutionarily paid off for us to be!
The essays collected in this volume share this understanding, just
as they share an evolutionary and comparative approach to the study
of human mind and kind. To understand how a capacity as morality
evolved – i.e., to understand what it was for, and how it was helpful
in optimizing the organisms’ survival and general fitness – helps us
to understand what morality is. And if we wish to understand what
is uniquely human, why not take a closer look at the other creatures
around us, both inside and outside the primate line, and compare
similarities and differences?
The ambition has not been to create an “all inclusive” volume like a
textbook in the traditional sense in which no study is left untouched.
Instead the idea was to compile a stimulating and hopefully thought-
provoking reader that brings students and scholars face-to-face with
some of the main protagonists of the field by offering their outlooks
and perspectives on human morality and sociality.
Psychology has never been a unified science, collected under one
paradigmatic hat, as for example physics, and different paradigms –
covering the whole range from realist to social constructionist per-
spectives – coexist, even often in the same department.
During some periods, major movements have dictated the agenda
and led the masses, and in the history of psychology we usually refer
to the major paradigmatic “forces” that have dominated the field.
Behaviorism, psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology consti-
tuted the first three forces. Now, after some 30 years interregnum,
a fourth unifying force, which integrates an evolutionary and cog-
nitive angle to the study of man, has emerged strong and vital, gen-
erating hypotheses, boosting research and inspiring interdisciplinary
collaborations on a scale not seen before.
Some may look at this force as a delta of minor streams spread-
ing from the spring of Darwinian thinking, and there are differ-
ences between “socio-biology,” “human behavioral ecology,”
“ gene-culture coevolution,” “memetics,” “evolutionary psych-
ology broad and narrow,” etc., as there were between “Watsonian,”
“Pavlovian” and “Skinnerian” behaviorism and between “humanis-
tic” and “existential” psychology.
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Henrik Høgh-Olesen 3
However, let us not indulge in “the narcissism of the little
difference,” as Freud put it. It is not the aim of this book to stress the
variations of the basic theme. The different “regiments” in this force
may wave different colors (and it is mutually stimulating that they
do), but it is still the same force united in a common evolutionary
understanding.
Scope and Outline
A solitary organism has no need for moral rules, nor does a creature
living among others without mutual dependency. Humans, how-
ever, have evolved from a long lineage of social-hierarchical and
interdependent animals, for which life in groups are not an option
but a survival strategy. We simply are each other’s means to the
common goals, and as such are a species whose sociality and moral-
ity are communicating vessels. It is meaningless to treat one without
the other.
We are also animals with large brains. Hominine brain size has
increased more than 250 percent in less than 3 million years, and
much of this increase has occurred within the past 500,000 years
(Flinn, Geary, and Ward 2005). A multitude of selective forces (ecol-
ogy, climate, foraging, tool use, predators, etc.) may have influenced
this increase, and among these, perhaps first and foremost the force
of our own social relations: The necessity of dealing continually with
conspecifics in social circumstances that became ever more complex
as the human line evolved. Nothing would select more potently for
increased encephalization and social cognition than such an intra-
specific, coevolutionary arms race in which success was dependent
on skills in social competition (Alexander 1987; Dunbar 1998).
Furthermore, human nature is complex and the idea is not just to
understand and comparatively analyze our altruistic and pro-social
inclinations, from in-group helping, caring and sharing, to solidar-
ity and large-scale collaboration with unrelated strangers, but also
to examine the complementary, “darker” sides of our sociality, such
as free-riding, cheating, cheater-detection and punishment, distrust
and stranger hostility, and last but not least, inter-group conflicts and
warfare.
In Chapter 2 Dennis Krebs opens the discussions by challenging
the logic behind traditional biological theory: Does it necessarily
follow that anything that has evolved by natural selection should
be selfish, as biologists from Huxley (1893) to Williams (1989)
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