Table Of ContentNATURAL SELECTIONS
ALSO BY DAVID BARASH
Sociobiology and Behavior
The Whisperings Within: Evolution and the Origins of Human Nature
Stop Nuclear War! A Handbook
(with Judith Eve Lipton)
Aging: an exploration
The Caveman and the Bomb: Human Nature, Evolution and Nuclear War
(with Judith Eve Lipton)
The Arms Race and Nuclear War
Marmots: Social Behavior and Ecology
The Great Outdoors: Star-gazing, Mountain Climbing,
Beachcombing, and other Pleasures of Nature
Introduction to Peace Studies
The L Word: An Unapologetic, Thoroughly Biased,
Long-overdue Explication and Celebration of Liberalism
Beloved Enemies: Exploring Our Need for Opponents
Gender Gap: The Biology of Male-Female Differences
(with Judith Eve Lipton)
Ideas of Human Nature: From the Bhagavad Gita to Sociobiology
Approaches to Peace: a reader
The Mammal in the Mirror: Understanding Our Place in the Natural World
(with Ilona A. Barash)
Understanding Violence
The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People
(with Judith Eve Lipton)
RevolutionaryBiology: The New, Gene-centered View of Life
Peace and Conflict Studies (with Charles P. Webel).
Economics as an Evolutionary Science: From Utility to Fitness
(with Arthur and Anna Gandolfi)
The Survival Game: How Game Theory Explains the
Biology of Cooperation and Competition
Madame Bovary’sOvaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature
(with Nanelle R. Barash)
NATURAL SELECTIONS
Selfish Altruists, Honest Liars, and
Other Realities of Evolution
David P. Barash
B E L L E V U E L I T E R A RY P R E S S
N E W YO R K
Iespecially want to thank my friend and agent, John Michel, for his consistently sound
advice and good cheer, and Erika Goldman, doyenne of Bellevue Literary Press, for
her publishing vision, initiative, wisdom, and for making the making of this book a
genuine pleasure. I’m also grateful to my honors seminar students at the University
of Washington, who helped hone the ideas and improve the presentation, and to
Malcolm Scully and others at The Chronicle of Higher Education, where much of this
material originally appeared (albeit in somewhat different form). Topper and Higgins,
our newly acquired three-legged orphan kittens, provided amusement and encourag-
ing reminders of life’s resourcefulness.
—DAVIDP. BARASH
Redmond, WA
First published in the United States in 2008 by
Bellevue LiteraryPress
New York
FORINFORMATIONADDRESS:
Bellevue LiteraryPress
NYU School of Medicine
550 First Avenue
OBV 640
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 2008 David P. Barash
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy,recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in
writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote
brief passages in connection with a review written for
inclusion in a magazine, newspaper,orbroadcast.
Quote on page 181 © Walt Kelly Studios. Used with permission.
This book was published with the generous support of
Bellevue LiteraryPress’s founding donor the Arnold Simon Family Trust
and the Bernard & Irene Schwartz Foundation.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Libraryof Congress
Book design and type formatting by Bernard Schleifer
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-934137-05-5
FIRSTEDITION
135798642
This book is dedicated to
Eva Louise Barash,
yoga teacher extraordinaire
and much loved daughter.
Contents
1. Seductions of Centrality 9
2. Evolutionary Design Flaws, or, Why Bad Things
Have Happened to Perfectly Good Creatures
(Including Ourselves) 16
3. Mainstream Misconceptions 21
4. Neither Leaps Nor Bounds 32
5. Who’s in Charge Here? 42
6. Material of Mind: A Surprising Homage
to B. F. Skinner 49
7. Y B Conscious? 57
8. Intelligence 64
9. Let Us Reason Together 71
10. Believing Is Seeing 80
11. Evolutionary Existentialism and the Meaning of Life 86
12. The Tyranny of the Natural 98
13. Forbidden Knowledge? 104
14. Are We Selfish Altruists? Group-Oriented
Individualists? (Or What?) 111
15. Dealing with Dilemmas: Personal Gain
versus Public Good 118
16. The Ugly Underside of Altruism 126
17. Why Is Violence Such a “Guy Thing”? 136
18. One and a Half Cheers . . . 148
19. Honest Liars? 155
20. What Puts the Dys in Dystopia? 162
21. Evolution’s Odd Couple 173
Index 185
1
Seductions of Centrality
S
IGMUND FREUD WAS NOT A HUMBLE MAN. AND SO, IT WILL
probably come as no surprise that when he chose to identify
three great intellectual earthquakes, each of them body-blows to
humanity’s narcissism, his own contribution figured prominently: First,
Freud listed replacement of the Ptolemaic, Earth-centered universe
by its Copernican rival; second, Darwin’s insights into the natural, bio-
logical origin of all living things, Homo sapiens included; and third,
Freud’s suggestion that much—indeed, most—of our mental activity
goes on “underground,” in the unconscious. (It is interesting to con-
sider that even as he recounted a history of diminished human impor-
tance, Freud wasn’t shy about his own!)
In any event, many of Homo sapiens’s most glorious scientific
achievements, rather than expanding our self-image, have paradoxi-
cally diminished it. But despite this progression of self-administered
“narcissistic injuries” (as Professor Freud would have it), a widespread
feeling of centrality is nonetheless widespread, an insistence that the
world somehow revolves around human beings, as a species and for
most individuals. Many of us remain narcissists in this particular
sense. Whereas infantile narcissism is plausible, predictable, and
eventually outgrown, centrality remains fundamental—dare I say
“central”?—to the way many adults think of themselves. But this
doesn’t make it true.
Almost by definition, we each experience our own private subjec-
tivity, a personal relationship with the universe, in return for which it
is widely assumed that the universe reciprocates, even though there is
no evidence supporting this latter assumption . . . as well as consider-
able logic urging that it is untrue. Moreover, even as the illusion of
