The Sociopath Next Door (23 page)

—Lewis Thomas

S
ince we have it on excellent authority that nature is red in tooth and claw, why are all human beings not killers like Hannah's father? Why do most of us, most of the time, operate according to a seventh sense that directs us not to kill, even when we might profit in some way from doing so? And lesser transgressions, too: Why do we usually feel guilty when we steal, or lie, or hurt other people?

We have already discussed what causes sociopathy, and so it is only fair to address the twin question: What causes conscience? From a certain point of view, this inquiry is not merely parallel; it is actually the better and more baffling question. Since Darwin published
The Origin of Species,
in 1859, much of scientific theorizing has considered that all living things, including human beings, have evolved according to the law of natural selection. According to this law, known more popularly as “the law of the jungle,” any characteristic that enhances survival and reproduction (and therefore the continuance of its own genetic components) will tend to remain in the population. If a physical trait or a behavioral tendency bestows this felicitous survival advantage on individuals for countless generations, in many situations and across habitats, it may, incrementally and in the course of time immemorial, become part of the standard genetic blueprint for the species.

According to the law of natural selection, tigers have claws, chameleons change colors, rats avoid open spaces, possums play dead, and apes have big brains because tigers with claws, camouflaged lizards, secretive rodents, playacting possums, and very smart primates tend to survive longer and so make more babies than their peers do. In turn, these babies survive better and reproduce more often than their less fortunate playmates who are not genetically endowed with natural weapons, camouflage techniques, survival-promoting anxiety, theatrical ability, or superior intelligence.

But according to this utterly amoral law of the jungle, of what possible use to the individual members of a predatory species—for human beings are technically predators—are the limitations and interruptions of a powerful moral sense? Imagine, for example, a great white shark with a demanding conscience. How long would she live? What, then, can conceivably be the evolutionary origins of human conscience?

Let us put this extraordinary question another way. Picture people stranded on a small, remote island with limited resources. In the long run, what kind of individual is more likely to survive—an honest, moral person, or someone ruthless like Skip? The kind and empathic Jackie Rubenstein, or Doreen Littlefield? Sydney, or the unremittingly self-involved Luke? Hannah, or Hannah's father? If there were a few others on the island for the survivors to make babies with—and given that sociopathy is at least partially genetically determined—over a great many generations, might we not end up with an island populated mainly by people who possessed no conscience? Then would not this population of sociopaths proceed without a second thought to deplete the island's resources completely, and all die? And if, to the contrary, people with conscience were still to be found on the island, where life was fragile and ruthlessness paid off, what in the natural world could possibly have been fostering their moral sense?

Precisely on account of this seemingly impossible challenge to evolutionary theory, naturalists, sociobiologists, comparative psychologists, and philosophers have long been interested in the origins of unselfishness in humans and in other animals. Whenever we carefully observe the actions of the so-called higher animals, we see an apparently irreconcilable dichotomy between selfish survivalism and intense social interest. And of course, nowhere is this dichotomy more extreme than in the human species. We compete ferociously, and we teach our children to compete. We finance wars and weapons of mass destruction. And we also fund foundations, social welfare programs, and homeless shelters, and try to teach our children—those very same children—to be kind.

Our species has produced both a Napoléon and a Mother Teresa. But according to fundamentalist evolutionary theory, Mother Teresa should never have been born, because neither charity nor a sense of good and evil would seem to have anything at all to do with the law of the jungle. So what is going on here? As David Papineau asked in his
New York Times
review of Matt Ridley's book
The Origins of Virtue
, “If nice guys always finished last when our ancestors were scrabbling around for food on the African savanna, why does morality come so naturally to us now?”

And humans are hardly the only animals who can be unselfish. Thomson's gazelles “stot” (leap up and down conspicuously) when they see a predator, decreasing their chances of individual survival but increasing the chances that the herd will get away. Chimpanzees share their meat, and sometimes even their most valued fruit. According to psychobiologist Frans de Waal, a raven will communicate the precious discovery of a carcass with loud calls to the flock, making itself a standout to wolves.

When it comes to surviving, clearly there is a certain conflict of interest between the individual and the herd/community/flock, and arguments concerning the origin of what evolutionary psychologists call “altruistic behaviors” have generally centered around the
unit of selection
in evolution. Does natural selection “choose” only individuals for survival, or can selection perhaps operate at the level of groups, thus favoring the survival of whole populations over others?

If “survival of the fittest” applies only to the individual as the unit of selection, the evolution of unselfishness is almost impossible to explain, for the same reason that cutthroat Skip, Doreen, Luke, and Hannah's father, as individuals, would indeed be more likely to outlast the rest of us on a desert island. But if the unit of selection is the group as a whole, then a certain amount of altruism can be explained. Quite simply, a group composed of individuals who cooperate and take care of one another is much more likely to survive
as a group
than a collective of individuals who can only compete with or ignore one another. In terms of survival, the successful group will be the one that is operating to some extent as an entity, rather than the group in which every single individual is looking out for number one, to the exclusion of everyone else.

Group selection, and all it implies about our true nature, has been an extremely controversial idea among evolutionists, reflecting the fact that the theory of evolution itself is still evolving. Early theories of group selection assumed the possibility that, in the beginning, there had been cohesive groups of altruistic individuals (mammals that emitted warning behaviors, birds that would signal food to the flock, primates who were generous, and so forth) for group selection to favor in the first place. This poorly explained assumption—aggregations of altruists from the clear blue sky—was irritating to many scholars, who bestowed on it the damning label of weak science.

In 1966, George C. Williams of the University of Chicago published a now-classic text entitled
Adaptation and Natural Selection
, in which he argued that although group selection was theoretically possible, it was unlikely to occur in nature. Williams wrote that neither the group
nor
the individual was the fundamental unit of natural selection, maintaining that the true unit of selection was the gene itself. For creatures that reproduce sexually, as opposed to organisms that generate clones, the gene is the only unit that self-replicates exactly (more or less) through time. Children are not exact copies of their parents, but genes
are
fairly precise replicas of themselves. And so, Williams insisted, the gene must be the only unit that natural selection can efficiently use. In other words, “survival of the fittest” meant survival of the fittest genes (or rather, the information coded in them), not necessarily the survival of the fittest individual animals or groups. For Williams, individuals and groups were there only to serve as temporary environments for genetic information.

And ten years later, in 1976, in a still-popular book called
The Selfish Gene
, Richard Dawkins extended Williams's gene-centered theory and biologist W. D. Hamilton's notion of
kin selection
, which paradoxically reexplains the evolution of unselfish behaviors at the level of the individual by invoking the idea of “selfishness” at the level of the gene. This is a rather strange notion, and deserves some explanation.

Kin selection means that pieces of the individual's genetic blueprint (the only biological aspect of the individual that stands a chance of being “immortal,” so to speak) will fare better if the individual guards not only his own survival and reproduction odds but also those of other individuals who share some of his genetic makeup. If he behaves generously and protectively toward his blood relatives, their enhanced survival and reproduction rate will increase the numbers of his own genes in future generations, since his relatives and he have many genes in common.

Of course, the expression “selfish gene” is not intended to imply that DNA is a thinking, feeling thing with its own desires. Dawkins uses “selfish gene” as a metaphor. He means that the characteristics of a species are determined by genes that cause individuals to think, feel, and behave in ways that maximize the existence of those same genes in the gene pool, regardless of the effects of those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors on the individuals themselves. For example, if my brain allows me to form emotional attachments, and I feel so warmly toward my cousins that I share my fruit with all of them, my individual life may be shortened, but on average, the odds that my genes will continue in the population have actually been multiplied, because my genes are shared in part by each of my cousins. And the genes that I have donated to the gene pool by lengthening the lives of my cousins may well include the genes that cause me to feel emotional attachments.

In other words, the genes for emotional attachment are “selfish” in the sense that they exist to enhance their own proliferation, and they do this without regard to the well-being or even the continued existence of the individual creature. As in the famous quotation by Samuel Butler, “A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg.”

According to many evolutionists, because we share the greatest percentage of our genetic complement with our parents, our siblings, and our children, kin selection accounts for the fact that we tend to be more selfless toward our parents, siblings, and children than toward more distant relatives and strangers. Furthermore, kin selection explains why we nurture and protect our children despite the fact that doing so lessens our own energies and our individual survival resources. From this vantage point,
conscience
is the genetically programmed mechanism that makes sure we do not ignore the extra little packages of our genetic material that just happen to be walking around on feet other than ours.

As for our genetically designed sense of conscience toward the aforementioned distant relatives and strangers—gene-centered evolutionists propose that their version of natural selection would have favored genes that resulted in “reciprocal altruism,” or non-zero-sum (win-win) behaviors such as the division of labor, friend seeking, cooperation, and the avoidance of conflict. These behaviors would be mediated by emotions such as gratitude, compassion, and conscience, and so emotions such as these would have had an advantage where the natural selection of genes was concerned.

But in a revival of the idea of group selection, other evolutionary theorists, among them David Sloan Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould, have implored both the biological and the behavioral sciences to consider that evolution may in fact have taken place on more levels than just the gene-centered one. Naturalist Gould reexamines the evidence from paleontology and maintains that natural selection operates on multiple levels, from the gene to the individual to the group, and even—or especially—the species. In addition, he makes the case that forces operating in a much less incremental fashion than natural selection, and far more rapidly than time immemorial—events that include global or near-global catastrophes—have significantly affected the course of evolution and may do so again.

The various levels of natural selection are likely at odds with one another, particularly with respect to altruistic behaviors and emotions such as conscience. At the level of the gene and also at the level of the group, conscience is adaptive, and natural selection would favor it. But at the level of the individual creature, the
absence
of conscience may sometimes be even more adaptive for survival. In this way, nature would constantly be fostering conscience in most of us, while, at a different level, continually supporting a smaller percentage of individuals who thrive without the neurobiological underpinnings of emotional attachment and conscience.

As evolutionist David Sloan Wilson has said, “There are compelling intellectual and practical reasons to distinguish between behaviors that succeed by contributing to group-level organization and behaviors that succeed by disrupting group-level organization. That is what the words ‘selfish' and ‘unselfish,' ‘moral' and ‘immoral' are all about in everyday language.” What Wilson describes in this way is the same bewildering and all-too-familiar dichotomy: the majority, who think and feel in terms of minimizing conflict, sharing when necessary, and living out their lives with the people they love, and the minority, who prosper from conflict, and for whom life is no more and no less than a constant competition for dominance.

So we find that even on the most reductionistic biological level, the struggle between good and evil is more ancient than humankind. However, the contest is likely to reach its conclusion with us, and its ultimate resolution will depend on the ways we meet the towering challenges humankind has brought into the world, among them the problem of sociopathy. In ways we are just beginning to understand, natural selection has favored a certain amount of altruism in the human population and has helped to shape a human species endowed with the capacity to love and bond together in positive intention by the still small voice of conscience. At least 96 percent of us are fundamentally thus. What we will end up doing with the species survival problems created by the other 4 percent is, at present, unknowable.