Haidt 2012

Haidt Ch. 9: Why Are We So Groupish?

Exhibit A: Major Transitions in Evolution

• Life on Earth underwent a “major transition” around 2 billion years ago
  • Cells became more complex–developed internal organelles which worked together instead of competing
  • Single-celled eukaryotes spread throughout the oceans
• A few hundred million years later: some eukaryotes develop ability to stay together after cell division and form multicellular organisms
  • Also suppresses competition because each cell only reproduces if the organism as a whole reproduces
• Whenever a way to suppress free-riding emerges, natural selection at the higher level wins out over selection at the lower level
  • Favors most cohesive “superorganisms”
• Fittest groups pass on their traits
  • Genes created selfless group members which constituted a selfish group
• Groups used new forms of technological innovation
• Some groups are ultrasocial: live in very large groups with internal structure around division of labor
  • One key feature: need to defend a shared nest
  • Two other features: need to feed offspring and intergroup conflict
  • These three factors applied to humans
• Group selection leads to group related adaptations

Exhibit B: Shared Intentionality

• Chimpanzees rarely work together
• In an experiment conducted on chimps and human toddlers, both did equally well on assigned tasks, but chimps failed social challenges whereas children aced them
• Humans developed shared intentionality: work together to overcome challenges or towards a common goal
  • Increased early humans’ ability to hunt, gather, raise children, and raid others
• Tomasello: human ultrasociality arose in two steps
  1. Ability to share intentions in groups of 2-3
  2. Natural selection favored group-mindedness: shared social norms, beliefs, institutions, goals, etc.
  • Created selection pressures within groups
• Humans’ “shared defensible nest” is our moral communities

Exhibit C: Genes and Cultures Coevolve

• Only around 600,000-700,000 years ago where hominids began to cross over into shared intentionality
  • Most likely Homo heidelbergensis that made this cross
• Richerson and Boyd argue that cultural innovations evolve similarly to biological ones; you can’t study one without studying the other
  • Thus, cultural innovations around morality might have led to genetic responses, ultimately leading to ultrasociality
• “Tribal instincts hypothesis”: human groups have always been competing with neighboring groups
  • Groups with cultural innovations that allowed them to cohere better usually won
• Example: body modifications like tattoos and piercings might have started off as a way to establish a sense of community by creating a physical resemblance/commonality
• “Self-domestication”: groups selected those who conformed to social and group norms best
  • Selected friends and partners based on “ability to live within the tribe’s moral matrix”
  • Created friendlier, gentler humans and conditions for peaceful coexistence

Exhibit D: Evolution can be fast

• Human evolution did not slow in any way 50,00 years ago, but instead increased in pace, reaching a peak around 12,00 years ago. Massive environmental and cultural change should be accounted for “in our attempts to understand who we are, and how we got our righteous minds”
  • Stephen Jay Gould from a 2000 interview, “natural selection has almost become irrelevant in human evolution” because cultural change works much faster than genetic change.
    • Gould add in the same interview, “there’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.”
  • However, the results of a study by Soviet scientist, Dmitri Belyaev, through his selective breeding process of foxes, was able to selectively bred for tameness and saw success in as few as ~30 generations.
• The question surrounding the rate of change in the human genome has been answered by geneticists, who claim that the