Pop Evolutionary Psychology

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology & Everyday Life – Robert Wright

Through the lens of human evolutionary psychology, this book examines one, the life of Charles Darwin in terms of his theory and two, nature as it is expressed in human behavior. The theory, I think, posits us as animals with morals, with our impulses and instincts formed millions of years ago when we were human primates, long before we were influenced by the culture of our hunter-gatherer forebears.

Much good in this mean old world is a result of natural selection even when our intentions to be cautiously skeptical, favorably accepting, gratefully generous are not ideally carried out, even for the sake of passing on our genes to the next generations. Wright asserts:

The one thing one can't do, I submit, is argue that evolutionary psychology is irrelevant to the whole discussion. The idea that natural selection, acutely sensitive to the most subtle elements of design in the lowliest animals, should build huge, exquisitely pliable brains and not make them highly sensitive to environmental cues regarding sex, status, and various other things known to figure centrally in our reproductive prospects - that idea is literally incredible. If we want to know when and how a person's character begins to assume distinct shape, if we want to know how resistant to change the character will subsequently be, we have to look to Darwin. We don't yet know the answers, but we know where they'll come from, and that knowledge helps us phrase the questions more sharply.

We know it must be the genes because the same stuff pops up in many cultures around the world. Most infanticides are committed by stepfathers.  Men find women with large eyes and small noses more beautiful. To be human is to gossip. No culture admires its members who are cheap but universally people are stingy when they know they can get away with it. We most of us would take a bullet for the same sibling that we’d gladly strangle during a fight over an inheritance.

These and many other crucial questions about human behavior are explained with evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biology used to be called sociobiology, but back in the day sociobiology attracted so much gleeful politically incorrect attention from fascists, clansmen, and fundamentalists that decent people ran away the word, if not the field.

And Wright is quite a good writer, able to explain hard concepts in prose a reader of average intelligence (like me) can comprehend. Wright is a science journalist, not a biologist. But his is a good read for people that are interested in our evolutionary path and the latent drives that motivate our feelings and responses, as well as the environmental conditions that have shaped human nature over millions of years.